plan." Apparently it ought to read "the apparent failure of His plan." A printer's error, possibly. To suppose that God could fail in anything is, of course, absurd on the face of it. Whatever made Him fail would be greater than He, therefore God would not be God; one greater than He, and more powerful would be God. God's plans may often seem to fail, but do they really fail? Never, they could not fail. Who shall contend with God? Who shall say He shall not do this or that? There is an apparent failure, no doubt; there is the mystery of evil. It is a mystery, and yet we say that evil is, as was pointed out a little while ago, necessary for the perfecting of moral character in man. How could there be love of enemies, how could there be long-suffering and forgiveness, how could there be these things, if there were no such thing as evil? No doubt the devil thought he had gained a wonderful victory when he persuaded men to nail the Prince of Life to the Cross. Yet was it not for this cause that the Saviour came ? Satan's victory was apparent only. We may perhaps compare the Divine purpose and plan to some great wheel advancing towards the great goal-the greater glory of God and the blessedness therefore of His creatures. As this wheel goes on towards that goal, the lower portion of it is moving in exactly the opposite direction to that of the wheel as a whole. A part of the wheel is going backwards, but the wheel itself is going straight forward. This backward movement is necessary. Now I think we have here perhaps some illustration of how evil is really being made by God's infinite power, wisdom, and love, to subserve His will. Evil is evil, but evil when. God over-rules it, when God takes it in hand, is made to carry out God's grand purpose. We have many instances of this in history, where wicked men become the instruments of Divine judgment. Of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things; to Him be glory for ever! We shall quite agree with the conclusion of the Author, that the law of the universe is that the physical element is subservient to the moral and spiritual. When the wheel reaches its goal, then the backward movement of the lower portion stops. "Evil cannot form part of the moral scheme in its completeness, but it is being over-ruled to draw out the depths of the Divine character, which is infinite LOVE, and which is manifested in the mission of Christ"; and (may we not add?) to produce, in moral and spiritual beings, a character conformed thereto.

Canon GIRDLESTONE, in replying, said: I have to draw your attention to three points which have been mentioned. A suggestion was made by Dr. Withers Green concerning the development of the spiritual over the physical, and it will be an interesting topic to work out. With regard to Lord Kelvin, I believe the passage as I have it on page 161 was taken accurately from a paper in his life (p. 1162). The only other point is Professor Orchard's charitable hope that the word "apparent" was left out of page 164 by the printer. I am afraid I must acknowledge that it was not the printer but the author. Obviously, the word "apparent" should have been put in to show that what seems a failure is not a failure.

The Rev. J. J. B. COLES writes :-The ȧvaкepadawσaσ0αι τà πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς of Ephes. i, 10, gives us, as we know, the Purpose of God with reference to Christ and the Church in connection with the whole created Universe, and is a fuller revelation than that which is contained in those Scriptures, the scope or range of which does not go beyond matters relating to a "New heaven and a new earth." As a single solar system or local star-cluster is but a very small portion of the entire stellar universe or universes-so the scope of those scriptures which relate only to this earth and its immediate heavenly surroundings (and their future renewal) is but a very limited one in comparison with the scope of the later Epistles of St. Paul, which have a range transcending human thought. No philosophy which aims at a unification of knowledge relating to "GOD, Man and the Universe" can ever surpass or even attain to the comprehensiveness of that system of Truth which is revealed by the Spirit of God, in Ephesians and Colossians. The future glory of the Risen and Ascended Christ as "Prototokos" of the whole created Universe of God is as difficult to apprehend as are the vastness and sublimity of the realms of space revealed by modern up-to-date telescopes and star maps. By the death of Christ on the Cross God was glorified before the whole created Universe, in all His attributes, both absolute attributes and relative ones, and by that Cross sin was morally put out of His Universe, as it will be actually before long, both from the "heavenlies" and from this world, by the exercise of Divine Power, Might and Majesty. Christ, by the sacrifice of Himself, accomplished this eternal purpose of God. We, who in the riches of His grace have been redeemed by that finished work of the Cross, are now in possession of a synthetic philosophy which includes the otherwise insoluble problem of moral and spiritual evil, the origin of which is traced back, as we know, to a higher order of created beings than man.

THE 517TH ORDINARY MEETING OF MEMBERS

WAS HELD IN THE

ROOMS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS

ON THE 24TH APRIL, 1911.

THE REV. CANON GIRDLESTONE IN THE CHAIR.

The Secretary read the Minutes of the previous Meeting, and announced the following elections by the Council:

MEMBERS.-The Ven. Archdeacon W. M. Jefferis, D.D., Diocese of W. Virginia, U.S.A.; Robert D. Richardson, Esq., Winnipeg.

ASSOCIATES:-Rev. Samuel B. McCormick, D.D., Chancellor of the University of Pittsburg, U.S.A.; W. H. Seagram, Esq., London.

The CHAIRMAN, in introducing Sir David Gill, said :-The subject we have brought before us to-day is one of engrossing interest, and has been so from time immemorial. We are utterly lost in contemplation as we look up at night into the starry heavens, but perhaps we shall hear some things this afternoon which will make us feel a little more at home than we have been hitherto in that wonderful phenomenon, the sidereal universe.

The following paper, compiled by the Secretary from shorthand notes, was read:

MR

THE SIDEREAL UNIVERSE.

By Sir DAVID GILL, K.C.B., LL.D., D.Sc., F.R.S.

R. CHAIRMAN, Ladies and Gentlemen: Your Chairman has just told you what an immense subject the sidereal universe is. In the hour at my disposal I shall try to tell you a little about it, but naturally you must expect me to pass over some points much more rapidly than one would have to do in discussing a more limited subject. Our sun is a star, and all the so-called fixed stars are suns, sources of light and heat, and probably accompanied by little bodies like our earth as planets surrounding them. The name "fixed stars" has descended to us, because until the year 1718 the stars were supposed to be absolutely fixed, relatively to each other, in the heavens. But Halley in that year, by comparing the old observations with the modern observations of his time, discovered that certain of them had certainly moved relatively to

each other. We know nowadays that the stars not only all move, but that if they had been originally created at rest they would now be in motion in consequence of their mutual attractions. Tobias Mayer in 1760, was the first to recognise that if our sun moved amongst the stars, the mere effect of that motion must be to produce apparent motions amongst the stars. He used the illustration, and a very excellent one it is, that if a man walks through a wood not too closely planted with trees, he would observe that all the trees in front of him appear to open out as he proceeds, that those he leaves behind will close behind him, that those near him to the right and left will appear to move backwards as he moves forward. If the sun moves, then the stars right and left of the direction of the sun's motion must appear to move in an opposite direction to the sun; those stars in front must be opening outwards and those behind closing up. This will be easier to realise if I draw your attention to fig. 1 (p. 189). In this figure, if the line AB is taken to represent the movement of the sun and the crosses represent stars about the same distance from the sun in various directions, then the apparent movement of each star as the sun passes from A to B will be represented by the dotted lines. Those stars at right-angles to the direction of the sun's motion would apparently move the fastest (that is, through the greatest angles), while for those stars more in front and behind the resulting motion would be smaller. It is evident also that as the sun approaches a group of stars they open out, while those left behind close up. Fig. 1 gives you a good idea of what would take place if you could see certain stars now, and again at a sufficiently later point of time, But, in order to enable you to realise at all what these movements are, it has been necessary to draw this figure on an enormous scale of time. Suppose that the stars indicated by a cross are distant from the sun by the average distance of the first magnitude stars, then it would take half a million years to produce the changes in the apparent directions which are shown in the figure. If these stars were at the average distance of 9th magnitude stars, it would require five million years to produce a like change.

The first observations, sufficiently accurate for determining the proper motions of a number of stars, were made by Bradley 150 years ago, and have been made unceasingly ever since. Now, although it would be easy to find the direction of the sun's motion through space, if the stars were fixed as they are represented on fig. 1, you can easily realise what a much more complicated matter it must be to find the sun's motion through space

if each of these stars has a proper motion of its own. In order to simplify our ideas about the question, let us imagine that all the stars are moving at random. Let me define what I mean by "at random." Imagine a swarm of bees and the queen bee at rest upon a bough of a tree, and that she is surrounded by her swarm of bees flying about her in all directions. If the queen bee looks outwards in any direction she will see as many bees flying away from her as towards her, as many to right as to left, as many up as down. If that were not the case the swarm would not retain its general globular form. If the stars moved like the bees we might call these proper motions" random-motions," that is to say, motions which on the whole have no sytematic tendency in any particular direction.

Now, to find out how the sun is moving, I will adopt Mr. Eddington's method of illustrating and discussing it, which will be probably the easiest for you to understand. We have ascertained the apparent direction of the motion of each of a large number of stars, of which sufficiently numerous old and recent observations exist.

A certain area in a map of the heavens or on a celestial globe is taken and a list prepared of all the stars in that area of which the motions have been determined. These motions are then sorted out in groups according to their directions. We then count the number of stars moving in a particular direction, and lay down as in fig. 2 (p. 190) a solid line from the centre towards 0°, representing in length and direction the number of the stars observed to be moving in that direction. Similarly other solid lines, from the centre towards 15°, 30°, etc., are drawn proportional in length to the number of stars moving in the direction of each of these lines respectively. Finally a curve is drawn through the ends of the lines radiating from the centre, which proves to be a rough ellipse. If all these lines were of equal length like the dotted lines we should assume that the stellar motions are not affected by any one common cause and do not show a tendency to any particular drift, but as a matter of fact that is not the case, and this figure means, therefore, that the star-drift as a whole is in the direction of 0°, and that the sun is moving with respect to the stars in the opposite direction. Now if we select a number of such regions symmetrically distributed over the sky, and form similar figures to the above from the motions of the stars in those regions, we find that the figures so formed would when placed in their corresponding positions upon a celestial globe have their longer axes directed nearly to one point, as shown in fig. 3, and