Psalms 148:3

Praise Him, all ye stars of light.

Lessons of the stars

1. One of the most impressive lessons we learn from a study of the stars is the immensity of creation. As they crowd the sky on a clear, bright night we see the beauty and force of the words employed of old to express the increase of Israel--“God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.” The distance between the furthest planet and the nearest star is twenty-one billions of miles. If we could travel as fast as light travels, we should go round the world four hundred and eighty times a minute; and yet, travelling at the same rate, it would take us three years and seven months to get to that nearest star. The distance of Sirius is so great that it would require a journey of twenty-one years to reach it. There is another star, visible by the naked eye, so far away that we could not cover the distance in less than seventy-two years. Travelling at the same rate, it would take seven hundred thousand years to visit the group, remote and cloudlike, which Sir William Herschell discovered with his telescope.

2. We learn from the stars the existence of abiding law and order in creation. The celestial bodies perform their revolutions in fixed periods; and though some seem an exception to this rule, yet they only exemplify it the more strikingly, for their irregularities, occurring at stated times, have as much method as their uniform movements. Byron sings of--

“A pathless comet and a curse,

The menace of the universe.”

But now it is known of some, and may be inferred of all, that they are as obedient to law as the planets themselves. Another illustration of law we have in the elliptic movements of the planetary bodies. We owe to Kepler the discovery of the fact that they all move in elliptic orbits--that if you draw a line from the planet to the sun, the areas described by that line in its motion round the sun are proportional to the times employed in the motion, and that the squares of the periodic times are as the cubes of the distance. The first of these is a law of forms, the other two are laws of numbers. By their mutual attractions the planets sometimes produce disturbance among themselves. Through observing the irregular movements of Uranus the astronomers discovered Neptune; yet even at such times order reigns. The primal law of gravitation, discovered by Sir Isaac Newton--that law which keeps all the stars in their places and regulates the descent of a snowflake--abides for ever. Law and order are seen in the motions of the double stars. In many parts of the heavens two or more stars are seen, apparently near each other, and mutually connected as part of a system. In some cases these companion stars revolve round each other; in other cases two or more revolve round a common centre. They are at a much greater distance from each other than the furthest planet of our system is from the sun. The period of their revolution varies from thirty to upward of seven hundred years. Yet they all travel according to fixed law. And this reign of law is observable in the most remote part of the heavens as much as in the nearer. Every fresh discovery reveals its existence and operation.

3. The stars remind us of the beauty and grandeur of creation. In the spheroid shape of the planets and their satellites we have beauty of form. Then we have degrees of magnitude and brightness. It requires the light of a hundred stars of the sixth magnitude to make that of one of the first magnitude. One star differeth from another star in glory. There is a variety of colour as well as of size and lustre. “Through the clear, transparent atmosphere of a Syrian night, without any optical aid whatever, one star is seen to shine like an emerald, another like a ruby, a third like a sapphire, and a fourth like a topaz--the whole nocturnal heavens appearing to sparkle with a blaze of jewels.” There are individual stars, each shining in a splendour all its own. There are starry clusters which hang in the heavens like fruit in the tree. Some are extremely irregular in shape, while others show regular forms of a round, spiral, or other tendency. The Great Bear is a grand and striking constellation. Pleiades glitters and quivers with radiance like a breastplate of jewels. Orion, with his brazen girdle, is not only the most glorious constellation in the heavens--he is also one of the few visible in all parts of the habitable globe.

4. The stars witness for God. An atheistic leader of the French Revolution said one day to a Christian villager: “We are going to pull your church-tower down, so that you may have nothing left to remind you of God, or religion.” “You will not only have to pull down the church-tower,” said the man, “you will also have to blot out the stars before you can destroy all that reminds us of God. They speak to us of Him.”

(1) They speak of His living, all-pervading presence; and so illustrate Christ’s words, “My Father worketh hitherto.” He upholds them by the constant acting of His power.

(2) They bear witness to God’s condescension and care. While they speak of His majesty and power, they speak at the same time of our littleness. Yet the power that made and upholds the stars made and upholds man. (W, Walters.)