Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-12-19
BIBLICAL ASTRONOMY.
DR.. Talmage Begins an Interesting
Series of Tabernacle Sermons,
THERE ARE WORLDS AND WORLDS,
But Ours Has Eeen the Scene Of the Dark
est Human Tragedy,
HEAVEN ONLY WILL SURVIVE TIE CRASH

BROOKLYN, Lee. lo-ISSN. OEs 1dlluokC
to-day preached the first of the promised
series of sermons on God in the natural
world as disclosed in the Bible. The sub
iect chosen for the initial sermon was "rhe
Astronomy of the Bible; or, God Among
the Stars" the text being from Amos 9: 6:
sit is be that buIldeth his stories in the
heavens" Preceding the sermon the great
congregation sang Isaac Watts hymn:
The heavens declare thy glory, Lord
In every star thy wisdom shines.
That is frst-rate poetry from Amos, the
herdsmau. While guarding his focks at
night, he got watching the heavens. He
saw stars above stars, and the universe
seemed to him like a great mansion many
stories high, silver room above silver room,
silver pillars beside silver pillars, and win
dows of silver and. doors of silver, and tur-
rets and domes of silver rising into the i'm
mensities, and the prophets sanctifed i'm
agination walks through that great silver
palace of the universe, through the first
story, through the second story, throug h
the third story, through the twentieth story,
through the hundreth story, through the
thousandth story, and realizing that God is
the architect and carpenter and mason of
all that upheaved splendor, he cries out in
the words of the text: 'It is he that buildeth
his stories in the heaven"
Astronomy Was born in Chaldea. Its
mother was astrology or the science OF
foretelling events by iuxtaposi ion of
stars. The Orientals living much out of
doors and in a very clear atmosphere,
through which the stars shone especially
lustrous, got the habit of studying the
night heavens In the hot seasons cara
vans journeyed chiefly at night and that
gave travellers much opportunity of stellar
information. On the first page of the Bible
the sun and moon and stars roll in. The
sun, body nearly 5000, 900 miles in cir
cumference and more than 1900 times as
large as our earth; the moon, more than
1000 miles in diameter. But God is used
to doing things on such an omnipoten
scale that he takes only one verse to tell OF
this stellar and lunar manufacture.
How Job Read the Signs Alright
Read on in your Bibles, and after awhile
the Bible flashes with the Aurora Borealis
or Northern lights, that strange illumina-
tion, as mysterious and underlined now as
when, in the book of Job it was written:
'sMen see not the bright light which
is in the clouds Fair weather cometh
out of the North While all the
nations supposed that the earth was built
on afoundation of some sort, and many sup
posed that it stood on q huge turtle, or some
great marine creature, Job knew enough of
astronomy to say it had no foundation, but
was suspended on the invisible arm of the
Almighty, declaring that 'He hangeth the
earth upon nothing" While all nations
thought the earth was level, the sky spread
over it like tent over fat surface, Isaiah
declared the world to be globulAr, circular,
saying of God: "He sitteth upon the circle
of the earth" See them glitter in the
sTriptursl sky-Arcturus, Orion, the
Pleiades and the Bear with her young"
While running your fingers among the
leaves of your Bible, with the astron omical
thought in your mind, you see two worlds
stop-the sun and the moon. But what
does that Christian know about that miracle
who does not understand something of those
two lumlnaries? Unless you watch modern
astronomy, put those two worlds in its
steelyards and weigh them, you are as ig-
norant as q Hottentot about the stipend
business of that scene in the life of Joshua
The sun over three hundred thousand times
as heavy as our earth and going Thousands
of miles an hour. Think of stopping that
and starting it again without the shipwreck
of the universal But l caI easily believe it
What confounds me is not that he could
stop and start again those two worlds in
Joshua's time, brit that he could have msde
the wheel of worlds of which the sun and
moon are only cogs, and keep that wheel
rolling for thousands Of years-tke fly
wheel of all eternity.
There Are Other Worlds Than Ours.
But what gladdens me, and at the same
time overwhelms ME, is that those worlds
are inhabited. The Bible saws SO, and
what small idea you must have OF God
and His dominion if you think it only ex-
tends across this chip of world which you
and now inhahit. Have you taken this
idea of all the other worlds being inhabited
rs human guesswork?. Read Isaiah, forty
fifth chapter, eighteenth verse: "Thus
saith the Lord that created the heavens
God himself that formed the earth, and
made it; He hath established it, He
created it not in vain, He formed it to
be inhabited" Now, if He inhabited
the earth so that it would not be created
in vain, would he make worlds hundreds
and thousands of times larger and not have
them inhabited? Speaking of the Inhabit
ants of this world, he says: "The nations
are as the drop of bucket" II all the in.
habitants of this world are as q drop of
bucket, where are the other drops of the
bucket? Again and again the Bible speaks
of the host of heaven, and the word "host"
means living creatures, not inert masses,
and the expression Ghosts of heaven" must
mean inhabitants of other worlds. The
above-the heavens" If there were no in
habitants above the heavens, what use of
any mercy?
Again, the Bible exclaims: ''Thy good
ness is great above the heavens" What
could be the use of his goodness above the
heavens if there were no inhs bitants to en-
joy it? Again, the Bible says: "He has set
thy glory above the heavens. And here
nv text comes in with its idea of mansion
of MANY stories: at is He that buildeth
his stories in the heaven" Is it possible
that we who live on the ground floor Of this
many-storied building are the only tenants,
and that the larger rooms and the more gor-
geously upholstered rooms and the more
brilliantly chandeliered rooms above it are
uninhabited? Beside this we are positively
told in the Bible that two other worlds are
inhabited-the world angelic and the world
diabolic. These two worlds added to our
own make it positive that three worlds are
inhabited Why then stop with three
worlds of living beings when there are not
only millions but billions of worlds?
The Heavenly Cars Well Filled.
Did Prot. Herschel and his sister Gather
ine in finding worlds find only worlds unin-
habited and q waste? Is Ceres, which
Piozzi discovered in 1901, wasted? Is
Vesta, that Olbers discovered in 1907,
wasted Is Prosperine, which Prof. Luther
discovered in 1858, wasted? Is Urania,
which Prof Hind discovered in 1854,
wasted? Is Pandora, discovered in 1858 by
Prof SearIe, wasted? Are the 10, 900 stars
recorded in one year in the observatory at
Washington wasted? Is all except the
h;llionth mort of the uuiversa uastad0