The Globe-republican., 1893-01-06

| Scriptures when 1t finds fault with th1
cessation of stellar and lunar travel
Here Is nv watch. could not make Z
watch II tried, but can stop it anC
start it again.
Ny difficulty is not that God could
stop two worlds and start them agar
but that he could make them at all a.
he did make them. What pleaSes I'M
and astounds me more is that each on,
of the million worlds has God-giver
name. Only comparatively small
| number OF them have names given them
BY scientists. If astronomers can give &
name to whole constellation or galaxy
they think they do well. but God has q
name for each star in all immensity. In
spired David declares of God, "Hs
telleth the number OF the stars; he call
eth them all by their names,"
They are not orphans that have
never been christened. They are moi
unknown ships on the high seas Of i'm
mensity. They belong to a family Of
| which God Is the Father, and as you cal
your children Benjamin or Mary or Ber
| tha or Addison or Josephine so he calls
all the infant worlds and all the adul,
| worlds by their first name, and sthey
know 1t as well as though there were
! only one child Of light in all the divine
family. ''He calleth them all by their
names," and when he calls, l warrant
they come.
Oh, the stars. Those vestal fires kept
burning on infinite altars. Those light.
houses on the coast of eternity. The
hands and weights and pendulum of the
great clock of the universe According
IN hal ho IoA o<o
not fixed at all, but each one sun with
q mighty system of worlds rolling round
it, and this whole system with all the
| other systems rolling on around some
other great center-millloEs and mil
trillians, QuadrilliOns and QnadrillionS!
But what gladdens me, and at the
same time overwhelms me, is that those
worlds are inhabited. The Bible says
SO, and what small idea you must have
of God and his dominion II you think it
only extends across this chip Of world
which you and l now inhabit Have you
taken this idea of all the other worlds
being inhabited as human guesswork? /?
Read Isaiah, forty-tifth chapter, eight
eenth 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 nhabited?
Speaking of the inhabitants Of this
world, he says. ''The nations are as the
drop Of a bucket"
If all the Inhabitants of this world are
as 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 liv-
ing creatures, not inert masses, and the
expression ''hosts of heaven must mean
inhabitants of other worlds The psalm
ist cries out, ''Thy mercy is great above
the heavens" If there were no in
habitants above the heavens, what use
of any mercy? Again, the Bible ex-
claims, ''Thy goodness is great above
the heavens. What could be the use Of
his goodness above the heavens II there
were no Inhabitants to enjoy it? Again,
the Bible says, HE has set thy glory
above the heavens And here my text
comes In with its idea of q mansion of
many stories, 1T is he that buildeth his
stories in the heaven"
l admit that scientific exploration has
discovered that around many worlds
there Is an atmosphere in which lungs
like ours could not breathe, and there
are heats or colds that physique like ours
could not endure. But do you suppose
that we have the only kind of lungs that
God can make? Do our bodies exhaust
divine ingenuity. and must He make all
INTELLIGENT creatures with our respiration
or puISatiOn or masticatiOn or digestion
or habituGe, or not make them at all?
Because organisms like ours cannot live
in Mercury or Saturn or Jupiter or the
sun we have no right to conclude that
those globes are lifeless.
Without any telescope and without
out any observatory and without any
astronomical calculation, l know that
the other world, are inhabited. because
my Bible and my common sense tell me
so. 1t has been estimated that in the
worlds belonging to our solar system
there Is room for at least twenty-five
trillion of population. And l believe
it is all occupied or will be occupied by
intelligent beings God will not fill them
with brutes. He would certainly put
into those worlds beings intelligent
enough to appreciate the architecture,
the coloring, the grandeur, the beauty,
the harmony of their surroundings.
Yea, the inhabitants of those worlds
have capacity of locomotion like ours,
for they would not have had such spa
ciOus opportunity for movement il they
had not powers of motion. Yea, they
have sight, else why the light and hear
ing: else how get on with necessary lam
guage and how clear themselves from
advancing perils? Yea, as God made
our human race in His own image He
probably made the inhabitants Of other
worlds, in His own image - in other
words, it is as near demonstration as
care to have IL, that while the inhabi-
tants of other worlds have adaptations
of bodily structure to the particular
climate in which they dwell, there Is yet
of mental and spiritual char
acteristics among all the inhabitants of
the universe Of God, and made in his i'm
age they are made wonderfully alike.
Nov what should be the practical re-
suit of this discussion founded on Scrip
ture and common sense? 1t is first of all
to enlarge our ideas Of God and so in
tensify our admiration and worship.
Under such consideration how much
more graphic the Bible question, which