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Page 66
Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an
order of development on earth--tender grass, herb, tree; moving
creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle,
man. The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it God's
successive creations.
During ages on ages man's wisdom held the earth to be flat. Meanwhile,
God was saying, century after century, of himself, "He sitteth upon
the sphere of the earth" (Gesenius).
Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold [Page 234] the
earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and
turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported
them. Meanwhile, God was perpetually telling men that he had hung
the earth upon nothing.
Men were ever trying to number the stars. Hipparchus counted one
thousand and twenty-two; Ptolemy one thousand and twenty-six; and
it is easy to number those visible to the naked eye. But the Bible
said, when there were no telescopes to make it known, that they
were as the sands of the sea, "innumerable." Science has appliances
of enumeration unknown to other ages, but the space-penetrating
telescopes and tastimeters reveal more worlds--eighteen millions
in a single system, and systems beyond count--till men acknowledge
that the stars are innumerable to man. It is God's prerogative "to
number all the stars; he also calleth them all by their names."
Torricelli's discovery that the air had weight was received with
incredulity. For ages the air had propelled ships, thrust itself
against the bodies of men, and overturned their works. But no man
ever dreamed that weight was necessary to give momentum. During
all the centuries it had stood in the Bible, waiting for man's
comprehension: "He gave to the air its weight" (Job xxviii. 25).
The pet science of to-day is meteorology. The fluctuations and
variations of the weather have hitherto baffled all attempts at
unravelling them. It has seemed that there was no law in their
fickle changes. But at length perseverance and skill have triumphed,
and a single man in one place predicts the weather and winds [Page
235] for a continent. But the Bible has always insisted that the
whole department was under law; nay, it laid down that law so
clearly, that if men had been willing to learn from it they might
have reached this wisdom ages ago. The whole moral law is not more
clearly crystallized in "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," than all the fundamentals
of the science of meteorology are crystallized in these words: "The
wind goeth toward the south (equator), and turneth about (up) unto
the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
again according to his circuits (established routes). All the rivers
run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from
whence the rivers come, thither they return again" (Eccles. i. 6,
7).
Those scientific queries which God propounded to Job were unanswerable
then; most of them are so now. "Whereon are the sockets of the
earth made to sink?" Job never knew the earth turned in sockets;
much less could he tell where they were fixed. God answered this
question elsewhere. "He stretcheth the north (one socket) over
the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." Speaking
of the day-spring, God says the earth is _turned_ to it, as clay
to the seal. The earth's axial revolution is clearly recognized.
Copernicus declared it early; God earlier.
No man yet understands the balancing of the clouds, nor the suspension
of the frozen masses of hail, any more than Job did.
Had God asked if he had perceived the _length_ of the earth, many
a man to-day could have answered yes. But the eternal ice keeps
us from perceiving the _breadth_ [Page 236] of the earth, and shows
the discriminating wisdom of the question.
The statement that the sun's going is from the end of the heaven,
and his circuit to the ends of it, has given edge to many a sneer
at its supposed assertion that the sun went round the earth. It
teaches a higher truth--that the sun itself obeys the law it enforces
on the planets, and flies in an orbit of its own, from one end of
heaven in Argo to the other in Hercules.
So eminent an astronomer and so true a Christian as General Mitchell,
who understood the voices in which the heavens declare the glory of
God, who read with delight the Word of God em bodied in worlds, and
who fed upon the written Word of God as his daily bread, declared,
"We find an aptness and propriety in all these astronomical
illustrations, which are not weakened, but amazingly strengthened,
when viewed in the clear light of our present knowledge." Herschel
says, "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose
of confirming more strongly the truths that come from on high, and
are contained in the sacred writings." The common authorship of
the worlds and the Word becomes apparent; their common unexplorable
wealth is a necessary conclusion.
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