suns at a time.

These points of light, not larger to our eye than the head of a pin, have been measured. Four of the most brilliant stars seen in our sky have been named Sirius, Arcturus, Antares, Vega. According to the observations and calculations of Herschel and Arago, two of the greatest astronomers, the diameter of Arcturus, the finest star in the constellation (or group of stars) called Bootes, is at least eleven times greater than that of our sun, so that if it were put in our sun's place, it would appear to us a sun 121 times larger than our great light. From the observations of Wollaston, it has been reckoned that the diameter of the bright star Sirius is at least three times and three-quarters that of our sun, and that placed at the same distance from us it would appear to us fourteen times larger than the sun. Yet Vega, the most brilliant star in the constellation Lyra, far exceeds even these. From the observations and measurements of Herschel, its diameter is reckoned to be 3,000 times that of our sun, and its distance from our earth is calculated to be twenty-two millions of millions of miles. Such measurements are almost too vast for

our minds to conceive, and yet there are others greater and more distant still.

Astronomers have tried to form triangles for measuring some of the distant stars, by taking as the known side an imaginary line between the two extreme points of the earth's orbit, which are nearly 200,000,000 of miles distant from each other; but even this long line is too short for such a purpose, and they have only been able to give an idea of their distance by the speed of light. They reckon that light, which travels 192,000 miles in a second, and comes to us from the sun in eight minutes, would take more than six years to come to us from the nearest of the fixed stars; and that if light takes six years to come from a star of the first magnitude, it will take 2,000 years to reach us from a star of the eighteenth magnitude.

*

Ah! my young friends, let us adore the Creator of these wonders, and let us say with Amos, "Seek the Lord, and ye shall live. Seek him that maketh the seven stars [Pleiades] and Orion," these grand

Amos v. 6, 8.

constellations in the heavens. And let us also say with David, "O Lord, when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Ps. viii. 3, 4.)

There is an evil thought which sometimes comes into the minds of men when they behold all the glory and grandeur of the heavens, and it is this: They say to themselves, "Ah! heaven is so great that I can scarcely believe that the Creator of all could have humbled himself to come down into this miserable little world to die for us." I shall answer this in two ways. First, This difficulty only occurs to those who do not know or consider enough the infinite greatness of God. God is so great that in his sight there is but little difference between what we call great and what we call little. All is as nothing compared with him. Suppose that, instead of creating men about six feet in height, he had chosen to make them of such an enormous size that, with their feet on earth, their heads should have reached the sun, so that a cannon ball flying day and

night would have taken ten years and three months to go from their feet to their heads. Suppose, I say, that men had been created as large as this, would they have been worthy then that God should trouble himself with them? No; certainly not. If the objection, the evil thought were true at all, it would still be equally true even in that case. Even then men would be very small compared with the infinite distances and wonderful size of the numberless stars; they would be but very small compared with fixed stars of the eighteenth magnitude, and still but atoms compared with the nebulæ. When compared with these immense far distant suns unseen by the naked eye, men would even then be less than the millions of invisible animalculæ are, which the microscope shows us swimming in a drop of water, when compared with the visible glories of our starry sky.

You see, then, that what proves too much in fact proves nothing; for if this objection were true, it might lead us to say that God is too great to trouble himself about any created thing at all, since all are nothing compared with him; and such a supposition, instead of

exalting him, would, on the contrary, tend to take away from his glory, as his work of preserving and governing the creatures he has made is as great a wonder as his work in creating them at first.

But there is a second answer to this evil thought. Does the greatness of God bewilder us and crush us to the dust, because we are so small and low, and it is too high for us,-we cannot comprehend it, for it is infinite? Ah, my friends! let us remember that the goodness of this all-perfect God is infinite too, and that we ought to feel still more humbled in the dust when we think of it. Sin has made us even more unable to comprehend his infinite mercy than his infinite power, and we are much smaller in the view of his great love than even in the view of his great power. Ah! if it is true that these heavens, which were created by his powerful hand, are so far away above our heads, let us remember that it is written in the Bible that "as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him" (Ps. ciii. 11).

You see, then, that in God one mystery corresponds with another mystery,—the mystery