between the earth and moon, or 240,000 miles; in the second place, one of the angles can be very easily measured, the angle between the two glasses turned from the earth at the same time on the moon and on the sun. But we must have a second angle, and how can we measure that? for we cannot carry ourselves to the moon, along with our instrument, to learn the angle which these two glasses would make if from the moon we were to direct one on the earth, and the other on the sun. Certainly not; but this is what they do in order to get the second angle: They take care to make the observation at the moment when the moon is half-full, for they know that then the line going from the sun to the moon makes exactly a right angle, or the angle of a square, with the line which would come from the moon to the earth. Thus, then, having in this triangle one side which is 240,000 miles, and two angles, the one a right angle at the moon, and the other which you have yourself measured on the earth, you have all the rest, and you know at once that the line going from us to the sun is nearly four hundred times as long as that which goes from us to the moon. Now, as this is about 240,000 miles, the distance of the sun being 400 times as great, would be 96,000,000 of miles, or, more exactly, 95,000,000.

You see already, dear children, by these immense distances, how great the universe is, and how small we are. As soon as we know the precise distance of the sun, we can also, by geometry, determine its size very exactly. It is 1,300,000 times larger than the earth. It is so great that if its centre were put where our earth is, it would fill up not only all the space that extends between us and the moon, but also nearly as far again; that is to say, two hundred thousand miles beyond the moon; for the half of its diameter is a hundred and ten times the half diameter of the earth, and the distance of the moon is only sixty times this semi-diameter. It is calculated that a bullet, going always as quickly as when it leaves the cannon, would

make a thousand miles an hour, or twenty-four thousand miles a day; well, how long a time do you think it would take to go from the earth to the sun? Ten years, ten months, and eight days!

Now, dear children, this journey which a cannon-bullet would take ten years ten months and eight days to make, we ourselves make six times over in our course around the sun, at the rate of eighteen miles per second; and we make the journey without noticing it. While you are on these benches and I in this pulpit, we are borne along on the globe. And yet it is a heavy coach, since it is twenty-five thousand miles around, and since it weighs (as has been ascertained) twice as much as if it were entirely of marble. Moreover, more than fifty planets have now been counted, all of which, like us, revolve around the sun, some smaller, and others much larger than our earth. Uranus, for example, is 77 times as large; Saturn, 887 times; Jupiter, 1470 times. And these great bodies, instead of having only one moon, as our planet, have several, and are much further than we from the sun— Jupiter more than five times; Saturn more than nine and a half times; Uranus more than nineteen times.

But even they are nothing compared with what the telescope and modern science have revealed, during the last fifty years, in the world of fixed stars. It has been ascertained that these countless little lights, which seem to your eyes about the size of a pin-head, are so many suns equal, ay, often much superior, to ours in size. God has recently given man the astonishing instrument, the telescope, which carries us into the depths of creation, and which makes us discover, from day to day, new immensities. I shall tell you a word or two about them, by

the way.

The naked eye on a fine winter night cannot see more than a thousand stars at the most, and it is found that a telescope can discover to us 80,000 times more than the naked eye. The

telescope of Herschel, I mean his reflecting mirror of forty feet, which magnified 6000 times, could let us see the mountains and valleys of the moon as if we were suddenly transported to forty miles from that luminary. It makes an object 3700 times as brilliant as it would seem to the naked eye, and lets us distinguish stars of the 1.344th magnitude, 1 while the most practised eye can see only as far as the sixth or seventh magnitude. Once, when it was pretty dark, Herschel saw a steeple three miles off, and the hour to which the handle of its clock pointed. The stars of the first magnitude too, before appearing on his reflector, announced their approach by a twilight as the sun does to us, and they soon spread so dazzling a brightness that it was necessary to turn the eyes aside.

I should like to give you an idea, first of all, of the multitude of fixed stars or suns which the heaven contains, and then of their wondrous size. To let you have a conception of their immense number, I shall tell you that Herschel, when he turned his glass on the Milky Way, ascertained that in a space of the sky not larger than what the moon seems to our eye to occupy, he could count with his telescope two thousand suns at a time; and that if he had turned it on one of these masses of stars which are so much studied to-day, and which are called nebulæ, the moon would then have covered two hundred thousand suns in the firmament. The strongest naked eye, in a dark clear night, can only see stars as low as the sixth magnitude, while the astronomical glasses enable us to count them even of the sixteenth magnitude, and every increase in the dimensions and power of telescopes (particularly the new instrument constructed by Lord Rosse), makes new stars appear, so that there is ground for saying to-day that the number of stars is really infinite, and that the Bible-at a time when the eyes of men in the clearest nights could see only a thousand-spoke the truth when it

Arago in his "Notice sur Herschel," Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes, 1842.

called them" countless as the sand of the sea," God having "sown them in heaven as dust."

So much for their number, it is infinite; but listen now to a word or two on their size. I called them, a little ago, suns, and I said that the moon, while moving through the heaven, hides behind it about two thousand. Well! you will judge of their dimensions by some facts, for already many of these fixed stars, which appear to us in the vast space of the sky only as a luminous point without any size, have been measured. For example, you know the brightest stars which can be seen from our country, Sirius, Arcturus, Antaris, Vega. According to the researches of the great Herschel, and the deductions of Arago, the diameter of Arcturus, the most beautiful star of Bootes, is at least eleven times that of our sun, so that if it were put in its place, its surface would present to our eyes a sun 121 times as great as our luminary. As for Sirius, the brightest of the stars of our hemisphere, it has been concluded from the experiments of Wollaston on its light, that its diameter is at least three and three-quarter times that of our luminary, so that, placed at the same distance, it would present to us in surface a sun fourteen times the size of ours. And what shall I say of Vega, the most beautiful star of Lyra? According to measurements taken several times by Herschel, it has a diameter 3000 times as great as our sun, and is at a distance of twenty millions of millions of miles. These measurements, which would assign to it dimensions equal to three-fourths of our solar system, surpass all our conceptions.

And now at what distance can we suppose these brilliant luminaries to be situated ? They have tried to make triangles to measure it, taking for one of the sides the two extremities of the orbit of the earth, which are a hundred and ninety millions of miles from one another; but that line has been found too small for such distances, and we have been able only to calculate that light, which goes at the rate of a hundred and ninety-two

thousand miles a second, and which takes only eight minutes to travel from the sun to us (while you recollect that a cannon-ball would take ten years and ten months for this journey),--light would take at least six years to come from the nearest to us, and if that of a star of the first magnitude takes only six years, that of stars of the eighteenth magnitude would take 2000 years. Ah, my friends, let us adore the God of creation! and repeat with Amos, Seek him that maketh the Pleiades, and the Great Bear, and Orion1 (these magnificent constellations of the sky); and with David, "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 ?" 2

But there is an evil thought which sometimes occurs to men in the contemplation of this greatness, and it is this: They say, “Ah, the heaven is too great to allow me to think that the Creator has come down to this insignificant earth, and come hither to die for us." I shall give two answers. First, this difficulty comes only from not knowing sufficiently the greatness of the Most High. God is so great that to him nothing is great and nothing small. If instead of giving us a stature of five or six feet, he had given us a stature such that, while our feet were on earth, our head would touch the sun, so that a cannon-ball going night and day, would take more than ten years to rise from our feet to our head, would we then be great enough for God to be mindful of us? No, without doubt, not even then ; and the objection, you must see, would be as strong in that case as it is at present, for it could still be said quite as truly that we would be too little for favours from God. What would we even then be in comparison with the fixed stars of the eighteenth magnitude? What would we be compared with the nebulæ ? He who proves too much, proves nothing, and that argument would amount to saying that God cannot be mindful of anything, be1 Amos v. 8. 2 Ps. viii. 3, 4.