CH. xxn. SUMMARY. 183 



the intellect to discover and understand these wonderful 

 truths if he will only seek them in an earnest and teachable 

 spirit. 



Then came Kepler with a still grander lesson, for he 

 showed that the movements of the planets are governed by 

 regular and fixed laws, which can be traced out so accurately 

 that an astronomer is able to foretell with confidence what 

 will happen many years after he himself has passed away. 

 Thus we see Gassendi and Horrocks, by the use of Kepler's 

 labours, calculating within a few minutes the time of a 

 planet's passage across the face of the sun and watching the 

 exact fulfilment of the prediction. Nor is this all : so exact 

 and true are these movements, and so completely is man 

 able to read them rightly, that by this simple passage of a 

 small black spot across the sun Halley showed that we may 

 actually number the millions of miles between ourselves and 

 the great light around which we move. We might almost 

 think that we had now travelled as far as man's mind could 

 go, but something far greater remained behind. Newton 

 sitting under his apple-tree and pondering on the wonderful 

 mechanism of the heavens, found the one great law which 

 accounts for the movements of all the bodies in the universe 

 a law which explains equally why a pin falls to the ground 

 and why a comet which has been lost from sight for more 

 than a hundred years will return to a certain fixed spot at a 

 day and an hour which can be accurately foretold. Kepler 

 had pointed out fixed and definite laws by which the uni- 

 verse is governed ; Newton demonstrated that one law ex- 

 plains them all. He showed us how one single thought, as 

 it were, of the Divine mind suffices to govern the most 

 complicated as well as the simplest movements of our 

 system. 



