March 1, 1888.] 



♦ KNOVSTLEDGE ♦ 



^ILLUSTRATED ^MAGAZINE >^ 

 fclENCELITERATURE, & AR& 



LONDON: MARCH 1, 1888. 



GOD'S UNIVERSE. 



N old times men looked round upon the eartb, 

 seeing there the whole world, the kingdom 

 over which the gods ruled, while in the heavens 

 above they recognised the temple in which 

 their gods abode and were enshrined. There 

 is something strangely impressive in the 

 thought of what earth and heaven must have 

 been to men in those days. We talk of myths doubtiugly 

 and coldly, because we cannot readily place ourselves in the 

 position of those who were moved to make myths. We 

 cannot readily picture to our minds what they not only 

 paw, but felt; what — if we consider their position aright 

 — we see they could not help feeling. The grave busi- 

 ness man is as unable to recall the fancies of his two- 

 year-old childhood, and s3 interpret the feelings of his 

 two-year-old child, as the more advanced races of man 

 to-day to recall the feelings with which the child-man con- 

 templated the mysteries of earth and sun and moon, and the 

 yet more marvellous mystery of the star-strewn heavens. 

 Our school children can at least verbally describe the globe 

 of the earth ; they can name the great distance separating 

 us from the sun, and speak of his size and might and power ; 

 they can tell how Copernicus and Kepler and Newton ex- 

 plained the strangely seeming movements of the planets. 

 But grown men in old times could not inteipret aught they 

 saw. To them the earth's renewal of life year after year was a 

 standing mystery ; the sun, as day by day he renewed bis 

 victory over the powers of darkness, yet day after day sunk 

 to seeming death in the blood-stained western fields, was as 

 a living, acting, and enduring being, a veritable giant 

 l)ower, rejoicing as a giant to run his course. The moon 

 seemed of set purpose to bear sway over the skies of night, 

 as month after month she returned to full midnight glory, 

 and though she " nightly changed in her circling orb,'' 

 waxing and waning in power, even in this her individuality 

 and self-power seemed attested. She seemed to measure 

 time for man, as if specially considering bLs wants. Even 

 more strikingly did the planets, as they pursued 



Their wandering course, now high, now low, then lr!cl, 

 Progressive, retrograde, and standing still, 



peem to exercise powerful sway over the destinies of men. 

 It was not merely, as Wordsworth sang, that those " radiant 

 Mercuries " 



Se?med to move, 



Carrying throngh ether, in perpetual round, 



Decrees and resolutions of the gods, 



but that they seemed to be themselves veritable gcds. Men 

 watched the movements of those divine beings even as 

 children in Catholic churches watch the entrances and the 

 exits of mitred bishops, robed priests, and surpliced acolytes, 

 recognising in each a solemn religious meaning, though not 



knowing what their movements and ministrations may 

 precisely signify. Tliey had no need in those days, so far 

 as worship was concerned, of " temples made with hands," 

 for the arched dome of heaven, alike by day and by night, 

 was their temple, the sun and moon, the stars and planets, 

 were their gods. But that they might note with due pre- 

 cision the positions and movements of these ruling powers, 

 they required earthly structures, and those structures, thus 

 raised to watch the movements of their gods, became sacred : 

 their pyramids and towers were like lady-chapels within 

 a vast cathedral, their gnomons and obelisks were as altars 

 or other essential adjuncts of their Sabaistic temples. 



Turn without passing through all the intermediate stages 

 of men's progress, at once from the simple adoration of 

 those older times, when men prostrated themselves bodily 

 before the orbs of heaven, to the teachings of modern 

 science, and it might seem that men had become on the one 

 hand altogether wiser, on the other altogether less reverent. 

 Think what the earth is to us now in its lessons of a vast 

 antiquity of ever-changing aspect, of ever-varying forms of 

 life 1 Consider the infinite depth and solemnity of the tones 

 in which the heavenly orbs speak to man to-day ! We are 

 then disposed to smile at the simple, the almost touching 

 ignorance of mankind, during the childhood of their race. 

 Yet, even as the grown man looks back with something of 

 regret upon the fond hopes of youth, and even on the fooUsh 

 fancies of boyhood and the illusions of infancy, so might the 

 profoundest student of to-day be led to envy former ages 

 their simpler faith, did he not recognise that the univer.se 

 as we see it today, rightly understood, j)resents a grander 

 and more enduring temple for men, a more wonderful 

 powei- for their worship than the men of old times could 

 even have imagined. 



Consider the steps by which men passed from their former 

 contented ignorance to their present growing, but ever un- 

 satisfied, thirst for knowledge — noting at every step how the 

 unknown and unexplained seemed ever to be the place of 

 Deity, but that while the unknown was ever passing into 

 the domain of the known and the unexi)lained into the 

 domain of the understood, men's recognition of the immen- 

 sity of the unknowable, the infinity of the inexplicable, has 

 been ever growini; clearer and more defined — so that whereas 

 once men saw a temple in the skies and deities in the orbs 

 of heaven, the universe itself is now recogniseil as the temple 

 of the godhead, the power working in and through all things 

 as Almighty Omnipresent — aye, and Ever-manifest — Deity. 



First came the recognition that our earth is a globe, and 

 the measurement of that globe's size. The n.ations of old 

 times had doubtless come to recognise the earth as occupying 

 a large space, for they knew that long distances separated 

 Babylon from Egypt, and either from India, and fo forth. 

 None of the earlier nations can have doubted that the earth's 

 surface must be measured by millions of square miles, or 

 the equivalent of such spaces in their modes of measurement. 

 Still, the surfivce they had imagined as belonging to the 

 earth was almost as nothing compared with the 200 millions 

 of square miles which thej' recognised as forming the surface 

 of the entire globe, even when they had measured but small 

 arcs of it, and surveyed but a minute portion even of the 

 regions known to them. Then the recognition of the fact 

 that this globe-shaped home of the human race is suspended, 

 as it were, in mid space, even if it be considered (as by them 

 it was considered) to be the fixed centre of the universe, 

 must have had an impressive effect on the minds of thinking 

 men. 



Still all this was as nothing compared with the signifi- 

 cance of the demonstration by Copernicus that the earth and 

 the planets form one family, the sun being the centre about 

 which they all travel. Because, so soon as this had been 



