THE PIAMILTON ASSOCIATION. II 



.beam of light would take 9 years and 10 months to leap. We 

 have reached a new earth ; we would expect to reach a new 

 heaven. We lift up our eyes, and there yet w^e see the old 

 familiar constellations The Pleiades, " like a swarm of fireflies 

 tangled in a silver braid," shine down on us yet. Orion blazes 

 there with his gorgeous belt, the pale daughter of Andromeda, 

 still as here displays her trembling jewels. Acttu'us, still from 

 his sentinel out-look, watches the Great Bear which there, as 

 here, points out our earth's Polaris. All is unchanged and the 

 abysmal distance we have crossed is only a fraction of the 

 entire diameter of the stellar system and yet the change wrought 

 by this mightv journey in the appearance of the heavens is no 

 greater than would be produced in the relative position of the 

 persons, comparing this audience to a person near its centre 

 who shall change his seat with his immediate neighbor. The 

 leaves of many trees in the vast African forests are preyed 

 upon by minute insects and each of these has its own little 

 retinue of parasites. If one of these monads were destroyed 

 the forest would still flourish as gloriously as ever, its strength 

 would be as unabated, its beauty as undimmed, and its vastness 

 as undiminished_ — the little monad's -destruction, important no 

 doubt to itself, would be as nothing in the forest. And this is 

 only a faint, a very faint comparison to vs^hat would be the ap- 

 parent result in case the besom of the Almighty's wrath were 

 to sweep from the universe our earthly dwelling place — it would 

 be naught but the disappearance of a little speck from the field 

 of created things wdiich the hand of His omnipotence has so 

 profusely thrown around Him. Is then space infinite? Is 

 space a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circum- 

 ference is nowhere? And yet God magnified himself in the 

 flesh for the salvation of so paltry a world. And yet the Son 

 of God put on the form of our species and sojourned amongst 

 us and shared in all our infirmities and crowned the whole scene 

 of humiliation by the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyr- 

 dom. When I look through a telescope into the deoths of space 

 I feel overwhelmed with awe, for I know God has written His 

 word here in these scriptures of the sky, and gazing into that 



