Gospel in the Stars

ISBN: 0825437024

Author: Seiss, Joseph A.

Condition: Used

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1882. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... THE GOSPEL IN THE STARS. ILectute jFirst. THE STARRY WORLDS. Gen. 1:14: "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years." THE sublimest visible objects of human contemplation are the Starry Heavens. The beholder is awed at every thoughtful look upon them. And when viewed in the light of astronomical science the mind is overwhelmed and lost amid the vastness and magnificence of worlds and systems which roll and shine above, around and beneath us. The Sun. The most conspicuous, to us, of these wonderful orbs is the Sun. Seemingly, it is not as large as the wheel of a wagon, but when we learn that we see it only at the distance of more than ninety-one millions of miles, and consider how the apparent size of objects diminishes in proportion to their remoteness, we justly conclude that it must be of enormous magnitude to be'so conspicuous across a gulf so vast. Our earth is a large body; it takes long and toilsome journeying for a man to make his way around it. But the Sun fills more than a million times the cubic space filled by the earth. A railway-train running thirty miles an hour, and " never stopping, could not go around it in less than eleven years, nor run the distance from the earth to the Sun in less than three hundred and sixty years. If we were to take a string long enough to reach the moon, and draw a circle with it at its utmost stretch, the Sun would still be six times larger than that circle. Belonging to the system of which it is the centre there are eight primary planets, some of them more than a thousand times larger than our earth, besides eighty-five asteroids, twentyone satellites or moons, and several hundred comets. But t...