CHAPTER VIII

THE NATURAL ORDER ONCE MORE

"Natural things are glorious, and to know them is glorious."-TRAHERNE.

IN considering such great subjects as now occupy us, it is often necessary that we should go back a little in our considerations, take our bearings, as it were, and see to what point we have so far attained.

A time for thus retracing our steps has arrived now, for in the last chapters we have travelled very far from any point of view which takes earth and earthly life as its centre. In one sense, we certainly cannot say that the scientific aspect of the universe does this, for modern science teaches us as strongly and clearly as possible that the whole solar system to which our earth belongs, is but as a speck of dust or a grain of sand in comparison with the starry hosts of heaven among which it has its place, while as to the tiny earth, it holds (so far as size goes) quite an insignificant place even among its

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fellow planets. scientific point of view does take earth, or more truly man as its centre, because it makes man's understanding the standard and test of either accepted or probable truth. The religious aspect on the other hand, takes in its crude and early stages the bare Power of God, and in later and more developed stages that Power as shown in Righteousness and Love as its standard of accepted or probable truth.

Yet in another sense the

These two different standards are mutually very helpful if we give to each its rightful place, and do not allow either to usurp that of the other. Unfortunately, however, owing to the one-sidedness of the human mind, people who are much taken up with natural laws and their application to the vast and increasing store of natural knowledge, are often inclined to think the religious aspect of the universe superfluous. On the other hand, religious people who are profoundly impressed with the spiritual aspect of the universe are too ready to neglect that of science, even sometimes to oppose it, because they think it does not agree with their religious beliefs. Misunderstandings of this kind, on whichever side the chief fault lies,

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are almost invariably due to that taking of a part for the whole which is so characteristic a fault of our human way of looking at things. If instead of exalting one view at the expense of the other, we were to employ our energies in trying to see where the one least familiar to us supplements our own, and gives it a force and meaning it could not otherwise have, we should be rewarded by the correcting, strengthening, and widening of our own view, and by gladly recognising the usefulness and beauty of the other. I will give you some illustrations of this, and will begin by quoting from two striking and beautiful descriptions of the vastness and grandeur of the Natural Order as seen from an astronomical point of view, but from which the writer of the second, because he restricts himself to that view only, draws quite a false conclusion. Then by a third quotation from a totally different source, I will show you how the religious view supplements the scientific without detracting one iota from its truth and value. The first quotation referred to is a description of the Milky Way.

"There are stars in all orders of brightness, from those which (seen with the telescope) resemble in lustre the leading glories of the firmament down to tiny points of light only

caught by momentary twinklings. Every variety of arrangement is seen. Here the stars are scattered as over the skies at night; there they cluster in groups, as though drawn together by some irresistible power; in one region they seem to form sprays of stars like diamonds sprinkled over fern-leaves; elsewhere they lie in streams and rows, in coronets and loops and festoons, resembling the star-festoon which, in the constellation Perseus, garlands the black robe of night. Nor are varieties of colour wanting to render the display more wonderful and more beautiful. Many of the stars which crowd upon the view, are red, orange, and yellow. Among them are groups of two and three and four (multiple stars as they are called), amongst which blue and green and lilac and purple stars appear, forming the most charming contrast to the ruddy and yellow orbs near which they are commonly seen."

These stars are suns, and the distance of the nearest of them from our sun is 20 millions of millions of miles. An express

train travelling at 60 miles an hour would take about forty million years to reach the nearest star-sun, and even this is a short way compared to the distance between our sun

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and the great nebula in Orion. Our minds refuse to take in such enormous distances; we can attach no clear meaning to them. Our imagination is overwhelmed before "millions and millions-countless millions of suns. Innumerable galaxies and systems of suns, separated by black gulfs of space so wide that no man can realise the meaning of the figures which denote their stretch. Suns of fire and light, whirling through vast oceans of space like swarms of golden bees. And around them planets whirling at thousands of miles a minute."

The thought of this vast and magnificent aspect of the stellar universe so exclusively possesses the writer of the last quotation that at the end of it he asks whether it is possible to conceive that its Creator "would be driven across the unimaginable gulfs of space, out of the transcendent glory of His myriad resplendent suns, to die on a cross, in order to win back to Him the love of the puny creatures on one puny planet in the marvellous universe His Power had made?" What a natural thought, if we allow the space and time view of things to occupy our whole range of vision, and yet what an unsatisfactory, desolate, terrifying thought to us human beings who