God’s Law

Review and Herald Publishing Assn. · Washington, D.C. · Dec 31, 1903

SOME time ago a visitor at the Observatory of Harvard University was desiring to look through their great telescope. Consulting a book of astronomical tables, his friend said: “A star will pass across the field of vision at 5:20 o’clock.” The instrument was adjusted, and the visitor, lying upon his back, applied his eye to the glass, his friend meanwhile standing with a small hammer in his hand, and with his eye fixed on a tall chronometer clock. At precisely 5:20 o’clock the observer said, “There!” At the same instant his friend’s hammer struck the

table. The exclamation and the hammer stroke were absolutely simultaneous, although the man at the telescope could not see the clock, nor the man with the hammer the star. It was a wonderful coincidence—that passage of the star hundreds of millions of miles away across the object glass of that telescope, at the instant when the second hand marked the hour 5:20 o’clock.

The wonder seems greater when we know that the book in which was the predicted position of that distant star was published ten years before, the forecast being based on calculations running back a thousand years. In the same book were other tables predicting celestial movements a thousand years still in the future—movements which we may be assured will prove as certain in fact and as exact in time as that which has just been noted. So perfect is the law of God, and so absolute the obedience of nature to his decree! But the God of nature and the God of grace are one; and his relations to redemption are equally definite, and are sustained by no less power than those which bind the universe about his feet.—The Pacific.