How GOOD the Lord is to give to us, poor, doubting children that we are, so many assurances of his willingness and power to do for us all that we need. He does not give these proofs because they make the promises more sure, but he does it that our faith in his ability to fulfill them may be strengthened. He does it so that we, when in our weakness we doubt him, and, like Peter, begin to sink beneath the billows of life, might look about us, and see the evidence of his power, and the pledges he has made to use that power in our behalf. With this in view, let us read: "Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth." Isa. 40:26. As we obey this command, and "lift up our eyes," and "behold . . . these things," what will we see? Let the following description tell us:—
Go with me to yonder "lighthouse of the skies." Poised on its rocky base, behold that wondrous tube which lifts the broad pupil of its eye high up as if gazing instinctively into the mighty deep of space. Look out upon the heavens and gather into your eye its glittering constellations. Pause and reflect that over the narrow zone of the retina of your eye a universe is pictured, painted by light in all its exquisite and beautiful proportions. Look upon that luminous zone which girdles the sky,—observe its faint and cloudy light. How long, think you, that light has been streaming, day and night, with a swiftness that flashes it on its way 12,000,000 of miles in each and every minute? How long has it fled and flashed through space to reach your eye and tell its wondrous tale? Not less than a century has rolled away since it left its home. . . . Place your eye for one moment to the tube that now pierces that seeming domain of night, and, lo! 10,000 orbs, blazing with light innumerable, burst on the astonished sight. . . . Look once more. The vision changes; a hazy cloud of light now fills the field of the telescope. Whence comes the light of this mysterious object? Its home is in the mighty deep, as far beyond the limit you had vainly fixed,—10,000 times as far,—as that limit is beyond the reach of human vision. And thus we mount, and rise, and soar, from height to height, upward, and even upward still, till the mighty series ends, because vision fails, and sinks, and dies.
One more description:—
We come to the nearest portion of that vast congeries of stars which we denominate the Milky Way, composed of not less than one hundred millions of suns, and of such vast proportions that light flashing at the rate of 12,000,000 miles in a single minute, could not cross its deepest range in less than ten thousand years. Leaving the milky way and plunging yet deeper into space, we find other milky ways, grander, and more populous in stars even than our own, until at last our telescopic ray extends so deeply that its length . . . fails to plunge across any other mighty depth, and we stand wondering and awestruck on the very threshold of infinitude.
Reader, how many of those shining worlds, think you, there are? "The host of heaven cannot be numbered." Jer. 33:22. Yet, as said above, our Heavenly Father "bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power." It does not take all his wisdom and power simply to number and name those glorious orbs, but he keeps them all in their places, so that "not one faileth." The following will give some faint idea of the care he has over his creative works, so they do not fail:—
Should the rotation of the earth on its axis be increased by five seconds of time in twenty-four hours, all the time keepers in all the watch towers of the world would proclaim the fact; all the stars would fail to keep their appointed meridian transits, and would, in sympathy with the great orbs of light, linger in their nocturnal march. The bursting out in the heavens of a thousand fiery comets in a single night could produce no such mortal terror to the astronomer as this failing backward of the mighty sphere of the starry universe for one single second in twenty-four hours, for it would speak the doom of the universe in announcing that God's right arm was growing heavy, and his omnipotent will was beginning to stagger under the weight of 10,000,000 of rolling worlds. Should such an event ever occur, . . . when the astronomer shall wistfully look through "optic tube" for the coming of the faithful star which, prompt to the thousandth of a single second, has traversed his meridian, and, lo! the star lingers in its journey, seconds ebb slowly away and merge into minutes, and at last the star appears, no matter if with its wonted beauty, the astronomer stands aghast, and well may he tremble, for the powers of the heavens are smitten, and God is deserting the universe which sprang into being at his divine command. Human confidence and faith would be gone forever, and no remedy could avail to rectify the wrong.