God's Laws by C. S. Robinson

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 11, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 11.

God's Laws.

By C. S. Robinson

ONCE, as I entered the observatory of Harvard College, at the close of a day, a friend who had led me there asked that I might be shown the new instrument that had just been introduced. The professor replied courteously, "Yes; I think there may be time enough yet for him to see a star if you will find one." My companion "found one" by looking in a worn book of astronomical tables lying there on the desk, and replied quietly, "There is one at 5:20." So in a hurried instant the covering was stripped off from the great brass tube, and prone upon his back, under the eyepiece, lay the enthusiastic professor. While my friend stood by, with what seemed a tack-hammer in his hand, I noticed that he kept his eye on a tall chronometer clock near us.

Suddenly two sounds broke the impressive stillness; we had been waiting for the stars. One was the word "There," spoken by the professor; the other was the tap of the hammer on the stone top of the table by my companion. Both occurred at the same instant,—the same particle of the instant,—they were positively simultaneous. But the man who spoke the word could not see the clock; he was looking at the star that came swinging along till it touched the spider-web line in his instrument; and the other man who struck the hammer stroke could not see the star; he was looking at the second-hand on the dial-plate. When the index in its simplicity of regular duty marked twenty minutes after five, there fell the click on the stone; and then, too, there came on in the heavens, millions of miles away, one of God's stars, having no speech, but rolling in on time, as He bade it ages ago!

Then I was invited to look in, and see the world of light and beauty as it swept by the next fiber in the tube. But afterward I went curiously to the book, and found that it had been published ten years before, and that its calculations ran far away into the future, and that it had been based on calculations 1,000 years old. And God's fidelity to the covenant of nature, here now almost 3,000 years after David had made the nineteenth psalm, had brought the glorious creature of the sky into the field of Harvard College's instrument just as that patient clock reached the second needed for the truth of the ancient prediction. Need I say that those two professors almost wondered, so used to such things were they, at the awestruck devotion, the hushed reverence, with which I left the room?—Dr. C. S. Robinson.