What pleasures you have in astronomy, what a constant delight! You are reading the poems of the old Greeks written in the skies. They had thoughts about manhood so broad, so heroic, so full of glorious sympathies, that there were no books on earth fit to record them in, no marbles enduring enough to celebrate the remarkable and interesting deeds. So they took the page of the clear heavens, and put one hero there, and some suffering one near by, and the hero marching on to the deliverance of the suffering. The poetry, the pathos, the great deeds, the special sacrifices, all that they could think of, was written in the skies, and they read it nightly and taught it to their children in the open air. They read it as they sailed on the round sea. They kept in their minds the glory and heroism of the race, as it was there portrayed before them.
But the thoughts of the Greeks were mean and poor and small, compared with the thoughts that come to the astronomer of to-day. Then the stars were only little points in the heavens, and now they are greater worlds than we can think. We use them as the machinery of the gymnasium upon which to stretch our minds and invigorate our thought, not only in regard to material distance and greatness and glory, and years without count, but after a little they will become significant of the infinite power and godhead of our father who made all these things. Paul puts it just right, that these things that are seen tell of the eternal power and Godhead, so that people that see these things, and do not believe in him, are even without excuse. Then comes the teachings of the Elder Brother and the infinite Savior teaching something more than his power and Godhead, even of his Fatherhood and loving care for his children.
Do you know the pleasure of reading these heavens, of all the bright eyes signify, perchance, to you, in their nightly gaze upon you? Whenever I look into the heavens above there are friendly faces, there are bright eyes, there are, I may almost say, individuals that I well know, that I can not only call their names, but tell the very substances of which they are made, and rejoice that they look down upon me with a friendly eye. Under the oak at Hebron I hear God’s voice saying to me, as it did to Abraham, “Lift up thine eyes now unto the heavens.” When God wants to make a man great enough to found a nation, to have a special influence on the earth, he takes him out under the open heavens. By the infinite stars Abraham got his faith in an infinite God enlarged enough to trust him in all things.
I think any one who has not known the heavens might complain like Carlyle in his old age, “Why didn’t somebody teach me when I was young the names of the stars and the groupings of the constellations, which I do not half know now, and thereby have lost pleasure for a lifetime?” You can easily teach these things to those about you, to younger brothers and sisters, to children committed to your care as teachers. They will receive such teaching with delight. First teach them the North Star and the Pointers as always directing the gaze toward it. Tell them some stories about the Greek mythology of Theseus. Then tell them a little about finding some of the constellations. Teach them to know where to look for them at various seasons of the year. Then come to the planets. The planet that happens to be plainest in your sky at present is Venus. Tell them how far east it will come among the stars. You can get, in any ordinary almanac, her greatest elongation, the date, the time, and the star to which it goes. Tell one of these children that this star in the sky will journey so far toward the east, and then begin to go back among the stars toward the west. What a thing it will be for you to have a reputation for having the gift of prophecy, and what a thing it will be for you and your reputation when it comes true. Then tell them it will go west and come so close to the sun that by and by you can scarcely see it for the glory and brightness of the setting sun. Meanwhile, perhaps, Mercury will come in sight, and on some favorable night, on rare occasions, you can tell them, “There, you see that star; perhaps you will never see it again in your lives.” Thus you will give them acquaintance with a few stars and get them in the habit of looking up, a blessed thing for individuals in this world to do. They will interest father and mother about it, and that will interest all the rest of them, and it will be an exceeding great delight. Tell them of the few stars in the east just before sunrise, of Jupiter in the east at present. Tell them of the great changes that are going forward in that planet at present. You saw an account of that in the newspapers. But tell them that Jupiter has been so hot and covered with clouds so long that probably we have never seen its surface at all until a few months since, and now that a great floating island of scoria has come up to the surface, and it has been seen there now for nearly two years, and when it came near the sun men were anxious to know if the spot would be seen when it came up on the other side of the sun. They looked for it eagerly, and when they discovered that spot again, it had floated a long way in longitude.
These stars seem to be almost alive, and the thought that great activities are going on in them will exceedingly interest those with whom you have to do.
Then, how easily you can teach your circles the idea of distance. Just draw them in your school rooms where you “schoolma’ams”—the most honorable name in the world except that of mother—are permitted to teach. Draw them, and by this means you will be able to teach these little ones a few fundamental facts, and enlarge yourselves as you strive to grasp these distances. Bring the idea to them how long itwould take a locomotive to go from the earth to the sun, three hundred and twenty years, running all the time; how long it would take to go elsewhere. Just stretch these little ones, for minds never give way, however much they may stretch or enlarge, stretch them up to understand these things that God has put before us.
I will represent the size of the sun by this table, and then represent Mercury and Venus with the head of a pin; represent the earth by a small-sized pea, very small, the smallest that grows at the end of the pod; represent Mars with another, and Jupiter with an orange. In an astronomy which I first taught, and the first one I ever studied, too, and it was studied and taught at the same time, there used to be an illustration that I have often used with great profit. Go out on your croquet ground, put down a two-bushel basket, for instance, to represent the sun, then draw at suitable distances the orbits of the different bodies. If you have some little children about the school house, put the liveliest little fellow you have to represent Mercury; then the liveliest girl to represent Venus; you know who will represent the earth; put some little fiery fighter to represent Mars, and explain it; then you can get some least sized brothers to represent the asteroids; some big old grandfather that will go slowly to represent Jupiter, etc. Try to start them. Let Mercury go his round swiftly as possible; let Venus go with queenly dignity, and the earth more slowly. You will get into confusion at first, and you will have a good laugh, but you will give to those young minds some illustration of how the earth revolves around the sun.
Don’t try to teach too much. Begin slowly with a single idea. You know how these lectures were represented with an apple swinging around the sun, sometimes with an elastic string to represent how near the moon came down to it. There are a thousand ways of making this interesting, plain and profitable. As you begin to study these, you find your own mind develops and unfolds in this direction.
I just looked into a book of poetry before coming up here, and almost to my surprise on a single page I found more than a dozen allusions to the stars. Astronomy is making itself felt in literature, is coming to be one of the largest means of expression. We are always lacking means of expressing our thoughts; for our words you philologists know have been mostly taken from material things, and then raised up one degree to represent mental ideas. For instance, we say “hard” of a table, then complain that it is a “hard” thing to bear, bringing it up into the region of mind; and we give words one more uplift for spiritual significance. So that our language is all the time one, two or three degrees below the full significance of that which is in our spiritual perception. Now, astronomy with its vastness, with its might and glory, is coming more and more into literature, so that you want an idea of it, and want to know what is to be understood by the words used. And especially when you come to that highest thought, when the Infinitely Wise condescends to speak in the language of men, and men’s words tremble and break down and can not bear his great thought, then you want to say, “High as the heavens are above the earth, so high are his thoughts and ways above ours.”
How much shall we grasp of his thoughts? As much as we grasp of his symbols. He has filled the Bible all full of his symbols, with the Divine Word full of the things of heaven, that we may know of the greatness and glory and power expressed in some of his great thoughts for the children of men. And we want to rise, grasping them, more and more of them, until “a primrose by the river’s brim, a yellow primrose, is to” us, and something more, and the meanest flower that blows brings thoughts that lie too deep for tears. What shall the heavens mean when we are used to utter God’s thought?
By reason of this I want you to spread the knowledge of the heavens above you just as freely as you possibly can. In Pennsylvania, in a quiet inland town that was supposed to be almost dead, some one with a little enthusiasm proposed to form a star club. It was a club for the study of the stars, and no man was to be admitted thereto except on certain conditions. He could be put on the course of study, he could have his preparatory course, he could gradually come along up, but the excellence of the real membership could not be obtained until he passed this test, until he could go out under the open heavens and call a hundred stars by name. How many here are eligible? A little pains would make it, a little pains along in the early evenings of a month, and then along in the later evenings of a month or two; a few minutes only would give you the ability of calling a hundred stars by name. It makes you feel a little like God, for “He calls all the stars by their names,” in the greatness of his power. And it is good for me to know some of the names that have trembled into the air from divine power and out of divine wisdom; it is good to call over the works of God.
Now, with a little enthusiasm here and there and elsewhere, you can get individuals to know the names of the stars very easily. I see here before me what I do not hesitate to advertise, simply because I have not been requested to do it, the outgrowth of one of our ideas in the “Recreations in Astronomy.” You will remember that there are some dark plates with bright spots, with directions to cut them out, stick them in a box, and put them before a candle. It is a little crude, but that thought has been taken up by Prof. Bailey, and a lantern constructed that is the most perfect invention in this department ever made. [Shows the lantern.]
This round disk is a representation of the northern heavens. It is an exact representation of all the stars in the northern sky. It gives their names, makes them revolve around the heavens, sets them to any hour or minute of the night of any month, in the exact position that they are at that very minute or month in the sky. Here on these other sides are the other portions of the heavens, north and south. It is beyond question the greatest invention in this line that has ever been made. It has the approval of such astronomers as Proctor, Asaph Hall, the men of distinction in the United States, and of such names as carry weight and authority anywhere. This is a Chautauqua invention. (Applause.) It has done more for the study of the heavens and the understanding of uranography than any other invention that has been made.[D]