SECT.  XVIII.  Of the Stars.

But let us once more view that immense arched roof where the stars shine, and which covers our heads like a canopy.  If it be a solid vault, what architect built it?  Who is it that has fixed so many great luminous bodies to certain places of that arch and at certain distances?  Who is it that makes that vault turn so regularly about us?  If on the contrary the skies are only immense spaces full of fluid bodies, like the air that surrounds us, how comes it to pass that so many solid bodies float in them without ever sinking or ever coming nearer one another?  For all astronomical observations that have been made in so many ages not the least disorder or irregular motion has yet been discovered in the heavens.  Will a fluid body range in such constant and regular order bodies that swim circularly within its sphere?  But what does that almost innumerable multitude of stars mean?  The profusion with which the hand of God has scattered them through His work shows nothing is difficult to His power.  He has cast them about the skies as a magnificent prince either scatters money by handfuls or studs his clothes with precious stones.  Let who will say, if he pleases, that the stars are as many worlds like the earth we inhabit; I grant it for one moment; but then, how potent and wise must He be who makes worlds as numberless as the grains of sand that cover the sea-shore, and who, without any trouble, for so many ages governs all these wandering worlds as a shepherd does a flock of sheep?  If on the contrary they are only, as it were, lighted torches to shine in our eyes in this small globe called earth, how great is that power which nothing can fatigue, nothing can exhaust?  What a profuse liberality it is to give man in this little corner of the universe so marvellous a spectacle!

But among those stars I perceive the moon, which seems to share with the sun the care and office of lighting us.  She appears at set times with all the other stars, when the sun is obliged to go and carry back the day to the other hemisphere.  Thus night itself, notwithstanding its darkness, has a light, duskish indeed, but soft and useful.  That light is borrowed from the sun, though absent: and thus everything is managed with such excellent art in the universe that a globe near the earth, and as dark as she of itself, serves, nevertheless, to send back to her, by reflection, the rays it receives from the sun; and that the sun lights by means of the moon the people that cannot see him while he must light others.

It may be said that the motion of the stars is settled and regulated by unchangeable laws.  I suppose it is; but this very supposition proves what I labour to evince.  Who is it that has given to all nature laws at once so constant and so wholesome, laws so very simple, that one is tempted to believe they establish themselves of their own accord, and so productive of beneficial and useful effects that one cannot avoid acknowledging a marvellous art in them?  Whence proceeds the government of that universal machine which incessantly works for us without so much as our thinking upon it?  To whom shall we ascribe the choice and gathering of so many deep and so well conceited springs, and of so many bodies, great and small, visible and invisible, which equally concur to serve us?  The least atom of this machine that should happen to be out of order would unhinge all nature.  For the springs and movements of a watch are not put together with so much art and niceness as those of the universe.  What then must be a design so extensive, so coherent, so excellent, so beneficial?  The necessity of those laws, instead of deterring me from inquiring into their author, does but heighten my curiosity and admiration.  Certainly, it required a hand equally artful and powerful to put in His work an order equally simple and teeming, constant and useful.  Wherefore I will not scruple to say with the Scripture, “Let every star haste to go whither the Lord sends it; and when He speaks let them answer with trembling, Here we are,” Ecce adsumus.