02.09. Lessons from the Stars
Chapter 9 LESSONS FROM THE STARS.
Some writer tells us truly that there are sermons in stones, and books in running brooks. We have been struck with the startling Gospel truths that are prominent in mythological narrative, and surprised and pleased to note that even in the plays of childhood the most profitable moral lessons and spiritual truths can be discovered.
Lately in astronomical study we have been deeply impressed with the profound and solemn teachings to be received from the floating universe above us. Volumes could be written about the laws of attraction and repulsion; the apparent waste of light and energy; the unknown shape of the stellar system; the motion of the universe itself toward some unseen point, and many other impressive facts.
Among the strange truths in the stars is the fact of different-colored suns. Some are red, others pure white, still others yellow, while a number are black. These colors are not arbitrarily given of God, but strangely declare the age, energy and condition of the suns bearing them. It is found by astronomers, through the spectroscope and other instruments, that certain elements lack or abound in these vast globes of fire that are rolling in mid air trillions and quadrillions of miles from us, according to their youth, maturity or old age. These elements make a strange handwriting in the spectrum of the astronomer, and he knows by the color of the star whether it is beginning or ending, or has terminated its life career.
First, the red sun declares the lusty strength of youth. Comparatively few cycles have passed over it, and it has a long and wonderful history of light and heat, and hence of usefulness before it. It has not reached its highest power, but is on the way. This well covers the case of the blood red justified man he has light, heat and strength, and is a blessing. But he has only begun his life and work, according to the Bible, and is destined for greater things. It is quite interesting to see the soundly and recently converted individual rushing on his way, pouring out his new life on all around him, and not dreaming that there is another and greater glory for him, with profounder influence and wider sweep of power.
Second, the heavens above hold in its depths the flaming type of a mightier grace in the form of giant suns of purest white, with intense measures of heat, and vaster orbits of influence and power.
We are certainly glad to know that the Kingdom of Grace measures up here most gloriously to the hints and teachings of the firmament above us. Not only the Bible, but history, rolls into view, not only the red suns of the justified, but great life orbs flooding community, and nation, and the world itself with the flashing white light and the glowing white heat of holiness.
Wesley, Fletcher, Fenelon, Finney, Inskip and others of their spiritual magnitude correspond well with Sirus, Procyon, Vega, Altair and Regulus, by whose side our sun is small and faint indeed.
We are grateful indeed for the pure light of holiness which can be possessed without regard to physical size, or social and ecclesiastical station. We thank God that many have it and are illumining and warming up homes, neighborhoods and churches with its beautiful radiance. The experiences of these people agree with the handwriting of the stars. They say that God called them into spiritual life and being, and after enjoying for awhile a blood red justification, they were swept into a burning, glowing, snow white sanctification. A third class of suns in the heavens is seen in what is called the yellow stars. This orb is in the afternoon of its existence. Its fires are burning out, its heat is gradually waning, its time of decrepitude is at hand, and it is on the road to extinction. The marvellous little instrument called the spectroscope has found out what the telescope could not discover, and has placed in a strange handwriting in the spectrum before the intelligent eye of the astronomer the solemn announcement that the life of a sun is steadily going out before us far up in the heavens.
What is seen in the sky is likewise beheld on the earth. The gradual fading of a star in the firmament is not a more certain and terrible fact than the dying out of the divine fire and light from an immortal soul once illumined and quickened of God. And while it must be a solemn sight, indeed, for men of science to watch through the flight of centuries the gradual extinction of a sun, yet it is a far more dreadful spectacle to behold right before our eyes in the course of a few months or years the light and life of God go out in a human soul.
Men who study the heavens sometimes give us reasons for the decay and death, so to speak, of a sun; but oftener they confess to profound ignorance of such mysteries happening so far away in space. As thoroughly mystified are observers today who see men pass into the blood red, thence up to the snow white, powerful experience of the Christian life, and then begin to enter upon the yellow of an unmistakable decay. Something has happened to sun or Christian, but what is the happening? What has gone wrong? What force has died out? What constituent element has departed? A star ninety trillions of miles away is not harder to read and understand than a human soul only a few feet removed from us. Both are dying out, both are growing yellow, but what did it, and what is the matter, is the question. The reader will notice that the colors we have mentioned, and the order in which they have been named, are all true to nature. We may take the flush of the morning, the white of noonday, and the yellow of evening; or start with the blush of spring, the whiteness of summer and the brown tints of autumn; or begin with the rosy hue of infancy, the fairness of youth, and the yellowing skin of increasing years yet in every instance we see that the order of colors as laid down in this article is the correct one. The yellow sun in the universe is a dying sun!
What a pang it gives the heart to look about us in life and see the fearful fatal correspondence in the moral world to what is transpiring in the natural realm. And it seems that no number of newly justified and wholly sanctified souls rushing here and there in their orbits of devotion and duty can take away the sadness aroused in us at the spectacle of the soul weakening, heart cooling, character crumbling, and general life darkening of men and women once ablaze for the truth and God, and full of faith and the Holy Ghost. A fourth class of suns swing in deadness, and blackness through the fathomless regions of the far away firmament.
They have burned out. All their heat and fire have departed. Light and warmth may fall around them and upon them, but they themselves have no light or heat of their own. Under the strongest instruments they are recognized to be darkened and dead.
Usually they are found geared up or connected in some way with suns of the first and second magnitude. One is following Sirius, around, and another has been discovered attached to the star Algoz. They are not planets, but burned out suns. They are the backslidden stars of the heavens. Cold and helpless themselves, they get what light that is upon them, and are prevented from flying away altogether into outer darkness through their great faithful white hot brethren in the skies known as Sirius, Algoz, Vega, Capella, Altair and Regulus. The eye has only to drop from the sky to the earth to behold at once the darkened faces, midnight souls, and cold, unresponsive and unprofitable lives of those who once shone, burned, flashed, moved, rushed and achieved for God. The black suns are in our midst. They no longer give light or heat. The radiance which falls upon them and about them comes from other people.
They are actually kept in some kind of orbit by the power of some great faithful soul with whom they find themselves providentially connected. A preacher may become a darkened sun, and yet be kept in place by a faithful spiritual congregation. A church may become lifeless, and yet through a devoted man in the pulpit be held to some kind of duty, and be saved from utter worldliness. As we look still deeper into these mysteries with the glass of observation we see a sanctified man at a white heat going through life with a cold, irreligious wife circling round him. Or a holy woman moving in a home or church orbit with a spiritually dead husband carried along by her side. In still another direction we behold a darkened household swinging around a single consecrated member of that home. Four, six or eight dark bodies moving around, and kept in some kind of order by a solitary life full of the love and grace of God. And still again we observe a shallow, unspiritual, and actually backslidden singer journeying about with a holiness evangelist who has the real fire and glory in his soul. In every instance we observe that the dark body gives no light nor heat of its own, and seems to be kept in place by another soul that is greater, brighter and warmer than itself, in the best and highest sense of the word.
Let each reader of these lines ask himself, or herself, which one of the suns covers their case. Is it red, white, yellow or black with our souls!
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