Astro-Theology

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 edition. Excerpt: ... LECTURE III. OKTHODOXY AT ISSUE WITH THE CKEATION; OE, THE "BELIGIOUS DIFFICULTli" CONFESSED BY SIB DAVID BBEWSTEB AND HIS OPPONENT. We have learnt, from one of their Psalmists, how the pious Hebrews of old interpreted the religion of the sky,--possessed as they were of little scientific knowledge, unable to conceive the sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies, and of course intirely ignorant of the laws by which their motions are guided; yet with eyes to discern their beauty, with admiring perception of their order and constancy, and thankful recognition of their evident benefits to mankind; and, above all, possessing that sublime theology which ascribed Creation and Providence to One Supreme Mind, and led them to look upon all the starry host as the ministering servants of the Most High God. Those words of the Hebrew Psalmist express therefore the essential thought of the devout, but unscientific, observer, in ages also since his own. We have carried the thought with us (in the second Lecture) along the path of scientific astronomy; and have found the noblest and truest commentary upon it, not among Churchmen, who have too often made the letter of Scripture untrue by exaggeration or irrational interpretation, but among Mathematicians and Sages, realizing its spirit continually more and more in the widened pages of the sky; in the wonderful insight of Pythagoras, the scientific devotedness of Copernicus, the mathematical genius of Kepler, the sight-convincing telescope of Galileo, the comprehensive and all-harmonizing theory of Newton. These great enlargers of our knowledge have felt that, as their knowledge of the universe advanced, whether in exactness or in extent, it furnished the more solid basis continually for those devout...