The Art of IllustrationSpurgeon, C. H. (Charles Haddon)
Religion
The Art of Illustration
Spurgeon, C. H. (Charles Haddon)
Homiletical illustrations; Preaching
I think that naming of the various constellations is very like a good
deal of mystical preaching that there is nowadays. The preachers say,
"That is so-and-so, and that is so-and-so." Well, perhaps it is so; but
I do not see it. You may imagine anything you like in the constellations
of the heavens. I have pictured a fortress in the fire, and watched it
being built up, and seen little soldiers come and pull it all down. You
can see anything in the fire, and in the sky, and in the Bible, if you
like to look for it in that way; you do not see it in reality, it is
only a freak of your imagination. There are no bulls and bears in the
heavens. There may be a virgin, but she is not to be worshiped as the
Romanists teach. I hope you all know the pole-star; you ought also to
know the pointers; they point to the pole-star, and that is just what we
ought to do, to direct the poor slaves of sin and Satan to the true Star
of liberty, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Then there are the Pleiades; almost anybody can tell you where they are.
They are a cluster of apparently little stars, but they are intensely
bright. They teach me that, if I am a very little man, I must try to be
very bright; if I cannot be like Aldebaran, or some of the brightest
gems of the sky, I must be as bright as I can in my own particular
sphere, and be as useful there as if I were a star of the first
magnitude. Then, on the other side of the globe, they look up to the
Southern Cross. I dare say one of our brethren from Australia will give
you a private lecture upon that constellation. It is very beautiful to
think of the Cross being the guide of the mariner; it is the best guide
any one can have, either this side of the tropics or the other.
* * * * *
Besides the stars, there are vast luminous bodies which are called
NEBULÆ. In some parts of the heavens there are enormous masses of
light-matter; they were supposed by some to be the material out of which
worlds were made. These were the lumps of mortar, out of which,
according to the old atheistic theory, worlds grew by some singular
process of evolution; but when Herschel turned his telescope upon them,
he very soon put the nose of that theory out of joint, for he discovered
that these nebulæ were simply enormous masses of stars, such myriads
upon myriads of miles away that, to our sight, they looked just like a
little dust of light.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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