"Who telleth the number of the stars, Who calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great praise; His understanding is infinite. The Lord lifteth up the meek; He casteth the wicked to the ground." --Psalm cxlvii. "The heavens declare the glory of God, The firmament showeth his handiwork; Day unto day uttereth speech, Night unto night showeth knowledge. They have no speech nor language, Their voice is not heard; Yet their line is gone out to all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a pavilion for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. Its going forth is from the end of the heavens, And its circuit unto the end of them. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." --Psalm xix. These are excellent illustrations of the truth of the Scripture mode of treating natural objects, in connection with their Maker. It is but a barren and fruitless philosophy which sees the work and not its author--a narrow piety which loves God but despises his works. The Bible holds forth the golden mean between these extremes, in a strain of lofty poetry and acute perception of the great and beautiful, whether seen in the Creator or reflected from his works. The work of this day opens up a wide field for astronomical illustration, more especially in relation to the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator as displayed in the heavens; but it would be foreign to our present purpose to enter into these. It may be well, however, to think for a moment of the importance of the facts suggested by the writer of Genesis in mentioning the use of the heavenly bodies as signs of time. To what extent civilization or even the continued existence of man as an intelligent being would have been possible without the marks of subdivision of time given by the great astronomical clock of the universe, it is almost impossible for us to imagine. Without such marks of time, in any case, the whole fabric of human culture must have been different from what it is. Farther, in connection with this, it is a grand thought of our early revelation that all these heavenly bodies, however magnificent, and however they might seem to the heathen to be objects of worship, are but marks on God's clock, parts of a mere machine which keeps time for us, and is therefore our servant, as the children of the great Artificer, and not our ruler. The idea has been termed an astrological one; but astrology as a means of divination has no place in the record. The heavenly bodies are under the law of the Creator, and their function relatively to us is to give light and to give time. Astrological divination is an outgrowth of the Sabaean idolatry, and held in abomination by the monotheistic author of Genesis. His object may be summed up in the following general statements: