"'_I will praise the name of the Lord with a song, and magnify it with thanksgiving._' "The Sun is the central pivot of the solar system, and round it the earth and all the other planets keep whirling in elliptical orbits. Its power and influence, its light, heat, and attraction, reach through a domain in space which it would require _six thousand millions of miles_ to span. With the greater part of this wide field, astronomers are familiar, and it may be truly said that scarcely a man knows the roads of his own parish or neighborhood, or a citizen the streets of his own city or village, with more exactness than they do the highways of the skies. Not only can they map out to a nicety the paths of the planets careering through it like islands floating through a sea of ether, but they can look backward and tell the exact spot where each globe was at any moment of the remote past, or forward, and point to the place where each will be found at any given moment of the remote future. "What is the mighty power which maintains such order in the Heavens, which steadies the planets in their orbits, and traces out for them a route so wisely planned as to avoid all chances of collision? Two antagonistic forces--gravitation and attraction, combined with a centrifugal impulse--accomplish the wonderful task. To these faithful servants, God commits the safety of the Universe, nor can anything disturb or derange the order of this machinery, save the Word which created it. "The Sun was placed in the centre, and became the pivot of the whole system, tying to itself the different planets by the cord of its superior attraction. In accordance with the law we have mentioned, this loadstone power of the Sun is the inevitable result of its superior mass, as it is computed to be six hundred times greater in magnitude than this earth and all the planets put together. But behold the wisdom and wondrous power of the Great Architect, in creating these vast worlds, and placing each in its proper position in space; where each revolves within its own orbit--some with the velocity of even one hundred thousand miles an hour--yet maintaining toward each other that _centrifugal_ force which prevents their being drawn by the attractive power of that vast globe _within_ the Sun, into certain destruction, by its surrounding fires.