*[j There are but few stars more interesting and beautiful than Vega (a first-magnitude star in the constellation Hydra). To its own intrinsic interest must now be added that arising from the fact that each successive night we look upon it we have swept more than 1,000,000 miles nearer to its brilliant globe, and that with every year we have lessened, by some 400,000,000 miles, the distance that divides us from it. There can surely be no thought more amazing than this ! It seems to gather up and bring to a focus all other impressions of the vastness of celestial distances and periods. So swift and ceaseless a motion, and yet the gulfs that sever us from our neighbours in space are so huge that a millennium of such inconceivable travelling makes no perceptible change upon the face of the heavens ! ^
2. His Timelessness.
There are some subjects on which it would be good to dwell, if it were only for the sake of that enlargement of mind which is produced by their contemplation. And eternity is one of these, so that you cannot steadily fix the thoughts upon it without being sensible of a peculiar kind of elevation, at the same time that you are humbled by a personal feeling of utter insignificance. You have come in contact with something so immeasurable — beyond the narrow range of our common specula-
^ J. Baikie, Through the Telescope, p. 271.
ISAIAH 417
tions — that you are exalted by the very conception of it. Now the only way we have of forming any idea of eternity is by going, step by step, up to the largest measures of time we know of, and so ascending, on and on, till we are lost in wonder. We cannot grasp eternity, but we can learn something of it by perceiving that, rise to what portion of time we will, eternity is vaster than the vastest.
IF The late Mr. Proctor said that the planets were like a group of human beings in different stages of growth and development. Some of them were probably in their babyhood, and not yet ripe for the life-bearing destinies that might probably be before them. And other of the planets had already passed through babyhood, youth, and maturity, and had entered upon a useless and decrepit old age. They were barren, played-out, infertile, and had been so for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. And the planetary system is one of myriads of similar systems, some of which may have been contemporaneous, and some of which may have existed in succession to each other ; and the solar system may be a mere mushroom growth of the night, a Jonah's gourd in comparison with the more patriarchal groups of the firmament. What a term of measurement does that give us ! The life of the entire stellar universe, however, is but the throb of the second hand on the dial that measures out God's everlasting days.^
1[ It was once supposed that the dark patch in the heavens called the Magellan clouds was starless, an enigma of vacancy in the glittering skies. That idea is given up now, although the particular portion of the heavens to which the name is applied is not so rich in stars as the other parts. In all eternity past there is no vacant century, no impeopled epoch, no barren, un- illumined, God -lacking millennium. He fills immeasurable time to its utmost dimension, every moment of the vast eternity, past and to be, pulsating with God's conscious presence.^
IF A striking definition was given by one of the pupils of the deaf and dumb institution at Paris, who, in answer to the question, "What is eternity?" replied, "The lifetime of the Almighty." This is the gauge and measure of our text, " The One that inhabiteth eternity." ^
3. His Holiness.
In the choice language of this verse, what may be called the natural distance of God from us is measured both on its
27
^ T. G. Selby, The Lesson of a Dilemma, p. 169.
» lUd. p. 171.
•A. G. Brown, In the Valley of Decision, p. 170,
4i8 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
physical and on its moral side. He is " high," or, as the same word is put in Isaiah's vision, He is lifted up. By this is typified such an elevation as separates the strongest from the weak, the wisest from the foolish, the unbeginning from the creations of yesterday, the Lord of might from His servants ; in a word, all that sort of elevation or superiority of God over man which is not moral. As the Maker, Master, Owner, and Disposer of men, Jehovah inhabits the lofty place. But there is another sort of distance between us. The distance betwixt the Best of all and the bad is of quite another kind. His place of habita- tion is not only high — it is " holy " ; and betwixt the Holy One in His sanctuary, and us in our sin, the gulf is not a gulf of being, but a gulf of character. The sky is above the earth, so is He higher than we are ; but the sky, when unclouded, is also pure and full of light, unstained by the darkness or foulness of earth ; by so much more is He cleaner than we. Thus nature symbolises the double contrast of the Divine to the human.