Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an order of development on earth—tender grass, herb, tree; moving creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle, man. The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it God's successive creations.
During ages on ages man's wisdom held the earth to be flat. Meanwhile, God was saying, century after century, of himself, "He sitteth upon the sphere of the earth" (Gesenius).
Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold the earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported them. Meanwhile, God was perpetually telling men that he had hung the earth upon nothing.
Men were ever trying to number the stars. Hipparchus counted one thousand and twenty-two; Ptolemy one thousand and twenty-six; and it is easy to number those visible to the naked eye. But the Bible said, when there were no telescopes to make it known, that they were as the sands of the sea, "innumerable." Science has appliances of enumeration unknown to other ages, but the space-penetrating telescopes and tastimeters reveal more worlds—eighteen millions in a single system, and systems beyond count—till men acknowledge that the stars are innumerable to man. It is God's prerogative "to number all the stars; he also calleth them all by their names."
Torricelli's discovery that the air had weight was received with incredulity. For ages the air had propelled ships, thrust itself against the bodies of men, and overturned their works. But no man ever dreamed that weight was necessary to give momentum. During all the centuries it had stood in the Bible, waiting for man's comprehension: "He gave to the air its weight" (Job xxviii. 25).
The pet science of to-day is meteorology. The fluctuations and variations of the weather have hitherto baffled all attempts at unravelling them. It has seemed that there was no law in their fickle changes. But at length perseverance and skill have triumphed, and a single man in one place predicts the weather and winds for a continent. But the Bible has always insisted that the whole department was under law; nay, it laid down that law so clearly, that if men had been willing to learn from it they might have reached this wisdom ages ago. The whole moral law is not more clearly crystallized in "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," than all the fundamentals of the science of meteorology are crystallized in these words: "The wind goeth toward the south (equator), and turneth about (up) unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits (established routes). All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again" (Eccles. i. 6, 7).
Those scientific queries which God propounded to Job were unanswerable then; most of them are so now. "Whereon are the sockets of the earth made to sink?" Job never knew the earth turned in sockets; much less could he tell where they were fixed. God answered this question elsewhere. "He stretcheth the north (one socket) over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." Speaking of the day-spring, God says the earth is turned to it, as clay to the seal. The earth's axial revolution is clearly recognized. Copernicus declared it early; God earlier.
No man yet understands the balancing of the clouds, nor the suspension of the frozen masses of hail, any more than Job did.
Had God asked if he had perceived the length of the earth, many a man to-day could have answered yes. But the eternal ice keeps us from perceiving the breadth of the earth, and shows the discriminating wisdom of the question.
The statement that the sun's going is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit to the ends of it, has given edge to many a sneer at its supposed assertion that the sun went round the earth. It teaches a higher truth—that the sun itself obeys the law it enforces on the planets, and flies in an orbit of its own, from one end of heaven in Argo to the other in Hercules.