Ah! what is Hell? of ever-absent day,
A night all hopeless!—and all endless too!”
The successive changes of day and night may suggest what is frequently the condition of good people in this world. Their day of prosperity is sometimes followed with a night of adversity; and then, when sorrow and weeping have endured for a night, light and joy spring up in the morning.—Is the light of the day pleasing? rejoice in it with trembling, for the night is advancing. Is the darkness of the night solemn and awful? rejoice in hope that the day is approaching. Hence be instructed, oh my soul, in the concerns of thy eternal welfare. Are prosperity, health, and relatives, agreeable? rejoice in them as one that rejoices not: these must have an end; and adversity, sickness, and death, will come. Are losses, affliction, and pain, not joyous, but grievous? mourn as one that weeps not: ease, health, and gladness, are in prospect, and will continue for ever. And how happy and glorious will that world be, where light and joy shall never cease! But how dreadful is that abode where darkness, despair, and anguish shall never end!
The succession of cold and heat, winter and summer, will always suggest pious and useful reflections in retirement. How pleasing it is to see the sun return, and to feel his cheering rays, after a long, cold, and tempestuous winter! So it is delightful to the humble penitent sinner, after a long season of darkness and sorrow, when the Sun of Righteousness arises with his reviving influences, and God lifts upon him the smiles of his reconciled countenance. All misery, and clouds of doubt and fear, are then dispersed, and heavenly light breaks into the soul, and fills it with gladness. And does the want of the light of God cause the serious Christian to mourn and weep, and taste no sweetness in any of the comforts of life? How extremely miserable, then, must a person be, who is driven to an everlasting distance from the presence of God, and from the glorious Sun of Righteousness; only to see his glory very remote, but never to feel the reviving beams of his love; and to be punished in hell, far “from the presence of the Lord, and the glory of his power.”
Section IV.—The Planets and Fixed Stars.
Mercury — Venus — The Earth — Mars — Ceres — Pallas — Juno — Vesta — Jupiter — Saturn — Georgium Sidus — Comets — Fixed Stars — Religious Improvement.
Moses, after stating that God created the sun and the moon, says, “he made the stars also.” A learned author explains it, “he made the lesser light, with the stars, to rule the night.” It is very probable that the whole solar system was created in six days: but as the design of the sacred historian was to relate what especially belongs to our globe and its inhabitants, he therefore passes by the planetary system, leaving it simply included in the plural word, שמים shamayim, heavens. In a work of this nature, it is proper to take a concise view of all the planets, their number, distances, magnitudes, revolutions, &c.
Wandering Stars, says Baseley, is one of the many appellations by which our solar system has been sometimes designated. And the figure it makes in the heavens is not unaptly expressed by the phraseology. For we distinguish the planets from the fixed stars by the lustre of the former, which is only from that side which faces the sun, and by their motion, which is seldom, and then but apparently, interrupted. Their brightness seems more uniform, has the cast of reflected rather than direct illumination, and is altogether free from scintillation or twinkling. Their connection with the globe we inhabit is more perceptible, and their relative situation to one another less stationary. Their distance from us is not so remote, and more susceptible of calculation. The latter occupy a certain region situated in our neighborhood between us and the former.
The planets are opake bodies, and nearly spherical. Being opake in themselves, they become visible only by reflecting the light, which they receive from the sun. The laws by which they are governed were discovered by Kepler, who demonstrated that they must necessarily revolve in elliptical, and not in circular orbits. Astronomers have divided them into classes: the primary planets are Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Georgium Sidus; and the second class includes the satellites which belong to some of the primary planets, such as the Moon, the attendant on the Earth, the four moons or satellites that revolve about Jupiter, the seven that attend Saturn, and the six that wait on the Georgium Sidus.