Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/95

Rh of the Lord? Nay; the sun, moon and stars to whom appeal is thus made are set up in the firmament of the mind of man. It is a command to all mankind to let their love, their faith, their knowledges of God and good, go forth in the silent praise which the warmth, and light, and clear shining of a genuine spiritual life forever render to the Lord. When, amid the higher and holier states of life, the heart arises to the Lord with loving thanks, whether silent or expressed, when, amid its darker states of trial and temptation, in unbroken faith, it hopes and trusts in Him, when, in the momentary lull of either or of both, its knowledges of the true and good, of God and heaven, still assist in the dispersion of the gross darkness of merely natural life, then do the sun, moon and stars of the mind praise the Lord. Then is the command of the sacred psalm fulfilled.

In that oft-repeated prophecy of our Lord concerning his second coming, it is said, "The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven." Shall we then entertain so foolish an idea, as that the natural sunlight shall be obliterated; that the natural moon shall lose her power to shine; that the myraid of stars which stud the sky, many of them inconceivably larger than the earth on which we live, shall fall on this one small globe? The