o
regulate the calendar, and mark out the times for the days of solemnity.
In the words of the 104th Psalm:--

"He (God) appointed the moon for seasons:
The sun knoweth his going down.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night;
Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey,
And seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they get them away,
And lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work
And to his labour until the evening.
O Lord, how manifold are Thy works!
In wisdom hast Thou made them all:
The earth is full of Thy riches."

FOOTNOTES:

[81:1] How the little children must have revelled in that yearly
holiday!

[90:1] T. G. Pinches, _The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical
Records of Assyria and Babylonia_, p. 278.

[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE MILKY WAY.

The "America Nebula": photographed by Dr. Max Wolf, at Heidelberg.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE STARS

The stars and the heaven, whose host they are, were used by the Hebrew
writers to express the superlatives of number, of height, and of
expanse. To an observer, watching the heavens at any particular time and
place, not more than some two thousand stars are separately visible to
the unassisted sight. But it was evident to the Hebrew, as it is to any
one to-day, that the stars separately visible do not by any means make
up their whole number. On clear nights the whole vault of heaven seems
covered with a tapestry or curtain the pattern of which is formed of
patches of various intensities of light, and sprinkled upon this
patterned curtain are the brighter stars that may be separately seen.
The most striking feature in the pattern is the Milky Way, and it may be
easily discerned that its texture is made up of innumerable minute
points of light, a granulation, of which some of the grains are set more
closely together, forming the more brilliant patches, and some more
loosely, giving the darker shades. The mind easily conceives that the
minute points of light whose aggregations make up the varying pattern of
the Milky Way, though too small to be individually seen, are also
stars, differing perhaps from the stars of the Pleiades or the Bears
only in their greater distance or smaller size. It was of all these that
the Lord said to Abram--

"Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able