ronomical discoveries, thirty-six hundred years
before Herschel and Rosse enabled us to understand its full
significance: "He brought him forth abroad, and said unto him, _Look now
toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and
he said unto him, So shall thy seed be._"[308]

The scenery was well calculated to impress Abraham's mind with a sense
of the ability of Christ to fulfill a very glorious promise, by a very
improbable event; but the illustration was as well calculated as the
promise to test the character of that faith which takes God's Word as
sufficient evidence of things not seen; for, if the promise was a trying
test of faith, so was the illustration. Before this, God had promised
that his seed should be as the dust of the earth; and afterward he
declared it should be as the sand of the seashore; the well-known symbol
of a multitude beyond all power of calculation. To couple the stars of
heaven with the sand upon the seashore in any such connection as to
imply that the stars too were innumerable, or that their number came
within any degree of comparison with the ocean sands, must have seemed
to Abraham in the highest degree mysterious, even as it has appeared to
scoffers, in modern times, utterly ridiculous; for, though the first
glance at the sky conveys the impression that the stars are really
innumerable, the investigations of our imperfect astronomy seem to
assure us that this is by no means the case. And, as the patriarch sat,
night after night, at his tent door, and, in obedience to the command of
Christ, counted the stars, and made such a catalogue of them as his
Chaldean preceptors had used, he would very speedily come to the
conclusion, that so far as he could see, they were by no means
innumerable; for the catalogue of Hipparchus reckons only one thousand
and twenty-two as visible to one observer, and the whole number visible
in both hemispheres by the naked eye does not exceed eight
thousand.[309] And even if we suppose, that these old patriarchs had
better eyes, as we know they had a clearer sky, than modern western
observers, and that Abraham saw the moons of Jupiter, and stars as
small, still the number would not seem in the least degree comparable
with the number of the sands upon the seashore--whereof a million are
contained in a cubic inch,[310] a number greater than the population of
the globe in a square foot,[311] while the sum total of the human race,
from Adam to t