n one place predicts the weather and winds [Page
235] 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_ [Page 236] 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.

So eminent an astronomer and so true a Christian as General Mitchell,
who understood the voices in which the heavens declare the glory of
God, who read with delight the Word of God em bodied in worlds, and
who fed upon the written Word of God as his daily bread, declared,
"We find an aptness and propriet