ns--and
these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world
-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so
multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope
only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those
nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous
clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars,
are suns and systems--but so far away from us and from one another
that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful
glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and
bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal
themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator
himself could number them?

How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent
door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How
did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute
certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science--that
the stars _cannot_ be counted for number?

How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the
North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that
there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine
--a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of
worlds had come to an end?

How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were
saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant,
that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants;
that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where
the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time
to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?

How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to
speak of "the circle of the earth," at the time when the scientific
men of his day said that it was four square and flat?

How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar
universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out
the heavens as "thinness," when the wise men of that hour were
teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the
most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as "thinness"? It
is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out
the heavens as a "tent"; but the word "tent" in the Hebrew is (doq)
and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been be