Waiting upon the earth is The Moon. In addition to her duty as one of the planets revolving round the sun, she has the task of attending upon the earth, doing much useful service for it, and at night lighting it with her great reflector-lamp, according to the allowance of oil she has available for shedding her beams upon us. The moon also operates upon the earth by her powers of attraction; and as the water is the more mobile part of our planet, the moon draws it toward herself, so making the tides; and those tides help to keep the whole world in healthful motion; they are a sort of lifeblood to it.
The moon undergoes eclipse, sometimes very frequently, and a great deal more often than the sun; and this phenomenon has occasioned much terror. Among some tribes, an eclipse of the moon is an occasion for the greatest possible grief. Sir R. Schomberg thus describes a total lunar eclipse in San Domingo: “I stood alone upon the flat roof of the house which I inhabited, watching the progress of the eclipse. I pictured in imagination the lively and extraordinary scene which I once witnessed in the interior of Guiana, among the untutored and superstitious Indians, how they rushed out of their huts when the first news of the eclipse came, gibbered in their tongue, and, with violent gesticulations, threw up their clenched fists toward the moon. When, as on this occasion, the disk was perfectly eclipsed, they broke out in moanings, and sullenly squatted upon the ground, hiding their faces between their hands. The females remained, during this strange scene, within their huts. When, shining like a sparkling diamond, the first portion of the moon, that had disencumbered itself from the shadow, became visible, all eyes were turned toward it. They spoke to each other with subdued voices; but their observations became louder and louder, and they quitted their stooping position as the light increased. When the bright disk announced that the monster which wanted to stifle the Queen of Night had been overcome, the great joy of the Indians was expressed in that peculiar whoop which, in the stillness of the night, may be heard for a great distance.”
Want of faith causes the most extraordinary fear, and produces the most ridiculous action. A man who believes that the moon, though temporarily hidden, will shine forth again, looks upon an eclipse as a curious phenomenon worthy of his attention, and full of interest; but the man who really fears that God is blowing out the light of the moon, and that he shall never see its bright rays any more, feels in a state of terrible distress. Perhaps he will act as the Hindus and some of the Africans do during an eclipse: they beat old drums, and blow bullocks’ horns, and make all manner of frightful noises, to cause the dragon who is supposed to have swallowed the moon to vomit it up again. That is their theory of an eclipse, and they act accordingly; but once know the truth, and know especially the glorious truth that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose,” and we shall not be afraid of any dragon swallowing the moon, nor of anything else that the fears of men have made them imagine. If we are ignorant of the truth, every event that occurs, which may be readily enough accounted for from God’s point of view, may cause the utmost terror, and drive us, perhaps, into the wildest follies.
The next planet to the earth is Mars; fiery Mars, generally shining with a ruddy light. It used to be thought that the color of Mars’s “bloodred shield” was caused by the absorption of the solar rays; but this idea has been refuted, and it is now believed to be due to the color of its soil. According to the former idea, an angry man, who is like Mars, the god of war, must be one who has absorbed all other colors for his own use, and only shows the red rays to others; while the more modern notion, that the soil of the planet gives it its distinctive color, teaches us that, where there is a fiery nature, there will be a warlike exhibition of it unless it is restrained by grace. Mars is about 140,000,000 miles from the sun; it is much smaller than our earth, its equatorial diameter being 4,363 miles. Traveling at the rate of 53,600 miles an hour, it takes 687 days to complete its revolution round the sun.
Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter there is a wide zone, in which, for many centuries, no planets were visible; but the astronomers said within themselves, “There must surely be something or other between Mars and Jupiter.” They could not find any great planets; but as telescopes became larger and more powerful, they observed that there was a great number of Asteroids or Planetoids, as some term them. I do not know how many there are, for they are like some of our brethren’s families, they are daily increasing. Some hundreds of them have already been discovered; and by the aid of telescopic photography, we may expect to hear of the finding of many more. The first asteroid was identified on the first day of the present century, and was named Ceres. Many of them have been called by female mythological names, I suppose because they are the smaller planets, and it is considered gallant to
