Seek Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion. - Amos.
A country farmer wrote this text Amos
of Tekoa. He plowed the earth and threshed the
grain by a new threshing-machine just invented, as
formerly the cattle trod out the grain. He gathered
the fruit of the sycamore-tree, and scarified it with
an iron comb just before it was getting ripe, as it
was necessary and customary in that way to take from
it the bitterness. He was the son of a poor shepherd,
and stuttered; but before the stammering rustic the
Philistines, and Syrians, and Phoenicians, and Moabites,
and Ammonites, and Edomites, and Israelites trembled.
Moses was a law-giver, Daniel was
a prince, Isaiah a courtier, and David a king; but
Amos, the author of my text, was a peasant, and, as
might be supposed, nearly all his parallelisms are
pastoral, his prophecy full of the odor of new-mown
hay, and the rattle of locusts, and the rumble of
carts with sheaves, and the roar of wild beasts devouring
the flock while the shepherd came out in their defense.
He watched the herds by day, and by night inhabited
a booth made out of bushes, so that through these
branches he could see the stars all night long, and
was more familiar with them than we who have tight
roofs to our houses, and hardly ever see the stars
except among the tall brick chimneys of the great
towns. But at seasons of the year when the herds
were in special danger, he would stay out in the open
field all through the darkness, his only shelter the
curtain of the night, heaven, with the stellar embroideries
and silvered tassels of lunar light.
What a life of solitude, all alone
with his herds! Poor Amos! And at twelve
o’clock at night, hark to the wolf’s bark,
and the lion’s roar, and the bear’s growl,
and the owl’s te-whit-te-whos, and
the serpent’s hiss, as he unwittingly steps
too near while moving through the thickets! So
Amos, like other herdsmen, got the habit of studying
the map of the heavens, because it was so much of
the time spread out before him. He noticed some
stars advancing and others receding. He associated
their dawn and setting with certain seasons of the
year. He had a poetic nature, and he read night
by night, and month by month, and year by year, the
poem of the constellations, divinely rhythmic.
But two rosettes of stars especially attracted his
attention while seated on the ground, or lying on
his back under the open scroll of the midnight heavens the
Pleiades, or Seven Stars, and Orion. The former
group this rustic prophet associated with the spring,
as it rises about the first of May. The latter
he associated with the winter, as it comes to the
meridian in January. The Pleiades, or Seven Stars,
connected with all sweetness and joy; Orion, the herald
of the tempest. The ancients were the more apt
to study the physiognomy and juxtaposition of the
heavenly bodies, because they thought they had a special
influence upon the earth; and perhaps they were right.
If the moon every few hours lifts and lets down the
tides of the Atlantic Ocean, and the electric storms
of last year in the sun, by all scientific admission,
affected the earth, why not the stars have proportionate
effect?
And there are some things which make
me think that it may not have been all superstition
which connected the movements and appearance of the
heavenly bodies with great moral events on earth.
Did not a meteor run on evangelistic errand on the
first Christmas night, and designate the rough cradle
of our Lord? Did not the stars in their courses
fight against Sisera? Was it merely coincidental
that before the destruction of Jerusalem the moon
was eclipsed for twelve consecutive nights? Did
it merely happen so that a new star appeared in constellation
Cassiopeia, and then disappeared just before King Charles
ix. of France, who was responsible for St. Bartholomew
massacre, died? Was it without significance that
in the days of the Roman Emperor Justinian war and
famine were preceded by the dimness of the sun, which
for nearly a year gave no more light than the moon,
although there were no clouds to obscure it?
Astrology, after all, may have been
something more than a brilliant heathenism. No
wonder that Amos of the text, having heard these two
anthems of the stars, put down the stout rough staff
of the herdsman and took into his brown hand and cut
and knotted fingers the pen of a prophet, and advised
the recreant people of his time to return to God,
saying: “Seek Him that maketh the Seven
Stars and Orion.” This command, which Amos
gave 785 years B.C., is just as appropriate for us,
1885 A.D.
In the first place, Amos saw, as we
must see, that the God who made the Pleiades and Orion
must be the God of order. It was not so much a
star here and a star there that impressed the inspired
herdsman, but seven in one group, and seven in the
other group. He saw that night after night and
season after season and decade after decade they had
kept step of light, each one in its own place, a sisterhood
never clashing and never contesting precedence.
From the time Hesiod called the Pleiades the “seven
daughters of Atlas” and Virgil wrote in his
AEneid of “Stormy Orion” until now, they
have observed the order established for their coming
and going; order written not in manuscript that may
be pigeon-holed, but with the hand of the Almighty
on the dome of the sky, so that all nations may read
it. Order. Persistent order. Sublime
order. Omnipotent order.
What a sedative to you and me, to
whom communities and nations sometimes seem going
pell-mell, and world ruled by some fiend at hap-hazard,
and in all directions maladministration! The God
who keeps seven worlds in right circuit for six thousand
years can certainly keep all the affairs of individuals
and nations and continents in adjustment. We
had not better fret much, for the peasant’s argument
of the text was right. If God can take care of
the seven worlds of the Pleiades and the four chief
worlds of Orion, He can probably take care of the
one world we inhabit.
So I feel very much as my father felt
one day when we were going to the country mill to
get a grist ground, and I, a boy of seven years, sat
in the back part of the wagon, and our yoke of oxen
ran away with us and along a labyrinthine road through
the woods, so that I thought every moment we would
be dashed to pieces, and I made a terrible outcry
of fright, and my father turned to me with a face perfectly
calm, and said: “De Witt, what are you crying
about? I guess we can ride as fast as the oxen
can run.” And, my hearers, why should we
be affrighted and lose our equilibrium in the swift
movement of worldly events, especially when we are
assured that it is not a yoke of unbroken steers that
are drawing us on, but that order and wise government
are in the yoke?
In your occupation, your mission,
your sphere, do the best you can, and then trust to
God; and if things are all mixed and disquieting,
and your brain is hot and your heart sick, get some
one to go out with you into the starlight and point
out to you the Pleiades, or, better than that, get
into some observatory, and through the telescope see
further than Amos with the naked eye could namely,
two hundred stars in the Pleiades, and that in what
is called the sword of Orion there is a nebula computed
to be two trillion two hundred thousand billions of
times larger than the sun. Oh, be at peace with
the God who made all that and controls all that the
wheel of the constellations turning in the wheel of
galaxies for thousands of years without the breaking
of a cog or the slipping of a band or the snap of an
axle. For your placidity and comfort through
the Lord Jesus Christ I charge you, “Seek Him
that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion.”
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that
the God who made these two groups of the text was
the God of light. Amos saw that God was not satisfied
with making one star, or two or three stars, but He
makes seven; and having finished that group of worlds,
makes another group group after group.
To the Pleiades He adds Orion. It seems that
God likes light so well that He keeps making it.
Only one being in the universe knows the statistics
of solar, lunar, stellar, meteoric creations, and
that is the Creator Himself. And they
have all been lovingly christened, each one a name
as distinct as the names of your children. “He
telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all
by their names.” The seven Pleiades had
names given to them, and they are Alcyone, Merope,
Celaeno, Electra, Sterope, Taygete, and Maia.
But think of the billions and trillions
of daughters of starry light that God calls by name
as they sweep by Him with beaming brow and lustrous
robe! So fond is God of light natural
light, moral light, spiritual light. Again and
again is light harnessed for symbolization Christ,
the bright and morning star; evangelization, the daybreak;
the redemption of nations, Sun of Righteousness rising
with healing in His wings. Oh, men and women,
with so many sorrows and sins and perplexities, if
you want light of comfort, light of pardon, light
of goodness, in earnest, pray through Christ, “Seek
Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion.”
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that
the God who made these two archipelagoes of stars
must be an unchanging God. There had been no
change in the stellar appearance in this herdsman’s
life-time, and his father, a shepherd, reported to
him that there had been no change in his life-time.
And these two clusters hang over the celestial arbor
now just as they were the first night that they shone
on the Edenic bowers, the same as when the Egyptians
built the Pyramids from the top of which to watch
them, the same as when the Chaldeans calculated the
eclipses, the same as when Elihu, according to the
Book of Job, went out to study the aurora borealis,
the same under Ptolemaic system and Copernican system,
the same from Calisthenes to Pythagoras, and from
Pythagoras to Herschel. Surely, a changeless God
must have fashioned the Pleiades and Orion! Oh,
what an anodyne amid the ups and downs of life, and
the flux and reflux of the tides of prosperity, to
know that we have a changeless God, the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever.
Xerxes garlanded and knighted the
steersman of his boat in the morning, and hanged him
in the evening of the same day. Fifty thousand
people stood around the columns of the national capitol,
shouting themselves hoarse at the presidential inaugural,
and in four months so great were the antipathies
that a ruffian’s pistol in Washington depot
expressed the sentiment of a great multitude.
The world sits in its chariot and drives tandem, and
the horse ahead is Huzza, and the horse behind is
Anathema. Lord Cobham, in King James’ time,
was applauded, and had thirty-five thousand dollars
a year, but was afterward execrated, and lived on
scraps stolen from the royal kitchen. Alexander
the Great after death remained unburied for thirty
days, because no one would do the honor of shoveling
him under. The Duke of Wellington refused to
have his iron fence mended, because it had been broken
by an infuriated populace in some hour of political
excitement, and he left it in ruins that men might
learn what a fickle thing is human favor. “But
the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
to them that fear Him, and His righteousness unto the
children’s children of such as keep His covenant,
and to those who remember His commandments to do them.”
This moment “seek Him that maketh the Seven
Stars and Orion.”
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that
the God who made these two beacons of the Oriental
night sky must be a God of love and kindly warning.
The Pleiades rising in mid-sky said to all the herdsmen
and shepherds and husbandmen: “Come out
and enjoy the mild weather, and cultivate your gardens
and fields.” Orion, coming in winter, warned
them to prepare for tempest. All navigation was
regulated by these two constellations. The one
said to shipmaster and crew: “Hoist sail
for the sea, and gather merchandise from other lands.”
But Orion was the storm-signal, and said: “Reef
sail, make things snug, or put into harbor, for the
hurricanes are getting their wings out.”
As the Pleiades were the sweet evangels of the spring,
Orion was the warning prophet of the winter.
Oh, now I get the best view of God
I ever had! There are two kinds of sermons I
never want to preach the one that presents
God so kind, so indulgent, so lenient, so imbecile
that men may do what they will against Him, and fracture
His every law, and put the cry of their impertinence
and rebellion under His throne, and while they are
spitting in His face and stabbing at His heart, He
takes them up in His arms and kisses their infuriated
brow and cheek, saying, “Of such is the kingdom
of heaven.” The other kind of sermon I never
want to preach is the one that represents God as all
fire and torture and thundercloud, and with red-hot
pitch-fork tossing the human race into paroxysms of
infinite agony. The sermon that I am now preaching
believes in a God of loving, kindly warning, the God
of spring and winter, the God of the Pleiades and
Orion.
You must remember that the winter
is just as important as the spring. Let one winter
pass without frost to kill vegetation and ice to bind
the rivers and snow to enrich our fields, and then
you will have to enlarge your hospitals and your cemeteries.
“A green Christmas makes a fat grave-yard,”
was the old proverb. Storms to purify the air.
Thermometer at ten degrees above zero to tone up the
system. December and January just as important
as May and June. I tell you we need the storms
of life as much as we do the sunshine. There are
more men ruined by prosperity than by adversity.
If we had our own way in life, before this we would
have been impersonations of selfishness and worldliness
and disgusting sin, and puffed up until we would have
been like Julius Cæsar, who was made by sycophants
to believe that he was divine, and the freckles on
his face were as the stars of the firmament.
One of the swiftest transatlantic
voyages made last summer by the “Etruria”
was because she had a stormy wind abaft, chasing her
from New York to Liverpool. But to those going
in the opposite direction the storm was a buffeting
and a hinderance. It is a bad thing to have a
storm ahead, pushing us back; but if we be God’s
children and aiming toward heaven, the storms of life
will only chase us the sooner into the harbor.
I am so glad to believe that the monsoons, and typhoons,
and mistrals, and siroccos of the land and sea
are not unchained maniacs let loose upon the earth,
but are under divine supervision! I am so glad
that the God of the Seven Stars is also the God of
Orion! It was out of Dante’s suffering came
the sublime “Divina Commedia,” and out
of John Milton’s blindness came “Paradise
Lost,” and out of miserable infidel attack came
the “Bridgewater Treatise” in favor of
Christianity, and out of David’s exile came the
songs of consolation, and out of the sufferings of
Christ came the possibility of the world’s redemption,
and out of your bereavement, your persecution, your
poverties, your misfortunes, may yet come an eternal
heaven.
Oh, what a mercy it is that in the
text and all up and down the Bible God induces us
to look out toward other worlds! Bible astronomy
in Genesis, in Joshua, in Job, in the Psalms, in the
prophets, major and minor, in St. John’s Apocalypse,
practically saying, “Worlds! worlds! worlds!
Get ready for them!” We have a nice little world
here that we stick to, as though losing that we lose
all. We are afraid of falling off this little
raft of a world. We are afraid that some meteoric
iconoclast will some night smash it, and we want everything
to revolve around it, and are disappointed when we
find that it revolves around the sun instead of the
sun revolving around it. What a fuss we make
about this little bit of a world, its existence only
a short time between two spasms, the paroxysm by which
it was hurled from chaos into order, and the paroxysm
of its demolition.
And I am glad that so many texts call
us to look off to other worlds, many of them larger
and grander and more resplendent. “Look
there,” says Job, “at Mazaroth and Arcturus
and his sons!” “Look there,” says
St. John, “at the moon under Christ’s feet!”
“Look there,” says Joshua, “at the
sun standing still above Gibeon!” “Look
there,” says Moses, “at the sparkling
firmament!” “Look there,” says Amos,
the herdsman, “at the Seven Stars and Orion!”
Don’t let us be so sad about those who shove
off from this world under Christly pilotage. Don’t
let us be so agitated about our own going off this
little barge or sloop or canal-boat of a world to
get on some “Great Eastern” of the heavens.
Don’t let us persist in wanting to stay in this
barn, this shed, this outhouse of a world, when all
the King’s palaces already occupied by many
of our best friends are swinging wide open their gates
to let us in.
When I read, “In my Father’s
house are many mansions,” I do not know but
that each world is a room, and as many rooms as there
are worlds, stellar stairs, stellar galleries, stellar
hallways, stellar windows, stellar domes. How
our departed friends must pity us shut up in these
cramped apartments, tired if we walk fifteen miles,
when they some morning, by one stroke of wing, can
make circuit of the whole stellar system and be back
in time for matins! Perhaps yonder twinkling
constellation is the residence of the martyrs; that
group of twelve luminaries is the celestial home of
the Apostles. Perhaps that steep of light is
the dwelling-place of angels cherubic, seraphic, archangelic.
A mansion with as many rooms as worlds, and all their
windows illuminated for festivity.
Oh, how this widens and lifts and
stimulates our expectation! How little it makes
the present, and how stupendous it makes the future!
How it consoles us about our pious dead, that instead
of being boxed up and under the ground have the range
of as many rooms as there are worlds, and welcome
everywhere, for it is the Father’s house, in
which there are many mansions! Oh, Lord God of
the Seven Stars and Orion, how can I endure the transport,
the ecstasy, of such a vision! I must obey my
text and seek Him. I will seek Him. I seek
Him now, for I call to mind that it is not the material
universe that is most valuable, but the spiritual,
and that each of us has a soul worth more than all
the worlds which the inspired herdsman saw from his
booth on the hills of Tekoa.
I had studied it before, but the Cathedral
of Cologne, Germany, never impressed me as it did
this summer. It is admittedly the grandest Gothic
structure in the world, its foundation laid in 1248,
only two or three years ago completed. More than
six hundred years in building. All Europe taxed
for its construction. Its chapel of the Magi with
precious stones enough to purchase a kingdom.
Its chapel of St. Agnes with masterpieces of painting.
Its spire springing five hundred and eleven feet into
the heavens. Its stained glass the chorus of all
rich colors. Statues encircling the pillars and
encircling all. Statues above statues, until
sculpture can do no more, but faints and falls back
against carved stalls and down on pavements over which
the kings and queens of the earth have walked to confession.
Nave and aisles and transept and portals combining
the splendors of sunrise. Interlaced, interfoliated,
intercolumned grandeur. As I stood outside, looking
at the double range of flying buttresses and the forest
of pinnacles, higher and higher and higher, until
I almost reeled from dizziness, I exclaimed; “Great
doxology in stone! Frozen prayer of many nations!”
But while standing there I saw a poor
man enter and put down his pack and kneel beside his
burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And
tears of deep emotion came into my eyes, as I said
to myself: “There is a soul worth more
than all the material surroundings. That man will
live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one
stone of all that cathedral glory shall remain uncrumbled.
He is now a Lazarus in rags and poverty and weariness,
but immortal, and a son of the Lord God Almighty;
and the prayer he now offers, though amid many superstitions,
I believe God will hear; and among the Apostles whose
sculptured forms stand in the surrounding niches he
will at last be lifted, and into the presence of that
Christ whose sufferings are represented by the crucifix
before which he bows; and be raised in due time out
of all his poverties into the glorious home built for
him and built for us by ‘Him who maketh the
Seven Stars and Orion.’”