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The big ball we live on

The Story of the Boundless Universe and All Its Wondrous Worlds

How still the Earth seems on a moonlight night ! Yet the Earth has never been still for a moment of time. We do not know how long it has been spinning, but for millions and millions of years it has been flying like a ball through space. It began as a cloud of fiery gas; it cooled and shrank; and at last it became hard and round like an orange. And, as we now know, the Earth is like a speck in a boundless universe, one of the smallest of a thousand million worlds, all moving on and on in perfect order through space that seems to have no end. What are they like е

Are they alive е Are little children playing there е Perhaps not; we do not know. But they have their place in God’s great scheme of things, and here we will read all we can know of them until the day when our eyes shall see and our minds shall understand the marvellous purposes of God.

The big ball we live on mountains, and rivers, and seas, and deserts, and forests, and plants, and animals, is only a speck in the vast infinity of space. KJj It is surrounded by millions of suns and planets burning and spinning, and by millions of suns and planets born untold ages before the Earth came into being, which have now burnt out and ceased to spin. In comparison with its own Sun, the Earth is a tiny thing, and if. it were a little nearer that shining star it would be drawn into one of its fiery whirlpools and devoured like a daisy in a prairie fire.

And there are many suns in space millions of times as large as ours. Besides suns and planets, too, there are tremendous clouds of glowing substance known as nebulae, so huge that the Earth in the middle of one of them would be like a pea in the Pacific Ocean. In space itself the Earth is quite lost. Think of the width, and breadth, and height of space!

The Sun seems a long way off, but its light takes only a few minutes to flash across to us, whereas astronomers who have been measuring the distances of stars have calculated that some of them are so far off that light, which travels with its 186,000 miles in a second, takes hundreds of years to reach us. An express train would take hundreds of millions of years to cover the distance. Even farther off than that there are stars, for every time a bigger telescope is made new stars come into view. The big Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson revealed thousands of stars out beyond the stars that were previously known.

So little, then, is our big ball, when we look at it amid the suns and nebulae in the immensity of space. But we must not, therefore, think less of our Earth.

We who rush round the sun in such a wonderful chariot, with the stars millions of miles away shining into our eyes, must recognise that the Earth’s place amid the suns is a place of wonder and a place of honour. We are proud when we go sixty miles an hour in a motor car along a road; but what an adventure it is to go flying a thousand miles a minute round the sun, companioned by Jupiter and Venus and Mars—to go flashing with the Sun along pathless space towards some unknown goal. Life can never be a stupid and dull and sordid thing if we educate our imagination to realise through what a wonderful universe we are rushing.

Think, too, of the marvellous making of our little world. It is interesting to watch a sculptor making a figure out of marble, or to watch a painter putting trees and hills and faces on canvas; but on our journey through space we can watch a much more wonderful artist— we can watch the Creator’s work of making suns and planets and find out how this world came into being.