his hour, would not approach to the aggregate of the sands
of a single mile. Though the stars of a size too small to be visible to
our eyes, are much more numerous than the larger stars, yet even up to
the range of view possessed by ordinary telescopes, they are by no means
innumerable. In fact, they are counted and registered, and the number of
the stars of the ninth magnitude, which are four times as distant as the
most distant visible to our eyes--so distant that their light is five
hundred and eighty-six years in traveling toward us--is declared to be
exactly thirty-seven thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine. Abraham's
sense and Abraham's faith must have had many a conflict on this promise,
as the faith and the sense of many of his children, especially the
scientific portion of them, have since, when reading such portions as
this; and those other Scriptures which represent it as an achievement of
Omniscience, that "he telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them
all by their names."[312] It is indeed remarkable how God delights to
test the faith of his people, and to stumble the pride of fools, by
presenting this mysterious truth, of the innumerable multitude of the
stars, in every announcement of the wonderful works of Him who is
perfect in wisdom. Infant astronomy stretched out her hands to catch the
stars, and count them. Many a proud Infidel wondered that Moses could be
so silly as to suppose he could not count the stars, and the believer
often wondered what these words could mean. But faith rests in the
persuasion of two great truths: "God is very wise," and "I am very
ignorant."

The increase of knowledge, by widening the boundaries of our ignorance,
seemed for a time to render the difficulty even greater. The increased
power of Herschel's telescope, and his discovery of the constitution of
the Milky Way, mark an era in the progress of astronomy, and enlarge our
views of the extent of the universe, to an extent inconceivable by those
who have not studied the science. Where we see only a faint whitish
cloud stretching across the sky, Herschel's telescope disclosed a vast
bed of stars. At one time he counted five hundred and eighty-eight stars
in the field of his telescope. In a quarter of an hour, one hundred and
sixteen thousand passed before his eye. In another portion, he found
three hundred and thirty-one thousand stars in a single cluster.[313] He
found the whole structure of that vast luminous cloud