To what end does this enormous power, this central source of power,
exist? That it could keep all these gigantic forces within itself
could not be expected. It is in a system where every atom is made
to affect every other atom, and every world to influence every
other. The Author of all lives only to do good, to send rain on
the just and unjust, to cause his sun to rise on the evil and the
good, and to give his spirit, like a perpetually widening river,
to every man to profit withal.

The sun reaches his unrelaxing hand of gravitation to every other
world at every instant. The tendency of every world is to fly off
in a straight line. This tendency must be momentarily curbed, and
the planet held in its true curve about the sun. These giant worlds
must be perfectly handled. Their speed, amounting to seventy times
as fast as that of a rifle-ball, must be managed. Each and every
world may be said to be lifted momentarily and swung perpetually
at arm's-length by the power of the sun.

The sun warms us. It would convey but a small idea of the truth
to state how many hundreds of millions of cubic miles of ice could
be hailed at the sun every second without affecting its heat; but,
if any one has any curiosity to know, it is 287,200,000 cubic miles
of ice per second.

We journey through space which has a temperature of 200° below
zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of
perpetual winter. We are roofed over by the air that treasures the
heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat,
[Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains
ripen. The sun has a strange chemical power. It kisses the cold