yes, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and
all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but
the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plow passes over the site
of mighty cities,--the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the
languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them
are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same
equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman
to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his
course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and
constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom,
and the love, which placed them in the heavens and uphold them there.

[Footnote A: "Nobly does Aristotle observe, that if there were beings
who had always lived under ground, in convenient, nay, in magnificent
dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and every thing which
belongs to prosperous life, but who had never come above ground; who had
heard, however, by fame and report, of the being and power of the gods;
if, at a certain time, the portals of the earth being thrown open,
they had been able to emerge from those hidden abodes to the regions
inhabited by us; when suddenly they had seen the earth, the sea, and
the sky; had perceived the vastness of the clouds and the force of the
winds; had contemplated the sun, his magnitude and his beauty, and
still more his effectual power, that it is he who makes the day, by
the diffusion of his light through the whole sky; and, when night had
darkened the earth, should then behold the whole heavens studded and
adorned with stars, and the various lights of the waxing and waning
moon, the risings and the settings of all these heavenly bodies, and the
courses fixed and immutable in all eternity; when, I say, they should
see these things, truly they would believe that there were gods, and
these so great things are their works."--Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_ lib.