discoveries of science, and the beauties of nature, serve his need as a
teacher of morals and religion. And here, again, he was helped by the
spirit of his age. Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published in 1859, a
kind of crown and culmination of a half century of brilliant progress in
science. Starr King but shared the temper of his time as he turned with
delight to the writings of the masters and reveled in the new universe
there revealed. Modern science, which troubled the faith of many, only
deepened and strengthened his own, as he idealized and spiritualized
each new wonder of earth and heaven. The comet of July, 1861, gave noble
opportunity to enforce in his pulpit the religious lessons of that
mother of all the sciences, Astronomy. "I am glad," he began, "at every
new temptation to consider in the pulpit and the Church the wonders and
laws of modern astronomy."

"Does it ever occur to you, brethren, how we waste truth? Have you ever
felt what a sad thing it is that so little of the vast accumulation of
inspiring knowledge should reach our deepest, our religious sentiments,
to kindle and feed them? The most certain knowledge which men now hold
is that which is gathered from the sky. Astronomy, dealing with objects
thousands of millions of miles away, and with forces that rule through
limitless space, is the most symmetrical and firm of all the structures
of science which have been reared by the human mind. Immeasurably more
than David could have known, the heavens, as Herschel reads them,
declare the glory of God. Yet how seldom do we think of the splendors
and harmonies which a modern book of astronomy unveils as part of God's
appeal to our wonder; how seldom does the solemn light from the
uppermost regions of immensity, the light of nebulae which science has
broken up into heaps of suns, converge upon a human soul with power
enough to stimulate devout awe and make the heart bend before the
Creator of the universe."