Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made these two groups of the text was the God of light.  Amos saw that God was not satisfied with making one star, or two or three stars, but He makes seven; and having finished that group of worlds, makes another group—­group after group.  To the Pleiades He adds Orion.  It seems that God likes light so well that He keeps making it.  Only one being in the universe knows the statistics of solar, lunar, stellar, meteoric creations, and that is the—­Creator Himself.  And they have all been lovingly christened, each one a name as distinct as the names of your children.  “He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”  The seven Pleiades had names given to them, and they are Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Electra, Sterope, Taygete, and Maia.

But think of the billions and trillions of daughters of starry light that God calls by name as they sweep by Him with beaming brow and lustrous robe!  So fond is God of light—­natural light, moral light, spiritual light.  Again and again is light harnessed for symbolization—­Christ, the bright and morning star; evangelization, the daybreak; the redemption of nations, Sun of Righteousness rising with healing in His wings.  Oh, men and women, with so many sorrows and sins and perplexities, if you want light of comfort, light of pardon, light of goodness, in earnest, pray through Christ, “Seek Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion.”

Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made these two archipelagoes of stars must be an unchanging God.  There had been no change in the stellar appearance in this herdsman’s life-time, and his father, a shepherd, reported to him that there had been no change in his life-time.  And these two clusters hang over the celestial arbor now just as they were the first night that they shone on the Edenic bowers, the same as when the Egyptians built the Pyramids from the top of which to watch them, the same as when the Chaldeans calculated the eclipses, the same as when Elihu, according to the Book of Job, went out to study the aurora borealis, the same under Ptolemaic system and Copernican system, the same from Calisthenes to Pythagoras, and from Pythagoras to Herschel.  Surely, a changeless God must have fashioned the Pleiades and Orion!  Oh, what an anodyne amid the ups and downs of life, and the flux and reflux of the tides of prosperity, to know that we have a changeless God, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

Xerxes garlanded and knighted the steersman of his boat in the morning, and hanged him in the evening of the same day.  Fifty thousand people stood around the columns of the national capitol, shouting themselves hoarse at the presidential inaugural, and in four months so great were the antipathies that a ruffian’s pistol in Washington depot expressed the sentiment of a great multitude.  The world sits in its chariot and drives tandem, and the horse ahead is Huzza, and the horse behind is Anathema.