One of the swiftest transatlantic voyages made last summer by the “Etruria” was because she had a stormy wind abaft, chasing her from New York to Liverpool.  But to those going in the opposite direction the storm was a buffeting and a hinderance.  It is a bad thing to have a storm ahead, pushing us back; but if we be God’s children and aiming toward heaven, the storms of life will only chase us the sooner into the harbor.  I am so glad to believe that the monsoons, and typhoons, and mistrals, and siroccos of the land and sea are not unchained maniacs let loose upon the earth, but are under divine supervision!  I am so glad that the God of the Seven Stars is also the God of Orion!  It was out of Dante’s suffering came the sublime “Divina Commedia,” and out of John Milton’s blindness came “Paradise Lost,” and out of miserable infidel attack came the “Bridgewater Treatise” in favor of Christianity, and out of David’s exile came the songs of consolation, and out of the sufferings of Christ came the possibility of the world’s redemption, and out of your bereavement, your persecution, your poverties, your misfortunes, may yet come an eternal heaven.

Oh, what a mercy it is that in the text and all up and down the Bible God induces us to look out toward other worlds!  Bible astronomy in Genesis, in Joshua, in Job, in the Psalms, in the prophets, major and minor, in St. John’s Apocalypse, practically saying, “Worlds! worlds! worlds!  Get ready for them!” We have a nice little world here that we stick to, as though losing that we lose all.  We are afraid of falling off this little raft of a world.  We are afraid that some meteoric iconoclast will some night smash it, and we want everything to revolve around it, and are disappointed when we find that it revolves around the sun instead of the sun revolving around it.  What a fuss we make about this little bit of a world, its existence only a short time between two spasms, the paroxysm by which it was hurled from chaos into order, and the paroxysm of its demolition.

And I am glad that so many texts call us to look off to other worlds, many of them larger and grander and more resplendent.  “Look there,” says Job, “at Mazaroth and Arcturus and his sons!” “Look there,” says St. John, “at the moon under Christ’s feet!” “Look there,” says Joshua, “at the sun standing still above Gibeon!” “Look there,” says Moses, “at the sparkling firmament!” “Look there,” says Amos, the herdsman, “at the Seven Stars and Orion!” Don’t let us be so sad about those who shove off from this world under Christly pilotage.  Don’t let us be so agitated about our own going off this little barge or sloop or canal-boat of a world to get on some “Great Eastern” of the heavens.  Don’t let us persist in wanting to stay in this barn, this shed, this outhouse of a world, when all the King’s palaces already occupied by many of our best friends are swinging wide open their gates to let us in.