For example, the total attractive effect of one planet on the other for 450 years is to quicken its speed.  The effect for the next 450 years is to retard.  The place of Saturn, when all the retardations have accumulated for 450 years, is one degree behind what it is computed if they are not considered; and 450 years later it will be one degree before its computed place—­a perturbation of two degrees.  When a bullet is a little heavier or ragged on one side, it will constantly swerve in that direction.  The spiral groove in the rifle, of one turn in forty-five feet, turns the disturbing weight or raggedness from side to side—­makes one error correct another, and so the ball flies straight to the bull’s-eye.  So the place of Jupiter and Saturn, though further complicated by four moons in the case of Jupiter, and eight in the case of Saturn, and also by perturbations caused by other planets, can be calculated with exceeding nicety.

The difficulties would be greatly increased if the orbits [Page 13] of Saturn and Jupiter, instead of being 400,000,000 miles apart, were interlaced.  Yet there are the orbits of one hundred and ninety-two asteroids so interlaced that, if they were made of wire, no one could be lifted without raising the whole net-work of them.  Nevertheless, all these swift chariots of the sky race along the course of their intermingling tracks as securely as if they were each guided by an intelligent mind. They are guided by an intelligent mind and an almighty arm.

Still more complicated is the question of the mutual attractions of all the planets.  Lagrange has been able to show, by a mathematical genius that seems little short of omniscience in his single department of knowledge, that there is a discovered system of oscillations, affecting the entire planetary system, the periods of which are immensely long.  The number of these oscillations is equal to that of all the planets, and their periods range from 50,000 to 2,000,000 years,

Looking into the open page of the starry heavens we see double stars, the constituent parts of which must revolve around a centre common to them both, or rush to a common ruin.  Eagerly we look to see if they revolve, and beholding them in the very act, we conclude, not groundlessly, that the same great law of gravitation holds good in distant stellar spaces, and that there the same sufficient mind plans, and the same sufficient power directs and controls all movements in harmony and security.

When we come to the perturbations caused by the mutual attractions of the sun, nine planets, twenty moons, one hundred and ninety-two asteroids, millions [Page 14] of comets, and innumerable meteoric bodies swarming in space, and when we add to all these, that belong to one solar system, the attractions of all the systems of the other suns that sparkle on a brilliant winter night, we are compelled to say, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high above our thoughts and ways must be the thoughts and ways of Him who comprehends and directs them all.”