Now, all that which is most valuable in nature, as a mechanism, we lay hold of and use without going through the labor necessary in the original examination by the first investigator. We do not need to understand the laws of heat and steam to use them; some one has learned the laws, and has brought fire and water together and has pronounced a nuptial blessing over them, and a child has been born of the marriage, and we take steam for our slave without knowing the ritual which married the father and mother. Some one must have learned how to reach his hand to the cloud, and bring down the electricity, make it run our errands and serve the purpose of our illumination; but we do not need to know the processes in order to sit under the light. Not only is it true that the mechanical uses that come from natural sciences we get without going through the processes, but the literary and spiritual we get also. Others have been turning over the pages of this marvelous book and have been reading it to us, and unconsciously, unknowingly, almost without the sense that we have been learning anything, we have learned great lessons in this book of nature. Scientists on the one side and theologians on the other have put science and religion into antagonism with one another. But they are sister teachers of the race; science has received all its life from the late comprehended revelation of the first chapter of Genesis that nature is man’s servant, not his god; and theology has learned some of its profoundest lessons from the book of nature which science has interpreted. Consider for one moment what a fundamental religious lesson we have learned in the school-room of science almost without knowing that she was our teacher. The ancient Hebrews believed that Palestine was the world; all the rest was a mere outlying district environing it, the back yard as it were. The Mediterranean was the Great Sea, the little pond of Galilee was the Sea of Galilee, the sun and moon and stars were torches for man’s illumination—that was their conception of the universe. With that conception it is not strange that they had an equally insignificant and unworthy conception of the God of the world, a conception against which the inspired writers were continually struggling, and from which they were continually endeavoring to lift the people up. When the Philistines fought against the Israelites and captured the ark of God they were in triumph. “We have captured God,” they thought; and the Israelites were almost equally in despair, for they also half thought that Jehovah had been carried off a prisoner. Now, science, even more than revelation, has been enlarging our conceptions of this universe. The Holy Land, a province about as large as Vermont, is no longer the earth; the Atlantic and the Pacific are the great seas; this globe on which we live is but one of the smaller globes of the planetary system; and the great planetary system itself is but a smaller one of the great planetary systems which are circling around some vast and distant sun. Science has taught us too that all this universe is linked together, bound together by a common law, bound together by a common order of phenomena. It has investigated the sun and the stars, it has analyzed their light, it has shown us that the substances of these bodies are identical with the substances of ours. It has taught us the unity of nature, it has taught us the vastness of nature. There are stars in the firmament which you can see with the naked eye, on which if a man were standing with a telescope fine enough and powerful enough to see what is transpiring on this globe, and should look through it to-day, he would see not this congregation assembled under this roof, but the first outbreaking of the revolution, so long does it take light to traverse from our globe to the stars, light that takes but eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. There are stars so distant that he would see not Chautauqua gathered here to-night, but the crucifixion of Christ taking place on the hill of Calvary; stars so distant, that with a telescope powerful enough to carry the message of this world to his sight, he would see Abraham coming out of the land of his idolatry into the promised land; stars so distant that he would see this earth first taking on its brightness in the birth-day of its glory. So vast is our universe that the mind can not attempt to comprehend its majestic distances. It is not theology, it is not religion, it is not even the Bible that has unfolded this vastness; it is science. It is impossible that men who have once learned anything of this greatness of creation, or anything of this unity of creation, should ever bow down again before idols of wood and stone.