A Sermon Preached by Bishop Molony in Holy Trinity Cathedral, on the first Sunday after the Epiphany, January 7, 1923
Ps. 19.1.
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork."
I propose to present to you day an argument for the existence of God which is nearly 3,000 years old, for this Paslm was probably written, about 1,000 years before Christ: or, if the Jewish tradition which ascribes Abraham's conversion to the sight of the starry sky be true, then the argument is more nearly 4,000 years old. And the discoveries of modern science have rather increased than lessened the force of the argument.
This earth on which we live is about 8,000 miles. in diameter. Thirty earth-diameters away is our satellite, the moon, which is itself about 2,000 miles in diameter. The earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, which is 93 millions of miles from us.
But the solar system is only a smal] cluster of material globes} isolated from the other heavenly bodies in the vast spaces of the Universe, for the nearest star to us, Alpha Centauri is 280,000 times as far away as the sun, while 30 millions of other stars are now being charted by photography. The vastness of the Universe and the immense distances separating the heavenly bodies defy our imagination.
And it is almost certain that all these bodies are moving forward through space and also revolving on their axes. There are many double stars, and the fact that one of a pair is occasionally eclipsed by the other shows that such double stars, in some cases at least, revolve about one another.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.