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Meantime, night as much enlarges the knowledge we get of the world as sleep the knowledge we get of ourselves. Perpetual sunlight and day would have kept us in a very small circle of discovery; for, as the vail of unconsciousness drawn over the soul in sleep reveals the depths of our spiritual nature to itself, and makes it a mystery of vastness and immortal grandeur, so the night of the sphere reveals innumerable other spheres, and peoples the sky with worlds of glory otherwise undiscovered. At this point of possibility all the discoveries of astronomic science begin. And the infinitude of God's realm begins at this point to be felt, apart from all science. We are no more shut in, or cornered, in a small triangle of knowledge, where sun and moon and earth are the mere-stone boundaries of the All; but we go out to look upon, or apprehend, or rather to be apprehended by, a real universe, in God's own measures. And this we do as truly before science begins as after. Enough that we are made to think a real everywhere. We may fall into no speculations about the population or non-population of these realms; still the sky will mean something like "heaven," or heaven something like that, and the word" celestial" will get a place in all languages for powers divine, and creatures of a supramundane quality. Our moral nature will be raised in order, too, by the sense of its religious affinity with other beings and worlds. This, too, by means of the night -"night unto night showeth forth knowledge."
"In her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world."
Sometimes we shall be oppressed, no doubt, by this dread immensity of worlds, and fall back into impressions of our insignificance that quite disable us.
But it will be a salutary oppressiveness; for the immensity felt is but the type of God, and the sublime purity and order it displays make it only a type the more attractive that it represents our ideals, when the distractions and deformities we meet here below represent only the moral disorder and conscious guilt of our practice. We get an idea thus of God which very nearly asserts itself, and are brought to conceive a glorious unknown society to whom we are somehow related. All the conditions of our moral existence are enlarged and exalted. And this we say, be it observed, not in the sense that we have got arguments to be so used, but in the sense that, being constituted as we are, we are taken by these inevitable impressions, and have them more or less distinctly felt in their practical reality. As tenants of a star-world, we are not the same beings we should be in a world of mere sunlight.
We have still a different kind of benefit in the fact that night and sleep bring us times of revision or moral reflection, such as greatly promote the best uses of existence. To live in a perpetual day, and have what we call the hours of business ceaseless even as the flow of rivers, would leave us no room for reflection. We should be like seas in the trade-winds, never getting still enough to reflect any thing. Our soul would be blind to itself by reason of the perpetual seeing of our eyes. God, therefore, draws a curtain over his light, checks the busy hours of work and the turmoil of trade, and recalls us to moods of silence and meditative though fulness in the depths of our own spirit. Many of us, I know, are sadly indisposed to this, and, in one view, wretchedly incapable of it. Yet, when their day is ended, even such will naturally fall into a different mood. If the day has not gone well, and they are much wearied by its engagements, it will be difficult sometimes not to meet the question, who they are that they should be wrestling in such struggles ~ It is quite natural, too, for them, going over the day, to ask what, after all, it amounts to ~ And then it will be strange if they do not sometimes go a little further, and ask whither they are going, on what point moving, in such a life. Deeper and more serious natures, even though sadly imbued with guilt, will be turned almost of course to some kind of review. Another day is gone, its works are ended. Ambition has spent the fever of another day. Pleasure has exhausted her charms. Idleness itself is weary. And now, as the world grows still and excitement dies away, the mind calls off its activity and turns it inward on itself: It hears no call of God, perhaps, and thinks of doing nothing as a duty. But a pause has come, and something it must think of, for it can not stand still. Detained by nothing now on and, it travels far, and makes a large review. It takes in, as it were by snatches, other worlds. It touches the springs of its own immortal wants, and they answer quick and heavily. Whatever wrong has been committed stalks into the mind with an appalling tread. Its God is a subject unwelcome, and guilt another even more unwelcome, the moral nature has so great advantage now, and, withal, so great sensibility, that the door of the soul is held open to things not welcome. All those highest and most piercing truths that most deeply concern the great problem of life will often come nigh to thoughtful men in the dusk of their evenings and their hours of retirement to rest. The night is the judgment bar of the day. About all the reflection there is in the world is due, if' not directly to the night, to the habit prepared and fashioned by it.
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