The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

egion is called the third heaven, and the heaven of heavens, and in the
plural 'heavens,' and by pre-eminence 'heaven,' Acts ii. 34; i. 10; I Cor. xv.
47; Eph. vi. 9." Many of the Calvinistic divines appeal to this passage as
proving the omnipresence of Christ, and, by consequence, His Deity.
But if Christ has ascended up far above all heavens, He has ascended
according to the body. But if the body of Christ has ascended far above all
heavens, by the processes of natural motion, it must have passed with a
rapidity to which that of light is sluggish, and must have been capable of
enduring processes which would not only have destroyed, but utterly
dissipated, a natural body. But when a theory which calls in nature to its
aid is compelled to acknowledge that a human. body, fettered by the
ordinary laws of natural presence, is hurried at a rate to which that of
nearly twelve millions of miles in a minute is slowness itself, it asks for a
trust in nature, what is harder to the mind than the most extreme demands
of the supernatural. The nearest of the fixed stars, whose distance has yet
been measured, is about twenty billions of miles from us, and requires
three and a third years for its light to reach us. "It has been considered
probable, from recondite investigations, that the average distance of a star
of the first magnitude from the earth is 986,000 radii of our annual orbit, a
distance which light would require 15-1/2 years to traverse; and, further,
that the average distance of a star of the sixth magnitude (the smallest
distinctly seen without a telescope) is 7,600,000 times the same unit, to
traverse which, light, with its prodigious velocity, would occupy more than
120 years. If, then, the distances of the majority of stars visible to the
naked eye are so enormously great, how are we to estimate our distance
from those minute points of light discernible only in powerful telescopes?
The conclusion is forced upon us that we do not see them as they
appeared within a few years, or even during the lifetime of man, but with
the rays which proceeded from them several thousands of years ago." 534
"The distance of a star whose parallax is 1" is about twenty trillions of
English miles. A spider's thread before the
534 Hind's Astronomy, quoted in Chambers's Encyclopedia. Article: Stars.