Address at Westminster Abbey, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Royal Greenwich Observatory

Abstract

I take as my text this afternoon verse 33 of Chapter 38 from the Book of Job. Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the Earth ? The foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 was closely associated with the early years of the Royal Society, founded 15 years earlier. The first Secretary of the Royal Society was Dr John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, a diocese in which I live and work. You will appreciate, I am sure, that today I feel constrained by the recommendation in his book The Gift of Preaching that the ‘style of the pulpit should be plain and without rhetorical flourishes’. Wilkins was one of the remarkable figures of that age—an embodiment of the belief in the unity of knowledge and purpose. He had been a Parliamentarian—even to the extent of marrying Cromwell’s sister. Yet less than a year after King Charles returned to England he was one of the small group of founders of the Royal Society persuading the King to look through a telescope at the moons of the planet Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. We have the authority of Evelyn’s diary that the King was so greatly impressed by this sight of the heavens that he was discussing the particulars even two weeks later, and that the event helped substantially towards the grant of a Royal Charter to the new Society.