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STUDY XII.

DAY IV. THE SUN.

"There are men who, seeing the great power this sun hath, are secretly enticed in their heart; and with their mouth have kissed their hand to him."--JOB xxxi. 26, 27.

Two dangers are to be guarded against in handling any science touching Holy Scripture: (1) an unwise adoption and adaptation of discoveries which seem to confirm the sacred statements; (2) an unworthy fear that any truly scientific result can be adverse.

These dangers may be turned into deliverances. It is not long since the sciences were mere aggregations of empirical knowledge. Astronomy could hardly be called a science in the days of Hipparchos, seeing that physics did not begin, as a science, till Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies. Chemistry began two hundred and seventy years later, when Lavoisier, discovering the true principles of combustion, overthrew the doctrine of phlogiston. At the end of the eighteenth century biology began, Bichat pointing out the relations between the functions of organs and the properties of tissues. Sociology is not yet a science. Scientific religion will not be completed until the whole physical and psychical nature of man, physics and metaphysics, history and revelation, the natural and preternatural, are regarded from the highest point attainable by human nature. Meanwhile, assured as we are by the co-ordination of all our faculties, that the religious sentiment will find as great, or even greater satisfaction in the future than it has in the past, and because the recognition of a Power which is beyond humanity, and upon which humanity rests, will become, by the advance of science, a scientific verity; it is well to remind the fearful that religion is not "a polity de

Scientific Difficulties.

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novo," but built on the concrete facts of past ages. It views the individual in his relation to the Supreme, who is manifested in creation, revelation, providence, history. It sanctions, sanctifies, and renders possible, the true morality which ought to govern men in relation to their fellow-creatures. Not only so-religion and morality united condemn whatever hinders or mars physical and spiritual completion of life; give the aspiration-the noblest we can entertain-for complete fulness of life; and yield philosophic explanation of the marvellous range of human sympathy, and of irrepressible yearnings after the divine. Hence, concluding that the divines and sages of the past were neither knaves nor the dupes of knaves but genuine philosophers; that they not only made the best use of such implements of research as they possessed, but embodied in the spiritual organization of creeds that alone, of all the things in the world, which was found capable of holding society together in troublous times, or of giving consolation to men in their affliction; we are preserved from hasty and unwise use-even as we have no servile dread of scientific discovery. The soul or life of this religion and morality is faith in a guiding and beneficent God, who inaugurates a better state of society here as preparation for a more glorious future by effecting not merely change of opinions; but, specially, change and improvement of heart.

St. Augustine cried in amazement, "Wondrous depths of Thy words! whose surface, behold, is before us inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth."1 The amazement of Christians is not less in these days: as the Book grows more venerable in antiquity it becomes more reverend in authority. The consideration of physical truths proves that Moses-living in barbaric time, as to science-was certainly wise; and that the message which he received from God is undoubtedly true. Scientific difficulties, far from casting doubt on the faith in which we were nurtured, confirm, in their explanation, its Divinity. If the science of one age could fathom all depths, the Book, revealing those depths might be wholly of man-a production of the land of Egypt and house of bondage; but knowledge opening new domains

1 Conf. lib. xii.

for wisdom to possess, finds new meaning shine as light out of a dark place. The old words, the old thoughts, remain ineffaceable but the child of the flesh is also a child of the Spirit-God's witness to the human heart. Moses dwelt in a land of sun-worshippers, and could not forget the sun; amongst men who laid stress on the letter of nature's book, and rendered every symbol of the Divine a myth of some special divinity—a god of day and light, a god of night and darkness, a god of water and a god of fire, a god of good and a god of evil, god warred against god; nevertheless, Moses restored the knowledge of the One true God. In laying the foundations of this higher knowledge, he advanced from nature to nature's God, and from the seen to the unseen.

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Impartial men will allow, that if Moses wrote such an account of creation as can stand the investigation of accurate modern science, he was one of the most wonderful men that ever lived.

Christians claim more for the account: they assert that the formula of Creation does not instruct men in science, yet contains even all which it revealeth not: is a formula, with mystery of deep within deep, for the profound; but to the simple-hearted as a clear lake wherein the face answering to their face is the Human Face Divine. Such a formula, wherein the problem to be solved is the equation of all things and nothing, of the finite and Infinite, of time and Eternity, must be a Divine product. No other intelligence, not even that of the highest archangel, knew or saw the primal generation; and no creature can understand or describe that genesis by which worlds-relatively eternal and infinite, both as to the past and the future-begin, continue, and end: the end issuing in the birth of new worlds evermore.

This formula, being for men, is to be regarded in human fashion. It reveals a process in which God, everywhere and in all things, everlastingly calls forth existences to live, move and have being in Him. To high intelligence, moreover, the process or plan will stand out in complete result, somewhat

Conceptions of Creation.

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as it is in presence of the Eternal, absolutely apart from time. Between these two conceptions of creation-one of infinite extent and eternal duration, the other as a gathering of all into a comprehensive "Now "-will intervene all that variety of representation ranging from a glance, as by instantaneous flash, revealing a vast panorama, to that same figurative display, such as we possess in Genesis, when enlarged by scientific conception. Whatever faculties our nature has received are to be used as lights to search these deep things of God; that we may find within the allegory, figure, symbol, parable, the foundation of that higher knowledge and conviction

"Our destiny, our being's heart and home,

Are with Infinity, and only there."

Thus searching the Divine Narrative, we find that events are as the rise and fall of a curtain, day and night cast light and shadow, voices and commands order the process, the formless takes shape, a long hidden beginning is revealed, the Spirit of God shines on the face of a great deep, and chaos passes into Creation. There are shinings-light; openings-firmamental expanse; gatherings and flowings-the great deep; rising as from watery womb-the new land; life germinating -afterwards to grow in power beneath sunny beams. We can conceive that this whole process might pass before the spirit of Moses in a series of days-a thousand of years to a day; or a day as a moment. The element of time is index, not computation: every day being yesterday's child and tomorrow's parent. The creations of God in plant and fish, in bird and mammal, appear not so much near or wide apart, as standing out with distinctness.

We are bound by the same analogy to regard the order or progress as not necessarily in a straight line; but, possibly, that described by those complex curves in which are contained the progress yet continual return of the heavenly bodies in their vast career. Expositors of the Divine Procedure are not to bind Scriptural narrative in those cords of exact order and sequence which science imposes as to her own essays and experiments. Revelation states why God made the world, science endeavours to find how God made the world. Revelation is for moral purpose, science for physical investigation

At a time when men worshipped the sun as Lord of Life—as did the Egyptians, and as do some Materialists now-that moral purpose is best served, and men are best instructed, by declaration that they live not by sun-power, but by Godpower. On this moral ground we vindicate the insertion of life as precedent to acknowledgment of the sun as ruler: so that should our scientific argument fail to convince, the Divine Act may nevertheless stand by its own integrity.

Try the scientific investigation.

Time has surprises and revenges. We have seen how light shone out of darkness; and now we shall find that the sun is not a naked and terrible wilderness of tempestuous combustion, but affords in its consideration a well-spring of intellectual delight.

The Sun's Origin.

Till of late it was tacitly assumed that the sun did during the past, and will through the future, emit an unfailing amount of light and heat. All this is now abandoned. We know that, in whatever shape energy manifests itself in the world, it must have existed previously under another shape. Solar radiations are the changed form of some other energy: possibly that by which the matter or nebulous substance of the sun was drawn to his centre of gravity from a space extending indefinitely beyond the outermost planet. A mass of coal, the size of the sun, would only suffice to give so large an amount of heat for five thousand years. We have, therefore, to accept the hypothesis of the falling together, from widely-scattered distribution in space, of the matter which now forms the various suns and planets. As the mass of our own sun aggregated and condensed, heat grew with the force of impact, and the luminous atmosphere was of gradual formation.

According to another and more probable theory, possibly the rarefied gaseous condition was caused by excessive temperature, and condensation began with the cooling and contraction of the mass. Or, if we unite both theories, then the solar system was evolved by the processes of contraction and accretion; and, according to the theory of Laplace, the planets were fashioned in the order of their distances from the sun,

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