Manifestation of the Supreme. 193 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 fellowcreatures. Religion and morality condemn whatever hinders or mars physical and spiritual completion of life; they give the noblest aspiration we can entertain for complete fulness of life; and yield philosophic explanation of the marvellous range of human sympathy, and of our irrepressible yearnings after the Divine. Sages of the past were neither knaves, nor dupes of knaves, but genuine philosophers; they not only made the best use of such implements of research as they possessed, but embodied in the spiritual organisation of creeds that which alone, of all the things in the world, was found capable of holding society together in troublous times, and of giving consolation to men in their affliction. Divines of our own time are preserved from hasty and unwise use-even as they are in no servile dread of scientific discovery. They have faith in a beneficent guiding God, who inaugurates and maintains our life now as preparation for a more glorious future. We are not subject to a blind, slow, unbroken process called law. We are conscious of influencing our own life; and of being helped, comforted by the never-failing wisdom, power, and love of God. 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: the Book, more venerable in antiquity, becomes more reverend in authority. Consideration of physical truths proves that Moses-living in what some account barbaric time, as to science-was certainly wise; and that the message which he claims to have 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 for wisdom to possess, finds new meaning. The old words, the old thoughts, remain ineffaceable; but the child of the flesh is also, by new birth, 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 made every symbol of the Divine a myth of some idol-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 our knowledge of One true God. In laying the foundations of this higher knowledge, he advanced from Nature to Nature's God, from the seen to the unseen, entered that which the poet looks upon from afar- "All experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades Impartial men will allow, that if Moses wrote such an account of creation as can stand the investigation of accurate modern science, he was the most wonderful of men. Christians claim more for the account: assert that the formula of Creation does not instruct men in science, yet contains more than it apparently revealeth: a formula, with mystery of deep within deep, for the profound; but to the simple-hearted a clear lake wherein the face answering face is the Human Face Divine. A formula, wherein the problem to be solved is the equation of all things and nothing, the finite and Infinite, time and Eternity, must be a Divine product. No other intelligence, not even the highest archangel, saw the primal generation; and no creature can fully understand or describe that genesis by which worlds begin, continue, end-the end issuing in the birth of new worlds evermore to exceed in glory. This formula, being for men, is to be regarded in human fashion. It reveals a process by which God, everywhere and in all things, everlastingly calls forth successive existences to live, move, have being in Him. The process stands out in complete result, in presence of the Eternal, apart from time. Between these two conceptions—one of infinite extent and eternal duration, the other a gathering of all into one comprehensive "Now"-intervenes that representation-as by instantaneous flash revealing a vast panorama; and that display we possess in Genesis when, enlarged by scientific conception and knowledge, we discern Our Destiny is with Infinity. "Our destiny, our being's heart and home, 195 Events rise and fall as a curtain, day and night cast light and shadow, voices and commands order the process, the formless takes shape, a beginning is revealed, the Spirit of God shines on the great deep, chaos passes into Creation. There are shinings-light; openings-firmamental expanse; gatherings and flowings-the vast deep; rising as from watery womb the new land; life germinating-afterwards to grow in power beneath sunny beams. This whole process might The pass before the spirit of Moses in a series of days-a thousand of years to a day, or a day as a nioment. element of time is index, not computation: every day being yesterday's child and to-morrow's parent. The creations of God in plant and fish, in bird and mammal, appear not so much near nor wide apart, as standing out with distinctness by Divine operation. The progress is not necessarily in a straight line; possibly, by those complex curves in which are contained the advance and continual return of the heavenly bodies in their vast career. Expositors of the Divine Procedure do not bind Scriptural narrative in those cords of exact order and sequence which science imposes on her own small essays and experiments. Revelation states why God made the world, science endeavours to find how God made it. 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 was and is best served, and men are best instructed, by declaration that life is not by sun-power, but by Godpower. Life was precedent to acknowledgment of the sun as ruler. The past was not a horrid confusion, nor is the future a yawning darkness. 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 equal unfailing amount of light and heat. That is now abandoned. In whatever shape energy manifests itself in the world, it existed previously under another shape. Solar radiations are the changed form of some energy: possibly that by which sun-matter, diffused in space, was drawn to the centre of gravity from a distance extending far 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. The hypothesis of the falling together, from widely scattered distribution in space, of the matter which now forms the various suns and planets, is generally accepted. As the mass of our sun aggregated and condensed, heat grew with the force of impact, and the luminous atmosphere was gradually formed by that energy of God which careers in every wind, moves in every wave, pours down in every current and waterfall, shines in every star. Another theory: the rarefied gaseous condition was caused by excessive temperature, and condensation began with the cooling and contraction of the mass. 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, the remoter being first formed. In drawing cosmical matters to the sun, the vaster the distances the more violent the impact. "The rush of matter which we now recognise affords, perhaps, but the faintest indications of the amazing conflicts in which our system had its birth. Tracing back the history of that system, we seem to recognise a time when the sun's supremacy was still incomplete, when planets struggled with him for the continually in-rushing materials from which his substance as well as theirs was to be recruited. We see him clearing, by the mighty energy of his attraction, a wide space around him of all save such relatively tiny orbs as Venus, Earth, Mars, Mercury, and the asteroids. With more distant planets the struggle was less unequal. The masses which flowed in towards the centre of the scheme swept with comparatively slow motion past its outer bounds, so that the subordinate centres there forming were able to grasp a goodly proportion of material to increase their own mass or to form subordinate systems around them. And so the planets, Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and distant Neptune, grew to their giant dimensions, and became records at once of the sun's might as a ruler-for without his overruling attraction the material which formed these planets would never have approached the system—and of the richness of the chaos of matter from which his bulk and theirs was alike derived. Nor is the consideration without a mysterious attraction, that in thus Truth excels Romance. 197 looking back at the past history of our system, we have passed, after all, but a step towards that primal state whence the conflict of matter arose. We are looking into a vast abysm, and, as we look, fancy we recognise strange movements and signs, as if the depths were shaping themselves into definite forms; movements show the vastness of the abysm; depths speak of far mightier depths, within which they are taking shape. 'Lo! these are but a portion of His ways; they utter but a whisper of His glory.'" 1 Truth is stranger than fiction and excels romance. Many ages back, in the immeasurable swoop of the past, an enormous moving mass existed and collided at and around the place now occupied by the solar system. This mass, obtaining swift and vehement rotation, assumed a somewhat globular shape. Huge rings of matter were integrated during successive ages of spinning and revolving-so were the planets formed. These again broke into portions—so are satellites accounted for-while certain whiffs or puffs gave birth to some of the eccentric comets. The array of sun and planets, the pomp of all material worlds, are a procession and gathering from the unseen to the seen, out of infinite to finite space. Their duration, compared with eternity, is as the flight of birds into our horizon-to pass out again and be no more seen. The Sun's Age. "It has never been maintained that the matter of the sun was created or even organised on the fourth day." 2 The development of the solar system includes all terrestrial arrangements. The formation and operation of the sun and of the earth were co-ordinate and partly contemporaneous. The sun, the earth, and other planets, being for one another, their whole substance formed part of that universal cosmical arrangement which is described Genesis i. 1. Dr. Buckland, p. 27, "Bridgewater Treatise," observes-"We are not told that the substance of the sun and moon was first called into existence on the fourth day. The text may equally imply that those bodies were then prepared and appointed to certain offices of high importance to mankind, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years. 1 "The Sun :" R. A. Proctor. 2" Genesis," p. 151: Prof. Lange. |