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.

"All experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."

TENNYSON.

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.

203

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,

the remoter being first formed. In the drawing of cosmical matters to the sun, the vaster the distances the more violent the impact. "The rush of matter which we now recognize 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 recognize a time when the sun's supremacy was still incomplete, when the 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 and the 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 comparative 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 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 recognize strange movements and signs, as if the depths were shaping themselves into definite forms. But in truth those movements show only the vastness of the abysm; those depths speak to us 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 nebulous mass existed at and around the place 2"Genesis," p. 151: Professor Lange.

now occupied by the solar system. This mass, obtaining swift and vehement rotation, assumed a somewhat globular shape. Huge rings of nebulous matter were integrated during successive ages of spinning and revolving. These again broke into portions- so are satellites accounted for-while certain whiffs or puffs gave birth to 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 in infinite space. Their duration, compared with eternity, is as the flight of birds into the 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 organized on the fourth day." Theologians hold that 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. I. 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. The fact of their creation had been stated before in the first verse." Against this it may be urged, “The text says the sun was made on the fourth day, not made to appear. Just as God made the firmament, made the beast of the earth, and made man, so did He make two great lights and the stars. There is an end of all ingenuousness in interpreting Scripture, if we foist in one of these examples a meaning not borne in any of the others." The reply is simple and convincing-The word "made" is not to be strained in the least, and when we say it means, not the making of globular and opaque masses in the depths of space, but the making of visible lights 1 "The Sun: R. A. Proctor.