then your wealth! Walk in the Light, Himself the Light and divine. How exceedingly great Oh, live worthily of your rich estate. even as He is in the Light, and is (1 John i. 5-7). Let every sunrise summon you, not only to the true Light, but also to a closer, brighter walk with Him. The nearer Him, the more luminous. May the life of each one of us be in very truth a helianthus, evermore keeping our petals turned toward the Sun of Righteousness! Yea, O Lord, evermore lift Thou upon us the light of Thy countenance, evermore cause Thy face to shine upon us. So shall we, with all Thy ransomed ones of every land and age; be made meet to enter into the exceeding rich patrimony, even the inheritance of the saints. in Light (Col. i. 12). Ay, in that day of noontide splendor, when the Lord shall have bound up the breach of His people, and healed the wound of their stroke, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be seven-fold, as the light of seven days (Is. xxx. 26). Nay, more in that day of eternal noontide, the sun shall no more be thy light; neither for brightness shall the moon give light to thee: for the Lord shall be to thee an everlasting Light, and thy God, thy Glory (Is. lx. 19). 2. A Word of Entreaty. Finally: a word of entreaty to the sinner. Of what use, O friend, is the most abounding light, if we persist in keeping our eyes closed? Awake, then, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give thee Light (Eph. v. 14). Oh, that at this very moment the day might dawn and the day-star arise in your heart (2 Peter i. 19)! Remember that that same God, Who called light out of darkness, divided the Light from the darkness, calling the Light Day, and the darkness He called Night. As there is an eternal Day for the Son of Light, so there is an eternal Night for the Son of Darkness. Give glory, then, to Jehovah, thy God, before it groweth dark, and before thy feet stumble upon the dark mountains: and, while thou art looking for light, He turn it into the death-shade (Jer. xiii. 16). Mehr Licht! gasped the great but Christless Goethe on his dying-bed. What Light is that which I see gleaming beyond the river, glinting even on the frowning crags which overhang the Valley of the Shadow of Death? It is the Light of the city which hath the foundations (Heb. xi. 10), even that eternal, dazzling city, which will never need the light of sun or moon; for the Effulgence of God. doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the Splendor thereof Rev.) xxi. 23). "There is a region lovelier far Than sages tell, or poets sing, It is not fanned by summer's gale; 'Tis not refreshed by vernal showers; It never needs the moonbeam pale, For there are known no evening hours. No, for that world is ever bright With purest radiance all its own; The streams of uncreated Light Flow round it from th' eternal throne. In vain the curious, searching eye May seek to view the fair abode, Or find it in the starry sky: It is the dwelling-place of God."-(TUCK.) Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. LECTURE V. GENESIS OF THE SKY. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and i was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."-GENESIS i. 6-8. I. Explanation of the Passage. 1.- Ancient Conception of the Sky. LET us first attend to the Explanation of the Passage. And, first, what did the Sacred Chronicler mean by the term "Firmament,” or, more literally, "Expanse?" Beware, then, at the very outset of trying to extort from the passage what is not in it. Beware of demanding from Moses the harvest of the Nineteenth Century of our Lord. Instead, then, of putting our meaning into Moses's words, is it not fairer, first of all, to ask what Moses himself meant? Having learned this, then it will be proper to ask whether his meaning is consistent with modern lights. Manifestly, then, the honest thing to do is, first of all, to forget modern attainments, and enter into sympathy with the simple, untutored conceptions of the ancients. Remembering now that the language of Scripture on such matters is not scientific, but phenomenal, let us try to ure" "He dwarf ourselves backward thousands of years, and catch the primeval, childlike conception of the Expanse, or Heavens. To the ancient Hebrew the sky seemed a vast, outstretched, concave surface or expansion, in which the stars were fastened, and over which the ethereal waters were stored. In the light of this infant conception let me now recall to you, without comment, a few Scriptural expressions. "He setteth a canopy over the face of the deep” (Prov. viii. 27); "He foldeth up the heavens as a vest(Heb. i. 12)," and rolleth them together as a scroll" (Is. xxxiv. 4); "He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in" (Is. xl. 22); "He walketh on the arch of heaven " (Job xxii. 14), “and sitteth upon the circle of the earth (Is. xl. 22); spreadeth out the skies, firm like a molten mirror” (Job xxxvii. 18): "there was under His feet, as it were, a paved work of sapphire stone, as it were heaven itself for clearness (Ex. xxiv. 10); "praise Him, ye heavens of heaven, and ye waters that are above the heavens " (Psalm cxlviii. 4); "He opened the windows of heaven, and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights" (Gen. vii. 11, 12). "Ah, all this," you tell me, "is scientifically false; the sky is not a material arch, or tent, or barrier, with outlets for rain; it is only the matterless limit of vision." Neither, let me again remind you, is there any such thing as 66 sunrise" or or "sunset." To use such words is to utter what science declares is a falsehood. And yet your astronomer, living in the blaze of science, fresh from the discovery of spectrum analysis and satellites of Mars, and knowing too that his words are false, still persists in talking of sunrise and sunset. Will you, then, deny to the untutored Moses, speaking in the childlike language of that ancient, infant civilization, the privilege which you وو so freely accord to the diploma-emblazoned, scientificallyspeaking, nineteenth-century astronomer? Taking now, as our clew, this primi2.- Panorama of tive, childlike conception of the sky as the Emerging Sky. an outstretched, ethereal expanse, and keeping distinctly in mind that the language of Scripture on such matters is not scientific, but optical, describing things as they seem, let us try to picture to ourselves the process of the Second Day as it appeared to the Sacred Narrator, when, from his mount of inspired vision, he gazed down on Creation's unfolding panorama. Everywhere is still a shapeless, desolate chaos. True, the Breath of God is moving over the face of the fluids, and marshaling the atoms into molecules, the molecules into masses. True, though the sun has not yet appeared, there is light; it may be the fierce light of incandescence, atom clashing with atom, molecule with molecule, discharging flashes at every shock. But although the organizing Breath and the fiery glow are here, yet all is still in seething, tumultuous, chaotic confusion. And now a sudden break is seen. A broad, glorious band or expanse glides through the angry, chaotic waste, separating it into two distinct masses-the lower, the heavy fluids; the upper, the ethereal vapors. The band, still bearing upward the vapor, swells and mounts and arches and vaults, till it becomes a concave hemisphere or dome. That separating, majestic dimension we cannot to this day call by a better name than the Expanse. And that Expanse God called Heavens. And there was evening and there was morning, a Second Day. Such is the panorama of the Birth of the Heavens. 3.-Meaning of the Term "Expanse." Still the question recurs: "What are we to understand by the term 'Expanse?"" Two answers have been given. |