THE SUN GOD
"A largeness universal like the sun." — Shakespeare
The modern mind has been so clouded and benumbed by looking upon Nature as a dead machine controlled by a Creator far away, that we can hardly follow the free flight of ancient thought which viewed the Universe as if it pulsed with life in every part. The ancients moved about the world with ever fresh delight and saw no desolate, forsaken spots although they passed through lands without inhabitants. The moving sea, the shady groves, the sunlit rocks and running streams were thickly peopled by divinities and haunted by glad throngs of nature spirits. The sun was not a ball of incandescent lava but the glittering raiment of a god thus veiled from mortal sight, through whose incessant bounty all living things were sustained. We may however get some little understanding of the ancient point of view helped by the very Science that has sometimes seemed to have destroyed that standing-ground.
The microscope has shown us living forms which are as round as marbles, and recently it has been shown that electricity can exist in a globular form, so that we run counter to no fact of ascertained knowledge if we try to imagine the sun as being truly alive, and imbodied in a vehicle of electric matter. The solar orb may be perhaps a vast intelligence enveloped in a living frame of stationary lightning, a temple fit for such august divinity. There is no need en passant to remind the intelligent reader that heat and light may be derived from a source which is both cool and non-luminous. Every incandescent electric lamp generates heat and light by setting up local resistance to a current supplied from a distant dynamo. The sun hangs in space beholden to no external source of light and from the dark robes of primeval night he spins a shining garment of dazzling brightness. He floods the boundless aether with his glory and the swift currents of his vitalizing force bathe the remotest regions of the solar sysem.
There is nothing parasitic or dependent about the sun. He is an infinite bestower, an exhaustless generator. No shadow ever falls athwart his face. He has no barren intervals in his existence. Dwelling in the central fountain whence all energy proceeds he gives with neither pause nor stint and fears no scarcity or want. Perpetual positivity is his condition and as the ceaseless rivers of the cosmic force take rise in his huge heart he thus repels all hostile influence from without. And we — need we for ever be consumers merely of the sun's beneficence, and paupers in the universe? Why should not man in emulation of the bright divinity become himself a sun to the society in which he lives? Can we not spin a shining garment from surrounding gloom and generate from source unseen a flow of life and brightness for our brothers in the dark? To our confusion be it said that we too often live upon the love of others. We are indolently satisfied to be receivers when we might originate instead. We make appeals for sympathy, attention and applause, and yet if we but willed we might be always giving like the god of day. Hail Great Sun!