Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of Creation

by Caroline Pridham

the spirit, that part of man which can never come to an end of its life, will still be living somewhere; and that those only who have been turned to God, and are His children by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, will live with Him all through that great for ever which will go on when sun and moon and all that we can see may have passed away.

And now, before I try to tell you a very little about the sun, I should like to know whether you have ever learnt any astronomy. My children thought it a hard name, but its meaning is beautiful, for it is only the Greek way of saying, "the law of the stars." Astronomy is the science which teaches us about the heavenly bodies, as the sun, moon, and stars are sometimes called; and all that we can learn about them is very wonderful and interesting, so that the more we know, the more we want to know. But the pleasantest way for you to learn would be if someone would talk to you a little, especially about the stars, and take you out of doors on clear nights, and show you some of those which are best known, so that in time you would learn to look for them yourself; that would be a delightful way of beginning to learn.

I remember that I had a great wish to know about the different constellations, or groups of stars; I wanted to know where to find Orion, with his seven brilliant stars, and those other seven stars which form the group called Charles's Wain; from an idea that they are so placed as to give a rough sketch of a waggon and three horses; and the wonderful cluster of the Pleiades—for I had heard of all these constellations; but I did not like the trouble of learning about them in difficult books. One day I met a gentleman who was very fond of sailing about in his yacht, and I thought he would teach me all about the stars, for I had heard that sailors knew them well. But, to my disappointment, I found that my new friend, though he was very kind to me, was not able to answer my questions; he said he did not know much about the stars, and that it was in the old times, before ships were steered by the compass, that sailors learned so much from watching them; though the moon considered in reference to the fixed stars is of very great importance as enabling them to ascertain their position.

Though it is a long time ago, I can remember how surprised I was when I first understood that the sun was a star, and that there are other stars very much like him, but most of them so very far from us that it is not possible to measure their distance. We do know how far our sun—the Star of Day, as he is sometimes called—is from us. Perhaps it may help you a little if I tell you that the astronomers say that if the sun was as far away from us as the nearest of these stars, he would appear but a point of light; but I think you will best understand how great the distance is if I tell you that a train, rushing along at full speed, as you see the express go by, and never resting, day or night, would take two hundred and ten years to reach him.

We cannot be surprised that very little is known certainly about a star so very far off, and yet nearer to us than any of the little points of light which you see so thickly sown over the sky; but we know that he is a great globe, like our earth, only twelve hundred thousand times as large—as much larger, I told the children when we were having our lesson in astronomy, as May's curly head was larger than the little blue bead which I put upon it.

But this great globe is unlike the earth in one respect; for while it is in itself quite dark, the sun which is used in the Bible as an emblem of God Himself shines by his own glorious light, and though he is believed to be made of the same materials as our earth, it is likely that they are in a state of very great heat.

Astronomers, who look at the sun through their wonderful telescopes, and so get much nearer to him than we can, tell us that we never see the sun himself; but that what we look at is the bright garment of light which is wrapped around him. They tell us also about great holes which sometimes appear in this bright covering; and they believe that they have actually seen, through these holes, the dark globe which is the real sun. These holes are called spots upon the sun, and very dark they look upon his bright face. The astronomers have long tried to find out what makes the sun-spots, and some of them now think that they are caused by furious winds which make great rents in this bright garment; for they tell us that there are sun-storms far more terrible than any storm that ever raged on sea or land.

It was while patiently watching the movement of these dark spots, through the little telescope which he had made and set up in Rome, that Galileo, nearly three hundred years ago, discovered that the sun moves round upon itself once during twenty-eight days, just as the earth turns round on herself once in twenty-four hours. But he lived in a time when it was believed that our earth was the centre of the universe, and that to say that it was only one of many planets moving round the sun was to deny the word of God; so to save his life, he pretended to give up what he knew to be true, and promised that he would never teach it again.

You remember that our earth has an atmosphere, a globe of air which wraps it round. We are told that the sun, too, has an atmosphere—a colour-globe, as it is called, because it is believed to be not air, but fiery gas. Then, outside this colour-globe, is something very lovely; that corona, or crown, of silvery light, which can be seen only during an eclipse of the sun. But what is an eclipse?

When the moon, which has no light of her own, passes directly between the earth and the sun, so as to hide his face from us, we say there is a solar eclipse, or obscuring of the sun's light. When the earth comes directly between the moon and the sun, instead of the sun's light falling upon the moon, she is eclipsed by the dark shadow of the earth passing over her face. I think you may have watched an eclipse of the moon: a solar eclipse is a much rarer sight, and there is something awful about it: as the darkness deepens, the stars begin to shine out, and it seems so much like night that the cocks and hens have been known to go to roost at midday. It is then, when the bright, dazzling face of the sun is hidden, that his lovely crown is seen, as a ring of soft light appearing all round the dark face of the moon.