Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers [[172]]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?
To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.
Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”
But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the [[173]]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.
‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”[1] and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,[2]) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’ [[174]]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.
As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’ [[175]]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”
“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,) τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”
And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.
“And call ye this to utter what is just,
You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?