"A strange field of speculation is opened by this phenomenon. Here we have a star fitfully variable to an astonishing extent, and whose fluctuations are spread over centuries, apparently in no settled period, and with no regularity of progression. What origin can we ascribe to these sudden flashes and relapses? What conclusions are we to draw as to the comfort or habitability of a system depending for its supply of light and heat on such an uncertain source? Speculations of this kind can hardly be termed visionary, when we consider that, from what has been before said, we are compelled to admit a community of nature between the fixed stars and our own sun; and when we reflect, that geology testifies to the fact of extensive changes having taken place, at epochs of the most remote antiquity, in the climate and temperature of our globe; changes difficult to reconcile with the operation of secondary causes, such as a different distribution of sea and land, but which would find an easy and natural explanation in a slow variation of the supply of light and heat afforded by the sun himself."[276] "I can not otherwise understand alterations of heat and cold so extensive as at one period to have clothed high northern latitudes with a more than tropical luxuriance of vegetation, and at another to have buried vast tracts of Europe, now enjoying a genial climate, and smiling with fertility, under a glacier crust of enormous thickness. Such changes seem to point to causes more powerful than the mere local distribution of land and water can well be supposed to have been. In the slow secular variations of our supply of light and heat from the sun, which, in the immensity of time, may have gone to any extent, and succeeded each other in any order, without violating the analogy of sidereal phenomena which we know to have taken place, we have a cause, not indeed established as a fact, but readily admissible as something beyond a bare possibility, fully adequate to the utmost requirements of geology. A change of half a magnitude on the luster of our sun, regarded as a fixed star, spread over successive geological epochs—now progressive, now receding, now stationary—is what no astronomer would now hesitate to admit as a perfectly reasonable and not improbable supposition."[277]
The most eminent astronomers are perfectly unanimous in their deductions from these facts. They regard variability as the general characteristic of suns and stars, our own sun not exempted. "We are led," says Humboldt, "by analogy to infer, that as the fixed stars universally have not merely an apparent, but a real motion of their own, so their surfaces or luminous atmospheres are generally subject to those changes (in their "light process") which recur, in the great majority, in extremely long, and therefore unmeasured, and probably undeterminable periods, or which, in a few, recur without being periodical, as it were, by a sudden revolution, either for a longer or a shorter time." And he asks, Why should our sun differ from other suns?
In reference to the extinction of suns, he says: "What we no longer see is not necessarily annihilated. It is merely the transition of matter into new forms—into combinations which are subject to new processes. Dark cosmical bodies may, by a renewed process of light, again become luminous."[278]
In confirmation of the fact adduced in support of this view, by La Place, "that those stars which have become invisible, after having surpassed Jupiter in brilliancy, have not changed their place during the time they continued visible," he adds, "The luminous process has simply ceased." Bessel asserts[279] that, "No reason exists for considering luminosity an essential property of these bodies." And Nichol sums up the matter in the following emphatic words: "No more is light inherent in the sun than in Tycho's vanished star; and with it and other orbs, a time may come when, through the consent of all the powers of nature, he shall cease to be required to shine. The womb which contains the future is that which bore the past."[280]
Here, then we behold astronomy presenting to our observation facts and processes so similar to those which revelation presents to our faith, that all those men who are most profoundly versed in her lore, reasoning solely from the facts of science, and without any reference to the Bible, unanimously conclude that there was such a state of darkness and confusion before our era, as the Bible declares—that its causes were most probably such as the Bible implies—and that the sudden illuminating of dark bodies, and their extinction, and even re-illumination, are facts so perfectly well authenticated as matters of observation in regard to other suns, that no reasonable man can hesitate to believe any credible assurance that our sun has passed through such a process. With what feelings, then, are we to regard men who, in defiance of the most common facts, and in contradiction to the demonstrations of science, blaspheme the God of truth as a teacher of falsehood, because he speaks of light distinct from that of the sun? Surely, such men are those whom he describes as "having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts. In whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not."[281]
These facts, of the sudden kindling of stars, their gradual passage through all the hues of a dying conflagration, and their final extinction, and present blackness of darkness, are facts of fearful omen to the enemies of God. They are the original threatenings of Heaven, whence the fearful language of Bible warning is derived. They attest its truth, and illustrate its import.
The favorite theory of the unbeliever is the uniformity of nature. "Where," says he, "is the promise of Christ's coming to judgment; for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were since the beginning of the world?" But the telescope dispels the illusion, exhibits the course of nature as a succession of catastrophes, displays the conflagration of other worlds, and the extinction of their suns, before our eyes, and asks, Why should our sun differ from other suns? It is not the preacher, but the philosopher, who has turned prophet, when—looking back on the period when the Siberian elephant and rhinoceros were frozen amid their native jungle, and icebergs visited the plains of India—he proclaims, "The womb that bore the past contains the future."
The threatenings of God's Word are invested with a mantle of terrible literality by the facts we have been contemplating. Raised at the day of resurrection, in these bodies, and with these senses, and this capability of rejoicing in the light, and shuddering and pining amid outward gloom, physical darkness will be the terrible prison of those who chose darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. The Father of Lights shall withdraw his blessed influences from the hearts, the dwellings, the eyes, of those who say to him, "Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways." The sun shall cease to vivify God's corn, and wine, and oil, which ungodly men consume upon their lusts. The moon shall cease to shine upon the robber's toil, and the stars to illumine the adulterer's path. The light of heaven shall cease to gild the field of carnage, where men perform the work of hell. In the very midst of your worldliness and business, unbeliever, when you are in all the engrossment of buying and selling, and planting and building, and marrying and giving in marriage, without warning or expectation, "the sun shall go down at noon, and the stars shall be darkened in the clear day." As in the warning and example given to the enemies of the Lord in Egypt, thick darkness, that may be felt, shall wind its inevitable chains around you, preventing your escape from the judgment of the great day, and giving you a fearful foretaste of that "blackness of darkness for ever" of which you are now forewarned in the Word of Truth.
"The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,
And the stars shall fall from the heavens,
And the powers of the heavens shall be shaken;
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in the heavens,
And then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn;
And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven,
With power and great glory."
"Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness;
There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."