Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith / Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity

by Robert Patterson

The third supposition, then, is most indisputably true; our solar system, and all the heavenly bodies, are in motion. To this conclusion all the observed facts conform. The Bible does say that the sun moves, and moves in a curve. All mathematicians prove that it must of necessity do so. All astronomers assert that it does so. The unanimous verdict of the scientific world is thus rendered by Nichol: "As to the subject itself, the grand motion of the sun, as well as its present direction, must be received now as an established doctrine of astronomy."[306] But the discovery was anticipated, three thousand years ago, by the Author of the Bible.

But, as will readily be perceived, the difficulty of determining either the direction or the rate of this motion is immensely increased in this case; for we are now not like persons riding in a carriage, watching the fixed lights in the street to determine our direction and rate of progress; but we are watching the lamps of a multitude of carriages, moving at various distances, and with various velocities, and, for anything we can tell at first sight, in various directions. We are on board a steamer, and are watching the lights of a multitude of other steamers, also in motion; and it is not easy to find out, in the darkness, how either they or we are going. If each were pursuing its own independent course, without any common object or destination, the confusion would be so great that we could learn nothing of the rate or direction either of our own motion or theirs.

But astronomers are not content to believe that the universe is governed by accident. The whole science is based upon the assumption, that a presiding mind has impressed the stamp of order and regularity upon the whole cosmos. They are deeply convinced that God's law extends to all God's creation; that all his works display his intelligence, as well as his power, and proceed according to a wise plan. Having seen that all the stellar motions previously known are orderly motions, in circular or elliptical orbits, and that the most of the solid bodies belonging to our own system revolve in one direction, they reasoned from analogy, that this might be the case with the sun and the fixed stars, and went to work with great diligence, to see whether it was or not; and, by comparing a great multitude of observations, ancient and modern, made both in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on all sorts of stars, they have come to the conclusion, that our sun, and all the bodies of the solar system, are flying northward, at the rate of three millions three hundred and thirty-six thousand geographical miles a day—five thousand times faster than a railway express train—toward the constellation Hercules, in R. A. 259° Dec. 35°.

Further, as the direction of this motion is slowly and regularly changing, just as the direction of the head of a steamer in wearing, or of a railway train running a curve, it is certain that the sun is moving, not in a straight line, but in a curve. The revolution of the sun in such an orbit was known to the Author of the Bible when he wrote, "his circuit is to the end of heaven." The direction of the circumference of a circle being known, that of its center can be found; for the radius is always a tangent to the circumference, and the intersection of two of these radii will be the center; so that, if we certainly knew the sun's orbit to be circular, or nearly so, we could calculate the center. But as we do not certainly know its form, we can not certainly calculate the center; we can only come near it. And as we know that the line which connects the circumference with the center of the sun's orbit, runs through the group of stars known as the Pleiades, or the Cluster; and as all the stars along that line seem to move in the same direction—a different direction from that of the stars in other regions, just as they must do if they and we were revolving around that group—Argelander and others have concluded, with a high degree of probability, that the grand center around which the sun and our firmament revolve, is that constellation which the Author of the Bible, more than three thousand years ago, called kyme—the pivot.

It would require a greater knowledge of electro-magnetism than most of my readers possess, to explain the connection of the earth's rotation with the sun's grand movement. I will merely state the facts. Electro-magnetism is induced by friction. The regions of space are not empty, but filled with an ether, whose undulations produce light; and this ether is sufficiently dense to retard the motions of comets. The friction, produced by the rapid passage of the sun and solar system through this ether, must be immense, and is one source of electricity, and the principal source of electro-magnetism. This kind of electricity differs from the other kinds, in that its action is always at right angles to the current, and tends to produce rotation in any wheel, cylinder, or sphere, along whose axis it flows.[307] The sun, and all the planets, traveling in the direction of their poles, the current is of course in the direction of the axis; and the result is, that while the sun moves along his grand course, he and all the bodies of the system will rotate, by the influence of the electro-magnetism generated by that motion; and if he stops, his and their rotation stops too. Day and night on earth are produced by the sun's motion causing the earth's rotation. You can see the principle illustrated by the child who runs along the street with his windmill, to create a current, which will make it revolve. The Author of the Bible made no mistake when, desiring to lengthen the day, he commanded the sun to stand still. It is not the Creator, but his correctors, who are ignorant of the mechanism of the universe.

Thus, these long-misunderstood and much-assailed Scriptures are not only vindicated, but far more than vindicated, by the progress of astronomical discovery. It not only proves the language of the Bible to be correct; it assures us that it is divine. The same Hand which formed the stars to guide the simple peasant to his dwelling, at the close of day, and to lead the mighty intellects of Newton and of Herschel among the mysteries of the universe, formed those expressions which, to the peasant's eye, describe the apparent reality, and, to the astronomer's reason, demonstrate the reality of the appearance of the heavens, and are thus, alike to peasant and philosopher, the oracles of God.

Nor is this the only instance of such Bible oracles. Thousands of years before philosophers knew anything of the formation of dew, Moses described it exactly, and noticed how it differed from the rain which drops down, while the dew evaporates. "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew."—Deuteronomy xxxii. 2. Solomon described the cycloidal course of the wind, and recorded it in Ecclesiastes long before Admiral Fitzroy's discovery; as he also anticipated the doctrine of aqueous circulation in his pregnant proverb: "Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."—Ecclesiastes i. 7. Job declared the law of pneumatics when he declared that "God maketh weight for the winds." Long before Madler, the celebrated Russian astronomer, published his remarkable opinion: "I regard the Pleiades as the central group to the whole astral system, and the fixed stars, even to its outer limits, marked by the Milky Way; and I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of the universe," Moses tells us they were known as "the hinge, or pivot," of the heavens; and God asks, "Canst thou bind the secret influences of the Pleiades?" Though Peter was no geologist, and probably incapable of calculating the ratio of the central heat, he tells us that the heavens and the earth are "reserved unto fire," literally, "stored with fire."

Equally in advance of modern medical science, thousands of years before our modern discoveries, the Author of the Bible declared that "the life is in the blood," and spoke of the slow combustion of starvation exactly in the language of the most recent physiology, "they shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat."—Deuteronomy xxxii. 24.

Here we have scientific truth not discovered for centuries by our men of science, but revealed by prophets—scientific discovery, in advance of science—predictions of the future progress of the human intellect, no less than revelations of the existing motions of the stars. He who wrote these oracles knew that the creatures to whom he gave them would one day unfold their hidden meaning (else he had not so written them), and in the light of scientific discovery, see them to be as truly divine predictions of the advance of science, as the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, read among the ruins of Thebes or Babylon, are seen to be predictions of the ruin of empires. Man's discoveries fade into insignificance in the presence of such unfolding mysteries; and we are led to our Bibles, with the prayer, "Open mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law."

4. The ancient charter of the Church was written in the language of one of the most recent astronomical discoveries, thirty-six hundred years before Herschel and Rosse enabled us to understand its full significance: "He brought him forth abroad, and said unto him, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be."[308]