THE CALL OF THE SUN.

Evening Star, Issue 14535, 10 December 1910, Page 2

THE CALL OF THE SUN.

AVhat a soft, long, masterful call is his! How everything *und everybody hoars it and responds! The Sun whispers to the seeds sleeping far away down in the earth, and they wake and obey. The ilowers and the birds catch his summons, and they follow him round tho world. And it is the same with Man. Old and young., rich and poor, black man and white man, yellow man and red man—all alike respond to the call of the Sun. It affects them differently, but none is deaf to its appeal. So masterful lias it been upon Man that he has taken it as divine. The highest and best mythologies of ancient times have bad Sun-worship for their source and inspiration. East and "West they run back into it. Indra in India, Zeus in Greece, Odin in the North, AniJit lia in Egypt are really names for the Sun. At a fashionable dinner party in London an Indian Brahmin sat next to a. society lady. The latter knew little of the East, but felt she had to say keep conversation going. So she ventured the query: "1 believe, your people worshio the Sun?" "Yes, madam; and so would you, too—if you ever saw him." It was November, and the fogs had been in charge of the city for some days. But wo know lu.tiiing of those fogs out here. In this Dominion, and more especially in Australia, the. call of the Sun is rarely silent. It is heard in some places through almost the entire year. And so wo are expecting some of these days to be told of the establishment of a cult of Sun-worshippers. One has only to scan the announcements of Sunday services in the Saturday's newspaper, or road the denominational returns in a census report, to see. the fertility with which we spawn new religions. Montaigne long ago declared that " Man " must be stark, staring mad, ii.v al- " though lie can't make a ilea he makes " gods by the dozen." Ho would be confirmed in this conclusion were he alive to-day. And in truth there are many worse cults among us than Sunworshipping. Henry Ward Beecher said that of all forms of idolatry, none would have tempted him so stroiigly as the Sun-worshippers. As a matter of fact, they were the best and purest of all idolaters. But if we do not worship the Sun in the usual sense of that word, we worship him in. other ways. Just, now our whole population is responding to bis appeal. By tram and train, ;>u cycles and i:i motor cars, a loot and afloat they are following him tl roughout, the land. The sick hear his voice and dream of health; the children go dancing over the hills and by the sea beaches; the old dream of youth ; rich and poor, all alike, are aft.T "the gleam" as the tides follow the moon. "Blessed Sun!" writes Carlyle. "It is sent to all living. " And the whole wealth of the. Bank '■<ij' England is not equal to a beam "of it!" The Sun's call is the call of health. ******* It is als i the call of wonder. It is hj'.-anse w:> are so accustomed to it. that it does not thus impress us. It is because light is so commonplace that we do not recognise its miracle. Wo do not pause to consider its marvels. Think of some of them for a moment. The scientific people tell us that space is filled with a thing called ether. It is t-lio great carrying eompnv.y of the forces of our own Sun and the billions of ot'ser sun.: ;>£ the universe. They are constantly communicating to this carrying company light-waves. The ether transmits these at the rate of eleven millions of miles in a minute. These light-waves—countless billions of them—all advrnce in perfectly straight lines. The colors that we see—red, blue, violet, etc.—are made by the nunih:>r of vibrations. Every point in the ether is vibrating hundreds of billions of times in a second. Now, when the light strikes the earth it is reflected by it. It is also refracted—scattered about all over it. as a. sower scatters seed. Everything on the earth —flowers, trees, grass, water—has its own definite laws of receiving and giving back these light-waves. It is thus that the earth is flooded with light. The ethor, therefore, not only convoys those, countless billions of lightwaves in lines so straight that they ar 1 tne despair of Man to copy them each ray ninety-two millions of miles long, and with a velocity of eleven million.? of miles in a second—but it \ym count-loss transverse waves, caused by reflection and refraction from the earth. Yet there is no chaos, no jostling. Everything moves in perfect ordor and harmony. Were this not so our visio.i of things would he, a blur, as when looking throigh » pano of glass with irroguhr formations. And whom this flawless pane of glass is as wide as the universe, what a. marvel is this ordered harmony! The call of flic Sun is sirrelv a. call of wonder. ******* But- ii. is also a call of mystery. Sunlight is the commonest of commonplaces, yet it is steeped in mystery. We talk of the inystory of darkness: it is nothing to the mystery of hght. Think of iho mystery of its power. We are hearing much about the potential energies stored up in our rivers and lakes. But mo nothing to the Sun. We. are breathing in every moment in those atoms of sunshine, if we had only heat enough to resolve them into the elements, forces sufficient to drive not only the workshops of New Zealand, but the workshops of the whole world. Add to i ho force of the air, expressed in its motions from the zephyr to the tornado, that of electricity of rivers, seas, arid glaciers: add to those again the energies hidden in the vegetable and animal world, in tire, steam, dynamite, etc.; sum these, all up, an;l they would only represent " one two - thousand - three.- hundred- " millionth of the fore, which the Sun "is every moment pouring through the "air into space." Again, think of this niysteiv of colors. It is the Sun that makes tho colors. All the colors of Nature are in it It is because they are that we have every variety of them on tho earth. Marvellous and mysterious is this adjustment between tho countless forces of the Sun and the beauty of the colors of tb i world. How r>re- wo to conceivo of those vast energies driving tho countless planets in their Jeash-o" through space, yet so dexterously and delicately poised as <o paint the lily and tint the rose, and stain tho speedwell with its "darling blue''? And each grass and flower, by some mysterious choice, takes in its own cob.' and rejects the rest,. The atoms that make up the grass or clover bloom have been arranged to icoeivo mi man/ vibrations of clher, and so wo have the green and purple sheen

of tli 3 glowing meadows, and the endless variation of tints in flower and shrub. And what each rejects is scattered abroad <'u every direction. It is by the.dispersion of tho Sun's rays that other objects are made visible to us. #♦*****

But that is not all: we aro merely I on the fringe of the mystery of the call of the Sun. In every second hundreds of billions of vibrations—lightwaves—are passing into that slit, the human eye. They are passing into' it from the flower, the tree, the plain, the hills, etc., and all the multitudes of visible things. And somewhere between the eye and the grey specks of matter that wo call tho brain a power takes hold of theso billions and billions of light-waves, sorts thorn out according to their vibrations, labels them as blue, green, rod, etc., with a swiftness surpassing lightning. For the psychologists tell us that color is not in things; it is in tho mind that looks at them. The colors which charm and confound us in a sunset or a sunflower are all due to a difference in tho vibrations of the ether that carries tho lightwaves round the world. Theso vibrations pass in through the slit of the eye, report themselves in consciousness, and as quick as an electric flash the mind distinguishes them, interprets theni as the crimson of a sunset, the emerald of a hillside, or the pink flush of a rose. How is it done? Nobody knows Nobody can tell how the movement of tho grey particles of the brain, set in motion by those vibrations entering the eye from without, changes into thought with tho rapidity of winking. And it is done with an case so majestic and so constant that we arc actually as unconscious of it as we are of winking Wo may, however, venture this much: that if all this v is achieved by the mere chance collocations of atoms of matter that we call Man and the World, we may as well dismiss rationality from tho vocabulary of human speech. And here wc are at the edge of another mystery which emerges out of tho call of the Sun: it is tho mystery of beauty. What is beauty? What is its use? The thing 'is there. Tho world is steeped in it. We stand spellbound before it, hardly less as wo gaze at it in the wayside (lower as when it overwhelms us in the splendors of a dawn or a sunset. But whence comes it, or what is its rationale? Does it appeal to other eyes than ours? Do tho brutes and tho "birds behold it? A little thought must make clear to us that beauty must he the appeal of mind to mind, and that what takes us captive in the outside world is the effort of some One to impart joy to His created beings. This conclusion can only lie set aside by showing either that the emotions which its perceptions excite are untrustworthy or that the Cause which is supposed to produce them is an illusion. Neither of these can be done—least of all tho second, for it would lead to the absurd conclusion that the. brutes who perceive no loveliness in the. landscape are yot nearer reality than tho poet or the artist or the common man .who does.

******* But we may return from those more mysterious calls of the Sun to hear his bettor-known call of health. It is curious and suggestive to remember that in Hebrew language the word for "air, wind" is the same as that for " spirit." And in their literature one may trace the evolution of the thought from its physical to its metaphysical base—from the air or wind to its eulmination in God, in the, Third Person of the Trinity. A Jewish historian says that Saul suffered from hypochondria, and that the Jews gave, this the name of "had air," which the Bible translates "evil spirit"; for they held, he says, that " the Devil inhabited the air." We may smile, perhaps, at these metaphysical subtleties. But Science is not so cocksure as it used to he. It has be?n discovered that there are more things in heaven and earth than it had supposed, and that what it though-; explanations of mysteries only conduct to dei'per mysteries still. But the plain man knows nowadays Ihat, however these, thines may be, bad aitis destructive «.f life. That is the reason, or partly the reason, for his migration into the open—lW the exodus from towns and cities that is just setting In. 'J lie ancients knew judging from their language, thai, the soul depended on the air wo brealbe. And they not so far astray. But, it lias taken us a good while to find this out. We are, however, beginning to realise it now. The abolition of slums, the regulations regarding streets and parks and gardens, and the, ovorinercasing movement out of crowded population info th >. country are the evidences of this. Wo may he thankful that in this land the conditions that have squeezed the life-blood out, of multitudes in older ciYiJisntions have not emerged. And wo must toko caro that they never shall. Rome pooplo a.ro beginning to think that we have too many holidays But it, is good, ar; often as possible, to escape from the industrial treadmill and act enure life 10 the music of Stevenson's lines:— Give to me fho life, { Jovo—•Let the lave go by mo. Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush, with stars to see: Bread I dip in the river: There is tbo life for a man like m«—„ There is the life, for over.