THE SUN STANDING STILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XX, Issue 6829, 6 October 1883, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE SUN STANDING STILL.

A COEBESPOJTDEST ol Public Opinion draws attention to a way in which the account in Joshua x. can be supported, not by Hebrew vowel-pointe, but by natural law, and that law a fixed law. Mr. Samuel Kinns, Ph.D. in his interesting and valuable book o'c " Moses and Geology,", at p. 475, thus refers to this account of th&-sun.:—«'This miracle is ridiculed by most infidel writers and speakers as being in direct opposition to astronomical facts, for they say that it implies that the sun goes round the earth. This is indeed, their weakest argument, for they use precisely the same kind of phraseology every day of their lives when they say the sua is lising and the moon i 3 setting. But when this absurdity is pressed home to thcin they shift their ground, and say that the ewth must then have stood still to- have produced the effects described ; and Colenso, in his work on the Pentateuch, enumerates, with alarming eloquence, the direful catastrophes which would in such cases have happened. There is no must in the matter. The earth need not have stood still, for the simple material law of atmoapharic refraction would - V. —"Tvu-wm -mttrtvv that on p.; 474 Captain Bedford Pim, R.N., states that in the polar regions this refraction is sufficient to cause the sun to appear for 4 several days' above the horizon after it has really set. In polar regions Captain Scoresby saw the inverted image of his father's ship above the horizon when it waß nearly twenty miles below it, and similar phenomena are continually happening all over the world. In [December, 1869, the whole oE Paris was seen in the sky j and the mirage in the desert exhibiting to the weary travellers, a beautiful country studded with shady trees, which, on' their approach, vanishes into thin air, is caused by the same law of rtfrcctica, Let not sceptics, then, talk any more nonsense about the necessity in Joshua's ease for the earth to be stopped in its course, and to cease revolving upon its axis. The circumstance was doubtless a miracle, but not at all contrary to known natural laws. On p. 474 Captain Bedford Pim, R.N., is quoted thus: ■ — 1 Tha*refraction is increased by cold, the Sun being for several days visible in the frigid zones, when he is as much as Ideg. below the horizon,' These remarks hardly require anj comment of mine, but I cannot refrain from pointing out that the Bible here is its otoj witness, and seems to point to the law of re* fraction when its says, in the latter part of Joshuaxi., 10, 'They wcremore which died with hailstones than they which the children of Israel stewwifch the sword.' Do uofc the hailstones indicate the coldness of the atmos* phcre above, and does not .Captain Pim say, as already quoted, that refraction ia increased by cold ?"