April 1, 1886.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



169 



^ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE - 

 tt!ENCE,HTERATURL& ARf 



LONDOX: APRIL 1, 1886. 



THE UNKNOWABLE. 



By Eichakd A. Proctur. 



SUN-WOKSHIT. 



The Srx as God of the Ye-vk. 



UT if the glory of the rising sun, the mani- 

 fest jwwer of the sun by day and the 

 seeming conflict of nature attending the 

 sun's daily departure, moved men of old 

 times to adoration and to &icrifice, how 

 much moie, in a moi-e advanced age, must 

 men have been moved by the annual career, 

 the alternate defeat and victory, of the 

 great sun god I We are so accustomed to the progress of the 

 year, we watch with such complacency the steady alter- 

 nations of the seasons, that we find it difficult to imagine 

 the sensations with which men in past ages must have 

 watched the gradual fading of the sun's influence as summer 

 merged into autumn and autumn into winter. Whether the 

 decline of the sun towards eventide was ever watched with 

 anxiety we cannot know, but we can judge with consider- 

 able probability that it was not. For, however far back we 

 trace the ideas of man, we always find the day measuring 

 but a very small portion of each man's experience in time. 

 Even before man in the lowest form of savagery existed, the 

 day was recognised — unconsciously in those times, but not 

 less reallj- — as a short time-measure. The Gibbon ape, which 

 welcomes the rising sun with noises and gestui-es of gladness, 

 is not concerned when the sun is setting, though he and all 

 creatures which show consciousness of the value of the sun's 

 light and warmth at all, are troubled when the sun dis- 

 appears in eclipse. If we could imagine man created 

 suddenly as man, with no past experience through thousands 

 of generations to guide him, we might regard as con- 

 ceivable the anxiety described in Blanco White's well-known 

 sonnet : — 



Mysterious night ! When our first parent knew 

 Thee from report diWne, and heard thy name, 

 Did he not tremble for this glorious frame. 

 This wondrous canopy of light and blue .' 



As we might also conceive that imagined first man's wonder 

 when 



"Xeath a curtain of translucent dew, 

 Hesperus and the host of evening came. 

 And, lo 1 creation widened on mans view. 



Though we can hardly imagine the first man asking himself 



Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd 

 Beneath thy beams, Sun .' or who could find. 



Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed. 



That to such countless worlds thou mad'st us blind .' 



For even the wildest dreamer has not imagined that a first 

 parent, besides being instructed Ln the names of all living 



creatures, had also received, on the first day of his life, such 

 instruction in astronomy as would make the nature of the 

 orbs of night cleai' to him. If he had, he would have been 

 able to view with considerable complacency the departure 

 "of the great setting tiame," though he would also, I con- 

 ceive, have been so sadly wearied that he would probably 

 have been asleep almost ere the last ray of sunlight had 

 disappeared. 



Nor again, can we imagine that man, even in his earliest 

 savage days, wouhl have watched with very great anxiety 

 the gi-adual falling off in the light of the moon, as day passed 

 after day, from the time of full moon till the moon was lost 

 altogether in the light of the sun. Possibly so soon as men 

 began to watch the moon more c;irefully than of yore, 

 anxieties may for a time have ai'isen each month, despite 

 the long experience of lunar changes the race had already 

 had. It would seem from the signs of rejoicing — the blow- 

 ing up of the trumpet in the new moon — with which the 

 Jews welcomed the moon's return, long after the)' had 

 ceased to o'fer sacrifice to her as to a deity (onl}- retaining 

 an old ceremonial because it could not conveniently be 

 dropped), that for a time in the history of each race an 

 occasion for prayer and saciifice, lest the moon should not 

 retiun, had been recognised. Yet it is difficult to put our- 

 selves in the position of races so childlike as to be afraid lest 

 the waning of the moon meant her approaching decease. 



But it is veiT diflTerent with the varying glory of the sun 

 as ruler of the year. It requires very little eflbrt to picture 

 to ourselves the intense anxiety with which the sun's waning 

 power in autumn must have been observed in the earlier 

 days of agricidture. We may well believe that in still 

 earlier times the gloom of winter inspired terror. But it 

 must have been in the period of transition from the state of 

 complete ignorance about the sun's annual motion to the 

 time when the laws of his motion around the celestial sphere 

 came to be clearly known, that men's anxiety lest the sun 

 was actually departing altogether, when each autumn he 

 sank day by day further south, must have been most fully 

 developed. 



Observe that in those times men would have thought 

 nothing about the sun's circling motion round the star 

 sphere. The circling daily motion around the sky they 

 could not but notice. But the circling annual motion round 

 the star sphere they would fail to recognise. Xot one man 

 in a hundred even now has cleai* ideas on this point, even 

 if he knows the general teachings of astronomy. In the 

 early days of agriculture all that men would notice would be 

 that, after shining in glory high in the heavens at midday, 

 and for a much longer time than he was below the horizon, 

 the sun's power seemed to be dechning. Shorter and shorter 

 became the duration of his daily glory, less and less the 

 fullness of the power attained when day was at its height. 

 As this went on (during a period which to the child-man 

 would seem very long indeed) doubt would be followed by 

 anxietv, anxiety wovild be replaced by dread. It would 

 seem a time for propitiation and entreaty. Sacrifice must 

 be offered to the powers by which the sun-god seemed to be 

 assailed and before whose continued assaults he seemed to 

 be yielding. Nay, it would become a most solemn duty on 

 the part of all the members of the community to join in 

 prayer, in entreaty, in sacrifice. The man who did not 

 affiict himself at that time would offend against the com- 

 munity, seeing that the sun-god whose retiu-n was longed 

 for, or his enemies whose withdrawal or defeat was to be 

 secured by saciifice, might possibly fail to respond to 

 the prayers and offerings of the people if even one single 

 member of the community seemed careless in the matter. 

 The sjime sujierstitiously selfish feeling which even in our own 

 day manifests itself (as when men grow angry with those 



