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was no slight testimony to the inspiration of this passage that 
when the celebrated heathen Dionysius Longinus first met with 
this sentence in the LXX. Version, he described their effect on 
his mind in these striking words : — “The Jewish lawgiver, who 
was no ordinary man, having conceived a just idea of the Divine 
power, expressed it in a dignified manner, for at the beginning 
of his laws he thus speaks : — c God said, — What? Let there 
be Light ! And there was light? ”* 
79. An objection has been raised by infidels of old like 
Celsus, and revived by modern sceptics like Voltaire and 
Goodwin in our own day, to this part of the Mosaic cosmogony, 
that the author represents light to have existed before and 
independent of the sun. But, passing by the fact that Moses 
only says respecting the sun, as one of the heavenly bodies 
■which were “ created in the beginning,” that at a certain time 
of Ilis preparing earth for the habitation of man, God appointed 
the chief light-bearer in the solar system to give light to the 
earth during the day, it does not conflict with his previous 
assertion that there was light independent of the sun, for modern 
science has at length discovered that such is indeed the case. 
80. Had Moses been a mere speculator, well posted up in 
the scientific conceptions of his own day, or, as Mr. Goodwin 
terms him, “ some Hebrew Descartes or Newton,” he would 
not have recorded the creation of light as separate from sun- 
light. But in this seeming inconsistency we have one of the 
strongest testimonies possible to the Divine authority of the 
Mosaic cosmogony ; for science teaches that the sun, though 
supreme in our system, is not the only source of light, but that 
there is, throughout the endless regions of space, a fine, subtle 
essence, called ether, which, restrained by no limits, washes the 
remotest shores of the universe with an invisible ocean, and 
which is of so refined a nature that the stars move through its 
depths very slightly affected by what is termed, the resisting 
medium, which astronomers consider identical with the lumini- 
ferous ether, f Hence arise those waves, or undulatory motions, 
* Dion. Long., On the Sublime, § 9. 
t As certain phenomena of optics require for their explanation a vehicle 
for light, so certain phenomena of astronomy demand for their satisfactory 
explanation the existence of a subtle fluid, such as the luminiferous ether is 
conceived to be. Hence Encke, in his Dissertation on the Comet, which 
bears his name, observes : — “Another question is this, whether the hypo- 
thesis of a resisting medium gives the true and probable explanations, 
though hitherto no other appears to have equal weight.” On which the 
Astronomer Royal says : “ There can scarcely be a doubt that the hypothesis 
of a resisting medium, or something which produces almost exactly the same 
effect, is the true one.” — Airy’s Translation of Enckcs Dissertation on the 
Comet, 1832. 
