In that world however there is a Sun, as we have often said above, and there are heat and light. The Spiritual Sun is for the heavens, and the Lord is in it. Yet neither can it, a globe of spiritual fire, and a living sun, be worshipped, because the Lord, Whose apparent mansion that sun is, is a divinely human mind, a human form within it, and as such alone is the object of all worship. His sun is the veil under which He can appear to angelic senses; His human form divine is the reality under which alone He can be loved and perceived by Angelic minds. A corollary from this is that the worship of the natural sun in this world is the last resort of sensuality, which in the character imports the final rule of the love of self.

LVI-THE HUMANE SUN.

The mighty work through the dead sun consists in the exclusion and preparation of dead nature as a first theatre of human life. Considering whose obeisant creature the sun is, its operations in a secondary sense may be called humane, just as the heat of fires and stoves, and the light of candles, by reason of their use, and as proceeding, from man, though dead, are also humane. It is important to plant this heavy conception upon science when it comes to deal with the agencies which are visibly at work in and from the central orb. Do not be afraid of the lessons of the A just theology tempers it, and puts reason into it. The Sun itself is one thing, and its proceeding is another. Its heat and light come down through firmaments of ether in to us noiseless passages, and chaos and darkness are met and abolished by them. Close around the sun there is indescribable activity, as it were of the commissioning and starting of these travellers and messengers on the highways of finite space, which are tracks of divine uses to the planetary worlds. Such innumerable goings forth cannot

sun.

but be attended with courages, partings and emotions with which the glowing surface pulsates and respires; for the sun, which is dead, still images Him Who is living. The apparent unrest is on the surface. The outfit for this host of messengers, which are mundane heat and light, involves the first surprises of matter when by alienation from the central fire it is, analogically speaking, frozen into substances which have names on earth. A perturbation in first matter but not in the sun. Immeasurable jets of such substances are observed; the beating and breathing of the uses of the secure, serene and pacific Sun. To the first thought it is a volcano; but there is no Vulcan here, but Apollo in all his significant splendour; if we may use these good myths. For the sun has no furnace and no anvil, but radiance is its nature, and it has only to ray to produce the substances which it gives away. Perhaps they occur freshly at every distance from the centre. The spectroscope shows that on our earth its terminal beams are charged with many of the matters which we know here. We infer, it may be hastily, that they also exist as such in the Sun. But is not their alienation from the Sun their separate creation ?

Of the body of the sun we know nothing from present science. Nor of the weight of it. Nor whether it has weight at all. Centrality may have a quality in it which stands for weight in a world of gravitating weights: a close dead analogue of the creative will making itself felt in universal physics: a form of forms. The sun's weight or importance lies in its imponderables. The pivot of worlds seems answerable to no claim or pull of its offspring but that of instant active service. The sun itself is hardly visible to the naked eye, being hidden in a blaze inferior to itself. There is no reason to suppose that any of the material elementary substances as they are called exist in the body of the sun. They would be dissipated there, and be resolved into what the sun is, the central universe of fire.

And what is that fire? It is not a fire of combustion kept up from without, but, under the divine auspices pure or autocratic fire. Combustion begins from the surface of the orb where separation occurs, and specialized things, not subsisting there, are produced and ignited. We have already used the word frozen in speaking of the first creations from that heat of heat for the solidity of nature may be regarded as the congelation of substances at a distance from the sun. The sun regarded as fire is therefore essential or as Swedenborg says "pure fire," the intangible and irresistible substance of all terrestrial subjects. Do not conceive the idea of fire as of what is flimsy or baseless; it carries the whole dead creation in it and on it and is the might and weight of

nature.

Another thought we draw from this. The perturbation of the surface has no place in the solar centre. There are no elements there to be resolved: the pure (Tup) fire is not mixed with these: it subsists in its aloneness, and there is nothing like it or second to it in its cosmos. Doubtless it is an architecture, a palace of uses to the whole world; an indefinite programme and order of details: but to none of these can we assign lines and currents of solids or fluids in any oceanic or planetary sense. Only we know that the pillars of the edifice are for ages of ages: enduring so long as the divine uses performed from that footstool-throne are required by its group of children, its earths or satellites. That is the limit of the existence of any particular sun. But the thought before alluded to is, that in all this work, the substantive sun remains peaceful and humane, and being constructive through deity in its outgoing, it is not destructive to itself. A proof, if you please from design, of this, is found in the distance at which the rest of the creation is placed from the sun. No habitable globe can fall into it, and undergo the resolution involved. The sun itself revolving has already thrown it forth. Destruction is prevented in the very plan, and permanent construction ensured.

The circumferences attest the pacific intention in the centre. We may name our majestic luminary in itself Physical Peace.

The sun is a plane of cessation: the Spiritual Sun proceeding through its degrees has at length ceased into it, and nature, dead nature begins, the spiritual now accompanying it from without. It begins from its peaceful womb. But being a divine operation, equated to everlasting use, it is of a substance and on a scale above human thought excepting in bare general acknowledgment of an ardour betokening the infinite and eternal. It is a shadow and correspondence of the attributes of the Almighty, humane because God is human.

This is not science; it has theology pressing behind it, and yet it is in its measure true of the sun. Better and greater thoughts will come to the subject from spiritual intuition and reverent natural consideration. I have set forth my own imperfect view affirmatively, yet not dogmatically, for I would have it to be amenable to all the fresh light and heat of wisdom and love that can be given from time to time.

The centre of the earth seems at first sight more inscrutable than the body of the sun, for it is buried deeply under our feet; crusts of matter wall it in; it seems to be hidden in darkness as the sun is hidden in light. But both sun and earth centrally are beyond scientific thought. Speculation about the earth's inmost region is of little account. Mythology has made it sometimes into a hell; sometimes into the abode of the disembodied to which the grave was an antichamber. The temperature gradually increasing the deeper the descent is made in mines may point to a central heat of great intensity; and volcanoes, and their connection with each other in spaces of time, may induce the same conclusion. The fire, like the sun's, may be either something we know nothing of, or a relic of the first heat of the planet when sent forth from the sun. But the only way through

the darkness seems to lie in the science of correspondences, and in the revelation of man to himself. For he is a microcosm, an earth in miniature. Without a revelation he does not know his own centre. Without a mind having faith in the revelation, he does not admit the concentric globe of his faculties. His senses and his understanding and his animus, which are his surfaces, he believes to be his substance. But the order from within outwards is that his love, whether good, or evil, is his centre, and that his other faculties are circumferences animated by this amour propre or proprium, and are active forms of it. The love here, unthought of and unsuspected, is a central fire in the man. The earth by this analogy is an obverse image of the sun; a lowest centre of terrene heat and self-combustion the opposite to the supreme unwasting solar fire. It may suggest itself as a prison of centres in chaotic conflict. But it is futile to pursue the unknowable further. Not that we need despair of knowing whenever such is useful for human regeneration. Intuition can be given, with confirmations from the facts and analogies of man and nature, and the earth may become transparent to guided seership when the humble man of the Church consents on any measureable scale to see into himself.

LVII.-SPACES AND NUMBERS IN THE
WORD.

The measures of space signify according to extensions in the heavens. Length in the Word denotes good: breadth, truth; and height, the degrees of these. A broad land is the extension of truth in the Church. Length of days is increase of good in the mind. Elongation or distance is disagreement and aversion. Height is degree as to good and then as to truth: what is high is what is internal: height is the measure of inwardness. Heaven is high, and the Kingdom of God is within you; the highest kingdom the deepest within.