" He is quite as self dependent as he is self-luminous; and for
the maintenance of his heat requires no help, no foreign accession of
vital energy; for he is the heart of his system, a heart that will not
cease its throbbing until its hour of rest shall come. Were the sun "a
cooling mass," our great life-giver would have indeed grown dim with age
by this time, and found some trouble to keep his watch-fires burning for
the future races to accomplish their cycles, and the planetary chains to
achieve their rounds. There would remain no hope for evoluting
humanity; except perhaps in what passes for science in the astronomical
textbooks of Missionary Schools--namely, that "the sun has an orbital
journey of a hundred millions of years before him, and the system yet
but seven thousand years old!" (Prize Book, "Astronomy for General
Readers.")
The "Adepts," who are thus forced to demolish before they can
reconstruct, deny most emphatically (a) that the sun is in combustion,
in any ordinary sense of the word; or (b) that he is incandescent, or
even burning, though he is glowing; or (c) that his luminosity has
already begun to weaken and his power of combustion may be exhausted
within a given and conceivable time; or even (d) that his chemical and
physical constitution contains any of the elements of terrestrial
chemistry in any of the states that either chemist or physicist is
acquainted with.
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