The Colossus, or brazen statue of the Sun, was placed across the mouth of the harbor of Rhodes, its legs stretched to such a distance that a large ship under sail might easily pass between them. It was seventy cubits high, or a hundred English feet; its fingers were as long as ordinary statues, and few men with both arms could grasp one of its thumbs. Scarcely sixty years had elapsed before this work of art was thrown down by an earthquake, which broke it off at the knees, in which position it remained till the conquest of Rhodes by the Saracens (A.D. 684), when it was beaten to pieces and sold to a Jew merchant, who loaded nine hundred camels with its spoils.

Anaxagoras (500 B.C.) taught that there was but one god, and that the sun was only a fiery globe and should not be worshiped. He attempted to explain eclipses and other celestial phenomena by natural causes, saying that there is no such thing as chances, these being only names for unknown laws. For this audacity and impiety, as his countrymen considered it, he and his family were doomed to perpetual banishment. “Man,” said Protagoras of Abra (430 B.C.), “is the measure of all things.… Of the Gods I know nothing, neither whether they be nor whether they be not; for there is much that stands in the way of knowledge, as well the obscurity of the matter as the shortness of human life.”

St. John begins his writings: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” But John, like many others of his time, knew nothing more than the use of words to make riddles, which he himself could not see through and no one else could understand. The man or men who first composed that part of scripture that informs us how the sun and earth were created, certainly knew nothing about it, because all that is at present known is of comparatively recent date. For many centuries, the established religion, the church, and the representatives of the theo-Christian organization, did all in their power to prevent light from penetrating their hidden benighted doings. They looked upon themselves as being all in all, knowing all in all—as having had everything worth knowing revealed to them by an agency no one else had access to. The ideas of their mysterious doings, of their mysterious Gods, are hidden from view in deep obscurity—like the temple of the Egyptian Isis, that bore the inscription: “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.”

The ancient writers of the scripture were full of deep, mysterious ways, and their writings of hidden meanings. Ordinary mortals were prohibited from making inquiry because the subject was considered too mysterious, and much too sacred.

Since then, many mysteries have been dissolved, or have been analyzed by the crucial test of science, and it has been discovered that there is nothing hidden except what our ignorance prevents us from knowing. We have lifted the sacred veil and looked into the temple of nature, as she is, and not as she appears. The more we search, the more we discover, the nearer we get to the truth.

There is not the slightest reason why every man, woman, and child at proper age should not be instructed in matters wherein they are immediately interested, the knowledge whereof would undoubtedly be to their benefit.

Men have lived through centuries of fable, ages of fiction, long periods of myth. The Christian God is as much of a myth as any myth that ever existed. Humanity having passed through these various mental afflictions, gone through so many bloody surgical operations, we are, as it were, approaching a condition that will soon be declared as convalescent, and this most miserable of theological nurses may at not a very remote period be dismissed.

We can say, without the slightest conscientious scruple, or fear of contradiction, with reason to sustain us and the light of science to prove the truth, that There is no God.

There never was—except such a one as men have invented, held sacred, and worshiped. There is nothing sacred except what man makes sacred, nothing holy except what man makes holy, nothing divine except what man makes divine. He makes his own God, and he religiously, piously, devoutly prays to and worships it. The more regularly he does so, the more saintly he becomes, or esteems himself.

For many thousand years the Sun was worshiped, held sacred, sacrificed to, entempled, etc. As reason and understanding increased, they forsook him as a god, dismissed him as they had dismissed many gods before him. Yet the sun was by far their greatest benefactor and best friend—more than they were aware of.

The sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth. Supposing a railway could be built to the sun, an express train traveling day and night, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, would require 352 years to reach its destination. The light of the sun is equal to 5,563 wax candles held at a distance of one foot from the eye. The heat of the sun that we receive annually is sufficient to melt a layer of ice 180 feet thick, extending over the whole earth. Yet the sunbeam is only 1/300000? part as intense as it is at the surface of the sun. Moreover, the heat and light stream off into space equally in every direction. Of this vast flood, but one twenty-three-hundred-millionth part reaches the earth.

The diameter of the sun is about 860,000 miles. Its volume is 1,300,000 times that of the earth, i.e., it would take 1,300,000 earths to make a globe the size of the sun. Its mass is 750 times that of all the planets and moons in the solar system, and 300,000 times that of the earth. Its weight may be expressed in tons thus: 1,910,278,070,000,000,000,000,000,000. The density of the sun is only about one-fourth that of the earth, or 1.41 that of water, so that the weight of a body transferred from the earth to the sun would not be increased in proportion to the comparative size of the sun. The sun rotates on his axis, like a wheel, once in about 25 days.

Our astronomers tell us that the solar heat is gradually diminishing. In time the sun will cease to shine, as the earth did long since. Newcomb says that in 5,000,000 years, at the present rate, the sun will have shrunk to half its present size, and that it cannot sustain life on the earth more than 10,000,000 years longer. Of this we may be assured, there is enough heat to support life on our globe for millions of years to come.

The sun consists of a central orb, liquid or solid, of exceeding brightness, which of itself would give a continuous spectrum, or in other words which emits all kinds of light. The sunlight is decomposed by means of the spectroscope, already alluded to, in order to discover the kind of elements it is composed of. Therefore Tyndall says: “I think we now possess knowledge sufficient to raise us to the level of one of the most remarkable generalizations of our age. It has long been supposed that the sun and planets have had a common origin and that hence the same substances are more or less common to them all. Can we detect the presence of any of our terrestrial substances in the sun?… I have said that the bright bands of a metal are characteristic of the metal; that we can without seeing the metal declare its name from the inspection of the bands. The bands are, so to speak, the voice of the metal declaring its presence.

“Professor Kirchhoff finds iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, chromium, etc., in the sunlight spectrum. We know also the total amount of solar heat received by the earth in a year, and we can calculate the entire quantity of heat emitted by the sun in a year. Conceive a hollow sphere to surround the sun, its center the sun’s center, and its surface at the distance of the earth from the sun. The section of the earth cut by this surface is to the whole area of the hollow sphere as 1 to 2,300,000,000; hence the quantity of solar heat intercepted by the earth is only 1/2300000000? of the total radiation.

“The heat emitted by the sun, if used to melt a stratum of ice applied to the sun’s surface would liquefy the ice at the rate of 2,400 feet an hour. It would boil per hour 700,000 millions of cubic miles of ice-cold water. Expressed in another form, the heat given out by the sun per hour is equal to that which would be generated by the combustion of a layer of solid coal 10 feet thick entirely surrounding the sun; hence the heat emitted in a year is equal to that which would be produced by the combustion of a layer of coal 17 miles in thickness. These are the results of actual measurements; and should greater accuracy be conferred on them by future determinations, it will not deprive them of their astonishing character. And this expenditure has been going on for ages, without our being able, in historic times, to detect the loss. When the tolling of a bell is heard at a distance, the sound of each stroke soon sinks, the sonorous vibrations are quickly wasted, and renewed strokes are necessary to maintain the sound. Like the bell,

“But how is its tone sustained? How is the perennial loss made good? We are apt to overlook the wonderful in the common. Possibly to many of us—and to some of the most enlightened among us—the sun appears as a fire differing from our terrestrial fires only in the magnitude and the intensity of its combustion. But what is the burning matter which can thus maintain itself? All that we know of cosmical phenomena declares our brotherhood with the sun—affirms that the same constituents enter into the composition of his mass as those already known to chemistry. But no earthly substance with which we are acquainted—no substance which the fall of meteors has landed on the earth—would be at all competent to maintain the sun’s combustion. The chemical energy of such substances would be too weak, and their dissipation would be too speedy. Were the sun a solid block of coal, and were it allowed a sufficient supply of oxygen to enable it to burn at the rate necessary to produce the observed emissions, it would be utterly consumed in 5,000 years. On the other hand, to imagine it a body originally endowed with a store of heat—a hot globe now cooling—necessitates the ascription to it of qualities wholly different from those possessed by terrestrial matter. If we knew the specific heat of the sun, we could calculate its rate of cooling. Assuming this to be the same as that of water—the terrestrial substance which possesses the highest specific heat—at its present rate of emission, the entire mass of the sun would cool down 15,000° Faht. in 5,000 years. In short, if the sun be formed of matter like our own, some means must exist of restoring to him his wasted power. The facts are so extraordinary, that the soberest hypothesis regarding them must appear wild. The sun we know rotates upon his axis; he turns like a wheel once in 25 days: can it be the friction of the periphery of this wheel against something in surrounding space which produces the light and heat? Such a notion has been entertained. But what forms the brake, and by what agency is it held, while it rubs against the sun? The action is inconceivable; but, granting the existence of the brake, we can calculate the total amount of heat which the sun could generate by such friction. We know his mass, we know his time of rotation; we know the mechanical equivalent of heat; and from these data we deduce, with certainty, that the entire force of rotation, if converted into heat, would cover more than one, but less than two, centuries of emission. There is no hypothesis involved in this calculation.

“There is another theory, which, however bold it may at first sight appear, deserves our earnest attention. I have already referred to it as the meteoric theory of the sun’s heat. Solar space is peopled with ponderable objects. Kepler’s celebrated statement that ‘there are more comets in the heavens than fish in the ocean’ refers to the fact that a small portion only of the total number of comets belong to our system, and are seen from the earth. But besides comets, and planets, and moons, a numerous class of bodies belong to our system—asteroids, which from their smallness might be regarded as cosmical atoms. Like the planets and the comets these smaller bodies obey the law of gravity, and revolve in elliptic orbits around the sun; and it is they, when they come within the earth’s atmosphere, that, fired by friction, appear to us as meteors and falling stars. On a bright night twenty minutes rarely pass at any part of the earth’s surface without the appearance of at least one meteor. At certain times (the 12th of August and the 14th of November), they appear in enormous numbers. During nine hours of observation in Boston, when they were described as falling as thick as snowflakes, 240,000 meteors were calculated to have been observed. The number falling in a year might perhaps be estimated at hundreds or thousands of millions, and even these would constitute but a small portion of the total crowd of asteroids that circulate round the sun. From the phenomena of light and heat, and by the direct observation of Encke, on his comet, we learn that the universe is filled with a resisting medium, through the friction of which all the masses of our system are drawn gradually toward the sun. And though the larger planets show, in historic times, no diminution of their periods of revolution, this may not hold good for the smaller bodies. In the time required for the mean distance of the earth from the sun to alter a single yard, a small asteroid may have approached thousands of miles nearer to our luminary.

“Following up these reflections we should infer that while this immeasurable stream of ponderable matter rolls unceasingly towards the sun, it must augment in density as it approaches the center of convergence. And here the conjecture naturally rises that that weak nebulous light, of vast dimensions, which embraces the sun—the Zodiacal light—may owe its existence to these crowded meteors. However this may be, it is at least proved that the luminous phenomenon arises from matter which circulates in obedience to planetary laws; the entire mass constituting the Zodiacal light must be constantly approaching, and incessantly raining its substance down upon, the sun.

“We observe the fall of an apple and investigate the law which rules its motion. In the place of the earth we set the sun, and in place of the apple we set the earth, and thus possess ourselves of the key to the mechanics of the heavens. We now know the connection between hight of fall, velocity, and heat at the surface of the earth. In the place of the earth let us set the sun, with 300,000 times the earth’s mass, and instead of a fall of a few feet, let us take cosmical elevations; we thus obtain a means of generating heat which transcends all terrestrial power.

“It is easy to calculate both the maximum and the minimum velocity imparted by the sun’s attraction to asteroids circulating round him; the maximum is generated when the body approaches the sun from an infinite distance as the entire pull of the sun being then expended upon it; the minimum is that velocity which would barely enable the body to revolve round the sun close to his surface. The final velocity of the former, just before striking the sun, would be 390 miles a second, that of the latter 276 miles a second. The asteroid on striking the sun with the former velocity, would develop more than 3,000 times the heat generated by the combustion of an equal asteroid of solid coal; while the shock, in the latter case, would generate heat equal to that of the combustion of upward of 4,000 such asteroids. It matters not whether the substances falling into the sun be combustible or not; their being combustible would not add sensibly to the tremendous heat produced by their mechanical collision.

“Here then we have an agency competent to restore his lost energy, and to maintain a temperature at his surface which transcends all terrestrial combustion. The very quality of the solar rays—their incomparable penetrating power—enables us to infer that the temperature of their origin must be enormous; but in the fall of asteroids we find the means of producing such a temperature. It may be contended that this showering down of matter must be accompanied by the growth of the sun in size; it is so; but the quantity necessary to produce the observed calorific emission, even if accumulated for 4,000 years, would defy the scrutiny of our best instruments. If the earth struck the sun it would utterly vanish from perception, but the heat developed by the shock would cover the expenditure of the sun for a century.

“To the earth itself apply considerations similar to those which we have applied to the sun. Newton’s theory of gravitation, which enables us, from the present form of the earth, to deduce its original state of aggregation, reveals to us, at the same time, a source of heat powerful enough to bring about the fluid state—powerful enough to fuse even worlds. It teaches us to regard the molten condition of a planet as resulting from mechanical union of cosmical masses, and thus reduces to the same homogeneous process the heat stored up in the body of the earth, and the heat emitted by the sun. Without doubt the whole surface of the sun displays an unbroken ocean of fiery fluid matter. On this ocean rests an atmosphere of flowing gas—a flame atmosphere, or photosphere. But gaseous substances, when compared with solid ones, emit, even when their temperature is very high, only a feeble and transparent light. Hence it is probable that the dazzling white light of the sun comes through the atmosphere from the more solid portions of the surface.… In conclusion, thus writes Professor Thomson: ‘The source of energy from which the solar heat is derived is undoubtedly meteoric.… The principal source—perhaps the sole appreciable efficient source—is in the bodies circulating round the sun at present inside the earth’s orbit seen in the sunlight by us called “Zodiacal light.” The store of energy for future sunlight is at present partly dynamical—that of the motions of these bodies round the sun; and partly potential—that of their gravitation towards the sun. This latter is gradually being spent, half against the resisting medium, and half in causing a continuous increase of the former. Each meteor thus goes on moving faster and faster, and getting nearer and nearer the center, until some time, very suddenly, it gets so much entangled in the solar atmosphere as to begin to lose its velocity. In a few seconds more it is at rest on the sun’s surface, and the energy given up is vibrated across the district where it was gathered during so many ages, ultimately to penetrate as light the remotest regions of space.…

“ ‘The heat of rotation of the sun and planets, taken all together, would cover the solar emission for 134 years; while the heat of gravitation (that produced by falling into the sun) would cover the emission for 45,589 years. There is nothing hypothetical in these results; they follow directly and necessarily from the application of the mechanical equivalent of heat to cosmical masses.’…

“But, continues Helmholtz, though the store of our planetary system is so immense as not to be sensibly diminished by the incessant emission which has gone on during the period of man’s history, and though the time which must elapse before a sensible change in the condition of our planetary system can occur is totally incapable of measurement, the inexorable laws of mechanics show that this store, which can only suffer loss, and not gain, must finally be exhausted. Shall we terrify ourselves by this thought? Men are in the habit of measuring the greatness of the universe, and the wisdom displayed in it, by the duration and the profit which it promises to their own race; but the past history of the earth shows the insignificance of the interval during which man has had his dwelling here. What the museums of Europe show us of the remains of Egypt and Assyria we gaze upon in silent wonder, and despair of being able to carry back our thoughts to a period so remote. Still, the human race must have existed and multiplied for ages before the Pyramids could have been erected. We estimate the duration of human history at 6,000 years; but vast as this time may appear to us, what is it in comparison with the period during which the earth bore successive series of rank plants and mighty animals, but no man? Periods during which, in our own neighborhood (Koenigsberg) the amber tree bloomed and dropped its costly gum on the earth and in the sea; when in Europe and North America groves of tropical palms flourished, in which gigantic lizards, and after them elephants, whose mighty remains are still buried in the earth, found a home. Different geologists, proceeding from different premises, have sought to estimate the length of the above period, and they set it down from one to nine million of years. The time during which the earth has generated organic beings is again small, compared with the ages during which the world was a mass of molten rocks. The experiments of Bischoff upon basalt show that for our globe to cool down from 2,000° to 200° centigrade would require 350 millions of years. And with regard to the period during which the first nebulous masses condensed, so as to form our planetary system, conjecture must entirely cease. The history of man, therefore, is but a minute ripple in the infinite ocean of time. For a much longer period than that during which he has already occupied the world, the existence of a state of inorganic nature, favorable to man’s existence, seems to be secured; so that for ourselves, and for long generations after us, we have nothing to fear. But the same forces of air and water, and of the volcanic interior, which produced former geological revolutions, and buried one series of living forms after another, still act upon the earth’s crust. They, rather than those distant cosmical changes of which we have spoken, will end the human race, and perhaps compel us to make way for new and more complete forms of life, as the lizard and the mammoth have given way to us and our contemporaries.

“Grand, however, and marvelous as are these questions regarding the physical constitution of the sun, they are but a portion of the wonders connected with our luminary. His relationship to life is yet to be referred to. The earth’s atmosphere contains carbonic acid, and the earth’s surface bears living plants; the former is the nutriment of the latter. The plant seizes the combined carbon and oxygen and tears them asunder, storing the carbon and letting the oxygen go free. By no special force, different in quality from other forces, do plants exercise this power—the real magician here is the sun. We have seen how heat is consumed in forcing asunder the atoms and molecules of solids and liquids, converting itself into potential energy, which reappears as heat when the attractions of the separated atoms are again allowed to come into play. Precisely the same considerations which we then applied to heat we have now to apply to light; for it is at the expense of the solar light that the decomposition of the carbonic acid is effected. Without the sun the reduction cannot take place, and an amount of sunlight is consumed exactly equivalent to the molecular work accomplished. Thus trees are formed, thus meadows grow, thus the flowers bloom. Let the rays fall upon the surface of sand, the sand is heated, and finally radiates away as much as it receives; let the same rays fall upon a forest, the quantity of heat given back is less than that received, for the energy of a portion of the sunbeams is invested in building up the trees. I have here a bundle of cotton which I ignite; it bursts into flame, and yields a definite amount of heat; precisely that amount of heat was abstracted from the sun in order to form that bit of cotton. This is a representative case—every tree, plant, and flower, grows and flourishes by the grace and bounty of the sun.

“But we cannot stop at vegetable life; for this is the source, mediate or immediate, of all animal life. In the animal body vegetable substances are brought again into contact with their beloved oxygen, and they burn within as a fire burns in a grate. This is the source of all animal power; and the forces in play are the same, in kind, as those which operate in inorganic nature. In the plant the clock is wound up, in the animal it runs down. In the plant the atoms are separated, in the animal they recombine. And as surely as the force which moves a clock’s hands is derived from the arm which winds the clock, so surely is all terrestrial power drawn from the sun. Leaving out of account the eruption of volcanoes and the ebb and flow of the tides, every mechanical action on the earth’s surface, every manifestation of power, organic and inorganic, vital or physical, is produced by the sun. His warmth keeps the sea liquid, and the atmosphere a gas, and all the storms which agitate both are blown by the mechanical force of the sun. He lifts the rivers and glaciers up the mountains; and thus the cataract and avalanche shoot with an energy derived immediately from him. Thunder and lightning are also his transmuted strength. Every fire that burns and every flame that glows dispenses light and heat which originally belonged to the sun. In these days, unhappily, the news of battle is familiar to us, but every shock, and every charge, is an application or misapplication of the mechanical force of the sun. He blows the trumpet, he urges the projectile, he bursts the bomb. And remember this is not poetry, but rigid mechanical truth. He rears, as I have said, the whole vegetable world, and through it the animal; the lilies of the field are his workmanship, the verdure of the meadows, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. He forms the muscle, he urges the blood, he builds the brain. His fleetness is in the lion’s foot; he springs in the panther, he soars in the eagle, he slides in the snake. He builds the forest, and hews it down, the power which raised the tree and that which wields the axe being one and the same. The clover sprouts and blossoms, and the scythe of the mower swings, by the operation of the same force. The sun digs the ore from our mines, he rolls the iron, he rivets the plates, he boils the water, he draws the train. He not only grows the cotton, but he spins the fiber and weaves the web. There is not a hammer raised, a wheel turned, or a shuttle thrown, that is not raised, and turned, and thrown by the sun. His energy is poured freely into space, but our world is a halting-place where the energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells; the self-same essence takes a million of shapes and hues, and finally dissolves into its primitive and almost formless form. The sun comes to us as heat; he quits us as heat; and between his entrance and departure the multiform powers of our globe appear. They are all special forms of solar power—the molds into which his strength is temporarily poured, in passing from its source through infinitude.

“Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has yet been addressed to the intellect and imagination of man. The natural philosopher of to-day may dwell amid conceptions which beggar those of Milton. So great and grand are they, that in the contemplation of them a certain force of character is requisite to preserve us from bewilderment. Look at the integrated energies of the world—the stored power of our coal fields; our winds and rivers; our fleets, armies, and guns; what are they? They are all generated by a portion of the sun’s energy, which does not amount to 1/2300000000?th of the whole. This, in fact, is the entire fraction of the sun’s force intercepted by the earth, and, in reality, we convert but a small fraction of that fraction into mechanical energy. Multiplying all our powers by millions of millions, we do not reach the sun’s expenditure. And still, notwithstanding this enormous drain, in the lapse of human history we are unable to detect a diminution of his store; measured by our largest terrestrial standards, such a reservoir of power is infinite; but it is our privilege to rise above these standards and to regard the sun himself as a speck in infinite extension—a mere drop in the universal sea. We analyze the space in which he is immersed, and which is the vehicle of his power. We pass to other systems and other suns, each pouring forth energy like our own, but still without infringement of the law, which reveals immutability in the midst of change, which recognizes incessant transference and conversion, but neither final gain nor loss. This law generalizes the aphorism of Solomon that there is nothing new under the sun, by teaching us to detect everywhere, under its infinite variety of appearances, the same primeval force. To nature nothing can be added; from nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost that man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the application of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, and out of one of them to form another. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change into ripples, and ripples into waves—magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude—asteroids may aggregate to suns, and suns may resolve themselves into flora and fauna, and flora and fauna melt in air—the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all the terrestrial energy—the manifestations of life, as well as the display of phenomena, are but the modulations of the rhythm” (Tyndall Lecture XII).