ly possible to give a few instances. David
sings, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." "The Lord shall be unto
thee an everlasting light," is the promise made to Zion. St. John
expressly uses the term of the Son of God, our Lord: "That was the true
Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Whilst the
more concrete emblem is used as often. In the eighty-fourth psalm, the
psalm of pilgrimage, we read, "The Lord God is a sun and shield;"
Malachi predicts that "the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with
healing in His wings," and St James, with the same thought of the sun in
his mind, speaks of God as "the Father of lights."

But in none of these or the other parallel passages is there the
remotest approach to any deification of the sun, or even of that most
ethereal of influences, light itself. Both are creatures, both are made
by God; they are things and things only, and are not even the shrines of
a deity. They may be used as emblems of God in some of His attributes;
they do not even furnish any indication of His special presence, for He
is equally present where sun and light are not. "The darkness hideth not
from Thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light
are both alike to Thee."

The worship of the sun and of other heavenly bodies is one of the sins
most unsparingly denounced in Scripture. It was one of the first
warnings of the Book of Deuteronomy that Israel as a people were to take
heed "lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the
sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest
be driven to worship them and serve them," and the utter overthrow of
the nation was foretold should they break this law. And as for the
nation, so for the individual, any "man or woman that hath wrought
wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing His
covenant and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them,
either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven" was when
convicted of working "such abomination" unsparingly to be put to death.

Yet with all this, sun-worship prevailed in Israel again and again. Two
of the reforming kings of Judah, Asa and Josiah, found it necessary to
take away "the sun-images;" indeed, the latter king found that the
horses and chariots which his predecessors, Manasseh and Amon, had
dedicated to sun worship were kept at the very entrance to the temple.
In spite of his reformation, however, th