Extracted text
Editorial transcription, lightly normalized from the scan. Line-break hyphenation and unmistakable OCR errors have been repaired; the claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
In The Editorial Perspective.
#### The Eclipse of the Sun.
The Eclipse of the Sun is attracting the attention of newspaper and magazine readers, as well as leaders in scientific circles. Expeditions have been sent to various points along the line of totality, and elaborate preparations are made for photographing the sun and surroundings during the period of total obscurity.
It is well to find out all the facts relative to eclipses, for they are all fraught with meaning. It was well perhaps, for the Pharisees to respect Moses so far as to observe all the little details concerning the tithing system; but they overlooked and disregarded the weightier matters of the law. The astronomers encompass the earth, following the trails of the eclipse shadows, for some clue to the explanation of solar phenomena, while overlooking and wholly disregarding the weightier matters of genuine science, the laws of universal form and function.
If the sums appropriated by the various governments for eclipse observations, were expended for the purpose of testing the direction of the actual curvature of the earth, all the problems which now confront the astronomer would find easy and definite and authoritative solution.
The apparent insignificance of man in the Copernican cosmos is pictured by Professor Serviss in the current Cosmopolitan. The universe is an open space, a room; particles of dust which arise from any disturbance, are like the myriads of worlds; and if one may imagine a particle of dust in a room to be inhabited by a billion and a half of animals, there is a likeness to one speck called the earth. From that one speck a few men called astronomers observe the phenomena of the heavens, including eclipses. If a light shone into such a room, the particles of dust would occult and eclipse each other; and that is all that an eclipse can possibly mean in the popular conception of astronomical relations.
We may suppose from such a basis, that an eclipse of the sun is just as much an eclipse of the earth by the moon; or that an eclipse of the moon is really an eclipse of the sun—according to the viewpoint in universal space. Are eclipses so indefinite as that? Does nothing really happen to the sun itself when eclipsed? Does something occur to the moon when darkened, or is there merely a shadow passing over its surface? If there is any definite meaning to the words of the language of all peoples, when the moon is eclipsed there is an actual cutting-off of the forces which perpetuate the moon; the lunar majesty faints or swoons, just as a human being faints or swoons when the circuit of vital electro-magnetism is broken by a sudden shock or blow.
When Jesus the Christ was being cut off by the power of his enemies, when in agony he hung upon the cross, the sun in the physical heavens experienced an extraordinary eclipse; Nature sympathized with its Creator, and in symbol suffered the intervention of a dark disc in the heavens, the darkening of the sun by its own reflex. The two eclipses, the one in the human world and the other in the physical, corresponded in every particular. We maintain that there was an actual eclipse of the sun, an actual cutting-off; and that cutting-off belonged to the universal order, the result of the conspiration of natural forces, and not a mere accident of orbital movement.
The astronomers who are now on the eclipse expeditions will discover little to benefit the world at large. They seek photographs of solar corona; of the fiery protuberances on the sun's limbus; and they seek to determine whether or not inter-Mercurial planets exist. In the Forties of the past century Leverrier discovered the planet Neptune, or rather indicated its place mathematically from the basis of perturbations of Uranus. That was heralded as a triumph of the Copernican system. We maintain that the discovery would have been made if the Copernican idea had never been entertained. But if that was a victory for the Copernican idea, the voluminous calculations of Leverrier indicating that Vulcan revolved in its orbit between Mercury and the sun, must count for a prodigious failure of the same system!
In conclusion we desire to note that the line of totality of the eclipse is only about one hundred miles in width; that is, the shadow on the earth at any given moment is a clear-cut circle having a diameter of about one hundred miles. Is this shadow cast by a moon 240,000 miles from a convex earth, in the light of a sun 92,000,000 miles from the earth, and that sun possessing a diameter of 886,000 miles? Let the student of astronomy arrange light and globes to sustain corresponding relations, and note if a definite shadow is projected by the globe representing the moon. It is in such tests that the Copernican idea most ignominiously fails!
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The source scans remain the record. This page preserves the periodical's claims without presenting its conclusions as independently established results.
Source: The Flaming Sword · Vol. 19, No. 12 · August 29, 1905 · Physical PDF p. 10
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 19, No. 12 · Aug 29, 1905 · PDF p. 10