Extracted text
Editorial transcription, lightly normalized from the scan. Line-break hyphenation, spacing, capitalization, and unmistakable OCR errors have been repaired; the claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
The New York Sun, which was supposed to shine for everyone till eclipsed by THE FLAMING SWORD, thinks that the Koreshan Cosmogony would be very interesting reading if it could only be understood.
It is no special discredit to the Sun not to be able to comprehend all that THE FLAMING SWORD teaches. It is not to be expected that a daily paper, even one so entertaining and brilliant as that luminary (the Sun), can fathom the profundity of the SWORD with the soundings adapted only to superficial observations. If the Sun would drop the enterprise of attempting to prove that it is the purpose of the democratic ring to fill the pockets of the laboring man just for the small matter of his vote, and give a little time to the study of the cause of the shortening of the geolinear impression upon the retina of the eye and hence the apparent foreshortening of distance, and the occasion of the vanishing point called the horizon, it would not only comprehend the Koreshan Cosmogony but would shine to some purpose.
It is a fact, known to all physicists, that the refracting power of any medium, liquid or gaseous, depends upon the relation of the medium to some other medium of greater or lesser density. It is also known that the greater the difference in density, the greater the relative refracting power.
In illustration, let us take the water at the surface of the earth, in its relation to the atmosphere above and resting upon the water. If you look into the water from the atmosphere, objects in the atmosphere are seen through reflected rays. The water acts as a mirror. If you lie upon your back at the bottom of a body of water four or five feet deep and look toward the atmosphere, the ground at the bottom of the water and your own body lying on the bottom can be seen as if it were as far beyond the surface of the water as you actually are below the surface. It will be noticed, then, that whether you look from a rare into a dense medium, or vice versa, the reflecting and the refracting power is the same. If you look from a dense medium toward a rare one, the rare medium affords the same obstruction to the penetration of vision that the dense one does to the penetration of vision into it from the rarer one.
There may not be—on the staff of The New York Sun—brains enough to comprehend this statement or to know this fact. It remains a fact, nevertheless, and we have brains of nine years' growth in the Koreshan Unity able to comprehend it fully.
If the foregoing statement is true, according to known facts in physical science, then it follows that at the termination of our atmosphere with the rarer condition beyond it the same phenomenon must obtain, and the surface of our atmosphere in juxtaposition with a more rare condition would act as a mirror, reflecting back to the earth whatsoever might be pictured against it as, for instance, the surface of the earth. This being true, the statement that "The Lord spreadeth out the heavens like a molten looking-glass," would not only be true, but it would also show forth the greater wisdom of those who wrote the Bible over that of the men who write for the "Sun."
It is a known physical fact that the greater the difference of the density of two transparent mediums the greater the refraction. If this law is applied to the observation of supposed bodies in an attenuated ether beyond our earth's atmosphere—a substance not fifty times more rare but so much lighter or attenuated as to bear no comparison—the refracting power or the refracting difference would be so great that no ray could penetrate this thinness from our atmosphere or ether, and no ray could penetrate our atmosphere from that ether. A ten-year-old boy or girl with well developed reasoning faculties can understand this logic. It is not to be expected that the "sages" of The New York Sun can understand it. If the Sun's sages ever comprehended the law of physics, they have forgotten all about it in the obscurations of the mazes of American politics.
It is not true that advocates of the "flat" theory ever supposed, if the earth were convex, that from any point on a canal the water would flow either way; nor has anyone ever proposed this as an argument who can make any claim to a scientific effort to put forth an hypothesis. We are sorry that the facetiousness of the writer of the article to be found in another column under the caption, "The Earth's Concavity," should have led him to say what is not true. The Sun should give forth light, not darkness. The Sun does not understand the Koreshan argument concerning the flowing down of water from the various sides of the earth to any point where a person may stand vertical to the center. The Sun knows very well that if the world is a shell or a circumference, this circumference comprises not the center of gravity but the periphery of gravity, while the center is the center of levity, and the law of gravic direction determines, necessarily, the emplacement of substances at the rind or circumference of the egg or shell.
The ridicule of a proposition is not argument, though not uncommonly it possesses greater potency, and has a more telling effect with men who do not and cannot reason, than the best of logic. We would ask the Sun, we mean the little "sun" in New York City, why, if the big sun, which is said to be the center of the solar system, is attractive enough to the smaller bodies—said to be revolving around it—to hold them in "their orbits," does it not attract these smaller bodies into it, and, as it does not, what is the origin of the energy that propels them with sufficient velocity to hold them in their orbital careers? It looks to us that if the energy of attraction (the centripetal moment) is physical, the centrifugal energy is also a physical moment, and the theory of an original fiat ought to find a substitute in some kind of hypothesis that could keep company with the so-called law of attraction.
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The source scans remain the record. This page preserves the periodical's argument and reported observations without presenting its conclusions as independently established results. The claims remain attributed to The Flaming Sword.
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The Flaming Sword · Vol. 4, No. 19 · · PDF pp. 1-2