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.  With reference to the latter, they add that, properly speaking, though the body of the sun—­a body that was never yet reflected by telescope or spectroscope that man invented—­cannot be said to be constituted of those terrestrial elements with the state of which the chemist is familiar, yet that these elements are all present in the sun’s outward robes, and a host more of elements unknown so far to science.  There seems little need, indeed, to have waited so long for the lines belonging to these respective elements to correspond with dark lines of the solar spectrum to know that no element present on our earth could ever be possibly found wanting in the sun; although, on the other hand, there are many others in the sun which have either not reached or not as yet been discovered on our globe.  Some may be missing in certain stars and heavenly bodies still in the process of formation; or, properly speaking, though present in them, these elements on account of their undeveloped state may not respond as yet to the usual scientific tests.  But how can the earth possess that which the sun has never had?  The “Adepts” affirm as a fact that the true Sun—­an invisible orb of which the known one is the shell, mask, or clothing—­has in him the spirit of every element that exists in the solar system; and his “Chromosphere,” as Mr. Lockyer named it, has the same, only in a far more developed condition, though still in a state unknown on earth; our planet having to await its further growth and development before any of its elements can be reduced to the condition they are in within that chromosphere.  Nor can the substance producing the coloured light in the latter be properly called solid, liquid, or even “gaseous,” as now supposed, for it is neither.  Thousands of years before Leverrier and Padri Secchi, the old Aryans