The velocities indicated by these movements are incredible.  An up-rush and down-rush at the sides has been measured of twenty miles a second; a side-rush or whirl, of one hundred and twenty miles a second.  These tempests rage from a few days to half a year, traversing regions so wide that our Indian Ocean, the realm of storms, is too small to be used for comparison; then, as they cease, the advancing sides of the spots approach each other at the rate of 20,000 miles an hour; they strike together, and the rising spray of fire leaps thousands of miles into space.  It falls again into the incandescent surge, rolls over mountains as the sea over pebbles, and all this for eon after eon without sign of exhaustion or diminution.  All these swift succeeding Himalayas of fire, where one hundred worlds could be buried, do not usually prevent the sun’s appearing to our far-off eyes as a perfect sphere.

[Page 94] What the Sun does for us.

To what end does this enormous power, this central source of power, exist?  That it could keep all these gigantic forces within itself could not be expected.  It is in a system where every atom is made to affect every other atom, and every world to influence every other.  The Author of all lives only to do good, to send rain on the just and unjust, to cause his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and to give his spirit, like a perpetually widening river, to every man to profit withal.

The sun reaches his unrelaxing hand of gravitation to every other world at every instant.  The tendency of every world is to fly off in a straight line.  This tendency must be momentarily curbed, and the planet held in its true curve about the sun.  These giant worlds must be perfectly handled.  Their speed, amounting to seventy times as fast as that of a rifle-ball, must be managed.  Each and every world may be said to be lifted momentarily and swung perpetually at arm’s-length by the power of the sun.

The sun warms us.  It would convey but a small idea of the truth to state how many hundreds of millions of cubic miles of ice could be hailed at the sun every second without affecting its heat; but, if any one has any curiosity to know, it is 287,200,000 cubic miles of ice per second.

We journey through space which has a temperature of 200 deg. below zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of perpetual winter.  We are roofed over by the air that treasures the heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat, [Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains ripen.  The sun has a strange chemical power.  It kisses the cold earth, and it blushes with flowers and matures the fruit and grain.  We are feeble creatures, and the sun gives us force.  By it the light winds move one-eighth of a mile an hour, the storm fifty miles, the hurricane one hundred.  The force is as the square of the velocity.  It is by means of the sun that the merchant’s white-sailed ships are blown safely home.  So the sun carries off the miasma of the marsh, the pollution of cities, and then sends the winds to wash and cleanse themselves in the sea-spray.  The water-falls of the earth turn machinery, and make Lowells and Manchesters possible, because the sun lifted all that water to the hills.