Again:  what should Joshua want with the moon for daylight, to help him to rout the foes of God more fiercely?  Why not, according to the astronomical ignorance of those days, let her sail away, unconsorted by the sun, far beyond the valley of Ajalon?  There was a reason, here, of secret, unobtruded science:  if the sun stopped, the moon must stop too; that is to say, both apparently:  the fact being that the earth must, for the while, rest on its axis.  This, I say, is a latent, scientific hint; and so, likewise, is the accompanying mention as a fact, that the Lord immediately “rained great stones out of heaven” upon the flying host.  For would it not be the case that, if the diurnal rotation of earth were suddenly to stop, the impetus of motion would avail to raise high into the air by centrifugal force, and fling down again by gravity, such unanchored things as fragments of rock?

Once more:  our objector will here perhaps inquire, Why not then command the earth to stop—­and not the sun and moon? if thus probably Joshua or his Inspirer knew better?  Answer.  Only let a reasonable man consider what would have been the moral lesson both to Israelite and to Canaanite, if the great successor of Moses had called out, incomprehensibly to all, “Earth, stand thou still on thine axis;”—­and lo! as if in utter defiance of such presumption, and to vindicate openly the heathen gods against the Jewish, the very sun and moon in heaven stopped, and glared on the offender.  I question whether such a noon-day miracle might not have perverted to idolatry the whole believing host:  and almost reasonably too.  The strictly philosophical terms would have entirely nullified the whole moral influence.  God in his word never suffers science to hinder the progress of truth:  a worldly philosophy does this almost in every instance, darkening knowledge with a cloud of words:  but the science of the Bible is usually concealed in some neighbouring hint quite handy to the record of the phenomena expressed in ordinary language.  In fact, for all common purposes, no astronomer finds fault with such phrases as the moon rising, or the sun setting:  he speaks according to the appearance, though he knows perfectly well that the earth is the cause of it, and not the sun or moon.  Carry this out in Joshua’s case.

On the whole, the miracle was very plain, very comprehensible, and very probable.  It had good cause:  for Canaan felt more confidence in the protection of his great and glorious Baal, than stiff-necked Judah in his barely-seen divinity:  and surely it was wise to vindicate the true but invisible God by the humiliation of the false and far-seen idol.  This would constitute to all nations the quickly-rumoured proof that Jehovah of the Israelites was God in heaven above as well as on the earth beneath.  And, considering the peculiar idolatries of Canaan, it seems to me that no miracle could have been better placed and better timed—­in other words, anteriorly more probable—­than