Job 38:19

β . He must also understand the cosmical phenomena of light and darkness; must not only know the paths to their house, but himself, venerable in years, must at some time have escorted them to their home, Job 38:19-21.

19. Way where light dwelleth Neither does the corpuscular theory of Newton, nor Huyghens’ undulatory theory, account for the rise, the cause, or the source of light. Its dwelling place, “in what kind of land it dwells,” (Septuagint,) is an impenetrable mystery. “Ask of the learned THE WAY, the learned are blind.”

Speaking of light, Prof. Tyndall remarks: “We are here dealing, for the most part, with suppositions and assumptions merely. We have never seen the atoms of a luminous body, nor their motions. We have never seen the medium which transmits their motions, nor the waves of that medium.” The Forms of Water, pp. 10, 12. And yet science has penetrated so far into the arcana of nature as to measure the magnitude of ‘the light waves’ by their effects, and to find them varying from one thirty thousandth to one sixty thousandth of an inch. “The whole of that region of space over which astronomers have extended their survey, and doubtless a region many millions of millions of times more extended, may be compared to a wave-tossed sea, only that, instead of a wave-tossed surface, there is a wave-tossed space. At every point, through every point, along every line, athwart every line, myriads of light waves are at all times rushing with the inconceivable velocity of 185,000 miles per second.” R.A. Proctor. Science, instead of solving, is constantly adding to, its difficulties. Its tetra incognita its land of the unknown in an inverse ratio to the explorations made, is constantly enlarging. The most approved works of modern science, professedly clearing the way to the penetralia of nature, do but little more than open up a multitude of indeterminate problems. The haze that rests upon the nature of ultimate material causes upon the beginning or essence of nature’s forces is no less dense now than in the days of Job. The secret of this lies in the profound thought of Edmund Burke, that every subject we attempt to explore branches into the infinite. The most that philosophy does is to record the processes of nature to peer a little into the infinite unknown, in which the primordia of nature DWELL. To make man sensible of his consummate ignorance, and to open up to him the essential finiteness of the human mind, is really the gist of these questions; questions which, though they he never so simple, philosophy will be powerless fully to unfold so long as mind is cased in flesh and blood. “As in Genesis i, the light is here regarded as a self-subsistent, natural force, independent of the heavenly luminaries by which it is transmitted; and herein modern investigation agrees with the direct observations of antiquity.” Schlottmann. See an article entitled “Drifting Light Waves,” by R.A. Proctor, in Contemporary Review, 1877, 2. pp. 219-240. Also, “On the Place where Light Dwelleth,” in Eclectic Magazine, 1870, i, pp. 725-739; 2. 80-86, taken from the British Quarterly Review.