Whene'er the proud enchantress gives command,
Eternal motion stops her active hand;
No more Heav'n's rapid circles joarney on,
But universal nature stands foredone;
The lazy God of day forgets to rise,
And everlasting night pollutes the skies.
* The Golden Bough, vol. i., pp. 24, 25.
No modern poet would think of saying like Statius that the sun stood
still at the unnatural murder of Atreus. Such an idea found its way into
poetry because it had previously been conceived as a fact.
Hence we find numerous similar stories to that of Joshua. Thus it is
related of Bacchus in the Orphic hymns that he arrested the course of
the sun and the moon. Mr. Spence Hardy in his _Legends and Theories
of Buddhists_, shows that arresting the course of the sun was a common
thing among the disciples of Buddha. We need not be surprised to find
that men were once believed to be able to control the sun when we
reflect that to this day the majority of people fancy there is some
magnified non-natural man, they call God, who is able to do the same.
Seeing the legend of Joshua in its true form as one of numerous similar
instances illustrating the barbarity and ignorance of the past, we see
also that the whole merit and instruction of the story is taken away by
those modern Christians, who speak of it as poetry, or who endeavor to
reconcile it with the conclusions of science. These explanations were
never sought for while miracles were generally credible. Josephus speaks
of the miracle as a literal one, and the author of Ecclesiasticus xlvi.
5 says the Lord "stopped the sun in his anger and made one day as two."
"Rationalistic" explanations of miracles are often the most irrational,
because they fail to take into account the vast difference between the
state of mind which gave rise to the stories, and that which seeks to
rationalise them.