[1] _"And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord: and he
brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had
gone down in the dial of Ahaz."_--2 Kings xx. 11.
How was this wonderful result secured? Did God arrest the
earth as it revolved on its axis, and wheel it round in the
opposite direction? No one who considers what would be the
natural result of such a proceeding, and what a stupendous
series of miracles would have been needed to have prevented
the destruction of all life upon the earth, will think so
for a moment, especially when a course much simpler, and
equally efficacious, is suggested by the very words of the
different narratives. Isaiah indeed says, "So the SUN
returned ten degrees" (xxxviii. 8). But his record of what
seemed to occur must be interpreted by what God had
promised to do: "Behold, I will bring again the shadow of
the degrees, which is gone down in the sundial of Ahaz, ten
degrees backward." And in the narrative in the Book of
Kings it is the _shadow_ and not the sun that is spoken of
throughout. To reverse the shadow in the dial it needed
nothing more than a _miraculous refraction of the light;_
and we believe that this is what occurred, not because it
was an easier thing for God to do, but because it is in
harmony with all that He does to believe that when two
courses were open to Him, one exceedingly simple and one
exceedingly complex, He would choose the simple course. God
never wastes power. The extraordinary results produced by
the refraction of light are familiar to all who have given
any attention to natural philosophy. The atmosphere
refracts the sun's rays so as to bring him in sight, on
every clear day, before he rises on the horizon, and to
keep him in view for some minutes after he is really below
it. Contradictory as it may sound, on almost any summer
evening you may see the sun at least five minutes after he
is set. It is entirely owing to refraction that we have any
morning or evening twilight. That the rays of the sun can
be so refracted as to cause him to be seen where he
actually is not is thus a matter of daily experience. And
there are some extraordinary cases on record. Kepler, the
great astronomer, mentions that some "Hollanders, who
wintered in Nova Zembla in the year 1596, were surprised to
find that, after a continual night of three months, the sun
began to rise almost _seventeen days_ sooner than he should
have done." This can only be accounted for by a miracle, or
by an extraordinary refraction of the sun's rays passing
through the cold dense air in that climate. In 1703 again,
the prior of the monastery at Metz, in Lothringen, and many
others, observed that the shadow of a sundial went back an
hour and a half. It is thus abundantly plain that the
result related could have been secured by a refraction of
the light, a common occurrence in Nature. The miracle
consisted _in its happening at that particular moment;_
just as in the case of the fish that Peter caught which
contained money. Many fish containing money have been
caught; but there was the miracle--that this fish was
caught at the very time which Christ had indicated. In like
manner the miraculous element in the regression of the
shadow on the sun-dial of Ahaz was its occurring just at
the very time at which it was needed to verify the
prophet's word and strengthen the monarch's faith.