Sun worship

“ Such dazzling magnificence led me to wonder that there is no revival of sun worship, since men must necessarily have some material representation of the divinity. It is true that the sun is not made in man’s image! ”

“ Let us worship the sun; I am tired of this jealous and bloodthirsty Jehovah; let us worship the sun; let us kneel to it as it rises over the hills, filling the world with light and love, when the dawn stands jocund on the mountain's misty top; it is the sun whose beams illumine and cover the earth with verdure and with beauty; it is the sun that covers the trees with leaves, that carpets the earth with grass and adorns the world with flowers; I adore the sun because in its light I have seen your eyes ”

“ Since a God was indispensably requisite to men, why did they not worship the Sun, that visible God, adored by so many nations? What being had greater claim to the homage of men, than the day-star, who enlightens, warms, and vivifies all beings; whose presence enlivens and regenerates nature, whose absence seems to cast her into gloom and languor? If any being announced to mankind, power, activity, beneficence, and duration, it was certainly the Sun, whom they ought to have regarded as the parent of nature, as the divinity. ”

“ A recent writer thus eloquently refers to the universality, in ancient times, of sun-worship: "Sabaism, the worship of light, prevailed amongst all the leading nations of the early world. By the rivers of India, on the mountains of Persia, in the plains of Assyria, early mankind thus adored, the higher spirits in each country rising in spiritual thought from the solar orb up to Him whose vicegerent it seems—to the Sun of all being, whose divine light irradiates and purifies the world of soul, as the solar radiance does the world of sense. ”

“ When thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars - The worship of the heavenly bodies was the oldest species of idolatry. Those who had not the knowledge of the true God were led to consider the sun, moon, planets, and stars, as not only self-existing, but the authors of all the blessings possessed by mankind. ”

“ It requires but little arithmetic to figure out that the people of Brief do not see the sun rise very often. When it does appear in the morning sky, all the public signals blow and the people appear in one or another of their places of worship. This beautiful custom has been in practice for over three thousand years. The worship is not sun worship, but a genuine service of thanksgiving to Him who ruleth over the sun and supplies it with fuel to burn. ”

“ Sun-Worship, the worship of the sun is conceived of as an impersonation of the deity, that originated among races so far advanced in civilisation as to recognise what they owed to its benignant influence, in particular as tillers of the soil, and, is associated with advance as the worship of Bacchus was, which could not originate prior to cultivation of the vine. ”

“ What more natural than that the Church should choose this day to celebrate the rising of her Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings, that she should strive thus to draw away to His worship some adorers of the god whose symbol and representative was the earthly sun! ”

“ The worship of the sun, moon, and stars, was the most ancient, most general, and most plausible idolatry. They made to themselves the star of their God, some particular star which they took to be their god, or the name of which they gave to their god. ”

“ And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. ”

“ In their religion they worship the Source of Life, and look upon the Sun as the place to which the spirit goes at death. In brief, the Sun is their Heaven. They believe that the Sun's heat will be no barrier to the spirit's complete happiness when liberated from the body. ”

“ As we look toward the east we see that the sun is just rising above the horizon, and it is the sun that those people are worshiping. In that country and in others we could find people who worship the moon in the same way, and the reason why these things are done is that all people everywhere have a desire in their hearts to worship, and these people have taken the things that they see which seem to them to be the most wonderful and have made gods out of them. ”

“ It is a familiar fact that the worship of the sun, as the most obvious type of regenerative life, was one of the very earliest and most widely spread germs of religion, not only among the primitive nations of America, but in the Old World as well. And the purist of to-day who sees nothing worshipful in these manifestations of the deity, may by his own misconceptions know less of some of the attributes of that deity than did his more reverent fellow in days of ignorant barbarism. ”

“ While the heathen have thus paid idolatrous worship to the sun, some persons, believing in the truth of revealed religion, have entertained strange notions concerning this luminary. It is remarkable, observes a polite writer, that whilst some of the ancients imagined the sun to be the seat of future blessedness, from Psal. ”

“ Among the signs of his power are the night, and the day, and the sun, and the moon. Worship not the sun, neither the moon: but worship GOD, who hath created them; if ye serve him. But if they proudly disdain his service; verily the angels, who are with thy LORD, praise him night and day, and are not wearied. And among his signs another is, that thou seest the land waste; but when we send down rain thereon, it is stirred and fermenteth. And he who quickeneth the earth will surely quicken the dead; for he is almighty. ”

“ The sun has been the most general object of idolatrous worship in all the ages. It is the most conspicuous object, and is the source of light and heat, and rules the seasons. Its worship was so general that the Hebrew people, when they lapsed from the worship of God, turned to the worship of the sun or Baal. No natural object is more worthy of worship. ”

“ They salute the rising sun with certain hymns before they worship it. This they do also to the moon, when it shines at night, to whom they pray for children, and fruitful increase of cattle, and abundant fruits of the earth, and other things of that sort. ”

“ Survivals of Ancient Sun and Fire Worship.
istory and prehistoric investigations have shown quite clearly that prehistoric man worshipped the Sun, the giver and vivifier of all life, as the supreme God. To the sun they offered sacrifices, and at stated periods celebrated festivals in his honour; and at these festivals bread and wine and meat were partaken of, with observances very similar in many respects to the practices of the Jews during their religious feasts. But although the sun was the supreme deity, other objects were also worshipped as subordinate deities. ”

“ It is a day of wonderful light. When the prophet speaks of the Gentiles coming to the light the reader begins to understand the time of the dawning. He further says, “Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise. The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. ”

“ At first I did adore a twinkling star,
But now I worship a celestial sun. ”

“ As the sun is the greatest visible glory in the natural world, so it is selected by the pen of Divine inspiration as the brightest emblem of the Supreme Being—“The Lord God is a sun.” This great luminary has been considered by the Heathen as the representative of the Deity, and as such received religious adoration. ”

“ Trenches, barbed-wire entanglement, and treacherous pitfall are nothing to one who weaves his sunbeams into song. Thus all difficulties fade away and vanish.
These statements are only another way of saying that one should weave God into every fiber of life. The sun is always emblematic of the Father, and he who weaves sunbeams will know and love God. This is no idle saying, nor a bit of rhetoric, but a soul-saving truth. It is the sun that banishes the shadows; it is God who enables us to overcome our temptations, pain and sorrow. ”

“ It gives forth the light of religion and bestows the life of the spirit, imbues humanity with archetypal virtues and confers eternal splendors. This Sun of Reality, this center of effulgences is the prophet or Manifestation of God. Just as the phenomenal sun shines upon the material world producing life and growth, likewise the spiritual or prophetic Sun confers illumination upon the human world of thought and intelligence, and unless it rose upon the horizon of human existence the kingdom of man would become dark and extinguished. ”

“ Therefore when these Suns arise, the world is renewed, the rivers of Life flow, the seas of Beneficence move, the clouds of Grace gather and the breezes of Bounty blow upon the temples of beings. Through the heat of these Divine Suns and Ideal Fires the heat of the love of God is produced in the pillars of the world; and through the favor of these abstracted Spirits the immortal Spirit of Life is conferred upon the bodies of the mortal dead.
The phenomenal sun is in reality a single sign of the splendor of that Ideal Sun which hath neither comparison, likeness, equal nor peer. ”

“ When we rise up, or sit down, or go out, he is always with us.—He created heaven and earth; therefore every thing in heaven—sun, moon, and stars. Therefore how should the sun be God, or the moon be God? ”

“ Is it towards the sky; where the great lord of earthly light—type of that more Glorious Sun which should arise "with healing on its wings"—is diffusing the cheering effulgence of the dawn, calling forth the fresh and wholesome airs of the morning, and literally chasing away the noisome spirits of the night? ”

“ It is not meant to say here that Christians have no need of the light of the sun or the moon, but to teach that the light of the sun and the brightness of the moon is not to be compared to the transcendent light of Christianity. ”

“ Thus, then, the Lord is properly to be thought of, as dwelling above the heavens, in the midst of a glorious spiritual sun, or great source of heavenly light and heat, which is, in truth, but an emanation from his own Divine and glorious Person. It is the light from the same heavenly Sun, that illumines the minds of men on earth, and it is its heat that warms their hearts with love: as Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." ”

“ It is always the sun of the Nineteenth Psalm, with the prevailing yellow color of the eastern sky intensifying in one spot, a cool, lingering freshness, a deepening of the yellow east into a brilliant rose color, till suddenly, "like a glory, the broad sun" wheels above the horizon, the dew-bathed earth rejoices, the air is flooded with vitality, all things which rejoice in light and heat come forth, night birds and night prowlers retire, and we pale people hastily put up our umbrellas to avoid being shriveled in less than ten minutes from the first appearance of the sun. ”

“ The dew of the morning comes from the womb of the night, and under the rays of the rising sun is drawn into the air to be formed into clouds to give rain upon the earth. So are the true saints to be the dew of the dawn of millennial glory, upon whom the Sun of righteousness shall shine and draw up into the new heavens as clouds to give the latter rain of blessing, and as showers to water the earth. ”

“ When he declines towards the winter solstice, dreariness and desolation ensue, and a temporary death takes place among the tribes of the vegetable world.—This splendid luminary, whose light embellishes the whole of this lower creation, forms the most lively representation of Him who is the source and the centre of all beauty and perfection. “God is a sun,” the sun of the moral and spiritual universe, from whom all the emanations of knowledge, love and felicity descend. “He covereth himself with light as with a garment.” ”

“ Religious emotion comes out in his prayers, sermons, and lectures, as the vegetative power of the earth in the manifold plants and flowers of spring.
"The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. ”

“ The clouds glide calmly across the heavens; the rays of the Sabbath sun rest sweetly on the face of nature. A dreamy, delightful serenity hovers over all the land. The incense of prayer rises from many a family altar, and the accents of praise tremble on many a lip. ”

“ Just as the great physical sun, the center of visible light, life and heat, is striving to purify the foul miasma of the marsh and send its luminous messages of love into the dark crevices of the earth, so the Great Spiritual Sun, of which the former is a visible prototype or reflection, is striving to illuminate with Divine Wisdom the personal soul and mind of man, thus enabling him to become cognizant of the spiritual or Christ presence within. ”

“ Christian men began to realize that heaven lay beyond the golden glory of the sunset sky, and felt, with those of the older dispensation, that it was a calamity for the sun to go down while it was yet day. ”

“ The sun is the greatest light of all, more than a million times greater than the earth, and the most glorious and useful of all the lamps of heaven, a noble instance of the Creator's wisdom, power, and goodness, and an invaluable blessing to the creatures of this lower world. Let us learn from 8 Ps. xix. 1-6 how to give unto God the glory due unto his name, as the Maker of the sun. ”