THE SUN AS A SYMBOL.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Phelips, Vivian
Suppose that, whatever the ultimate origin may have been, certain myths containing the parallels are, as we know them, solar myths (and on this point mythologists are now in complete accord); how can a belief be, at one and the same time, a solar myth and also an allegory expressing a spiritual truth? The sun is the object of worship, and its apparent movements give rise to myths concerning the birth, death, and resurrection of a Saviour.44 Can we call this Progressive Revelation? “Certainly,” the apologists may reply; “is there no bright Sun of Righteousness—no personal and loving Son of God, of whom the material sun has been the type or symbol, in all ages and among all nations? What power is it that comes from the sun to give light and heat to all created things? If the symbolical sun leads such a great and heavenly flock, what must be said of the true and only begotten Son of God? If Apollo was adopted by early Christian art as a type of the Good Shepherd of the New Testament, this interpretation of the sun-god among all nations must be the solution of the universal mythos. What other solution can it have? To what other historical personage but Christ can it apply? If this mythos has no spiritual meaning, all religion becomes mere idolatry, or the worship of material things.”45
Will this sort of reasoning satisfy the average man? To begin with, the sun-worshippers themselves had no idea that the sun was, as is now alleged, the symbol of a great Truth. The sun, or their conception of the sun as a divine person in a blazing car, was the object of their worship. What a waste of worship for thousands upon thousands of years!—worship that might have been centred upon the true God. Even now, nigh on 2,000 years after God was pleased at last to reveal Himself, as we are told, to all mankind, the greater portion do not know Him, or they deny Him. If God intended the sun to be a symbol of Christ, why have we never been told this before? Why even now is it only put forward by a certain school of apologists in costly books that few will ever set their eyes upon? It is noteworthy, too, that the horrors that accompanied the worship of this same “bright Sun” are discreetly kept in the background by these advocates of the “symbol” theory.