IN "Blair's Rhetoric" the opinion is expressed that the most sublime sentence in all literature is that in Genesis: "God said, Let there be light: and there was light." This book was first published in 1783, in Scotland, and the natural sciences, so called, since then have been quite busily at work to change the image which that wonderful sentence presents to thought, a change which mainly concerns, however, the details of the deific processes of creation.
Whatever his opinion may be in respect to Moses as a reliably exact cosmogonist, to the twentieth-century reader who sympathetically grasps his concept of creation, the sentence from Genesis affords an image full of grandeur. The darkness was immeasurable and illimitable, chaotic and undefinable, without center or circumference; no land, no sea, no sun, no moon, no stars, no life, no motion,— all was formless and void. But the divine moment arrives, omnipotence speaks, and lo! the vast night is vanquished and the darkness illumed with the splendor and beauty of universal golden light; chaos is passing, and harmony aim loveliness and wondrous proportions are beginning to appear.
Many modern ears, no doubt, adjudge the up-to-date piano to be a finer instrument than the harp; still, it ought not to be forgotten ever that the harp was a very useful ancestor of today's more popular instrument; that during many thousands of years unnumbered people have had sounds, which seemed to them from some better and fairer world, come to their famishing ears on the vibrations of the strings of the harp, sweetening and modifying the currents of their sorrow, purifying their joy, enrapturing their pleasure, and veiling for a few higher moments the sordidness of earth.
