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发表于 2010-4-29 22:19
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O history in the sense we know
it, for there would be no natural means of dating. "Time" must there be artificial, uncertain and
arbitrary. On the night side of Venus, if her men can see the stars at all for cloud, they would perceive the slow procession of stars coming out, for Venus turns continually
to the heavens--though not to the sun.
_Mazzaroth_ would still be brought out in his season, but there would be no answering change on Venus. Her men might still know the ordinances of heaven, but
they could not know the dominion thereof set upon their earth. This imaginary picture of the state of our sister planet may illustrate the fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Genesis:-- "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heave n to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and
for seasons, and for days, and years." The making of the calendar is
in all nations an astronomical problem: it is the movements of the various heavenly bodies
that give to us our most natural divisions of time. We are told in Deuteronomy:-- "The sun, and the moon, and the stars, even
all the host of heaven, . . . the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven." This is the legitimate use of the heavenly bodies, just as the worship of them is their abuse, for the division of time--in other words,
the formation
of a calendar--is a necessity. But as there are many heavenly bodies and several
natural divisions of time, the calendars in use by different peoples differ
considerably. One division,
however, is common to all calendars--the day. The "day" is the first and shortest natural division of time. At present we recognize three |
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