Ring Out, Ye Crystal Spheres!

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This is the epilogue from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Christmas cantata “Hodie,” which adapts the words from Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity“:

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the bass of heaven’s deep organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.
Such music (as ’tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.
Yea, truth and justice then
Will down return to men,
Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
And heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

It is a special Christmas offering to all the young-earth creationists out there. Presumably if your cosmology really is that of historic Christianity, you’ll find nothing in the words to disagree with…and if you don’t get what it is referring to, then alas, it seems that you don’t know enough about traditional cosmology or the historical Christian faith to be discussing either. But I hope you have a merry Christmas anyway!

I also recommend Joel Watts’ most recent post on the vast gulf between what young-earth creationists assert and what scientific data provides evidence of.