Both these passages have their meaning elucidated by Ps. civ. 3, 4:54

94

Who maketh the clouds His chariot,

Who walketh upon the wings of the wind;

Who maketh winds His messengers,

Flaming fire His ministers.

The very physical and meteorological phenomena are here made the media of His manifestation to men which are elsewhere called the cherubim and seraphim.95

96

(7) The next occasion when the cherubim are mentioned in Scripture is when they were set by Moses upon the Ark of the Covenant overshadowing it with their outstretched wings. Here they still have the same character as the Kerûbs or winged windgenii of Babylon. Just as these latter appear as the official sentinels of the royal abode or of a precinct devoted to a sacred cultus, so they are constituted 'the sentinels and guardians of the Majesty of God,' which is withdrawn from the gaze of the sinful, and as protectors of His sacred dwelling.' Their alert posture, with faces fixed upon the Mercy Seat, still seemed to suggest the idea of guardianship and the continued warning 'Procul, o procul este, profani.' As the cherubim signified, in the first instance, the descent of Deity when He bowed the heavens and came down, so they remained symbols of His gracious presence among His people. The frequent designation of Yahveh as He that dwelleth between the cherubim' seems to intimate the unapproachable presence of Him who, withdrawn from the senses of man, hides Himself behind secondary causes, and cosmical phenomena which are the outward signs of His working." The aspiration of His worshippers was therefore, 'Thou that dwellest between the cherubim, shine forth' (manifest Thyself).98 With the same significance these symbolic forms were embroidered on the curtain which veiled the inviolate privacy of Yahveh in the dark Holy of Holies.99

(8) The later belief which we find developed in Ezekiel that une cherubim were essentially four in number points unmistakably to the same conclusion, that they were an idealisation of the winds in

"So Bishop Westcott: The reference to the "winds" and "flame of fire" could not fail to suggest to the Hebrew reader the accompaniments of the giving of the Law. That awful scene was a revelation of the ministry of angels.' 'Where nien at first see only material objects and forms of nature there God is present, fulfilling His will through His servants under the forms of elemental action' (Ep. to the Hebrews, p. 25).

55 Compare Ps. xxxv. 5.

"Riehm; Schrader, Cuneif. Inscr. and the Old Test. i. 41; cf. Kerûb hassókék, 'the protecting cherub' (Ezek. xxviii. 14, 16). 'Around about were Seraphim and Cherubim and Ophanim [wheel-angels]; these are they who do not sleep, but guard the throne of His glory' (Book of Enoch, lxxi. 7). See also Ewald, Antiquities of Israel, 123.

* 2 Kings xix. 15; Ps. xcix. 1; Is. xxxvii. 16. "Ex. xxvi. 31.

98 Ps. lxxx. 1.

emblematic forms. The conception that each of the four cardinal points has a distinct wind assigned to it may be noticed among most peoples. The Babylonian Creation Tablet, in a passage very suggestive of the cherubic chariot, says that Marduk having created the four winds,

The Lord took up the storm his mighty weapon;

The chariot, the thing without peer, the terrible he mounted,

He yoked it, and harnessed the team of four thereto;

. . . ruthless, spirited, fleet.100

Among the tribes of Central America, the number four and the cross are held sacred from the adoration they pay to the cardinal points whence the four winds come.' 101 Some believe that the four cardinal winds make up god, who is himself the wind (Hurakan).102 Similarly in the Hebrew Scriptures Jeremiah says, 'Upon Elam will I [Yahveh] bring the four winds of the four quarters of heaven.' 103 Zechariah, again, in a vision saw these four winds of heaven, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth,' , 104 in a definite shape which at once reminds us of the cherubic symbolism. With this may be compared the vision granted to Ezekiel by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, which would naturally have a Babylonian colouring. In this he saw the likeness of four living creatures, 105 which he subsequently ascertained were cherubim. They proceeded out of a stormy wind (ruach) and a great cloud which flashed with fire continually.107 About these beings everything is quadruple. Each of the four has four faces-human, leonine, bovine, aquiline, as typical of the four supreme creaturesand each four wings.108 Whithersoever the wind (ruach) was to go, they went, for the wind (ruach) of the living creatures was in the wheels,109 and they flashed forth lightning as they went.' 110 That these cherubim were grounded on meteorological phenomena can hardly be doubted.

We have seen, then, that the Kerûbîm in their primitive conception were personifications of those winds favourable to vegetation which were chosen to protect and guard a sacred enclosure as the embodiments of benediction. In particular, they were the symbolical guardians which were posted eastwards in Eden to keep man at an inaccessible distance from the tree of life. In Palestine easterly winds (Qâdîm) were always regarded as inimical to man, as the strongest and most destructive gales blow from that quarter. In

100 Jastrow, 426; Ball, Light, 8. Fried. Delitzsch quotes from the Khorsabad inscription (Oppert and Menant) ‘Ana ir-bit-ti ša-a-re,' 'to the four winds' (Assyr. Grammar, 334). Brinton, Religion of Prim. Peoples, 143.

101 D. G. Brinton, Myths of the New World, 69. 102 So Ezek. xxxvii. 9; Dan. vii. 2.

chap. x., on the number four.

But see Maimonides, More Nerochim, pt. ii.

Job 111 it is the East wind that carrieth away the rich man and sweepeth him out of his place. But, although in one aspect these avenging winds suggest the keen fierceness of the swooping eagle, in another they wear the face of a man and have a fellowship with humanity. As their name Kerûbim implies, they exercise an influence beneficent as well as exclusive and punitive. To cut off sinful man from earthly immortality was only to rescue him from a sinful immortality. Thus the cherubim as symbols of the sanctuary indicate the unapproachable presence of the Holy God, but at the same time mark out the Mercy Seat where the forgiveness of sins is consummated. Though clouds and darkness are round about Him, yet righteousness and judgment are the foundation of His throne.' 112 The dark storm-cloud, we are never allowed to forget, is charged with fostering influences and fertilising showers; its overshadowing is as the folding wings of a mother-bird.

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy, and shall break

In blessings on your head.

If, in addition to the considerations advanced above, the Babylonians may in assigning to the wind the form of a bird of prey have been influenced by the thought that the vulture, the carrion-eater, is the great scavenger of nature, as the wind is the chief agent in cleansing and purifying the earth, we discover one more reason why A breeze is the most honourable chariot of the gods,

and worthy to symbolise even angelic ministrations.

A. SMYTHE PALMER.

111 xxvii. 21.

112 Ps. xcvii. 2.

OFFICIAL OBSTRUCTION OF

ELECTRIC PROGRESS

CASTING our eyes backwards over a period of thirty years we find a galaxy of electrical inventions, which have created great industries and enormously enhanced the conveniences of human life.

In 1870 the dynamo machine, by which an electric current is produced from mechanical energy, was still in process of evolution. The electric arc lamp was a laboratory instrument. The electric incandescent lamp, of which there are now four millions in use in London alone, was non-existent. The telephone was merely an inventor's dream; quadruplex and multiplex telegraphy were unsolved problems; the possibility of creating electric waves, though conceived by the genius of Clerk Maxwell, a mere theory. Hertz, world-famous for his experimental researches on their production, was a boy at school. Marconi, who has applied them in wireless telegraphy, was not yet born. Röntgen had not given the surgeon a new eye by which to see bones and bullets in the living tissue. Ideas on the subject of electric supply stations, electric tramcars, electric railways, electric transmission of power, telephone exchanges, the electrolytic production of caustic soda, bleaching powder, or the electrical production of pure copper and of aluminium, now all vast industries, had not arrived or had only floated in faintest outline as pleasant dreams through the minds of hopeful inventors. They were then all far off as realised facts.

In 1870 an electrical era dawned. Z. Gramme, a French electrician, made an improvement in the dynamo machine which rendered it possible to produce from it a perfectly uniform, steady electric current. Hefner-Alteneck, in Germany, made a similar advance in 1873. Paul Jablochkoff, a Russian officer passing through Paris, invented in 1876 his famous electric candle, consisting of two carbon rods placed side by side, an electric current springing between them creating a steady electric arc.

In 1873, at Vienna, the use of the dynamo as an electric motor was discovered; henceforth the machine for producing electric currents from mechanical energy became also a means for converting back again electric energy into energy of motion.

In 1878 C. F. Brush in America produced an efficient electric arc lamp and dynamo suitable for supplying many lamps in series. In 1879-80 Edison and Swan gave to the world the perfected carbon filament incandescent lamp. Edison proceeded at once to plan and erect in New York the first public electric supply station in the world. In 1881 Camile Faure, a Frenchman, made an important improvement in the electric storage battery, which owed its existence to the work of his compatriot G. Planté, twenty years before.

Domestic electric lighting was then fairly launched upon the world, and dates its real inception from the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition of 1882.

In 1883 Lucien Gaulard, following a line of thought of Jablochkoff, proposed to employ high-pressure alternating electric currents for electric distribution over wide areas. His ideas were improved by Zipernowsky and Blathy of Budapest, and by Ferranti, and to the persevering efforts of the last-named much of the great development of alternating current distribution is due.

Polyphase alternating currents, which afford the means for transmitting electric power easily over immense distances, came to us as a consequence of researches by Ferraris, Tesla, Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, and C. E. L. Brown, and first attracted notice when polyphase alternators were exhibited at the Frankfort Exhibition in 1891.

It is by means of these polyphase electric currents that Niagara's mighty energies have been tapped, and part of its wasted power poured into towns and factories clustering round. This particular form of electric current has advantages of a very special kind in the transmission of power; but while in America and Switzerland much has been done with it, we in England have only as yet laid feeble hands upon this tool.

Meanwhile, between 1876 and 1879, the speaking telephone had been given to us by Bell, Edison, and Elisha Gray in the United States, and the microphone by Hughes in England. Telephone exchanges, originating in the United States, quickly followed. An electric tramcar was exhibited by Siemens in Paris in 1881. The vast development of electric traction began in the United States about 1885, as the result of the early work of Field, Edison, Daft, Bentley and Knight, Sprague and others, between 1880 and 1884.

In telegraphy we have had quadruplex and multiplex telegraphy perfected, enabling four or more messages to be sent at the same time on one wire, and the improved writing telegraphs of Elisha Gray of Chicago and Mr. Foster Ritchie. More recently, high-speed telegraphy has been advanced by the Pollak-Verág system. These inventors have been able by their methods to transmit intelligence at the rate of 1500 words a minute, or nearly four times as fast as the quickest transmitters in ordinary use at the Post Office. The wonderful microphonograph of Poulsen, which attracted notice at the