Page:Anglo-Saxon version of the Hexameron of St. Basil.djvu/38

Rh also, through His divine power, commanded it to produce many various kinds of trees, with their increase, as fruits for man, and for other necessary purposes; and the earth forthwith, as God gave commandment to it, stood overgrown with groves, and with high cedar trees, and with many forests (extended) over her immense space, with trees bearing apples, and with orchards, and with every kind of tree with their own proper fruits.

VII. On the fourth day our Lord said, Let now there be light, that is the light stars in the firmament of heaven, that they may separate the day from the night, and let them be for a sign, and make times by days, and by years, and let them shine in the firmament, and let them enlighten the earth. God then forthwith made two shining lights great and majestic, the moon and the sun. The sun in the morning for the enlightening of the day; the moon in the evening, for the enlightening of men in the time of night with her signs. And all the stars He also then formed, and He fixed them in the compact firmament, in order that they might enlighten the earth with their manifold beams, and govern (the course of) the day, as well as of the night, and that they might separate the light and the darkness in twain. There were no seasons in the computation of the year, before that the Almighty Creator formed the stars for the seasons of the year, with many significations, at the time of the vernal equinox, as doctors tell us, by arithmetical art, on the twelfth of the kalends of April; and Easter never takes place before the day comes, that the light has exceeded the darkness, that is to say, that the day is longer than the night. Concerning the other seasons this same book speaketh in the same way that God Himself spoke to Noah. The seed-time and the harvest, the summer and the winter, the cold and the heat, the day and the night, do not at any time desist. All the stars do not stand in the lofty firmament, but some of them have a passage peculiar to themselves beneath the firmament, being set in order in different ways, and those that stand in the firmament turn