2 92 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and in the eighth the venerable Bede, pronounced in favor of the 

 earth's sphericity. After these two great doctors had spoken it was 

 allowable for any churchman to follow them. That many did not is 

 an incident in the warfare with ignorance, not an attack of religion 

 upon science; and this conclusion is a point to be emphasized. 



Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, in the 

 seventeenth century, declared that the scriptures taught that 'heaven 

 and earth, center and circumference, were created all together, in the 

 same instant,' and that 'this work took place and man was created by 

 the Trinity on October 23, 4004 b. c, at nine o'clock in the morning.' 

 It has been appositely remarked that a crowd of busy men, who had 

 invented geometry and other sciences, were busily engaged in building 

 pyramids in Egypt on this very October morning. The Bible does 

 not explicitly give the foregoing, or any, date. If it did so, we might 

 have a conflict between science and the Bible. Archbishop Usher in 

 1650 fixed a date by interpreting the Biblical words scientifically (not 

 theologically). His scientific methods will not stand examination. 

 Any modern Biblical scholar can show this. Have we here any signs 

 of a conflict between religion and science ? Not at all. In a scientific 

 question a mistaken method was employed then, as so many times be- 

 fore and since. That an erroneous scientific result had a bearing on 

 theological matters was incidental, not essential. The wild disorder 

 of Jordano Bruno's systems of cosmic infinities, notably his guess that 

 the stars were worlds, filled the mind of Kepler with horror. He ex- 

 pressly says that he shuddered with horror at the thought. It was 

 precisely these new infinities of worlds that the Eoman inquisitors 

 found to be heretical. They had, without knowing it, the support of 

 the great protestant astronomer. Kepler's horror for Bruno's ideas 

 was no theological opposition. It was based on the best philosophy of 

 the time. Like the Eoman inquisitors, Kepler believed the universe 

 to be finite. Can we wonder that the fugitive Dominican monk was 

 tried and sentenced for heresy? Can we wonder that ideas from which 

 the free-minded speculative Kepler recoiled were odious to a congre- 

 gation of monks? 



The cases so far examined are typical. Nearly every recorded 

 instance of 'conflict' can be reduced to one or another of them. All 

 are explicable as conflicts primarily with ignorance — and in that way 

 alone. 



Dante declared that hell was beneath the earth. Medieval text- 

 books answered the question: 'Why is the sun so red at sunset?' by 

 declaring : ' because he looketh down upon hell. ' This answer we know 

 to be absurd; we even feel a flush of superiority to Dante and the 

 middle age when the question is quoted; it is, apparently, sometimes 

 quoted by the warfare-of-science books to produce this grateful glow; 

 but not half the readers of this article can at once say what the 



