264 Of the Belation of Tradition to Falcetiology, 



Atmology in the Sacred Writings. If they had read in their 

 Scripture that the earth was a sphere, when it appeared to be 

 a plain, thoy would only have been disturbed in their thoughts 

 or driven to some wild and baseless imaginations by a declara- 

 tion to them so strange. If the Divins Speaker, instead of 

 saying that he would set his bow in the clouds, had been made 

 to declare that he would give to water the property of refract- 

 ing different colours of different angles, how utterly unmeaning 

 to the hearers would the words have been ! And in these 

 cases, the expressions, being unintelligible, startling, and be- 

 wildering, would have been such as tended to unfit the Sacred 

 Narrative for its place in the providential dispensation of the 

 world. 



Accordingly, in the great controversy which took place in 

 Galileo's time between the defenders of the then customary in- 

 terpretations of Scripture, and the assertors of the Copernican 

 system of the universe, when the innovators were upbraided 

 with maintaining opinions contrary to Scripture, they replied 

 that Scripture was not intended to teach men astronomy, and 

 that it expressed the acts of divine power in images which were 

 suited to the ideas of unscientific men. To speak of the rising 

 and setting and travelling of the sun, of the fixity and of the 

 foundations of the earth, was to use the only language which 

 would have made the Sacred Narrative intelligible. To ex- 

 tract from these and the like expressions doctrines of science, 

 was, they declared, in the highest degree unjustifiable ; and 

 such a course could lead, they held, to no result but a weaken- 

 ing of the authority of Scripture in proportion as its credit was 

 identified with that of these modes of applying it. And this 

 judgment has since been generally assented to by those who 

 most reverence and value the study of the designs of Provi- 

 dence as well as that of the works of nature. 



7. Science tells us nothing concerning Creation. — Other appa- 

 rent difficulties arise from the accounts given in the Scripture 

 of the first origin of the world in which we live : for example, 

 light is represented as created before the sun. With regard 

 to difficulties of this kind, it appears that we may derive some 

 instruction from the result to which we were led in the last 

 chapter ; — namely, that in the sciences which trace the pro- 

 gress of natural occurrences, wc can in no case go back to an 



