232 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



and to " look through nature up to nature's God." It is indeed 

 difficult for us to realize, that against the theory that the earth 

 is a terraqueous sphere, the whole power of the Christian 

 Church should have armed itself, as late as the sixth century ; 

 and that nothing but the fact of circumnavigation, centuries 

 later, dispersed the ecclesiastical farces. ,We turn with shame 

 from the ignominy heaped upon Copernicus while living, and 

 the insults to his ashes when dead ; from the imprisonment, 

 and torture, and fiery death of Bruno ; because they proclaimed 

 the great scientific fact, that the earth and planets revolve about 

 the sun. Our hearts are moved with indignation and sorrow 

 as we behold Galileo, driven from the pale of Christianity, 

 denounced, tormented, forced in his old age to " abjure, curse 

 and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the earth" 

 — because he had worn out his great life in studying the glories 

 of the heavens which God had made, and had taught the world 

 that, in obedience to the divine harmony which set the con- 

 stellations in their places, the earth did move, with its starry 

 companions, around a common centre. We can hardly believe 

 that the first great anatomist was exiled by the lovers of " sound 

 learning," in one of the most enlightened and pious courts of 

 Europe ; and we hasten to forget that in our own day, in the 

 name of religion, the best geologists, men of exemplary lives 

 and an abiding faith, have been denounced as infidels and 

 atheists, for having opened that volume on whose stony pages 

 are written the succeeding chapters of creation, and the great 

 laws of an all-wise Creator. 



But this severe struggle between science and religious dog- 

 matism, that strong fortress, behind whose frowning bastions 

 the most fervid religious faith is prone to seek shelter and pro- 

 tection, is small when compared with the long and bitter contest 

 which attended its emancipation from the tyranny of intellectual 

 arrogance and pride. Contrary to that modern theory of science 

 which would dispense, with a large and liberal hand, the boun- 

 ties of sound learning to all men, " for the relief of man's 

 estate," the ancient philosophers assumed that the object of all 

 learning was to elevate man above this sublunary sphere, and 

 to fill his mind with a lofty indifference to all his wants and 

 necessities and comforts. " Philosophy," said Seneca in reply 

 to Posidonius, who inadvertently complimented science, for 



