372 FRAGMENTS, OF SCIENCE. 
mind, in relation to this and kindred questions. In the 
fourth century the belief in Antipodes was deemed 
uuscriptural and heretical. The pious Lactautius was 
as angry with the people who held this notion as my cen- 
sors are now with me, and quite as unsparing in his 
denunciations of their "Monstrosities." Lactantius was 
irritated because, in his mind, by education and habit, 
cosmogony and religion were indissolubly associated, and, 
therefore, simultaneously disturbed. In the early part of 
the seventeenth century the notion that the earth was fixed, 
and that the sun and stars revolved round it daily, was 
interwoven with religious feeling, the separation then 
attempted by Galileo rousing the animosity and kindling 
the persecution of the Church. Men still living can 
remember the indignation excited by the first revelations of 
geology regarding the age of the earth, the association be- 
tween chronology and religion being for the time indissol- 
uble. In our day, however, the best-informed theologians 
are prepared to admit that our views of the universe and 
its Author are not impaired, but improved, by the aban- 
donment of the Mosaic account of the creation. Look, 
finally, at the excitement caused by the publication of the 
"Origin of Species," and compare it with the calm attend- 
ant on the appearance of the far more outspoken, and, 
from the old point of view, more impious, "Descent of 
Man." 
Thus religion survives after the removal of what had 
been long considered essential to it. In our day the Anti- 
podes are accepted; the fixity of the earth is given up; 
the period of creation and the reputed age of the world 
are alike dissipated; evolution is looked upon without 
terror; and other changes have occurred in the same direc- 
tion too numerous to be dwelt upon here. In fact, from 
the earliest times to the present, religion has been under- 
going a process of purification, freeing itself slowly and 
painfully from the physical errors which the active but 
uninformed intellect mingled with the aspirations of the 
soul. Some of us think that a final act of purification is 
needed, while others oppose this notion with the confidence 
and the warmth of ancient times. The bone of contention 
at present is the physical value of prayer. It is not my 
wish to excite surprise, much less to draw forth protest, 
by the employment of this phrase. I would simply ask any 
