THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 3 



be the centre of the universe; who were accustomed to 

 believe that God made the sun and moon and stars to shed 

 light on us ; and who fancied that the divine purpose in 

 creating nature was to form a dwelling-place for man. The 

 dogmatic elements of historical Christianity in like manner 

 assumed their fixity by slow degrees under the dominance of 

 Ptolemy's geocentric system of astronomy, and in harmony 

 with a metaphysic which accepted that view of the universe. 

 The discovery, published by Copernicus in 1543, by simply 

 shifting the position of our globe in space, shook the ponderous 

 fabric of scholastic theology to its foundations. The deduc- 

 tions made from his discovery by subsequent thinkers still 

 more seriously compromised a large part of that edifice. The 

 earth appeared not merely as a satellite of the sun ; but the 

 sun himself, with all his court of planets, took rank as only 

 one among innumerable sidereal companies. Space spread 

 into infinity. Up and down, heaven above and hell beneath, 

 were now phrases of symbolical or metaphorical significance 

 only. It was no longer possible to imagine that the celestial 

 bodies had been created in order to give light by day and 

 night. Man's station of eminence in the kosmos ceased to 

 seem manifest. It became difficult to take the scheme of 

 salvation, God's sacrifice of himself in the Second Person of 

 the Trinity for the advantage of a race located on a third-rate 

 planet, literally. Some mythical parts of the religion, which 

 had previously been held as facts, were immediately changed 

 into allegories. For instance, the ascension of Jesus from the 

 mountain lost its value as an historical event when the brazen 

 vault of heaven, or the crystal sphere on the outer surface of 

 which God sat, had been annihilated ; when there was no 

 more up or down, and when a body lifted into ether would 

 obey the same laws of attraction as a meteoric stone. 



The Copernican discovery very materially influenced 

 Christian dogma and mythology by thus converting at a 

 stroke what had been previously accepted as a matter of 

 literal and historical fact into symbol, allegory, metaphor. It 

 humbled human pride, and destroyed the overweening sense 

 of man's importance in the universe. The nature of this 



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