3?2 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



mind, in relation to this and kindred questions. In the 

 fourth century the belief in Antipodes was deemed 

 unscriptural and heretical. The pious Lactantius was 

 as angry with the people who held this notion us 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 hud 

 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 



