THE BIBLE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 



37 



of heaven and hell are taken away from popular conception, the 

 reality of them soon follows. I confess to feeling decided sym- 

 pathy with the Pope and the Cardinals; they all had a look 

 through Galileo's telescope, they saw the four moons of Jupiter 

 like a little diagram of the planetary system hanging up on the 

 wall of heaven for all to see, they listened to the arguments, but 

 they considered themselves the guardians of the Faith, and they 

 decreed that these things must not be, and they wrote down that 

 it was to be a part of the Catholic faith for ever that the earth 

 was fixed and central, for anything less than this contradicted 

 the whole tenor of the Bible. It was not till 1835 that helio- 

 centric books were taken off the Index. 



The next conflict is coupled with the name of Sir Isaac Newton. 

 His great work was not merely the discovery of the law of gravita- 

 tion, but that every department of Nature, Light, Sound, and 

 all else, was under the strict reign of law. Witchcraft, and a 

 thousand superstitions fell at one stroke, and again there was an 

 outcry that this view of the order of the world did away with 

 both the power of Satan and the power of God, and tended to 

 blank materialism. Yet Newton's discoveries have triumphed. 

 The next battle was only a hundred years ago; Geology awoke 

 and demanded time. Not a single week in the year 4004 B.C. 

 but it cried out for thousands and millions of years, and would 

 not be denied, so plain was the evidence of the rocks. The folly 

 of the outcries against this claim makes us profoundly ashamed 

 of ourselves, but there stands the documentary testimony to our 

 stubborn blindness. Fifty years after this the doctrine of Evolu- 

 tion was propounded — that creation is not sudden but very 

 gradual, and that life begins in its lowest forms and works 

 upward. Now with such a past history as we have behind us, 

 was it wise that these theories were met with a violent denial? 

 that sermons were preached and pamphlets were written by the 

 hundreds, bringing forward torrents of abuse, or endeavouring to 

 make the whole subject ridiculous? I myself remember such in 

 plenty. Do we wish the three former conquests undone, and the 

 conceptions of Space, Law and Time put back to where they stood 

 five hundred years ago? Certainly not. Has not Eeligion gained 

 rather than lost by them? " But," you add, " this discovery 

 is so uncertain, and many things disprove it. " Well, perhaps you 

 do not realize that the observed motion of the planets in the 

 sky seemed to disprove the Copernican theory over and over 

 again for a hundred and fifty years. Always wrong; the precal- 

 culated place and the actual place never coincided, till astronomers 

 were nearly in despair. Copernicus had made the radical mistake 

 of thinking the planetary orbits were circles ; Kepler, a century 

 and a half later, discovered they were ellipses, and the whole 

 theory fell into beautiful and permanent order. We are waiting 



