LT.-COL. G. MACKINLAY ON BIBLICAL ASTRONOMY. 



from our Lord's statement about what will happen at His sudden 

 second coming, it is certain that He Himself, being Divine, was 

 possessed of all knowledge, while His hearers, His disciples, who 

 had not yet received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, were 

 anything but learned men. 



According to Plutarch, Thales (sixth century B.C.) knew that the 

 earth was a sphere, but it is now said that he looked upon it as 

 being a flat disc ; Axiaiander, about the same period, thought that it 

 was cylindrical in shape; Pythagoras, a little later on, conceived it to 

 be a sphere ; Hipparchus (second century B.C.), the discoverer of the 

 precession of the equinoxes, was of opinion that it was flat ; while 

 Ptolemy, some four centuries after him, held the view that it was 

 sensibly spherical. Even at the commencement of the twentieth 

 century there are people in England, possessed of some measure of 

 education, who, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the 

 contrary, maintain that our planet is flat. 



Dr. Heyward Smith. — I should like to draw attention to the 

 constant recurrence in the paper of the expression "the Jews." On 

 page 13, "when the Jewish nation had reached the summit of its 

 glory, Solomon's temple was dedicated," etc. It is rather evasive, 

 because we know the Jews were not called Jews until after. They 

 were called Israel or Hebrews. 



Mr. Martin Rouse. — \Yhen Job used the words, " God stretches 

 out the north over empty space and hangeth the earth upon nothing," 

 it is clear that he did not believe that the earth was supported in 

 some fabulous way — such, for example, as the Brahmins conceived, on 

 the back of an elephant which stood on the back of a tortoise ; or, as 

 the Grecians conceived, upon the shoulders of Atlas ; but he believed 

 that in some wonderful way God held it poised without support in 

 space.* At the same time, the statement that He stretches out the 

 north over empty space shows that the speaker knew that the earth 

 was round — not necessarily globular, but certainly round ; because, 

 if the earth were a square or oblong figure with northern, southern, 

 eastern and western sides, the north would not have been stretched 

 out over empty space, but would have been a long line of earth ; 



* Therefore when the same speaker (in chap, ix, 6) said that God 

 causes the pillars of the earth to tremble, he must have alluded in a 

 poetic way to the inward supports of the earth's mighty crust. 



