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ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
twenty times as much. We need not think then, as our fore- 
fathers did, that the references in the Bible to the sun’s rising 
and setting and to his course across the sky, ever, at any time, 
justified men thinking that they had in them divine authority 
for asserting that the sun went round the earth. Nor need w T e 
suppose that the first chapter of Genesis was meant to give us 
a compact little bird’s eye view of the geological and biological 
history of our globe. It is surely more reasonable to conclude 
that there was in that chapter no purpose whatever of teaching 
us anything about the physical relationships of land and sea, 
of tree and plant, of bird and fish ; it seems, indeed, scarcely 
conceivable that it should have been the divine intention so to 
supply the ages with a condensed manual of the physical 
sciences. Wliat useful purpose could it have served ; what 
man would have been the wiser or better for it ; who could 
have understood it until the time when men, by their own 
intellectual strivings had attained sufficient knowledge of their 
physical surroundings to do without such a revelation at all. 
Wliat answer then have we to give to our first question, 
“What has the Bible to say respecting astronomy ? ” In a real 
sense it has nothing to say whatsoever. The contrary idea that 
it had something to say was responsible for one of the great 
defeats of the Church, a defeat which has left its mark to the 
present day, the evil influence of which is incalculable, and is 
present with us continually. 
One of the greatest men of science that the United States of 
America has yet produced, Dr. J. W. Draper, brought out a 
book entitled the Conflict between Religion and Science, and the 
chief incident that figures in that book is the well-known case 
of the condemnation of Galileo. It is an old story, one that 
has been told many a time, but it is worth while to tell it 
briefly yet once again, since the true lesson of the story is very 
generally missed 
In February, 1616, the Qualifiers or official experts of the 
Holy Office, reported upon two propositions extracted from 
Galileo’s work on sunspots. The propositions were : — 
1. The sun is the centre of the world, and, therefore, 
immovable from its place. 
2. The earth is not the centre of the world, and is not 
immovable, but moves, and also with a diurnal motion. 
The report of the Qualifiers ran as follows : — 
1. The first proposition is unanimously declared to be 
false and absurd philosophically, and formerly 
heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the 
