Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/598

578 view from Scripture to account for the planetary movements, and develops at length the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose.

How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we find in the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest leader of orthodox thought in the seventh century. He affirms that since the fall of man, and on account of it, the sun and moon shine with a feebler light; but he proves from a text in Isaiah that when the world shall be fully redeemed these "great lights" will shine again in all their early splendor. But despite these authorities and their theological finalities, the evolution of scientific thought continued, its main germ being the geocentric doctrine—the doctrine that the earth is the center, and that the sun and planets revolve about it.

This doctrine was of the highest respectability: it had been developed at a very early period, and had been elaborated until it accounted well for the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies; its final name—"Ptolemaic theory"—carried weight; and, having thus come from antiquity into the Christian world, it was finally acquiesced in and universally held to agree with the letter and spirit of Scripture.

Wrought into this foundation, and based upon it, there was developed in the middle ages, by means of Scriptural texts and theological reasonings, a new sacred system of astronomy, which became one of the great treasures of the universal Church—the last word of revelation.

Three great men mainly reared this structure. First was the unknown who gave to the world the treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. It was unhesitatingly believed that these were the work of St. Paul's Athenian convert, and therefore virtually by St. Paul himself. Though now known to be spurious, they were then considered a treasure of inspiration, and an