Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/463

Rh various passages in their sacred books, many of them most noble in conception, and most beautiful in form, regarding the "firmament," the "corners of the earth," the "pillars of heaven," the "waters above the firmament," and the "windows of heaven," point us back to these ancient springs of thought.

But as civilization was developed, there were evolved, especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth's sphericity. The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished them. These ideas were vague, they were mixed with absurdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxuriant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the earth is a globe.

A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their