Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/721

Rh Perfect Being, without parts, without partiality, and without shadow of turning, to be worshiped only in spirit and in truth.

Science, to be sure, in this process of purification, has destroyed a great deal that has been very dear to Faith. It has uprooted old ideas and pulled down about our ears accepted systems—both physical and spiritual systems. The change in our views of the world has been most radical.

What was the conception of the world held by the orthodox churchman of the middle ages? The earth was a square plain, at whose outer edges rose mountain-walls, supporting the vault of heaven. This vault was a solid crystal roof, wherein the fixed stars were set, and over which moon and sun were pulled to and fro by the angels. Above this firmament, separating the waters which are above from the waters which are below, was the celestial cistern through whose windows the rain fell. Above this, again, the seven-storied heaven, in whose highest story dwelt Jehovah himself, seated on his throne of glory, surrounded by angels and saints.

To-day, how has science stretched out this little cosmos! The astronomer has turned his telescope upon that adamantine firmament, and it has dissolved into thin air. The total solid particles that the blue expanse contains, it has been estimated by Tyndall, might probably be packed into a lady's traveling-bag. The glittering points that gemmed its surface have expanded into enormous sums—thousands of times as large as our own globe. The circumscribed heaven of the Apocalypse, 12,000 furlongs each way, has spread out, from that one-hundredth part of the cubic dimensions which we now know our own earth to have, into an immensity of space which puts us so far from the nearest fixed star that a locomotive could not reach it in 700,000 centuries; and that even when we had attained this enormous distance we should stand merely at the entrance of a starlight avenue, down whose infinite vista come the rays from still more remote suns! Our own earth, formerly the grand, immovable stage to which the wandering sun and stars were only decorations, has been shriveled into a petty pellet of cosmic stuff, dislodged from its fixed and central position, and sent whirling on its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a central body, which central body, though as much larger than it as a cart-wheel is than a pea, is yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained in its own part of space; and is itself not stationary, but moving with its planetary fleet at the rate of 4,000 miles a day round some still larger centre.

And in time, as well as space, has science enormously multiplied the numbers. Where the Bible chronology gave sixty centuries for the world's age, science demands as many millenniums. Where Genesis granted six days for the business of creation, geology requires as many æons. Science has mined in caverns and found man's tools and weapons among the bones of mammoths. It has deciphered