Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter.
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE ENLARGEMENT OF FAITH.
AS the traveler visits the old shrines and cathedrals of Europe, or the scholar delves among the mediaeval treatises on astronomy or geography, he is continually meeting with conceptions of the world and its creation of a most curious and childlike simplicity. A frequently recurring group in the sculptures, mosaics, stained-glass or missal paintings of the Middle Ages is that which represents the Almighty in human form, moulding the sun, moon, or stars, and with His own hands hanging them from the solid firmament which supports the upper heaven and its celestial waters and which overarches the great plain of earth; and when the work of the six days is finished He is represented as sitting, bent and fatigued, in the well-known attitude of the "Weary Mercury" of classical sculpture. As late as the seventeenth century, Milton, in his poetic representation of the popular theology of his day, does not hesitate at the most literal description of how the second person in the Trinity, when the hour for making the universe came
"Took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe and all created things
. One foot He centred, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, 'Thus far extend; thus far thy bounds:
This be thy just circumference, O world.' "
The two statements in the Genesis myths, that the world was made in six days and also that "God spake and it was done," were both of them accepted in the most literal way by the great ecclesiastical and scientific authorities of Christendom down to the sixteenth century. The contradiction of an instantaneous creation which lasted through six days was usually reconciled by some explanation, like that of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was adopted even by Luther and the earlier Protestant Reformers, viz.: that God created the substance of the world in a single moment but employed the six days in separating, shaping and further adorning it. As to the date of this great event, it was the general verdict of both Catholic and Protestant authorities down to a century or two ago that it could hardly be more than 6,000 years ago.
As to the shape and dimensions of the world, the prevalent ideas during the Middle Ages were marked by a precision and pettiness equally crude. Following unreflectingly the lead of whatever imagery the Scripture presented, they insisted that the earth was at creation vaulted over with a solid dome or ceiling, the firmament of Genesis, above which was the celestial cistern, containing the waters which are above the firmament. It is through apertures in this vault, "the windows of heaven," that the rains are allowed to fall on the earth by God and His angels; and above it, in the third heaven, or seventh as others said, is the customary abode of the Almighty and His court. In the curious description of the universe, based upon Scripture, written in the sixth century by "Cosmas Indicopleustes," which for a long while was regarded as most authoritative, the ideas of the early Christian theologians were summed up in a complete system. As in the ninth chapter of Hebrews the world is likened to the tabernacle in the desert, it must be oblong in shape. Like the table of shew-bread, the earth is fiat, and twice as long as broad, 400 days' journey one way and 200 the other. It is surrounded by four seas, at the outer edges of which rise massive walls, the pillars of heaven of which Job speaks, on which the vault of heaven rests. The disappearance of the sun at night is caused by its passing behind a great mountain at the north of the earth....
