twenty times as much. We need not think then, as our forefathers 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 we 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. What 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.

What 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

doctrines of Holy Scripture in many passages, both if taken in their literal meaning, and according to the interpretation of the Holy Fathers and learned theologians.

2. The second proposition is declared unanimously to deserve the like censure (as the first) in philosophy,

and, as regards its theological aspect, to be at least erroneous in faith.

Sixteen years later, Galileo brought out his most popular work, Dialogues on the Ptolemaic and Copernican Systems, and the appearance of this book caused him to be summoned to Rome to answer a charge of heresy. The points upon which his teachings had been formerly condemned were brought up again, and he was compelled to abjure them explicitly. It is not necessary for me to go into the melancholy history in detail; to paint again for you the sorrows and sufferings of the old philosopher, to enlarge upon the inveterateness of his enemies, or the bitterness of his humiliation. We are all at one in condemning the treatment bestowed upon him; we are all at one in declaring the verdict upon him to have been wrong.

But why was it wrong? Wherein was it wrong? It is necessary for us to look very carefully at that, as there is much misapprehension as to wherein the error lay.

It is clear to all of us that the Qualifiers were utterly wrong in seeking to uphold the doctrine of Ptolemy that the earth is the centre of the universe and is immovable. But their critics overlook that they would have been equally wrong if they had substituted for the Ptolemaic theory the theory which Galileo was promulgating. These were the only two theories then before the world, and we know to-day that both were wrong. Two propositions were under consideration-the motion of the Isun and the motion of the earth.

With regard to the first, the Ptolemaic theory declared that the sun moved. And the sun does move, but not at all in the sense in which the Ptolemaist used the words. Galileo held that the sun was immovable and in the centre of the universe. This we know to be untrue, though the statement was partly justifiable in the limited knowledge that Galileo possessed.

With regard to the second proposition, namely, that the earth was immovable we know that Ptolemy was wrong and Galileo right. But here again Galileo was at fault in the demonstration which he offered, as he gave the tides as the chief proof of the diurnal rotation of the earth, and refused to admit that they were due to the action of the moon.

We see then that if the Holy Office had done as Galileo would have had them do, as the apologists of to-day for Galileo would have had them do, if they had given approval to his views and had sent them forth with the seal and approbation. of the Church, it would have inevitably followed that a century later she would have been compelled to launch her thunders against Sir Isaac Newton when he showed that the tides were due to the moon, and two centuries later against Sir William Herschel when he showed that not only the earth but also the sun was in motion. The error of the Holy Office in 1616 and 1633 lay not that they had put the seal of the Church on the wrong scientific doctrine, but that they had put it on a scientific doctrine at all. In a word they had confused the provinces of religion and of science. They used the Holy Scriptures in order to prove the relation of one astronomical body to another. It happened by a curious coincidence that, through a twofold ignorance, one of their decisions was verbally and superficially correct. Galileo's proposition "that the sun is the centre of the world" (ie., of the universe), "and therefore immovable from its place," has been condemned not only by the Holy Office but by the progress of science since his day. That coincidence in no way palliates their fault, which lay in the fact that they were applying Holy Scripture to a purpose for which it was never intended.

Some three years ago, when Professor Silvanus Thompson was giving a corresponding address to that which I am privileged to give to-day, he gave you a brief but eloquent summary of the marvellous development which physical science has made during the last few years. A man must indeed be blind and deaf to all that is going on around him if he does not recognise how faithful that picture was. The progress that has been seen in every field of science within the last half century is amazing, and the rate of that progress seems to be accelerated every year. The twentieth century has not yet seen its eighth birthday, yet, scientifically speaking, the nineteenth century has already become antiquated. If we could conceive that in the year 1900 the Church had been prevailed upon to adopt the science of that year as its own and to put its seal upon it, as final truth, now, in the year 1908, we should have already had more than one Galilean persecution; so far as that verdict of finality had been imposed, science would have been hindered, thwarted, sterilized, and the Church herself would again have been brought into dishonour as the enemy of progress and thought.

Yet at all times, eight years ago, as to-day, there have been those, some of them leaders in science, some leaders in theology, who would have had the seal of final authority set upon the science of the day, in astronomy, geology, biology, Biblical criticism, archæology, and each and all of the other sciences, and would have had the Church make it her own as the Church in Galileo's day, had made her own the science of Ptolemy and Aristotle. There was some excuse for the Qualifiers of the Holy Office in 1616, in thinking that the Ptolemaic idea of the solar system was eternal truth. The evidence of men's senses seemed to show them that the earth is solid and immovable; the evidence of men's senses seemed to show them that the sun and stars move round the earth every twenty-four hours, and that the sun has a further motion round the earth once every year. A great and elaborate science had been built upon this basis, which enabled the movements of the planets to be correctly foretold, and this theory had lasted without challenge for thousands of years. There is no excuse for any man repeating their mistake to-day, when science is progressing, that is to say, is changing, with a rapidity that has never been witnessed in the history of the world before. It is the glory of science that it does progress; that is to say, it is the glory of science that it changes, that it is continually undergoing reconstruction, that it continually requires restatement.

Can the Holy Scriptures ever have been intended to teach us that which must always from its very nature be undergoing change? Is it not manifest that they deal with something very different; that is to say, not with science, the relation of thing to thing, but with religion, the relation of man to God. And in religion we find that which is essential and eternal. The creed, given to Israel of old, still remains true: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord"; and the practical application of that creed to conduct, requires neither reconstruction nor restatement: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength": And "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Science deals with fact, which is temporal; religion deals with truth, which is eternal.

In a very real sense, therefore, the Bible has nothing to tell us of science, and therefore, nothing to tell us of the science of astronomy. Let us reverse the question, and ask, "What light has astronomy to throw upon the Bible?" This question we can treat from two points of view; from the point of view of the astronomy of the times when the books of Holy Scripture

were severally composed, and from that of the astronomy of the present day.

The former enquiry need not involve us in any question of the higher criticism, for though the dating of the books of the Bible, once almost universally accepted, has been so greatly disturbed within the last sixty years or so, we find in dealing with astronomy that we are relieved from the necessity of fixing the true dates of the various sacred books since we know that the science underwent very little change between the earliest and latest dates that can, upon any hypothesis, be assigned to any of them. For, on the one hand, the constellations, substantially as they are preserved to us in the poem of Aratus, were certainly designed before the time of Abraham. On the other hand the Old Testament Scriptures had been completed before the great astronomical revolution was affected which we associate with the name of Hipparchus of Bithynia. In the period of more than 2,000 years which separated the two, there was, beyond doubt, some advance: the five planets were discovered, and their movements watched with some degree of particularity; the calendar was set in order, different devices for this purpose being adopted in different countries; but broadly speaking, we may say that astronomy underwent no revolutionary development during the whole of this period, just as later there was no important change between the days of Hipparchus and those of Copernicus and Galileo. Broadly speaking we may say that the astronomy of the ages during which the Old Testament Scriptures were being written, was the astronomy of the constellations.

The constellations of Aratus and of Ptolemy themselves reveal to us their date by a simple fact. They do not cover the whole sky, but leave untouched a large space in the south, which evidently represents the invisible part of the heavens at the time and place of the origin of the constellation figures. Somewhere between N. Lat. 40° and 35°, sometime in the third millennium before our era, the astronomers of the ancient world set their hands to this great task, the task of making a primitive catalogue of the stars.

It is not only that the constellations were the chief asset of astronomy in general during the two thousand years between Abraham and the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek; they formed in all probability a principal part of the Hebrew astronomy. For we know from the constellations themselves, that they were designed before the time of Abraham. And we also know from Babylonian "boundary stones" and