law Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and
its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance
of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old
Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the
spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had
no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact
of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of
gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it--a sentiment of
combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which
all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou hast hanged the world upon
nothing,' said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence
wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the
preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the
hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its
most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott's flat earth would be the true
territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any
objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no
foolish ideas about the dignity of man.

It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will
ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy;
whether we shall ever speak of 'early earth-turn' instead of 'early
sunrise,' and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or
looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large
number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new
mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious,
imagination, says that according to astronomers, 'the sea is a vast
mountain of water miles high.' To have discovered that mountain of
moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like
discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again.
In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out
sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this
earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall
discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all
the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and
catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that
they are living on a star.

In the early days of the world, the discovery of a