486 to examine and test the views of Christopher
Columbus, a considerable portion held it to be grossly heterodox to
believe that by sailing westwards the eastern parts of the world could
be reached. No one could entertain such a view without also believing
that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, not
flat,--errors denounced by not only great theologians of the golden age
of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactantius and St. Augustine, but
also directly opposed, it was said, to the very letter of Scripture.
"They observed," says Washington Irving, in his "Life of Columbus,"
"that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a
hide,--that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a
tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the hides
of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares
the heavens to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they
thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of Cosmas the
heavens are represented as a semicircular vault or tent raised on
perpendicular walls; a vast mountain beyond the "Great Sea," lofty as
the innermost continent of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately
under it; when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, and
when it emerged from it, it was day. And certainly under the crystal box
of the monk it would be in vain to attempt, by passing westwards, to
arrive at the far east. The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the
doctors of Salamanca; and the views of Columbus were denounced as
heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was one of the
earlier mistakes of the theologians. When merely told regarding the
authorship of the chronometer, they held that they had been told also
respecting the mechanism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings
to what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical figures, they
believed that not only was it revealed to them that God had created the
heavens and earth, but also that he had created the earth in the form of
an extended plain, and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as
one places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower-plot or
a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was this error ultimately
corrected? Simply by that science of the geographer which demonstrates
that the earth is not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not
edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come an