anac, in virtue of the literal meaning of the specified phrases, to
the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, would pledge it to a false science, which
its author never held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by
Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural phrases are in no
degree more express respecting the motion of the sun and the other
heavenly bodies than those of the almanac, which, we know, do not refer
to motion at all, but to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that
the cited Scriptures do not refer to _motion_, but to _authorship_. In
the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsideration of the
adduced passages that the error, once made, is to be corrected. In a
purely astronomic question the appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to
astronomic science. And in the fourth place, the reasonings of
Turrettine, when, quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a
theologian, but as a natural philosopher, are such as to read a lesson
not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in
which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and
Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian,
rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous
error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the
elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound
mysteries of nature. But of this more anon.

Let me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one of the
greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to find in Scripture
the fact of astronomic _construction_, La Place, one of the greatest of
the astronomers, failed in a manner equally signal to find in his
science the fact of astronomic _authorship_. The profound Frenchman
(whom Sir David Brewster well characterizes as "the philosopher to whom
posterity will probably assign the place next to Newton "), by
demonstrating that certain irregularities in the motion of the heavenly
bodies, which had been supposed to indicate a future termination to the
whole, were but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and
indicative of no such termination in consequence, demonstrated also
that, from all that appears, the present astronomical movements might go
on forever. And as he could find in the solar system no indications of
an end, so was he unable, he said, to find in it any trace of a
beginning. He failed in discovering in all astrono