onscience as an insane folly, and the freedom of
the press a pestilent error, which cannot be sufficiently detested.

But how is it possible to recognize an inspired and infallible oracle on
the Tiber, when it is remembered that again and again successive popes
have contradicted each other; that popes have denounced councils, and
councils have denounced popes; that the Bible of Sixtus V. had so many
admitted errors--nearly two thousand--that its own authors had to recall
it? How is it possible for the children of the Church to regard as
"delusive errors" the globular form of the earth, her position as a
planet in the solar system, her rotation on her axis, her movement round
the sun? How can they deny that there are antipodes, and other worlds
than ours? How can they believe that the world was made out of nothing,
completed in a week, finished just as we see it now; that it has
undergone no change, but that its parts have worked so indifferently as
to require incessant interventions?

THE ERRORS OF ECCLESIASTICISM. When Science is thus commanded to
surrender her intellectual convictions, may she not ask the ecclesiastic
to remember the past? The contest respecting the figure of the earth,
and the location of heaven and hell, ended adversely to him. He affirmed
that the earth is an extended plane, and that the sky is a firmament,
the floor of heaven, through which again and again persons have been
seen to ascend. The globular form demonstrated beyond any possibility
of contradiction by astronomical facts, and by the voyage of Magellan's
ship, he then maintained that it is the central body of the universe,
all others being in subordination to it, and it the grand object of
God's regard. Forced from this position, he next affirmed that it is
motionless, the sun and the stars actually revolving, as they apparently
do, around it. The invention of the telescope proved that here again
he was in error. Then he maintained that all the motions of the solar
system are regulated by providential intervention; the "Principia"
of Newton demonstrated that they are due to irresistible law. He then
affirmed that the earth and all the celestial bodies were created about
six thousand years ago, and that in six days the order of Nature was
settled, and plants and animals in their various tribes introduced.
Constrained by the accumulating mass of adverse evidence, he enlarged
his days into periods of indefinite length--only, however, to find