ith something
infinitely better? This feeling appears in St. Augustine's famous
utterance, "What concern is it to me whether the heavens as a sphere
inclose the earth in the middle of the world or overhang it on either
side?"

As to the heavenly bodies, theologians looked on them as at best only
objects of pious speculation. Regarding their nature the fathers of the
Church were divided. Origen, and others with him, thought them living
beings possessed of souls, and this belief was mainly based upon the
scriptural vision of the morning stars. singing together, and upon
the beautiful appeal to the "stars and light" in the song of the three
children--the Benedicite--which the Anglican communion has so wisely
retained in its Liturgy.

Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the angels, and that
stars were moved by angels. The Gnostics thought the stars spiritual
beings governed by angels, and appointed not to cause earthly events but
to indicate them.

As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the Church
was based upon the scriptural declarations that a solid vault--a
"firmament"--was extended above the earth, and that the heavenly
bodies were simply lights hung within it. This was for a time held
very tenaciously. St. Philastrius, in his famous treatise on heresies,
pronounced it a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God
from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other
view he declared "false to the Catholic faith." This view also survived
in the sacred theory established so firmly by Cosmas in the sixth
century. Having established his plan of the universe upon various texts
in the Old and New Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box,
covered by the solid "firmament," he brought in additional texts from
Scripture to account for the planetary movements, and developed at
length the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of
heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose.

How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we find in
the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest leader of orthodox thought
in the seventh century. He affirms that since the fall of man, and
on account of it, the sun and moon shine with a feebler light; but he
proves from a text in Isaiah that when the world shall be fully redeemed
these "great lights" will shine again in all their early splendour.
But, despite these authorities and their theo