which the stars were fixed, or
wandered; and above them heaven after heaven, each tenanted by its own
orders of beings, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity--and by
Him, be it always remembered, the mother of Deity--was enthroned.

And if above the earth was the kingdom of light, and purity, and
holiness, what could be more plain, than that below it was the kingdom of
darkness, and impurity, and sin? That was no theory to our forefathers:
it was a physical fact. Had not even the heathens believed as much, and
said so, by the mouth of the poet Virgil? He had declared that the mouth
of Tartarus lay in Italy, hard by the volcanic lake Avernus; and after
the unexpected eruption of Vesuvius in the first century, nothing seemed
more clear than that Virgil was right; and that men were justified in
talking of Tartarus, Styx, and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian
entities. Etna, Stromboli, Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) in
like wise mouths of hell; and there were not wanting holy hermits, who
had heard, from within those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and
the howls of demons tormenting the souls of the endlessly lost.

Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the Incarnation of
our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the same theory of moral
retribution; and that, painted on the walls of Buddhist temples, might be
seen horrors identical with those which adorned the walls of many a
Christian Church, in the days when men believed in this Tartarology as
firmly as they now believe in the results of chemistry or of astronomy.

And now--How is the earth shaken, and the heavens likewise, in that very
sense in which the expression is used by him who wrote to the Hebrews?
Our conceptions of them are shaken. How much of that mediaeval cosmogony
do educated men believe, in the sense in which they believe that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that if they
steal their neighbour's goods they commit a sin?

The earth has been shaken for us, more and more violently, as the years
have rolled on. It was shaken when Astronomy told us that the earth was
not the centre of the universe, but a tiny planet revolving round a sun
in a remote region thereof.

It was shaken when Geology told us that the earth had endured for
countless ages, during which continents had become oceans, and oceans
continents, again and again. And even now, it is being shaken by
researc