e in the church." The ship
went round. The earth was circumnavigated. Science passed its hand
above it and beneath it, and where was the heaven, and where was the
hell? Vanished forever! And they dwell now only in the religion of
superstition. We found there was no place for Jacob's ladder to lean
against; no place there for the gods and angels to live; no place there
to empty the waters of the deluge; no place there to which Christ could
have ascended; and the foundations of the New Jerusalem crumbled, and
the towers and domes fell and became simply space--space sown with an
infinite number of stars; not with New Jerusalems, but with
constellations.

Then man began to grow great, and with that you know came astronomy.
Now just see what they did in that. In 1473 Copernicus was born. In
1543 his great work. In 1616 the system of Copernicus was condemned by
the pope, by the infallible Catholic church, and the church is about as
near right upon that subject as upon any other. The system of
Copernicus was denounced. And how long do you suppose the church
fought that? Let me tell you. It was revoked by Pius VII. in the year
of grace 1821. For 205 years after the death of Copernicus the church
insisted that that system was false, and that the old idea was true.
Astronomy is the first help that we ever received from heaven. Then
came Kepler in 1609, and you may almost date the birth of science from
the night that Kepler discovered his first law. That was the dawn of
the day of intelligence--his first law, that the planets do not move in
circles; his second law, that they described equal spaces in equal
times; his third law, that there was a direct relation between weight
and velocity. That man gave us a key to heaven. That man opened its
infinite book, and we now read it, and he did more good than all the
theologians that ever lived. I have not time to speak of the
others--of Galileo, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of hundreds of others
that I could mention.

The next thing that gave this church a blow was statistics. Away went
special providence. We found by taking statistics that we could tell
the average length of human life; that this human life did not depend
upon infinite caprice; that it depended upon conditions, circumstances,
laws and facts, and that those conditions, circumstances, and facts
were ever active. And now you will see the man who depends entirely
upon special providence gets his life insur