For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and
its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance
of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old
Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the
spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had
no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact
of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of
gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it--a sentiment of
combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which
all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou hast hanged the world upon
nothing,' said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence
wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the
preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the
hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its
most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott's flat earth would be the true
territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any
objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no
foolish ideas about the dignity of man.
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