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 that even this device was inadequate.  The six ages, with their six special creations, could no longer be maintained, when it was discovered that species, slowly emerged in one age, reached a culmination in a second, and gradually died out in a third:  this overlapping from age to age would not only have demanded creations, but re-creations also.  He affirmed that there had been a deluge, which covered the whole earth above the tops of the highest mountains, and that the waters of this flood were removed by a wind.  Correct ideas respecting the dimensions of the atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the operation of evaporation, proved how untenable these statements are.  Of the progenitors of the human race, he declared that they had come from their Maker’s hand perfect, both in body and mind, and had subsequently experienced a fall.  He is now considering how best to dispose of the evidence continually accumulating respecting the savage condition of prehistoric man.