gnment, White rebukes the Fathers for having clung so
tenaciously to false opinions regarding the shape of the earth, the
motion of the heavens, and the nature of the firmament. And, most
seriously of all, he charges the Fathers with indifference and even
hostility to the study of science itself.

In a few short paragraphs it is impossible to give an adequate
rejoinder to these damaging complaints. But they demand some sort of
reply, however inadequate it be, as emanating from an American
scholar and statesman of high rank, and embodied in a work that has
free and wide circulation among our college students.

_Defence of Their Doctrine_.--The first palliation for the reputed
offence of the Fathers is that whatever false science they retail,
was practically all of it derived from the very sources which it is
the fashion of the day to laud in the highest degree. As far as was
consistent with their faith, the Christian Fathers were the pupils
of the Greeks. It was the latter and not the patristic writers who
invented the false theories of a solid firmament and a motionless
earth. If Europe and Arabia down to the Renaissance believed in the
Geocentric system, it was because they trusted Ptolemy the Greek,
till then admittedly the greatest of astronomers. And a similar
ancestry could be traced, we venture to say, for all or the major
part of their scientific errors as far as these may have extended.

_Restrictions Made by the Fathers_.--But if the Fathers were in
{487} general the heirs of the Greeks, they were not guilty of the
mistake of accepting the inheritance in its entirety. To a large
extent they could discern the chaff from the wheat, and were
actually at pains to make the separation. It ought to be known that
the scientific literature of the Grecians is teeming with the
wildest and vainest of speculations regarding all matters within the
scope of astronomical science. Here as elsewhere, the Greeks
speculated endlessly, contradictorily, emptily, and almost
aimlessly. In unfounded speculation they discoursed on all manner of
astronomical subjects, the shape and size and distance of the sun,
its nature and that of the moon and stars, and so on almost
indefinitely, with scarcely any agreement or concomitance of
opinion. There were almost as many diverse opinions as there were
men.

To this motley assemblage of groundless and conflicting t