e matters, turning our
souls to better things." Basil of Caesarea declared it "a matter of no
interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or
concave in the middle like a fan." Lactantius referred to the ideas
of those studying astronomy as "bad and senseless," and opposed the
doctrine of the earth's sphericity both from Scripture and reason.
St. John Chrysostom also exerted his influence against this scientific
belief; and Ephraem Syrus, the greatest man of the old Syrian Church,
widely known as the "lute of the Holy Ghost," opposed it no less
earnestly.

But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and
bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement of
Alexandria in the third, with others in centuries following, were not
content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an old heathen
theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which
one Church authority added one idea and another, until it was fully
developed. Taking the survival of various early traditions, given in
the seventh verse of the first chapter of Genesis, they insisted on the
clear declarations of Scripture that the earth was, at creation, arched
over with a solid vault, "a firmament," and to this they added the
passages from Isaiah and the Psalms, in which it declared that the
heavens are stretched out "like a curtain," and again "like a tent to
dwell in." The universe, then, is like a house: the earth is its ground
floor, the firmament its ceiling, under which the Almighty hangs out
the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. This
ceiling is also the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a
cistern, shaped, as one of the authorities says, "like a bathing-tank,"
and containing "the waters which are above the firmament." These waters
are let down upon the earth by the Almighty and his angels through the
"windows of heaven." As to the movement of the sun, there was a citation
of various passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various
proportions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from the Bible
that the earth could not be a sphere.(27)

(27) For Eusebius, see the Proep. Ev., xv, 61. For Basil, see the
Hexaemeron, Hom. ix. For Lactantius, see his Inst. Div., lib. iii, cap.
3; also citations in Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, London, 1857, vol.
i, p. 194, and in St. Martin, Histoire de la Geographie, pp. 216, 217.
For the