re even
worse. The interpretations of Scripture by Luther and Calvin became as
sacred to their followers as the Scripture itself. When Calixt ventured,
in interpreting the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that "the
waters above the heavens" were contained in a vast receptacle upheld by
a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as heretical.

In the latter part of the sixteenth century Musaeus interpreted the
accounts in Genesis to mean that first God made the heavens for the roof
or vault, and left it there on high swinging until three days later he
put the earth under it. But the new scientific thought as to the earth's
form had gained the day. The most sturdy believers were obliged to
adjust their, biblical theories to it as best they could.(29)

(29) For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see
Santarem, Cosmographie, vol i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance
of the idea of the earth's sphericity after the eighth century, see
Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of authors
are given. For the views of the Reformers, see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 679
and 693. For Calixt, Musaeus, and others, ibid., pp. 673-677 and 761.

II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH.

Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central
city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.

The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the centre.
The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure,
in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the
Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the
Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the
temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred
stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the "middle
kingdom." It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human
thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem.

The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth,
and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout
the "ages of faith" this was very generally accepted as a direct
revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the
greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on
the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could
be nowhere but at the earth's centr