of time some were as rude
as the skins of wild beasts, and others pleasing and cultured like silk
and gold. Words have been born of hatred and revenge, of love and self
sacrifice and fear, of agony and joy the stars have fashioned them, and
in them mingled the darkness and the dawn.

Every word that we get from the past is, so to speak, a mummy robed in
the linen of the grave. They are the crystallizations of human
history, of all that man enjoyed, of all that man has suffered, his
victories and defeats, all that he has lost and won. Words are the
shadows of all that has been; they are the mirrors of all that is. The
ghosts also enlightened our fathers in astronomy and geology. According
to them the world was made out of nothing, and a little more nothing
having been taken than was used in the construction of the world, the
stars were made out of the scraps that were left over. Cosmos, in the
sixth century, taught that the stars were impelled by angels, who
carried them upon their shoulders, rolled them in front of them, or
drew them after. He also taught that each angel who pushed a star took
great pains to observe what the other angels were doing, so that the
relative distances between the stars might always remain the same.

He stated that this world was a vast body of water, with a strip of
land on the outside; that Adam and Eve lived on the outer strip; that
their descendants were drowned on the outer strip, all except Noah and
his family; he accounted for night and day by saying that on the outer
strip of land was a mountain, around which the sun revolved, producing
darkness when it was hidden from sight, and daylight when it emerged;
he also declared the earth to be flat. This he proved by many passages
from the Bible; among other reasons for believing the earth to be flat
he referred to a passage in the New Testament, which says that Christ
shall come again in glory and power, and every eye shall see him, and
said, now, if the world is round how are the people on the other side
going to see Christ when he comes? That settled the question, and the
church not only indorsed this book but declared that whoever believed
either less or more was a heretic and would be dealt with as such.

In those blessed days ignorance was a king and science was an outcast.
The church knew that the moment the earth ceased to be the center of
the universe, and became a mere speck in the starry sphere of
existence, every religion