It is very significant that neither in the Acts nor in the Epistles is there any allusion to these resurrections. When Peter and the others were preaching the resurrection of Christ, why did they not adduce and produce some of these many, risen saints, whose visible, tangible, living and speaking evidence would have been irresistible? Just as the resurrection of Jesus could be accepted without misgiving by the non-scientific early Christians, to whom miracles appeared among the most frequent occurrences of life, so could the ascension. Their earth was a plane, vaulted by the sky, lamped by the little sun and moon and stars; above this vault was Heaven, where their God dwelt enthroned; they knew nothing of the law of gravitation; their Christ, standing in the flesh on the Mount of Olives, floated up through this vault to sit enthroned beside his Father in the most natural supernatural manner. We can conceive and sympathise with this simple faith; but it is hard to conceive and sympathise with the blind faith, which seems wilfully blind, of the modem educated Christians. It has been often remarked that Copernicus and Kepler and Newton have destroyed all the old mythologies, including of course the mythology of both the Old and New Testaments. With the earth no longer the universe of mortal life, between a Heaven above its domed firmament and a Hades like a vast dungeon beneath, but a quite infinitesimal grain of sand involved by an infinitesimal drop of dew, floating and revolving in an ocean of space boundless in heighth and depth and breadth, amidst innumerable other spherules, most of which visible are very much greater than itself, and at inconceivable distances from it; with man no longer the lord of the creation, for whose service all things were made, but an animalcule inexpressibly small, living for a moment inexpressibly brief, with limitless time before his beginning and limitless time beyond his end; the Christian mythology and system, among others, because ineffably absurd. Where is the Heaven for its God? where the Hell for its Devil? Where is above? Where beneath? Whence came the winged angels, with their wrings which would not enable them to fly? If Jesus had ascended and continued to ascend with the speed of light, he might be ascending now and go 011 ascending for millions and millions of years, and still not reach a heavenly region beyond the range of our telescopes I And think of the scheme of the Atonement in the system of the universe, as we are learning to know it now—try to conceive an infinite and eternal God of this infinite and eternal Whole sacrificing his only son for the salvation of us most insignificant insects on our most insignificant earth! The immense conceptions of science dwarf these petty conceptions of mythology to a littleness which reduces them beneath consideration, which in our days reduces them even beneath contempt.