One statement more, to clear the ground. You will not understand me at all to say that religion has done nothing for science. It has done much for it. The work of Christianity has been mighty indeed. Through these two thousand years, despite the waste of its energies on all the things its Blessed Founder most earnestly condemned--on fetich and subtlety and war and pomp--it has undermined servitude, mitigated tyranny, given hope to the hopeless, comfort to the afflicted, light to the blind, bread to the starving, joy to the dying, and this work continues. And its work for science, too, has been great. It has fostered science often. Nay, it has nourished that feeling of self-sacrifice for human good, which has nerved some of the bravest men for these battles. Unfortunately, a devoted army of good men started centuries ago with the idea that independent scientific investigation is unsafe--that theology must intervene to superintend its methods, and the Biblical record, as an historical compendium and scientific treatise, be taken as a standard to determine its results. So began this great modern war. GEOGRAPHY. The first typical battle-field to which I would refer is that of Geography--the simplest elementary doctrine of the earth's shape and surface. Among the legacies of thought left by the ancient world to the modern, were certain ideas of the rotundity of the earth. These ideas were vague; they were mixed with absurdities; but they were _germ ideas_, and, after the barbarian storm which ushered in the modern world had begun to clear away, these germ ideas began to bud and bloom in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men hazarded the suggestion that the earth is round--is a globe.[1] The greatest and most earnest men of the time took fright at once. To them, the idea of the earth's rotundity seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture: by which, of course, they meant _their interpretation_ of Scripture. Among the first who took up arms against the new thinkers was Eusebius. He endeavored to turn off these ideas by bringing science into contempt, and by making the innovators understand that he and the fathers of the Church despised all such inquiries. Speaking of the innovations in physical science, he said: "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things."[2] Lactantius asserted the ideas of those studying astronomy to be "mad and senseless."[3]