What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God. Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve was none of their concern. Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of Christ. There was for example the problem of our earth. The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of other stars. The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe. It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first chapter of Genesis. When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity, of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to establish a fixed date for the beginning of time. In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space. True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books. One book was enough. That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were divinely inspired.