For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s horror at the Newtonian astronomy and its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the spirit has much kinship with it.  The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas.  But the theory of gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it—­a sentiment of combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which all things hang upon one thread.  ’Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing,’ said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy.  The sense of the preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its most thrilling form.  Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s flat earth would be the true territory for a comfortable atheist.  Nor would the old Jews have any objection to being as much upside down as right way up.  They had no foolish ideas about the dignity of man.

It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy; whether we shall ever speak of ‘early earth-turn’ instead of ’early sunrise,’ and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or looking down on the stars.  But if we ever do, there are really a large number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new mythology.  Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious, imagination, says that according to astronomers, ’the sea is a vast mountain of water miles high.’  To have discovered that mountain of moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like discovering Atlantis:  it is enough to make the old world young again.  In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out sturdily to climb up the face of the sea.  If we once realize all this earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles:  we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own.  Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star.

In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of poetry.  When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use those facts symbolically.  Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence.  If we had the good fortune to