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But I may pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense.
Bearing this in mind, we may set up a fivefold division of the religious literature of the Babylonians in the stricter sense: the magical texts, the hymns and prayers, omens and forecasts, the cosmology, epics and legends. It will be apparent that the first three divisions represent a practical part of the literature, while the two latter are of a more purely literary character.
In the field of cosmology, Greek genius has demonstrated that the earth is spheroidal, that the moon is earthlike in structure and much smaller than our globe, and that the sun is vastly larger and many times more distant than the moon. The actual size of the earth and the angle of its axis with the ecliptic have been measured with approximate accuracy.
The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly advocated the separation of almonds and raisins.
The terms 'self-existent' and 'eternal' are not found in savage vocabularies and seem to have no representatives in savage thought. Savage cosmology carries the history of the world back to a certain point and stops when there is no familiar hypothesis of genesis.
He welds together all the different elements of his thought in the heat of his passion for God. His cosmology and his ontology are a philosophical exposition of the Jewish conception of God's relation to the universe, his ethics and his psychology of the Jewish conception of man's relation to God.
We cannot afford to reproduce them here as the discussions are technical, lengthy and intricate. Having given his philosophical cosmology, Gersonides then undertakes to show in detail that the Biblical story of creation teaches the same doctrine. Nay, he goes so far as to say that it was the Biblical account that suggested to him his philosophical theory.
Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the way for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which conceived the earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow that in shaking it shook also religion.
This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the learned might pass over to Catholicism that is to say, from reason to faith.
Then comes the fall from Libra, through Scorpio, and banishment from the Garden of Eden. That is the victory of Satan, or Winter, over Summer, etc. It is useless to repeat the same old, old story. The yearly journey of the Sun around the constellated dial of Deity is the Astro basis of all primitive cosmology.
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