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2. That this revelation of God was identical with the Messiah of the New Testament. John, 1: 18, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."

3. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New, and there is an identity of thought running throughout the sacred volume.

4. The grand idea of the Bible is the revelation of CHRIST to the world. He is the great Hero, both of the Old and the New Tes

taments.

5. What a bright evidence this unity of thought, kept up through the Pentateuch, Prophets, Gospels and Epistles, affords of the Inspiration of the Bible! God must have guided the minds of all, or their thoughts would not always have been running in the same channel.

6. What a glorious proof of our Lord's Divinity! He was the Angel of Jehovah, the Jehovah, the God who created the world, who presided over, and was worshipped by the Jewish nation.

ARTICLE V.

ASTRONOMICAL VIEWS OF THE ANCIENTS.

By PROFESSOR TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D., University of New-York.

SWEDENBORG tells us that in the course of his visits to the spiritual world, he several times met with the ghost of Aristotle, and held certain very interesting conversations with him respecting the opinions he had entertained while upon the earth. Among other things, he tells us that he found it exceedingly difficult to drive the old Stagyrite out of his absurd notions in regard to the figure of the earth. It would appear from this account that a two-thousand years' residence in the ghostly world had produced no change in his philosophical views, or given him any more light in respect to either spiritual or physical matters, than he had enjoyed during the dark days of his sojourn in this earthly and animal existence. After a most faithful effort, however, Swedenborg at last succeeds in convincing him of his errors. He learns with astonishment that the earth is actually round, and finally yields to the improbable idea of there being antipodes inhabiting the other side, with their feet and heads in vertical and opposite directions to our own. The ghost of the old Greek remembering, doubtless, with a stubborn pride the absolute sway he had so long exercised in the learned and

scientific world, is very reluctant to be taught such new and startling doctrines. He is exceedingly puzzled to understand how up and down can both have reference to the same point, or how persons and things on the under side of the earth can possibly maintain their position without falling off into the aлegov, or infinite abyss of space below. But he is at last convinced, and becomes, as we are told, very much ashamed of his former notions.

This may be taken as a pretty good sample of Swedenborg's dreams, or of the manner in which he was wont to transfer to the spiritual world the subjective states of his own mind, with all its errors, ignorance, and prejudices. In others of his numerous visions, his theological partialities and dislikes are equally apparent; furnishing conclusive evidence, that the spirituality in which he lived, transcended but little, if any, the sphere of his own brain, or the cherished thoughts and impressions of his waking hours.

No reputation that Swedenborg may have among his own followers can shield him here from the charge of having made, to say the least, a shameful and egregious blunder. He admits the possibility of lying appearances sent by evil spirits, and the most charitable supposition might be, that in this case the seer himself was thus imposed on by an emissary of darkness. The Aristotle whom he saw could not have been the renowned philosopher of that name, whose numerous works have come down to us. The truth, however, is that the Swedish mystic has imposed upon himself, by giving in his dreams, an objective presentation to one of the most vulgar errors of his day. Without taking any pains to test its truth, he simply assumes the common notion, that, until quite modern times, all mankind, the learned as well as the unlearned, had believed the earth to be a flat, extended, immovable plain. It is only as representing such a common notion, that we adduce his statement, or attach any importance to it; although we cannot but regard it as most strange, that one who has among his disciples such a reputation for learning, and especially for a knowledge of the ancient world and church, should have suffered himself to be imposed on, or should have imposed on himself, by such a falsity engendered of his own ignorance and prejudice.

That such an opinion in respect to the ancient ignorance should prevail among the comparatively uninformed masses, need excite no wonder. That it should be so often met with, however, among those who not only have the means of knowing, but the actual knowledge to the contrary, if they would but advert to it, can only be accounted for by remembering the strange tenacity of early errors imbibed in childhood, and the power with which they often override the clearest subsequent information. One of the first lessons the child learns in this boasting age, is the immense superiority of modern science, and modern philosophy, to anything which might bear those names in the ancient world. As though the for

mer had not sufficient ground, in the excellence of its own unchallenged claim, and in its acknowledged supremacy in many respects, the greatest pains are taken to present a false, and unnecessary, and foolish disparagement of the latter. Hence so many grow up with this idea, that in respect to all true views of the earth and the universe, almost all who lived before Copernicus and Galileo were the veriest infants in natural knowledge-the merest children of sense, who regarded the earth as a flat extended surface, the heavens as a solid vaulted arch on which the celestial beings had their residence, the sun and moon, the stars and planets, as fixed in this solid firmament, or in similar concentric and transparent spheres, with no other design but to give light to the earth, or serve as minute sparkling ornaments in the fancied kosmos of which our own world was the foundation as well as the most important partin other words, that for which all the rest existed.

Among other causes that have contributed to this, we may reckon certain familiar stories that are to be found in our most elementary reading-books, and which, in consequence, make an impression that is with difficulty erased, or even much affected by the best information afterwards acquired. There are, for example, the common histories of Columbus and of Galileo. The authors of the popular accounts of the discoverer of America have been disposed to set in the strongest light their hero's favorite idea of the spherical figure of the earth, as something at that time most striking and new. They have been too fond of representing him as a martyr to science-as the victim of that persecution which awaits all new discoveries. All this, too, feeds the scientific vanity of the relator or reader, as one who himself views things from an elevated scientific stand-point, and can therefore well appreciate the martyr's lofty position. Hence the tendency to contrast the meek science of the discoverer with the intolerant bigotry and ignorance of his In the opponents especially those of the ecclesiastical order. case to which we now refer, these have been unduly magnified. Accounts that may be proved to be spurious and inconsistent with known facts, have been handed down as authentic history. There is also given a false view of the nature of the oppposition he encountered. It is represented as having reference to his scientific theory of the earth's sphericity; whereas it was in fact mainly grounded on the practical objections to the execution of his scheme, which arose from the then state of navigation and geographical knowledge.

Be this, however, as it may, there is no denying that, from the common histories of Columbus (and they are among the first books that come into the hands of children) there is, in a great degree, derived this prevailing notion which afterwards adheres even to the better educated-namely, that previous to his time there had hardly been known, or even thought of, the doctrine of the earth's

sphericity, much less of its motion on its axis, and still less any idea, even the most remote, of its not being the center of the uni

verse.

Another thing which tends greatly to aid the strange misconception thus existing even among intelligent men, is the trite story of Galileo, so common in almost all our school-books, and such a special favorite with a certain class of sciolists and lecturers who seem never to become weary in repeating this stale account for the thousandth and ten-thousandth time. He, too, was a martyr to science. He, too, was a victim of that persecution that awaits all who make discoveries, and which the bold lecturer would have us believe may even yet be encountered by himself for his fearless avowal of such original views as generally accompany the recital of this thread-bare history. And then, too, to add to the eclat of their favorite saint, there has ever been a disposition among scientific men (a disposition ever the strongest with such as were the most skeptical, and, therefore, in their own way, the most bigoted themselves) to magnify the ignorance and bigotry of his clerical opponents, to ascribe to them a strange, motiveless hatred to knowledge in the abstract, and to repudiate any charitable suggestion that they, on their part, might possibly have been influenced by a pure zeal for truths of a higher order than any relating to the figure or motion of the earth,-truths, too, which seemed menaced, not so much by the facts as by the proud and boasting spirit of irreligious science, aiming, as it often does, to pervert such facts to an irreligious and unscientific purpose.

To return, however, to Swedenborg and Aristotle. In order to prove that the seer was in this case imposed on by some counterfeit ghost, we need only, in the first place, turn to the treatise entitled, De Calo. We believe that there is but very little, if any, dispute among the learned of this being one of the most genuine works of Aristotle. At all events, (if such a proof of authenticity might have weight with the decriers of the Stagyrite,) it does undoubtedly contain many very strange and extravagant opinions,enough to furnish an abundant stock for all who are most fond of declaiming on the absurdities of ancient science. On these questions, however, of the globular form of the earth, and of the antipodes, and in respect to a philosophical view of up and down, instead of being the fool that he is represented to be, he was undoubtedly as orthodox as any in the newest scientific church,-as sound, in short, as Galileo, or Bacon, or even Swedenborg himself. He not only held the earth to be round, and maintained the existence of antipodes, but put forth some of the best demonstrations that have ever been advanced in proof of those positions, except the actual fact of the circumnavigation of the globe.

A leading one among these arguments of Aristotle, yet maintains its place in our school-books on astronomy, and is, doubtless, often

appealed to by many, who are not aware of its antiquity, as a striking result of the progress of modern science, since its revival by Copernicus and Galileo. It may be found in the second book of the treatise De Cœlo, chap. xiv. 8. He is reasoning against Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and others of that ancient school, who, in spirit, at least, bore the nearest resemblance to some of most modern date. They claimed to be par eminence, the physici, the naturalists, the scientific men of their day. They were the Baconians of their time, the men of induction, of observation, of experiment,-who, avoiding all visionary a priori speculations about to Bextitor, and to zugiótatov, about the well and fit, and highest and best, and ideas, and final causes, prided themselves upon having adopted the cautious, scientific, a posteriori method of reasoning from facts or phenomena, as made known to us by the senses. In contending with this school, he refutes them on their own ground of philosophising from appearances, and shows that their doctrine of the earth's being flat, and floating on the compressed air or water, οὐ τέμνουσα ἀλλ ἐπιπωματίζουσα τὸν ἀέρα τὸν κάτωθεν, like a cover to a vessel, is utterly at war with the phenomena that are exhibited in an eclipse of the moon. He had before proved the doctrine from other and more a priori reasons, in other words, reasons drawn from the known or conceived relations and fitness of things. Here he appeals to the senses regarded as making their observations under the guidance of reason. “ Ετι δὲ καὶ διὰ τῶν ΦΑΙΝΟΜΕΝΩΝ κατὰ τὴν ΑΙΣΘΗΣΙΝ. οὔτε γάρ αἱ τῆς σελήνης ἐκλείψεις τοιαύτας ἂν εἶχον τὰς ἀποτομάς. νῦν μὲν γάρ. κ. T. 2. περὶ δὲ τὰς ἐκλείψεις ἀεὶ κυρτὴν ἔχει τὴν διορίζουσαν γραμμήν.” “ Ωστ' ἐπείπερ ἐκλείπει διὰ τὴν τῆς γῆς ἐπιπρόσθησιν, ἡ τῆς γῆς ἂν εἴη περιφέρεια του σχήματος αἰτία σφαιροειδὴς οὖσα, “And, moreover, it follows also from the appearances, or phenomena, that are presented to the sense. Otherwise the eclipse of the moon would not exhibit such sections as we see it does. For although in its monthly phases it has all diversities of outline, so as to be at one time straight, again gibbous or convex, and again, concave, yet in its eclipses it has the defining or intersecting line, (made by the shadow of the earth,) invariably curved. So that, since the moon suffers eclipse by the interposition of the earth, it must be the periphery (of the earth's shadow,) that is the cause, because the earth itself is spherical." Another phenomenal argument which still maintains its place in all popular astronomical treatises, is drawn from the appearances (qaraoias) and varying heights of the stars. From these, it is inferred, not only that the earth is round, but also that it hath no very great magnitude." Since even in a small change of distance, either to the north or to the south, there is a manifest change in respect to the horizon (ó ógicor xúxlog), so that the stars which were over our heads undergo a change (of position or direction,) and do not appear the same (that is, vertical,) as we travel either to the north or to the south. In this way, some stars are seen in Egypt,

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