As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault,
Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault of religion;
it was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological
dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words
and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded,
loud-voiced men are ever prone to substitute for religion. Justly
is it said by one of the most eminent among contemporary Anglican
divines, that "it is because they have mistaken the dawn for a
conflagration that theologians have so often been foes of light."[170]
CHAPTER IV.
FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS.
I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW.
FEW things in the evolution of astronomy are more suggestive than
the struggle between the theological and the scientific doctrine
regarding comets--the passage from the conception of them as
fire-balls flung by an angry God for the purpose of scaring a
wicked world, to a recognition of them as natural in origin and
obedient to law in movement.
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