The philosophy of eating. By Albert J. Bellows, M.D.

176

A REVELATION OF APPEARANCES.

understood, there was a constant jealousy lest some
astronomer or geologist should discover some discrepancy between the written word of God and the book
of nature. Thus, when Galileo announced the discovery through his telescope that the earth revolved around
the sun, the Christian philosophers of his day, with
that strange perversion of intellect by prejudices which
always characterized the human mind, demanded as
security for their precious Bible that he should retract
his opinion, and let the sun go on its revolutions
around the earth, and even demanded that he should
do so on pain of death. Not one of them dared to
look into the telescope, lest they might be convinced
of the revolution of the earth; for if the earth did revolve, then Joshua's testimony was not true. Joshua
said, when "the sun stood still in the midst of the
heavens, and did not go down about a whole day,"...
"there was no day like that before it or after it." Galileo said the sun had always stood still, and the revolution of the earth divided the day from the night; and
so determined were these philosophers to preserve the
Bible from harm, and so darkened were the minds of
these the best men of the age, that they deliberately
concluded to take his life as a choice of evils, —the life
of one man, even one of the best of men, being considered of little value compared with the value of the
precious word of God. But now that it is understood that Joshua only described a miraculous event,
as it appeared to him, there is no difficulty on that