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fear that the little attention I have hitherto paid to the subject of biblical astronomy will preclude my contributing much of value to its discussion.

However, with regard to certain miraculous astronomical events recorded in the Old Testament, and alluded to by the lecturer, it seems to me that if we accept as a fact that the planet upon which we live, and I am not going to enter into any controversy as to the opinions held by various scientists with respect to the earth's age or the manner of its formation, together with the sun, the moon and the vast myriads of other heavenly bodies pursuing their allotted courses through space, were created by the Supreme Spirit, whom we designate as God, then it is an equally simple matter to believe that the Great Architect of the Universe, in the exercise of His unfathomable wisdom and in the plenitude of His illimitable power, so temporarily dislocated or changed the working of the complex machinery which He himself had made, as to cause, without bringing about general destruction and chaos, the extraordinary astronomical phenomena which we are told, and know, have proved such stumbling blocks in the path of the faithful throughout subsequent ages of the world. To my mind, the two questions are indissoluble; if we accept the one we must accept the other, and if we reject the one we must reject the other.

Passing on; if, as the lecturer states, the astronomers of the present day are but little inclined to pay much attention to the scientific work of the ancients, the reason would seem to be intelligible. While those pioneers of astronomical science had certain glimmerings of the truth, that truth was more or less obscured and choked by erroneous matter; and with a vast field before them, which constant research is ever enlarging, modern observers may well be pardoned if they not unnaturally prefer to press forward rather than to look backward.

Nevertheless, it is not always safe to assume that the ancients were quite as ignorant as they are sometimes supposed and represented to have been. As an instance in point, I may mention that in the museum at Naples there is a case containing surgical instruments recovered from long buried Pompeii, and among those instruments is at least one which is identical with what is termed a modern invention.

Coming to the worship of the heavenly bodies by the ancients,

the Arabs before the time of Mohammed paid their devotions to the planets, stars, and various idols, but many of them at the same time, believed in one Supreme God the Creator and Governor of the Universe, and regarded their other deities rather in the light of intermediaries with the Almighty, and as subsidiary adjuncts of their religion. Mohammed sternly forbade the worship of all but one God, of whom he claimed to be the prophet, and in order to emphasise the absolute nothingness of the other objects of supplication, he, in the fifty-third chapter of the Koran, that sacred book of Islam so largely compiled from the Jewish Scriptures, declared that God is the Lord of the dog-star (Sirius), one of the celestial deities worshipped by the old Arabs.

The argument may be advanced that anything which obtained at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the seventh centuries of the Christian era had very little connection with systems current in Scriptural ages, but against this contention it may be urged that the East moves slowly, and that the same customs which existed at the commencement of the Hegira (which began July 16, A.D. 622) had probably obtained at least some centuries earlier.

As the Jews of old announced and celebrated the appearance of the new moon by the blowing of trumpets, and the Hindus in some places practice a similar observance, so the Mohammedans pay particular attention to the same manifestation. Those among us who have had experience of Eastern lands have witnessed the earnest anxiety exhibited for the appearance of the new moon which terminates the terribly severe fast of Ramadan and ushers in the feast of Bairam. Even the first appearance of the ordinary new moon is a cause of joy, and when a few years ago I was residing for a time in one of the protected native states (Bahawalpur) situated in the north-west of India, it was customary for the person who first sighted the Queen of Night, and reported her presence to the Nawab, to receive a present; then the members of the court tendered their felicitations to their ruler, and a salute of seventeen guns, the number allotted to his highness by the Government of India, was fired in honour of the auspicious occasion.

It is a difficult point to determine how far the ancient peoples were acquainted with the globular form of the earth. Personally, I am not competent to express any opinion as to the correctness, or otherwise, of translations; but with respect to the inference drawn

from our Lord's statement about what will happen at His sudden second coming, it is certain that He Himself, being Divine, was possessed of all knowledge, while His hearers, His disciples, who had not yet received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, were anything but learned men.

According to Plutarch, Thales (sixth century B.C.) knew that the earth was a sphere, but it is now said that he looked upon it as being a flat disc; Axiniander, about the same period, thought that it was cylindrical in shape; Pythagoras, a little later on, conceived it to be a sphere; Hipparchus (second century B.C.), the discoverer of the precession of the equinoxes, was of opinion that it was flat; while Ptolemy, some four centuries after him, held the view that it was sensibly spherical. Even at the commencement of the twentieth century there are people in England, possessed of some measure of education, who, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary, maintain that our planet is flat.

Dr. HEYWARD SMITH.-I should like to draw attention to the constant recurrence in the paper of the expression "the Jews." On page 13, "when the Jewish nation had reached the summit of its glory, Solomon's temple was dedicated," etc. It is rather evasive, because we know the Jews were not called Jews until after. They were called Israel or Hebrews.

Mr. MARTIN ROUSE.-When Job used the words, "God stretches out the north over empty space and hangeth the earth upon nothing," it is clear that he did not believe that the earth was supported in some fabulous way-such, for example, as the Brahmins conceived, on the back of an elephant which stood on the back of a tortoise; or, as the Grecians conceived, upon the shoulders of Atlas; but he believed that in some wonderful way God held it poised without support in space.* At the same time, the statement that He stretches out the north over empty space shows that the speaker knew that the earth was round-not necessarily globular, but certainly round; because, if the earth were a square or oblong figure with northern, southern, eastern and western sides, the north would not have been stretched out over empty space, but would have been a long line of earth;

*Therefore when the same speaker (in chap. ix, 6) said that God causes the pillars of the earth to tremble, he must have alluded in a poetic way to the inward supports of the earth's mighty crust.

whereas, if the earth is round, then of course the north is stretched over empty space, there being an imaginary line called north which touches the earth as a tangent of a circle at one point alone.

Respecting the Hebrew word khug, of whose employment in Isaiah xl, 22, Colonel Mackinlay has spoken, and which both our A.V. and R.V. there render "circle," the same word in Prov. viii, 27, is rendered by the A.V. "compass" and by the R.V. "circle," the full clause in the R.V. being "He sets a circle upon the face of the deep"; and it is plain that the circular horizon of the sea is intended. So, too, where in Job xxvi, 10, R.V., we read that He "described a boundary upon the face of the waters," the verb khag, translated described," clearly means drew a horizontal circle. But in the passage before us, It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers," since God could have contemplated all men only from above, not a horizontal, but a vertical circle must have been signified-that is, a meridian circle from zenith to nadir, which can exist only if the earth be a globe.

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I think with Colonel Mackinlay that, besides a figurative, spiritual meaning that the five pillars of the tabernacle entrance probably possessed, they were also designed to prevent the worship of the sun, while the fact which he has further brought to light, that Solomon's temple had also a central blank wall between two entrances, instead of the customary and majestic central doorway of temple or palace, confirms this view, for whereas the type (if it be a type) is changed, the same striking departures from custom is maintained.

Professor Ramsay has determined that the Saviour must have been crucified either in 28 or 29 A.D., and almost certainly in 29; and it is remarkable indeed, as Colonel Mackinlay has shown us, that when we take 29 as a date, and treat the morning star as alluded to in the figurative language used concerning John the Baptist (the forerunner of Christ, the Sun of Righteousness), the allusions all fit with the presence or absence and luminosity of Venus before the dawn. As regards the last recorded testimony of the Baptist (in John iii, 27-30), it must have been uttered between four and five months before the end of the year 27, when Venus was just beginning to be a morning star; for what called forth the testimony was the complaints of John's disciples that all men were going to Jesus instead of John for baptism; and the next thing recorded is that "therefore" when Jesus knew that this report had

reached the Pharisees, He withdraws into Galilee by way of Samaria, and during His few days' march through that province He is recorded to have incidentally observed that four months had still to elapse before harvest, or in other words before the passover (John iii, 26, and iv, 1, 35; cp. Jos. iii, 15, iv, 19, and v, 10, etc.).

The SECRETARY.—I should like to have an opportunity of referring to what I understood Captain Caborne to refer to when he spoke of the sun standing still, and the moon in the time of Joshua. It has been a great stumbling block to some believers in the Bible, arising entirely from us westerns forgetting that the poetical passages of the Scriptures which never were intended to be taken literally. Of course no man of science can believe that the Almighty brought the whole of this universe to a standstill in order to effect any purpose whatever. It is quite unthinkable; but the whole thing is explained as a poetical quotation from the book of Jasher, "Is not this written. in the book of Jasher, so the sun stood still and the moon over the valley?" It is a poetical quotation from a work not in the Scriptures itself. I believe this explains the passage.

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Colonel HENDLEY, C.I.E.-On page 124 Colonel Mackinlay speaks of the invariable orientation of the temples in the East. Some time ago I was asked by Sir Norman Lockyer to make some observations regarding the orientation of Indian temples. I found there was really no very definite rule at all, and the temple of the sun pointed to the north it had nothing to do with the sunshine. The only important point seemed to be that the doorway of the temple should not point to the south or the region of the demons. However, Hindus do so far believe in the effect of the sun and moon on the images, that on certain nights the images are taken out and bathed in the moonlight. Very few people really realise the importance of astronomy and still more of astrology in the East. Almost every act of a native is foretold by the astrologer. His marriages are regulated by it, and a rich man will have his horoscope made up every year; so that a friend of mine had one which was 30 feet long. When a coronation takes place it may be regulated by the sun. I was present at the coronation of the Desert King, the Maharajah of Jodhpur, and we waited until the sun rose above the horizon for a lucky moment, when the mark of investiture was made on his forehead.

Something was said in the paper about the Brahmans. Last night,

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