We
believed the sky to be only the ceiling of a room as large as the earth,
with another room on top of it. Death was to us a going upstairs into
that room, or, if we did not obey the priests, going downstairs into
the coal cellar. We founded our religion, our morality, our laws, our
lessons, our poems, our prayers, on that simple belief. Well, the moment
men became astronomers and made telescopes, their belief perished. When
they could no longer believe in the sky, they found that they could no
longer believe in their Deity, because they had always thought of him
as living in the sky. When the priests themselves ceased to believe in
their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name
and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They
set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders
and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder
workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity,
men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped
the astronomer as infallible and omniscient.
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