The spiritual mission, therefore, the purpose for which only the religious
teacher was sent, has now perished altogether--overlaid and confounded by
the merely scientific wranglings to which his own inconsiderate
precipitance has opened the door. But suppose at this point that the
teacher, aware at length of the mischief which he has caused, and seeing
that the fatal error of uttering one solitary novel truth upon a matter of
mere science is by inevitable consequence to throw him upon a road leading
altogether away from the proper field of his mission, takes the laudable
course of confessing his error, and of attempting a return into his proper
spiritual province. This may be his best course; yet, after all, it will
not retrieve his lost ground. He returns with a character confessedly
damaged. His very excuse rests upon the blindness and shortsightedness
which forbade his anticipating the true and natural consequences. Neither
will his own account of the case be generally accepted. He will not be
supposed to retreat from further controversy, as inconsistent with
spiritual purposes, but because he finds himself unequal to the dispute.
And, in the very best case, he is, by his own acknowledgment, tainted with
human infirmity. He has been ruined for a servant of inspiration; and how?
By a process, let it be remembered, of which all the steps are inevitable
under the same agency: that is, in the case of any primitive Christian
teacher having attempted to speak the language of scientific truth in
dealing with the phenomena of astronomy, geology, or of any merely human
knowledge.

Now, thirdly and lastly, in order to try the question in an extreme form,
let it be supposed that, aided by powers of working miracles, some early
apostle of Christianity should actually have succeeded in carrying through
the Copernican system of astronomy, as an article of blind belief, sixteen
centuries before the progress of man's intellect had qualified him for