Public Opinion | Page 2

with more than
usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day
in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been.
They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were
English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf
of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For
six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact
they were enemies.
But their plight was not so different from that of most of the population
of Europe. They had been mistaken for six weeks, on the continent the
interval may have been only six days or six hours. There was an
interval. There was a moment when the picture of Europe on which
men were conducting their business as usual, did not in any way
correspond to the Europe which was about to make a jumble of their
lives. There was a time for each man when he was still adjusted to an
environment that no longer existed. All over the world as late as July
25th men were making goods that they would not be able to ship,
buying goods they would not be able to import, careers were being
planned, enterprises contemplated, hopes and expectations entertained,
all in the belief that the world as known was the world as it was. Men
were writing books describing that world. They trusted the picture in
their heads. And then over four years later, on a Thursday morning,
came the news of an armistice, and people gave vent to their
unutterable relief that the slaughter was over. Yet in the five days
before the real armistice came, though the end of the war had been
celebrated, several thousand young men died on the battlefields.
Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in
which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us
now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture,
we treat as if it were the environment itself. It is harder to remember
that about the beliefs upon which we are now acting, but in respect to

other peoples and other ages we flatter ourselves that it is easy to see
when they were in deadly earnest about ludicrous pictures of the world.
We insist, because of our superior hindsight, that the world as they
needed to know it, and the world as they did know it, were often two
quite contradictory things. We can see, too, that while they governed
and fought, traded and reformed in the world as they imagined it to be,
they produced results, or failed to produce any, in the world as it was.
They started for the Indies and found America. They diagnosed evil
and hanged old women. They thought they could grow rich by always
selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying what he conceived to be
the Will of Allah, burned the library at Alexandria.
Writing about the year 389, St. Ambrose stated the case for the prisoner
in Plato's cave who resolutely declines to turn his head. "To discuss the
nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life
to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states. 'That He hung up
the earth upon nothing' (Job xxvi. 7). Why then argue whether He hung
it up in air or upon the water, and raise a controversy as to how the thin
air could sustain the earth; or why, if upon the waters, the earth does
not go crashing down to the bottom?... Not because the earth is in the
middle, as if suspended on even balance, but because the majesty of
God constrains it by the law of His will, does it endure stable upon the
unstable and the void." [Footnote: Hexaemeron, i. cap 6, quoted in
_The Mediæval Mind_, by Henry Osborn Taylor, Vol. i, p. 73.]
It does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know
what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half after St.
Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this occasion by the problem of
the antipodes. A monk named Cosmas, famous for his scientific
attainments, was therefore deputed to write a Christian Topography, or
"Christian Opinion concerning the World." [Footnote: Lecky,
Rationalism in Europe, Vol. I, pp. 276-8.] It is clear that he knew
exactly what was expected of him, for he based all his conclusions on
the Scriptures as he read them. It appears, then, that the world is a flat
parallelogram, twice as broad from east to west as it is long from north
to