DR. GODWIN’S “MAN IN THE MOON.”—This amusing little work was published in 1638, and written by Dr. Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and collated to the see of Hereford by her successor, King James I. It was composed when the author was a young student at Christ Church College, Oxford, under the assumed name of Domingo Gonzales. One of the prints represents a man drawn up from the summit of a mountain, with an engine set in motion by birds, which was the mode in which the said Gonzales was supposed to have reached the moon. This curious and now scarce production [there is a copy of it in the British Museum] excited wonder and censure on its appearance, and is thought to have supplied hints to Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, in compiling his work called “A Discovery of a New World in the Moon.” Dr. Godwin is familiar to most clerical readers as author of “_Præsules Anglicani_,” a useful referential work, and his “_Nuntius Inanimatus_” is said to have contained the first hints of a telegraph, which useful invention was, however, not discovered till the end of the last century.
Do not the remarks of Timayenis, the author of our excellent history of Greece, relative to the effect upon the popular faith of Greece, of the progress of philosophic thought, or of intellectual inquiry, (see page 396), suggest a striking and forcible, not to say new, argument in favor of the necessity of a revealed religion—of a divinely inspired and attested, and hence absolutely _authentic_, revelation of God’s will? His language is as follows: “But perhaps the principal reason (for the persecution of Socrates) was, that his dialectic and searching system, though limited by him to human questions only, was finally _applied by his hearers_ to the _higher_ questions concerning the _creation of the universe_, and _tended to undermine the foundations of the prevailing religion_. The misfortune of ancient society was, that the popular religion was _never to be the subject of any philosophical debate_; either philosophy must _be left to destroy the religion, or society_, striving for the conservation of the latter, _must limit, as much as possible, free philosophical research_. Hence we see the most intelligent and most liberal of the Hellenic tribes continually persecuting, for religious reasons, the most prominent philosophers.”