I.  THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE.





The next great series of battles was fought over the relations of

the visible heavens to the earth.



In the early Church, in view of the doctrine so prominent in the

New Testament, that the earth was soon to be destroyed, and that

there were to be "new heavens and a new earth," astronomy, like

other branches of science, was generally looked upon as futile.

Why study the old heavens and the old earth, when they were so

soon to be replaced with something infinitely better? This

feeling appears in St. Augustine's famous utterance, "What

concern is it to me whether the heavens as a sphere inclose the

earth in the middle of the world or overhang it on either side?"



As to the heavenly bodies, theologians looked on them as at best

only objects of pious speculation.  Regarding their nature the

fathers of the Church were divided.  Origen, and others with him,

thought them living beings possessed of souls, and this belief

was mainly based upon the scriptural vision of the morning stars.

singing together, and upon the beautiful appeal to the "stars and

light" in the song of the three children--the Benedicite--which

the Anglican communion has so wisely retained in its Liturgy.



Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the angels, and

that stars were moved by angels.  The Gnostics thought the stars

spiritual beings governed by angels, and appointed not to cause

earthly events but to indicate them.



As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the Church

was based upon the scriptural declarations that a solid vault--a

"firmament"--was extended above the earth, and that the heavenly

bodies were simply lights hung within it.  This was for a time

held very tenaciously.  St. Philastrius, in his famous treatise

on heresies, pronounced it a heresy to deny that the stars are

brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky

every evening; any other view he declared "false to the Catholic

faith."  This view also survived in the sacred theory established

so firmly by Cosmas in the sixth century.  Having established his

plan of the universe upon various texts in the Old and New

Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box, covered by the

solid "firmament," he brought in additional texts from Scripture

to account for the planetary movements, and developed at length

the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of

heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose.



How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we

find in the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest leader of

orthodox thought in the seventh century.  He affirms that since

the fall of man, and on account of it, the sun and moon shine

with a feebler light; but he proves from a text in Isaiah that

when the world shall be fully redeemed these "great lights" will

shine again in all their early splendour.  But, despite these

authorities and their theological finalities, the evolution of

scientific thought continued, its main germ being the geocentric

doctrine--the doctrine that the earth is the centre, and that the

sun and planets revolve about it.[40]



[40] For passage cited from Clement of Alexandria, see English

translation, Edinburgh, 1869, vol. ii, p. 368; also the

Miscellanies, Book V, cap. vi.  For typical statements by St.

Augustine, see De Genesi, ii, cap. ix, in Migne, Patr. Lat., tome

xxiv, pp. 270-271.  For Origen's view, see the De Principiis,

lib. i, cap. vii; see also Leopardi's Errori Populari, cap. xi;

also Wilson's Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures in

Ante-Nicene Library, p. 132.  For Philo Judaeus, see On the

Creation of the World, chaps. xviii and xix, and On Monarchy,

chap. i.  For St. Isidore, see the De Ordine Creaturarum, cap v,

in Migne, Patr. Lat., lxxxiii, pp. 923-925; also 1000, 1001.  For

Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, chap. cxxxiii, in Migne, tome

xii, p. 1264.  For Cosmas's view, see his Topographia Christiana,

in Montfaucon, Col. Nov. Patrum, ii, p. 150, and elsewhere as

cited in my chapter on Geography.





This doctrine was of the highest respectability:  it had been

developed at a very early period, and had been elaborated until

it accounted well for the apparent movements of the heavenly

bodies; its final name, "Ptolemaic theory," carried weight;

and, having thus come from antiquity into the Christian world,

St. Clement of Alexandria demonstrated that the altar in the

Jewish tabernacle was "a symbol of the earth placed in the middle

of the universe":  nothing more was needed; the geocentric theory

was fully adopted by the Church and universally held to agree

with the letter and spirit of Scripture.[41]



[41] As to the respectibility of the geocentric theory, etc., see

Grote's Plato, vol. iii, p. 257; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy

of the Ancients, chap. iii, sec. 1, for a very thoughtful

statement of Plato's view, and differing from ancient statements.

For plausible elaboration of it, and for supposed agreement of

the Scripture with it, see Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, Antwerp,

1631; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrinae Physicae.  For an

admirable statement of the theological view of the geocentric

theory, antipodes, etc., see Eicken, Geschichte und System der

mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, pp. 618 et seq.





Wrought into this foundation, and based upon it, there was

developed in the Middle Ages, mainly out of fragments of Chaldean

and other early theories preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, a

new sacred system of astronomy, which became one of the great

treasures of the universal Church--the last word of revelation.



Three great men mainly reared this structure.  First was the

unknown who gave to the world the treatises ascribed to Dionysius

the Areopagite.  It was unhesitatingly believed that these were

the work of St. Paul's Athenian convert, and therefore virtually

of St. Paul himself.  Though now known to be spurious, they were

then considered a treasure of inspiration, and an emperor of the

East sent them to an emperor of the West as the most worthy of

gifts.  In the ninth century they were widely circulated in

western Europe, and became a fruitful source of thought,

especially on the whole celestial hierarchy.  Thus the old ideas

of astronomy were vastly developed, and the heavenly hosts were

classed and named in accordance with indications scattered

through the sacred Scriptures.



The next of these three great theologians was Peter Lombard,

professor at the University of Paris.  About the middle of the

twelfth century he gave forth his collection of Sentences, or

Statements by the Fathers, and this remained until the end of the

Middle Ages the universal manual of theology.  In it was

especially developed the theological view of man's relation to

the universe.  The author tells the world:  "Just as man is made

for the sake of God--that is, that he may serve Him,--so the

universe is made for the sake of man--that is, that it may serve

HIM; therefore is man placed at the middle point of the

universe, that he may both serve and be served."



The vast significance of this view, and its power in resisting

any real astronomical science, we shall see, especially in the

time of Galileo.



The great triad of thinkers culminated in St. Thomas

Aquinas--the sainted theologian, the glory of the mediaeval

Church, the "Angelic Doctor," the most marvellous intellect

between Aristotle and Newton; he to whom it was believed that an

image of the Crucified had spoken words praising his writings.

Large of mind, strong, acute, yet just--even more than just--to

his opponents, he gave forth, in the latter half of the

thirteenth century, his Cyclopaedia of Theology, the Summa

Theologica.  In this he carried the sacred theory of the universe

to its full development.  With great power and clearness he

brought the whole vast system, material and spiritual, into its

relations to God and man.[42]



[42] For the beliefs of Chaldean astronomers in revolving spheres

carrying sun, moon, and planets, in a solid firmament supporting

the celestial waters, and in angels as giving motion to the

planets, see Lenormant; also Lethaby, 13-21; also Schroeder,

Jensen, Lukas, et al.  For the contribution of the pseudo-

Dionysius to mediaeval cosmology, see Dion. Areopagita, De

Coelesti Hierarchia, vers. Joan. Scoti, in Migne, Patr. Lat.,

cxxii.  For the contribution of Peter Lombard, see Pet. Lomb.,

Libr. Sent., II, i, 8,-IV, i, 6, 7, in Migne, tome 192.  For the

citations from St. Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, ed. Migne,

especially Pars I, Qu. 70, (tome i, pp. 1174-1184); also Quaestio

47, Art. iii.  For good general statement, see Milman, Latin

Christianity, iv, 191 et seq.; and for relation of Cosmas to

these theologians of western Europe, see Milman, as above, viii,

228, note.







Thus was the vast system developed by these three leaders of

mediaeval thought; and now came the man who wrought it yet more

deeply into European belief, the poet divinely inspired who made

the system part of the world's LIFE.  Pictured by Dante, the

empyrean and the concentric heavens, paradise, purgatory, and

hell, were seen of all men; the God Triune, seated on his throne

upon the circle of the heavens, as real as the Pope seated in the

chair of St. Peter; the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones,

surrounding the Almighty, as real as the cardinals surrounding

the Pope; the three great orders of angels in heaven, as real as

the three great orders, bishops, priests, and deacons, on earth;

and the whole system of spheres, each revolving within the one

above it, and all moving about the earth, subject to the primum

mobile, as real as the feudal system of western Europe, subject

to the Emperor.[43]



[43] For the central sun, hierarchy of angels, and concentric

circles, see Dante, Paradiso, canto xxviii.  For the words of St.

Thomas Aquinas, showing to Virgil and Dante the great theologians

of the Middle Ages, see canto x, and in Dean Plumptre's

translation, vol. ii, pp. 56 et seq.; also Botta, Dante, pp. 350,

351.  As to Dante's deep religious feeling and belief in his own

divine mission, see J. R. Lowell, Among my Books, vol. i, p. 36.

For a remarkable series of coloured engravings, showing Dante's

whole cosmology, see La Materia della Divina Comedia di Dante

dichiriata in vi tavole, da Michelangelo Caetani, published by

the monks of Monte Cassino, to whose kindness I am indebted for

my copy.







Let us look into this vast creation--the highest achievement of

theology--somewhat more closely.



Its first feature shows a development out of earlier theological

ideas.  The earth is no longer a flat plain inclosed by four

walls and solidly vaulted above, as theologians of previous

centuries had believed it, under the inspiration of Cosmas; it is

no longer a mere flat disk, with sun, moon, and stars hung up to

give it light, as the earlier cathedral sculptors had figured it;

it has become a globe at the centre of the universe.

Encompassing it are successive transparent spheres, rotated by

angels about the earth, and each carrying one or more of the

heavenly bodies with it:  that nearest the earth carrying the

moon; the next, Mercury; the next, Venus; the next, the Sun; the

next three, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; the eighth carrying the

fixed stars.  The ninth was the primum mobile, and inclosing all

was the tenth heaven--the Empyrean.  This was immovable--the

boundary between creation and the great outer void; and here, in

a light which no one can enter, the Triune God sat enthroned, the

"music of the spheres" rising to Him as they moved.  Thus was the

old heathen doctrine of the spheres made Christian.



In attendance upon the Divine Majesty, thus enthroned, are vast

hosts of angels, who are divided into three hierarchies, one

serving in the empyrean, one in the heavens, between the empyrean

and the earth, and one on the earth.



Each of these hierarchies is divided into three choirs, or

orders; the first, into the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and

Thrones; and the main occupation of these is to chant

incessantly--to "continually cry" the divine praises.



The order of Thrones conveys God's will to the second hierarchy,

which serves in the movable heavens.  This second hierarchy is

also made up of three orders.  The first of these, the order of

Dominions, receives the divine commands; the second, the order

of Powers, moves the heavens, sun, moon, planets, and stars,

opens and shuts the "windows of heaven," and brings to pass all

other celestial phenomena; the third, the order of Empire, guards

the others.



The third and lowest hierarchy is also made up of three orders.

First of these are the Principalities, the guardian spirits of

nations and kingdoms.  Next come Archangels; these protect

religion, and bear the prayers of the saints to the foot of God's

throne.  Finally come Angels; these care for earthly affairs in

general, one being appointed to each mortal, and others taking

charge of the qualities of plants, metals, stones, and the like.

Throughout the whole system, from the great Triune God to the

lowest group of angels, we see at work the mystic power attached

to the triangle and sacred number three--the same which gave the

triune idea to ancient Hindu theology, which developed the triune

deities in Egypt, and which transmitted this theological gift to

the Christian world, especially through the Egyptian Athanasius.



Below the earth is hell.  This is tenanted by the angels who

rebelled under the lead of Lucifer, prince of the seraphim--the

former favourite of the Trinity; but, of these rebellious

angels, some still rove among the planetary spheres, and give

trouble to the good angels; others pervade the atmosphere about

the earth, carrying lightning, storm, drought, and hail; others

infest earthly society, tempting men to sin; but Peter Lombard

and St. Thomas Aquinas take pains to show that the work of these

devils is, after all, but to discipline man or to mete out

deserved punishment.



All this vast scheme had been so riveted into the Ptolemaic view

by the use of biblical texts and theological reasonings that the

resultant system of the universe was considered impregnable and

final.  To attack it was blasphemy.



It stood for centuries.  Great theological men of science, like

Vincent of Beauvais and Cardinal d'Ailly, devoted themselves to

showing not only that it was supported by Scripture, but that it

supported Scripture.  Thus was the geocentric theory embedded in

the beliefs and aspirations, in the hopes and fears, of

Christendom down to the middle of the sixteenth century.[44]



[44] For the earlier cosmology of Cosmas, with citations from

Montfaucon, see the chapter on Geography in this work.  For the

views of mediaeval theologians, see foregoing notes in this

chapter.  For the passages of Scripture on which the theological

part of this structure was developed, see especially Romans viii,

38; Ephesians i, 21; Colossians i, 16 aand ii, 15; and

innumerable passages in the Old Testament.  As to the music of

the spheres, see Dean Plumptre's Dante, vol. ii, p. 4, note. For

an admirable summing up of the mediaeval cosmology in its

relation to thought in general, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle

Ages, chap. i, whose summary I have followed in the main. For

striking woodcuts showing the view taken of the successive

heavens with their choirs of angels, the earth being at the

centre with the spheres about it, and the Almighty on his throne

above all, see the Neuremberg Chronicle, ff. iv and v; its date

is 1493. For charts showing the continuance of this general view

down to the beginning of the sixteenth century, see the various

editions of the Margarita Philosophica, from that of 1503 onward,

astronomical part.  For interesting statements regarding the

Trinities of gods in ancient Egypt, see Sharpe, History of Egypt,

vol. i, pp. 94 and 101.  The present writer once heard a lecture

in Cairo, from an eminent Scotch Doctor of Medicine, to account

for the ancient Hindu and Egyptian sacred threes and trinities.

The lecturer's theory was that, when Jehovah came down into the

Garden of Eden and walked with Adam in "the cool of the day," he

explained his triune character to Adam, and that from Adam it was

spread abroad to the various ancient nations.







II.  THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY.





But, on the other hand, there had been planted, long before, the

germs of a heliocentric theory.  In the sixth century before our

era, Pythagoras, and after him Philolaus, had suggested the

movement of the earth and planets about a central fire; and,

three centuries later, Aristarchus had restated the main truth

with striking precision.  Here comes in a proof that the

antagonism between theological and scientific methods is not

confined to Christianity; for this statement brought upon

Aristarchus the charge of blasphemy, and drew after it a cloud of

prejudice which hid the truth for six hundred years.  Not until

the fifth century of our era did it timidly appear in the

thoughts of Martianus Capella:  then it was again lost to sight

for a thousand years, until in the fifteenth century, distorted

and imperfect, it appeared in the writings of Cardinal Nicholas

de Cusa.



But in the shade cast by the vast system which had grown from the

minds of the great theologians and from the heart of the great

poet there had come to this truth neither bloom nor fruitage.



Quietly, however, the soil was receiving enrichment and the air

warmth.  The processes of mathematics were constantly improved,

the heavenly bodies were steadily observed, and at length

appeared, far from the centres of thought, on the borders of

Poland, a plain, simple-minded scholar, who first fairly uttered

to the modern world the truth--now so commonplace, then so

astounding--that the sun and planets do not revolve about the

earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun:

this man was Nicholas Copernicus.



Copernicus had been a professor at Rome, and even as early as

1500 had announced his doctrine there, but more in the way of a

scientific curiosity or paradox, as it had been previously held

by Cardinal de Cusa, than as the statement of a system

representing a great fact in Nature.  About thirty years later

one of his disciples, Widmanstadt, had explained it to Clement

VII; but it still remained a mere hypothesis, and soon, like so

many others, disappeared from the public view.  But to

Copernicus, steadily studying the subject, it became more and

more a reality, and as this truth grew within him he seemed to

feel that at Rome he was no longer safe.  To announce his

discovery there as a theory or a paradox might amuse the papal

court, but to announce it as a truth--as THE truth--was a far

different matter.  He therefore returned to his little town in

Poland.



To publish his thought as it had now developed was evidently

dangerous even there, and for more than thirty years it lay

slumbering in the mind of Copernicus and of the friends to whom

he had privately intrusted it.



At last he prepared his great work on the Revolutions of the

Heavenly Bodies, and dedicated it to the Pope himself.  He next

sought a place of publication.  He dared not send it to Rome, for

there were the rulers of the older Church ready to seize it; he

dared not send it to Wittenberg, for there were the leaders of

Protestantism no less hostile; he therefore intrusted it to

Osiander, at Nuremberg.[45]



[45] For the germs of heliocentric theory planted long before,

see Sir G. C. Lewis; and for a succinct statement of the claims

of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus, and Martianus Capella, see

Hoefer, Hisoire de l'Astronomie, 1873, p. 107 et seq.; also

Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 12,

13; also pp. 99 et seq.  For germs among thinkers of India, see

Whewell, vol. i, p. 277; also Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic

Studies, New York, 1874; Essay on the Lunar Zodiac, p. 345.  For

the views of Vincent of Beauvais, see his Speculum Naturale, lib.

xvi, cap. 21.  For Cardinal d'Ailly's view, see his treatise De

Concordia Astronomicae Veritatis cum Theologia (in his Ymago

Mundi and separately).  For general statement of De Cusa's work,

see Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 512.  For

skilful use of De Cusa's view in order to mitigate censure upon

the Church for its treatment of Copernicus's discovery, see an

article in the Catholic World for January, 1869.  For a very

exact statement, in the spirit of judicial fairness, see Whewell,

History of the Inductive Sciences, p. 275, and pp. 379, 380.  In

the latter, Whewell cites the exact words of De Cusa in the De

Docta Ignorantia, and sums up in these words: "This train of

thought might be a preparation for the reception of the

Copernican system; but it is very different from the doctrine

that the sun is the centre of the planetary system."  Whewell

says: "De Cusa propounded the doctrine of the motion of the earth

more as a paradox than as a reality.  We can not consider this as

any distinct anticipation of a profound and consistent view of

the truth."  On De Cusa, see also Heller, vol. i, p. 216.  For

Aristotle's views, and their elaboration by St. Thomas Aquinas,

see the De Coelo et Mundo, sec. xx, and elsewhere in the latter.

It is curious to see how even such a biographer as Archbishop

Vaughan slurs over the angelic Doctor's errors.  See Vaughan's

Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin, pp. 459, 460.



As to Copernicus's danger at Rome, the Catholic World for

January, 1869, cites a speech of the Archbishop of Mechlin before

the University of Louvain, to the effect that Copernicus defended

his theory at Rome, in 1500, before two thousand scholars; also,

that another professor taught the system in 1528, and was made

apostolic notary by Clement VIII.  All this, even if the

doctrines taught were identical with Copernicus as finally

developed--which is simply not the case--avails nothing against

the overwhelming testimony that Copernicus felt himself in

danger--testimony which the after-history of the Copernican

theory renders invincible.  The very title of Fromundus's book,

already cited, published within a few miles of the archbishop's

own cathedral, and sanctioned expressly by the theological

faculty of that same University of Louvain in 1630, utterly

refutes the archbishop's idea that the Church was inclined to

treat Copernicus kindly.  The title is as follows:

Ant-Aristarchus sive Orbis-Terrae Immobilis, in quo decretum S.

Congregationis S. R. E. Cardinal. an. M.DC.XVI adversus

Pythagorico-Copernicanos editum defenditur, Antverpiae, MDCXXI.

L'Epinois, Galilee, Paris, 1867, lays stress, p. 14, on the

broaching of the doctrine by De Cusa in 1435, and by Widmanstadt

in 1533, and their kind treatment by Eugenius IV and Clement VII;

but this is absolutely worthless in denying the papal policy

afterward.  Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, pp. 217,

218, while admitting that De Cusa and Widmanstadt sustained this

theory and received honors from their respective popes, shows

that, when the Church gave it serious consideration, it was

condemned. There is nothing in this view unreasonable.  It

would be a parallel case to that of Leo X, at first inclined

toward Luther and others, in their "squabbles with the envious

friars," and afterward forced to oppose them.  That Copernicus

felt the danger, is evident, among other things, by the

expression in the preface: "Statim me explodendum cum tali

opinione clamitant."  For dangers at Wittenberg, see Lange, as

above, vol. i, p. 217.





But Osiander's courage failed him:  he dared not launch the new

thought boldly.  He wrote a grovelling preface, endeavouring to

excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the

apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the

earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis.  He declared

that it was lawful for an astronomer to indulge his imagination,

and that this was what Copernicus had done.



Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific

truths--a truth not less ennobling to religion than to

science--forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and

crawl.[46]



[46] Osiander, in a letter to Copernicus, dated April 20, 1541,

had endeavored to reconcile him to such a procedure, and ends by

saying, "Sic enim placidiores reddideris peripatheticos et

theologos quos contradicturos metuis."  See Apologia Tychonis in

Kepler's Opera Omnia, Frisch's edition, vol. i, p. 246.  Kepler

holds Osiander entirely responsible for this preface.  Bertrand,

in his Fondateurs de l"astronomie moderne, gives its text, and

thinks it possible that Copernicus may have yielded "in pure

condescension toward his disciple."  But this idea is utterly at

variance with expressions in Copernicus's own dedicatory letter

to the Pope, which follows the preface.  For a good summary of

the argument, see Figuier, Savants de la Renaissance, pp. 378,

379; see also citation from Gassendi's Life of Copernicus, in

Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p. 124.  Mr. John Fiske, accurate as

he usually is, in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy appears to

have followed Laplace, Delambre, and Petit into the error of

supposing that Copernicus, and not Osiander, is responsible for

the preface.  For the latest proofs, see Menzer's translation of

Copernicus's work, Thorn, 1879, notes on pp. 3 and 4 of the

appendix.





On the 24th of May, 1543, the newly printed book arrived at the

house of Copernicus.  It was put into his hands; but he was on

his deathbed.  A few hours later he was beyond the reach of the

conscientious men who would have blotted his reputation and

perhaps have destroyed his life.



Yet not wholly beyond their reach.  Even death could not be

trusted to shield him.  There seems to have been fear of

vengeance upon his corpse, for on his tombstone was placed no

record of his lifelong labours, no mention of his great

discovery; but there was graven upon it simply a prayer:  "I ask

not the grace accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me

only the favour which Thou didst show to the thief on the cross."



Not till thirty years after did a friend dare write on his

tombstone a memorial of his discovery.[47]



[47] See Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p. 190.





The preface of Osiander, pretending that the book of Copernicus

suggested a hypothesis instead of announcing a truth, served its

purpose well.  During nearly seventy years the Church authorities

evidently thought it best not to stir the matter, and in some

cases professors like Calganini were allowed to present the new

view purely as a hypothesis.  There were, indeed, mutterings from

time to time on the theological side, but there was no great

demonstration against the system until 1616.  Then, when the

Copernican doctrine was upheld by Galileo as a TRUTH, and proved

to be a truth by his telescope, the book was taken in hand by the

Roman curia.  The statements of Copernicus were condemned, "until

they should be corrected"; and the corrections required were

simply such as would substitute for his conclusions the old

Ptolemaic theory.



That this was their purpose was seen in that year when Galileo

was forbidden to teach or discuss the Copernican theory, and when

were forbidden "all books which affirm the motion of the earth."

Henceforth to read the work of Copernicus was to risk damnation,

and the world accepted the decree.[48] The strongest minds were

thus held fast.  If they could not believe the old system, they

must PRETEND that they believed it;--and this, even after the

great circumnavigation of the globe had done so much to open the

eyes of the world! Very striking is the case of the eminent

Jesuit missionary Joseph Acosta, whose great work on the Natural

and Moral History of the Indies, published in the last quarter

of the sixteenth century, exploded so many astronomical and

geographical errors.  Though at times curiously credulous, he

told the truth as far as he dared; but as to the movement of the

heavenly bodies he remained orthodox--declaring, "I have seen the

two poles, whereon the heavens turn as upon their axletrees."



[48] The authorities deciding this matter in accordance with the

wishes of Pope V and Cardinal Bellarmine were the Congregation of

the Index, or cardinals having charge of the Index Librorum

Prohibitorum.  Recent desperate attempts to fasten the

responsibility on them as individuals seem ridiculous in view of

the simple fact that their work was sanctioned by the highest

Church authority, and required to be universally accepted by the

Church. Eleven different editions of the Index in my own

possession prove this.  Nearly all of these declare on their

title-pages that they are issued by order of the pontiff of the

period, and each is preface by a special papal bull or letter.

See especially the Index of 1664, issued under order of Alexander

VII, and that of 1761, under Benedict XIV.  Copernicus's

statements were prohibited in the Index "donec corrigantur."

Kepler said that it ought to be worded "donec explicetur."  See

Bertand, Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne, p. 57.  De Morgan,

pp. 57-60, gives the corrections required by the Index of 1620.

Their main aim seems to be to reduce Copernicus to the grovelling

level of Osiander, making his discovery a mere hypothesis; but

occasionally they require a virtual giving up of the whole

Copernican doctrine--e.g., "correction" insisted upon for chap.

viii, p. 6.  For a scholarly account of the relation between

Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes to each other, see Mendham,

Literary Policy of the Church of Rome; also Reusch, Index der

verbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1855, vol. ii, chaps i and ii.  For a

brief but very careful statement, see Gebler, Galileo Galilei,

English translation, London, 1879, chap. i; see also Addis and

Arnold's Catholic Dictionary, article Galileo, p.8.





There was, indeed, in Europe one man who might have done much to

check this current of unreason which was to sweep away so many

thoughtful men on the one hand from scientific knowledge, and so

many on the other from Christianity.  This was Peter Apian.  He

was one of the great mathematical and astronomical scholars of

the time.  His brilliant abilities had made him the astronomical

teacher of the Emperor Charles V.  His work on geography had

brought him a world-wide reputation; his work on astronomy

brought him a patent of nobility; his improvements in

mathematical processes and astronomical instruments brought him

the praise of Kepler and a place in the history of science:

never had a true man better opportunity to do a great deed.  When

Copernicus's work appeared, Apian was at the height of his

reputation and power:  a quiet, earnest plea from him, even if it

had been only for ordinary fairness and a suspension of judgment,

must have carried much weight.  His devoted pupil, Charles V, who

sat on the thrones of Germany and Spain, must at least have given

a hearing to such a plea.  But, unfortunately, Apian was a

professor in an institution of learning under the strictest

Church control--the University of Ingolstadt.  His foremost duty

was to teach SAFE science--to keep science within the line of

scriptural truth as interpreted by theological professors.  His

great opportunity was lost.  Apian continued to maunder over the

Ptolemaic theory and astrology in his lecture-room.  The attack

on the Copernican theory he neither supported nor opposed; he was

silent; and the cause of his silence should never be forgotten so

long as any Church asserts its title to control university

instruction.[49]



[49] For Joseph Acosta's statement, see the translation of his

History, published by the Hakluyt Society, chap. ii.  For Peter

Apian, see Madler, Geschichte der Astronomie, Braunschweig, 1873,

vol. i, p. 141.  For evidences of the special favour of Charles

V,see Delambre, Histoire de l'Astronomie au Moyen Age, p. 390;

also Bruhns, in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.  For an

attempted apology for him, see Gunther, Peter and Philipp Apian,

Prag, 1822, p. 62.





Doubtless many will exclaim against the Roman Catholic Church for

this; but the simple truth is that Protestantism was no less

zealous against the new scientific doctrine.  All branches of the

Protestant Church--Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican--vied with each

other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine as contrary to

Scripture; and, at a later period, the Puritans showed the same

tendency.



Said Martin Luther:  "People gave ear to an upstart astrologer

who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or

the firmament, the sun and the moon.  Whoever wishes to appear

clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of

course the very best.  This fool wishes to reverse the entire

science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua

commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."

Melanchthon, mild as he was, was not behind Luther in condemning

Copernicus. In his treatise on the Elements of Physics, published

six years after Copernicus's death, he says:  "The eyes are

witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four

hours.  But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to

make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves;

and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun

revolves....Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert

such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious.  It is the

part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to

acquiesce in it."  Melanchthon then cites the passages in the

Psalms and Ecclesiastes, which he declares assert positively and

clearly that the earth stands fast and that the sun moves around

it, and adds eight other proofs of his proposition that "the

earth can be nowhere if not in the centre of the universe."  So

earnest does this mildest of the Reformers become, that he

suggests severe measures to restrain such impious teachings as

those of Copernicus.[50]



[50] See the Tischreden in the Walsch edition of Luther's Works,

1743, vol. xxii, p. 2260; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrinae

Physicae.  This treatise is cited under a mistaken title by the

Catholic World, September, 1870.  The correct title is as given

above; it will be found in the Corpus Reformatorum, vol. xiii

(ed. Bretschneider, Halle, 1846), pp. 216, 217.  See also Madler,

vol. i, p. 176; also Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i,

p. 217; also Prowe, Ueber die Abhangigkeit des Copernicus, Thorn,

1865, p. 4; also note, pp. 5, 6, where text is given in full.





While Lutheranism was thus condemning the theory of the earth's

movement, other branches of the Protestant Church did not remain

behind.  Calvin took the lead, in his Commentary on Genesis, by

condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the centre

of the universe.  He clinched the matter by the usual reference

to the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm, and asked, "Who

will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of

the Holy Spirit?"  Turretin, Calvin's famous successor, even

after Kepler and Newton had virtually completed the theory of

Copernicus and Galileo, put forth his compendium of theology, in

which he proved, from a multitude of scriptural texts, that the

heavens, sun, and moon move about the earth, which stands still

in the centre.  In England we see similar theological efforts,

even after they had become evidently futile.  Hutchinson's

Moses's Principia, Dr. Samuel Pike's Sacred Philosophy, the

writings of Horne, Bishop Horsley, and President Forbes contain

most earnest attacks upon the ideas of Newton, such attacks being

based upon Scripture.  Dr. John Owen, so famous in the annals of

Puritanism, declared the Copernican system a "delusive and

arbitrary hypothesis, contrary to Scripture"; and even John

Wesley declared the new ideas to "tend toward infidelity."[51]



[51] On the teachings on Protestantism as regards the Copernican

theory, see citations in Canon Farrar's History of

Interpretation, preface, xviii; also Rev. Dr. Shields, of

Princeton, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 61.





And Protestant peoples were not a whit behind Catholic in

following out such teachings.  The people of Elbing made

themselves merry over a farce in which Copernicus was the main

object of ridicule.  The people of Nuremberg, a Protestant

stronghold, caused a medal to be struck with inscriptions

ridiculing the philosopher and his theory.



Why the people at large took this view is easily understood when

we note the attitude of the guardians of learning, both Catholic

and Protestant, in that age.  It throws great light upon sundry

claims by modern theologians to take charge of public instruction

and of the evolution of science.  So important was it thought to

have "sound learning" guarded and "safe science" taught, that in

many of the universities, as late as the end of the seventeenth

century, professors were forced to take an oath not to hold the

"Pythagorean"--that is, the Copernican--idea as to the movement

of the heavenly bodies.  As the contest went on, professors were

forbidden to make known to students the facts revealed by the

telescope.  Special orders to this effect were issued by the

ecclesiastical authorities to the universities and colleges of

Pisa, Innspruck, Louvain, Douay, Salamanca, and others.  During

generations we find the authorities of these Universities

boasting that these godless doctrines were kept away from their

students.  It is touching to hear such boasts made then, just as

it is touching now to hear sundry excellent university

authorities boast that they discourage the reading of Mill,

Spencer, and Darwin.  Nor were such attempts to keep the truth

from students confined to the Roman Catholic institutions of

learning.  Strange as it may seem, nowhere were the facts

confirming the Copernican theory more carefully kept out of sight

than at Wittenberg--the university of Luther and Melanchthon.

About the middle of the sixteenth century there were at that

centre of Protestant instruction two astronomers of a very high

order, Rheticus and Reinhold; both of these, after thorough

study, had convinced themselves that the Copernican system was

true, but neither of them was allowed to tell this truth to his

students.  Neither in his lecture announcements nor in his

published works did Rheticus venture to make the new system

known, and he at last gave up his professorship and left

Wittenberg, that he might have freedom to seek and tell the

truth.  Reinhold was even more wretchedly humiliated.  Convinced

of the truth of the new theory, he was obliged to advocate the

old; if he mentioned the Copernican ideas, he was compelled to

overlay them with the Ptolemaic.  Even this was not thought safe

enough, and in 1571 the subject was intrusted to Peucer.  He was

eminently "sound," and denounced the Copernican theory in his

lectures as "absurd, and unfit to be introduced into the

schools."



To clinch anti-scientific ideas more firmly into German

Protestant teaching, Rector Hensel wrote a text-book for schools

entitled The Restored Mosaic System of the World, which showed

the Copernican astronomy to be unscriptural.



Doubtless this has a far-off sound; yet its echo comes very near

modern Protestantism in the expulsion of Dr. Woodrow by the

Presbyterian authorities in South Carolina; the expulsion of

Prof. Winchell by the Methodist Episcopal authorities in

Tennessee; the expulsion of Prof. Toy by Baptist authorities in

Kentucky; the expulsion of the professors at Beyrout under

authority of American Protestant divines--all for holding the

doctrines of modern science, and in the last years of the

nineteenth century.[52]



[52] For treatment of Copernican ideas by the people, see The

Catholic World, as above; also Melanchthon, ubi supra; also

Prowe, Copernicus, Berlin, 1883, vol. i, p. 269, note; also pp.

279, 280; also Madler, i, p.167. For Rector Hensel, see Rev. Dr.

Shield's Final Philosophy, p. 60.  For details of recent

Protestant efforts against evolution doctrines, see the chapter

on the Fall of Man and Anthropology in this work.





But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be

laughed down nor frowned down.  Many minds had received it, but

within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have

dared to utter it clearly.  This new warrior was that strange

mortal, Giordano Bruno.  He was hunted from land to land, until

at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives.  For

this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in

the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and

his ashes scattered to the winds.  Still, the new truth lived on.



Ten years after the martyrdom of Bruno the truth of Copernicus's

doctrine was established by the telescope of Galileo.[53]



[53] For Bruno, see Bartholmess, Vie de Jordano Bruno, Paris,

1846, vol. i, p.121 and pp. 212 et seq.; also Berti, Vita di

Giordano Bruno, Firenze, 1868, chap. xvi; also Whewell, vol. i,

pp. 272, 273. That Whewell is somewhat hasty in attributing

Bruno's punishment entirely to the Spaccio della Bestia

Trionfante will be evident, in spite of Montucla, to anyone who

reads the account of the persecution in Bartholmess or Berti; and

even if Whewell be right, the Spaccio would never have been

written but for Bruno's indignation at ecclesiastical oppression.

See Tiraboschi, vol. vii, pp. 466 et seq.





Herein was fulfilled one of the most touching of prophecies.

Years before, the opponents of Copernicus had said to him, "If

your doctrines were true, Venus would show phases like the moon."

Copernicus answered:  "You are right; I know not what to say;

but God is good, and will in time find an answer to this

objection."  The God-given answer came when, in 1611, the rude

telescope of Galileo showed the phases of Venus.[54]



[54] For the relation of these discoveries to Copernicus's work,

see Delambre, Histoire de l'Astronomie moderne, discours

preliminaire, p. xiv; also Laplace, Systeme du Monde, vol. i, p.

326; and for more careful statements, Kepler's Opera Omnia, edit.

Frisch, tome ii, p. 464.  For Copernicus's prophecy, see Cantu,

Histoire Univerelle, vol. xv, p. 473.  (Cantu was an eminent

Roman Catholic.)







III.  THE WAR UPON GALILEO.





On this new champion, Galileo, the whole war was at last

concentrated.  His discoveries had clearly taken the Copernican

theory out of the list of hypotheses, and had placed it before

the world as a truth.  Against him, then, the war was long and

bitter.  The supporters of what was called "sound learning"

declared his discoveries deceptions and his announcements

blasphemy.  Semi-scientific professors, endeavouring to curry

favour with the Church, attacked him with sham science; earnest

preachers attacked him with perverted Scripture; theologians,

inquisitors, congregations of cardinals, and at last two popes

dealt with him, and, as was supposed, silenced his impious

doctrine forever.[55]



[55] A very curious example of this sham science employed by

theologians is seen in the argument, frequently used at that

time, that, if the earth really moved, a stone falling from a

height would fall back of a point immediately below its point of

starting.  This is used by Fromundus with great effect.  It

appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by

dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship.  Bezenburg has

mathematically demonstrated just such an abberation in falling

bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of

the earth.  See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389,

second edition, 1877.





I shall present this warfare at some length because, so far as I

can find, no careful summary of it has been given in our

language, since the whole history was placed in a new light by

the revelations of the trial documents in the Vatican Library,

honestly published for the first time by L'Epinois in 1867, and

since that by Gebler, Berti, Favaro, and others.



The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when he

announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet

Jupiter.  The enemy saw that this took the Copernican theory out

of the realm of hypothesis, and they gave battle immediately.

They denounced both his method and its results as absurd and

impious.  As to his method, professors bred in the "safe science"

favoured by the Church argued that the divinely appointed way of

arriving at the truth in astronomy was by theological reasoning

on texts of Scripture; and, as to his results, they insisted,

first, that Aristotle knew nothing of these new revelations;

and, next, that the Bible showed by all applicable types that

there could be only seven planets; that this was proved by the

seven golden candlesticks of the Apocalypse, by the

seven-branched candlestick of the tabernacle, and by the seven

churches of Asia; that from Galileo's doctrine consequences must

logically result destructive to Christian truth.  Bishops and

priests therefore warned their flocks, and multitudes of the

faithful besought the Inquisition to deal speedily and sharply

with the heretic.[56]





[56] See Delambre on the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter

as the turning-point with the heliocentric doctrine.  As to its

effects on Bacon, see Jevons, p. 638, as above.  For argument

drawn from the candlestick and the seven churches, see Delambre,

p. 20.





In vain did Galileo try to prove the existence of satellites by

showing them to the doubters through his telescope:  they either

declared it impious to look, or, if they did look, denounced the

satellites as illusions from the devil.  Good Father Clavius

declared that "to see satellites of Jupiter, men had to make an

instrument which would create them."  In vain did Galileo try to

save the great truths he had discovered by his letters to the

Benedictine Castelli and the Grand-Duchess Christine, in which he

argued that literal biblical interpretation should not be applied

to science; it was answered that such an argument only made his

heresy more detestable; that he was "worse than Luther or

Calvin."



The war on the Copernican theory, which up to that time had been

carried on quietly, now flamed forth.  It was declared that the

doctrine was proved false by the standing still of the sun for

Joshua, by the declarations that "the foundations of the earth

are fixed so firm that they can not be moved," and that the sun

"runneth about from one end of the heavens to the other."[57]



[57] For principle points as given, see Libri, Histoire des

Sciences mathematiques en Italie, vol. iv, p. 211; De Morgan,

Paradoxes, p. 26, for account of Father Clavius.  It is

interesting to know that Clavius, in his last years, acknowledged

that "the whole system of the heavens is broken down, and must be

mended," Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 478.  See Th.

Martin, Galilee, pp. 34, 208, and 266; also Heller, Geschichte

der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, p. 366.  For the original

documents, see L'Epinois, pp.34 and 36; or better, Gebler's

careful edition of the trial (Die Acten des Galileischen

Processes, Stuttgart, 1877), pp. 47 et seq.  Martin's translation

seems somewhat too free.  See also Gebler, Galileo Galilei,

English translation, London, 1879, pp. 76-78; also Reusch, Der

Process Galilei's und die Jesuiten, Bonn, 1879, chaps. ix, x, xi.





But the little telescope of Galileo still swept the heavens, and

another revelation was announced--the mountains and valleys in

the moon.  This brought on another attack.  It was declared that

this, and the statement that the moon shines by light reflected

from the sun, directly contradict the statement in Genesis that

the moon is "a great light."  To make the matter worse, a

painter, placing the moon in a religious picture in its usual

position beneath the feet of the Blessed Virgin, outlined on its

surface mountains and valleys; this was denounced as a sacrilege

logically resulting from the astronomer's heresy.



Still another struggle was aroused when the hated telescope

revealed spots upon the sun, and their motion indicating the

sun's rotation.  Monsignor Elci, head of the University of Pisa,

forbade the astronomer Castelli to mention these spots to his

students.  Father Busaeus, at the University of Innspruck,

forbade the astronomer Scheiner, who had also discovered the

spots and proposed a SAFE explanation of them, to allow the new

discovery to be known there.  At the College of Douay and the

University of Louvain this discovery was expressly placed under

the ban, and this became the general rule among the Catholic

universities and colleges of Europe.  The Spanish universities

were especially intolerant of this and similar ideas, and up to a

recent period their presentation was strictly forbidden in the

most important university of all--that of Salamanca.[58]



[58] See Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. iii.





Such are the consequences of placing the instruction of men's

minds in the hands of those mainly absorbed in saving men's

souls.  Nothing could be more in accordance with the idea

recently put forth by sundry ecclesiastics, Catholic and

Protestant, that the Church alone is empowered to promulgate

scientific truth or direct university instruction.  But science

gained a victory here also.  Observations of the solar spots were

reported not only from Galileo in Italy, but from Fabricius in

Holland.  Father Scheiner then endeavoured to make the usual

compromise between theology and science.  He promulgated a

pseudo-scientific theory, which only provoked derision.



The war became more and more bitter.  The Dominican Father

Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why

stand ye gazing up into heaven?" and this wretched pun upon the

great astronomer's name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before

Caccini ended, he insisted that "geometry is of the devil," and

that "mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all

heresies."  The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion.



Father Lorini proved that Galileo's doctrine was not only

heretical but "atheistic," and besought the Inquisition to

intervene.  The Bishop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the

Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him

to the Grand-Duke.  The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to

entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome.  The

Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as

unscriptural; and Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting

him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was

secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence

against the astronomer.



But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was

Cardinal Bellarmin, one of the greatest theologians the world has

known.  He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on

making science conform to Scripture.  The weapons which men of

Bellarmin's stamp used were purely theological.  They held up

before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to

Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve

about the sun and not about the earth.  Their most tremendous

dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery

vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation."  Father Lecazre

declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation."

Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology.  If the

earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not

be that any such great things have been done specially for it as

the Christian doctrine teaches.  If there are other planets,

since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how

can their inhabitants be descended from Adam?  How can they trace

back their origin to Noah's ark?  How can they have been redeemed

by the Saviour?"  Nor was this argument confined to the

theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he

was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his

school.



In addition to this prodigious theological engine of war there

was kept up a fire of smaller artillery in the shape of texts and

scriptural extracts.



But the war grew still more bitter, and some weapons used in it

are worth examining.  They are very easily examined, for they are

to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that

field they were used with more effect than on almost any other.

These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist."  They

have been used against almost every man who has ever done

anything new for his fellow-men.  The list of those who have been

denounced as "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great

men of science, general scholars, inventors, and philanthropists.



The purest Christian life, the noblest Christian character, have

not availed to shield combatants.  Christians like Isaac Newton,

Pascal, Locke, Milton, and even Fenelon and Howard, have had this

weapon hurled against them.  Of all proofs of the existence of a

God, those of Descartes have been wrought most thoroughly into

the minds of modern men; yet the Protestant theologians of

Holland sought to bring him to torture and to death by the charge

of atheism, and the Roman Catholic theologians of France thwarted

him during his life and prevented any due honours to him after

his death.[59]



[59] For various objectors and objections to Galileo by his

contemporaries, see Libri, Histoire des Sciences mathematiques en

Italie, vol. iv, p. 233, 234; also Martin, Vie de Galilee.  For

Father Lecazre's argument, see Flammarion, Mondes imaginaires et

mondes reels, 6th ed., pp. 315, 316.  For Melanchthon's argument,

see his Initia in Opera, vol. iii, Halle, 1846.





These epithets can hardly be classed with civilized weapons.

They are burning arrows; they set fire to masses of popular

prejudice, always obscuring the real question, sometimes

destroying the attacking party.  They are poisoned weapons.  They

pierce the hearts of loving women; they alienate dear children;

they injure a man after life is ended, for they leave poisoned

wounds in the hearts of those who loved him best--fears for his

eternal salvation, dread of the Divine wrath upon him.  Of

course, in these days these weapons, though often effective in

vexing good men and in scaring good women, are somewhat blunted;

indeed, they not infrequently injure the assailants more than the

assailed.  So it was not in the days of Galileo; they were then

in all their sharpness and venom.[60]



[60] For curious exemplification of the way in which these

weapons have been hurled, see lists of persons charged with

"infidelity" and "atheism," in the Dictionnaire des Athees.,

Paris, [1800]; also Lecky, History of Rationalism, vol. ii, p.

50.  For the case of Descartes, see Saisset, Descartes et ses

Precurseurs, pp. 103, 110.  For the facility with which the term

"atheist" has been applied from the early Aryans down to

believers in evolution, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i, p.

420.





Yet a baser warfare was waged by the Archbishop of Pisa.  This

man, whose cathedral derives its most enduring fame from

Galileo's deduction of a great natural law from the swinging lamp

before its altar, was not an archbishop after the noble mould of

Borromeo and Fenelon and Cheverus.  Sadly enough for the Church

and humanity, he was simply a zealot and intriguer:  he perfected

the plan for entrapping the great astronomer.



Galileo, after his discoveries had been denounced, had written to

his friend Castelli and to the Grand-Duchess Christine two

letters to show that his discoveries might be reconciled with

Scripture.  On a hint from the Inquisition at Rome, the

archbishop sought to get hold of these letters and exhibit them

as proofs that Galileo had uttered heretical views of theology

and of Scripture, and thus to bring him into the clutch of the

Inquisition.  The archbishop begs Castelli, therefore, to let him

see the original letter in the handwriting of Galileo.  Castelli

declines.  The archbishop then, while, as is now revealed,

writing constantly and bitterly to the Inquisition against

Galileo, professes to Castelli the greatest admiration of

Galileo's genius and a sincere desire to know more of his

discoveries.  This not succeeding, the archbishop at last throws

off the mask and resorts to open attack.



The whole struggle to crush Galileo and to save him would be

amusing were it not so fraught with evil.  There were intrigues

and counter-intrigues, plots and counter-plots, lying and spying;

and in the thickest of this seething, squabbling, screaming mass

of priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, appear two

popes, Paul V and Urban VIII.  It is most suggestive to see in

this crisis of the Church, at the tomb of the prince of the

apostles, on the eve of the greatest errors in Church policy the

world has known, in all the intrigues and deliberations of these

consecrated leaders of the Church, no more evidence of the

guidance or presence of the Holy Spirit than in a caucus of New

York politicians at Tammany Hall.



But the opposing powers were too strong.  In 1615 Galileo was

summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, and the mine which had

been so long preparing was sprung.  Sundry theologians of the

Inquisition having been ordered to examine two propositions which

had been extracted from Galileo's letters on the solar spots,

solemnly considered these points during about a month and

rendered their unanimous decision as follows:  "THE FIRST

PROPOSITION, THAT THE SUN IS THE CENTRE AND DOES NOT REVOLVE

ABOUT THE EARTH, IS FOOLISH, ABSURD, FALSE IN THEOLOGY, AND

HERETICAL, BECAUSE EXPRESSLY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE"; AND

"THE SECOND PROPOSITION, THAT THE EARTH IS NOT THE CENTRE BUT

REVOLVES ABOUT THE SUN, IS ABSURD, FALSE IN PHILOSOPHY, AND, FROM

A THEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW AT LEAST, OPPOSED TO THE TRUE

FAITH."



The Pope himself, Paul V, now intervened again:  he ordered that

Galileo be brought before the Inquisition.  Then the greatest man

of science in that age was brought face to face with the greatest

theologian--Galileo was confronted by Bellarmin.  Bellarmin shows

Galileo the error of his opinion and orders him to renounce it.

De Lauda, fortified by a letter from the Pope, gives orders that

the astronomer be placed in the dungeons of the Inquisition

should he refuse to yield.  Bellarmin now commands Galileo, "in

the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of

the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the opinion that the

sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth

moves, nor henceforth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way

whatsoever, verbally or in writing."  This injunction Galileo

acquiesces in and promises to obey.[61]



[61] I am aware that the theory  proposed by Wohwill and

developed by Gebler denied that this promise was ever made by

Galileo, and holds that the passage was a forgery devised later

by the Church rulers to justify the proceedings of 1632 and 1644.

This would make the conduct of the Church worse, but authorities

as eminent consider the charge not proved.  A careful examination

of the documents seems to disprove it.





This was on the 26th of February, 1616.  About a fortnight later

the Congregation of the Index, moved thereto, as the letters and

documents now brought to light show, by Pope Paul V, solemnly

rendered a decree that "THE DOCTRINE OF THE DOUBLE MOTION OF THE

EARTH ABOUT ITS AXIS AND ABOUT THE SUN IS FALSE, AND ENTIRELY

CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE"; and that this opinion must neither

be taught nor advocated.  The same decree condemned all writings

of Copernicus and "ALL WRITINGS WHICH AFFIRM THE MOTION OF THE

EARTH."  The great work of Copernicus was interdicted until

corrected in accordance with the views of the Inquisition; and

the works of Galileo and Kepler, though not mentioned by name at

that time, were included among those implicitly condemned as

"affirming the motion of the earth."



The condemnations were inscribed upon the Index; and, finally,

the papacy committed itself as an infallible judge and teacher to

the world by prefixing to the Index the usual papal bull giving

its monitions the most solemn papal sanction.  To teach or even

read the works denounced or passages condemned was to risk

persecution in this world and damnation in the next.  Science had

apparently lost the decisive battle.



For a time after this judgment Galileo remained in Rome,

apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty; but

he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations made to

him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Florence, remained

in his hermitage near the city in silence, working steadily,

indeed, but not publishing anything save by private letters to

friends in various parts of Europe.



But at last a better vista seemed to open for him.  Cardinal

Barberini, who had seemed liberal and friendly, became pope under

the name of Urban VIII.  Galileo at this conceived new hopes, and

allowed his continued allegiance to the Copernican system to be

known.  New troubles ensued.  Galileo was induced to visit Rome

again, and Pope Urban tried to cajole him into silence,

personally taking the trouble to show him his errors by argument.

Other opponents were less considerate, for works appeared

attacking his ideas--works all the more unmanly, since their

authors knew that Galileo was restrained by force from defending

himself.  Then, too, as if to accumulate proofs of the unfitness

of the Church to take charge of advanced instruction, his salary

as a professor at the University of Pisa was taken from him, and

sapping and mining began.  Just as the Archbishop of Pisa some

years before had tried to betray him with honeyed words to the

Inquisition, so now Father Grassi tried it, and, after various

attempts to draw him out by flattery, suddenly denounced his

scientific ideas as "leading to a denial of the Real Presence in

the Eucharist."



For the final assault upon him a park of heavy artillery was at

last wheeled into place.  It may be seen on all the scientific

battlefields.  It consists of general denunciation; and in 1631

Father Melchior Inchofer, of the Jesuits, brought his artillery

to bear upon Galileo with this declaration:  "The opinion of the

earth's motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most

pernicious, the most scandalous; the immovability of the earth

is thrice sacred; argument against the immortality of the soul,

the existence of God, and the incarnation, should be tolerated

sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves."  From the

other end of Europe came a powerful echo.



From the shadow of the Cathedral of Antwerp, the noted theologian

Fromundus gave forth his famous treatise, the Ant-Aristarclius.

Its very title-page was a contemptuous insult to the memory of

Copernicus, since it paraded the assumption that the new truth

was only an exploded theory of a pagan astronomer.  Fromundus

declares that "sacred Scripture fights against the Copernicans."

To prove that the sun revolves about the earth, he cites the

passage in the Psalms which speaks of the sun "which cometh forth

as a bridegroom out of his chamber."  To prove that the earth

stands still, he quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes, "The earth

standeth fast forever."  To show the utter futility of the

Copernican theory, he declares that, if it were true, "the wind

would constantly blow from the east"; and that "buildings and

the earth itself would fly off with such a rapid motion that men

would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them to

hold fast to the earth's surface."  Greatest weapon of all, he

works up, by the use of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, a

demonstration from theology and science combined, that the earth

MUST stand in the centre, and that the sun MUST revolve about

it.[62] Nor was it merely fanatics who opposed the truth

revealed by Copernicus; such strong men as Jean Bodin, in

France, and Sir Thomas Browne, in England, declared against it as

evidently contrary to Holy Scripture.



[62] For Father Inchofer's attack, see his Tractatus Syllepticus,

cited in Galileo's letter to Deodati, July 28, 1634.  For

Fromundus's more famous attack, see his Ant-Aristarchus, already

cited, passim, but especially the heading of chap. vi, and the

argument in chapters x and xi.  A copy of this work may be found

in the Astor Library at New York, and another in the White

Library at Cornell University.  For interesting references to one

of Fromundus's arguments, showing, by a mixture of mathematics

and theology, that the earth is the centre of the universe, see

Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences mathematiques et physiques,

Bruxelles, 1864, p. 170; also Madler, Geschichte der Astronomie,

vol. i, p. 274.  For Bodin's opposition to the Copernican theory,

see Hallam, Literature of Europe; also Lecky.  For Sir Thomas

Brown, see his Vulgar and Common Errors, book iv, chap. v; and as

to the real reason for his disbelief in the Copernican view, see

Dr. Johnson's preface to his Life of Browne, vol. i, p. xix, of

his collected works.







IV.  VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO.





While news of triumphant attacks upon him and upon the truth he

had established were coming in from all parts of Europe, Galileo

prepared a careful treatise in the form of a dialogue, exhibiting

the arguments for and against the Copernican and Ptolemaic

systems, and offered to submit to any conditions that the Church

tribunals might impose, if they would allow it to be printed.  At

last, after discussions which extended through eight years, they

consented, imposing a humiliating condition--a preface written in

accordance with the ideas of Father Ricciardi, Master of the

Sacred Palace, and signed by Galileo, in which the Copernican

theory was virtually exhibited as a play of the imagination, and

not at all as opposed to the Ptolemaic doctrine reasserted in

1616 by the Inquisition under the direction of Pope Paul V.



This new work of Galileo--the Dialogo--appeared in 1632, and met

with prodigious success.  It put new weapons into the hands of

the supporters of the Copernican theory.  The pious preface was

laughed at from one end of Europe to the other.  This roused the

enemy; the Jesuits, Dominicans, and the great majority of the

clergy returned to the attack more violent than ever, and in the

midst of them stood Pope Urban VIII, most bitter of all.  His

whole power was now thrown against Galileo.  He was touched in

two points:  first, in his personal vanity, for Galileo had put

the Pope's arguments into the mouth of one of the persons in the

dialogue and their refutation into the mouth of another; but,

above all, he was touched in his religious feelings.  Again and

again His Holiness insisted to all comers on the absolute and

specific declarations of Holy Scripture, which prove that the sun

and heavenly bodies revolve about the earth, and declared that to

gainsay them is simply to dispute revelation.  Certainly, if one

ecclesiastic more than another ever seemed NOT under the care of

the Spirit of Truth, it was Urban VIII in all this matter.



Herein was one of the greatest pieces of ill fortune that has

ever befallen the older Church.  Had Pope Urban been broad-minded

and tolerant like Benedict XIV, or had he been taught moderation

by adversity like Pius VII, or had he possessed the large

scholarly qualities of Leo XIII, now reigning, the vast scandal

of the Galileo case would never have burdened the Church:

instead of devising endless quibbles and special pleadings to

escape responsibility for this colossal blunder, its defenders

could have claimed forever for the Church the glory of fearlessly

initiating a great epoch in human thought.



But it was not so to be.  Urban was not merely Pope; he was also

a prince of the house of Barberini, and therefore doubly angry

that his arguments had been publicly controverted.



The opening strategy of Galileo's enemies was to forbid the sale

of his work; but this was soon seen to be unavailing, for the

first edition had already been spread throughout Europe.  Urban

now became more angry than ever, and both Galileo and his works

were placed in the hands of the Inquisition.  In vain did the

good Benedictine Castelli urge that Galileo was entirely

respectful to the Church; in vain did he insist that "nothing

that can be done can now hinder the earth from revolving."  He

was dismissed in disgrace, and Galileo was forced to appear in

the presence of the dread tribunal without defender or adviser.

There, as was so long concealed, but as is now fully revealed, he

was menaced with torture again and again by express order of Pope

Urban, and, as is also thoroughly established from the trial

documents themselves, forced to abjure under threats, and

subjected to imprisonment by command of the Pope; the Inquisition

deferring in this whole matter to the papal authority.  All the

long series of attempts made in the supposed interest of the

Church to mystify these transactions have at last failed.  The

world knows now that Galileo was subjected certainly to

indignity, to imprisonment, and to threats equivalent to torture,

and was at last forced to pronounce publicly and on his knees his

recantation, as follows:



"I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on

my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the

Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and

detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the

earth."[63]



[63] For various utterances of Pope Urban against the Copernican

theory at this period, see extracts from the original documents

given by Gebler.  For punishment of those who had shown some

favor to Galileo, see various citations, and especially those

from the Vatican manuscript, Gebler, p. 216.  As to the text of

the abjuration, see L'Epinois; also Polacco, Anticopernicus,

etc., Venice, 1644; and for a discussion regarding its

publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana, p. 804.  It is

not probable that torture in the ordinary sense was administered

to Galileo, though it was threatened.  See Th. Martin, Vie de

Galilee, for a fair summing up of the case.





He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in the face of

all coming ages, to perjure himself.  To complete his dishonour,

he was obliged to swear that he would denounce to the Inquisition

any other man of science whom he should discover to be supporting

the "heresy of the motion of the earth."



Many have wondered at this abjuration, and on account of it have

denied to Galileo the title of martyr.  But let such gainsayers

consider the circumstances.  Here was an old man--one who had

reached the allotted threescore years and ten--broken with

disappointments, worn out with labours and cares, dragged from

Florence to Rome, with the threat from the Pope himself that if

he delayed he should be "brought in chains"; sick in body and

mind, given over to his oppressors by the Grand-Duke who ought to

have protected him, and on his arrival in Rome threatened with

torture.  What the Inquisition was he knew well.  He could

remember as but of yesterday the burning of Giordano Bruno in

that same city for scientific and philosophic heresy; he could

remember, too, that only eight years before this very time De

Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, having been seized by the

Inquisition for scientific and other heresies, had died in a

dungeon, and that his body and his writings had been publicly

burned.



To the end of his life--nay, after his life was ended--the

persecution of Galileo was continued.  He was kept in exile from

his family, from his friends, from his noble employments, and was

held rigidly to his promise not to speak of his theory.  When, in

the midst of intense bodily sufferings from disease, and mental

sufferings from calamities in his family, he besought some little

liberty, he was met with threats of committal to a dungeon.

When, at last, a special commission had reported to the

ecclesiastical authorities that he had become blind and wasted

with disease and sorrow, he was allowed a little more liberty,

but that little was hampered by close surveillance.  He was

forced to bear contemptible attacks on himself and on his works

in silence; to see the men who had befriended him severely

punished; Father Castelli banished; Ricciardi, the Master of the

Sacred Palace, and Ciampoli, the papal secretary, thrown out of

their positions by Pope Urban, and the Inquisitor at Florence

reprimanded for having given permission to print Galileo's work.

He lived to see the truths he had established carefully weeded

out from all the Church colleges and universities in Europe; and,

when in a scientific work he happened to be spoken of as

"renowned," the Inquisition ordered the substitution of the word

"notorious."[64]



[64] For the substitution of the word "notorious" for "renowned"

by order of the Inquisition, see Martin, p.227.





And now measures were taken to complete the destruction of the

Copernican theory, with Galileo's proofs of it.  On the 16th of

June, 1633, the Holy Congregation, with the permission of the

reigning Pope, ordered the sentence upon Galileo, and his

recantation, to be sent to all the papal nuncios throughout

Europe, as well as to all archbishops, bishops, and inquisitors

in Italy and this document gave orders that the sentence and

abjuration be made known "to your vicars, that you and all

professors of philosophy and mathematics may have knowledge of

it, that they may know why we proceeded against the said Galileo,

and recognise the gravity of his error, in order that they may

avoid it, and thus not incur the penalties which they would have

to suffer in case they fell into the same."[65]



[65] For a copy of this document, see Gebler, p. 269.  As to the

spread of this and similar documents notifying Europe of

Galileo's condemnation, see Favaro, pp. 804, 805.





As a consequence, the processors of mathematics and astronomy in

various universities of Europe were assembled and these documents

were read to them.  To the theological authorities this gave

great satisfaction.  The Rector of the University of Douay,

referring to the opinion of Galileo, wrote to the papal nuncio at

Brussels: "The professors of our university are so opposed to

this fanatical opinion that they have always held that it must be

banished from the schools.  In our English college at Douay this

paradox has never been approved and never will be."



Still another step was taken:  the Inquisitors were ordered,

especially in Italy, not to permit the publication of a new

edition of any of Galileo's works, or of any similar writings.

On the other hand, theologians were urged, now that Copernicus

and Galileo and Kepler were silenced, to reply to them with

tongue and pen.  Europe was flooded with these theological

refutations of the Copernican system.



To make all complete, there was prefixed to the Index of the

Church, forbidding "all writings which affirm the motion of the

earth," a bull signed by the reigning Pope, which, by virtue of

his infallibility as a divinely guided teacher in matters of

faith and morals, clinched this condemnation into the consciences

of the whole Christian world.



From the mass of books which appeared under the auspices of the

Church immediately after the condemnation of Galileo, for the

purpose of rooting out every vestige of the hated Copernican

theory from the mind of the world, two may be taken as typical.

The first of these was a work by Scipio Chiaramonti, dedicated to

Cardinal Barberini.  Among his arguments against the double

motion of the earth may be cited the following:



"Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no

limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move.  It is angels who

make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round.  If the earth

revolves, it must also have an angel in the centre to set it in

motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a

devil who would impart motion to the earth....



"The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all belong to one

species--namely, that of stars.  It seems, therefore, to be a

grievous wrong to place the earth, which is a sink of impurity,

among these heavenly bodies, which are pure and divine things."



The next, which I select from the mass of similar works, is the

Anticopernicus Catholicus of Polacco.  It was intended to deal a

finishing stroke at Galileo's heresy.  In this it is declared:



"The Scripture always represents the earth as at rest, and the

sun and moon as in motion; or, if these latter bodies are ever

represented as at rest, Scripture represents this as the result

of a great miracle....



"These writings must be prohibited, because they teach certain

principles about the position and motion of the terrestrial globe

repugnant to Holy Scripture and to the Catholic interpretation of

it, not as hypotheses but as established facts...."



Speaking of Galileo's book, Polacco says that it "smacked of

Copernicanism," and that, "when this was shown to the

Inquisition, Galileo was thrown into prison and was compelled to

utterly abjure the baseness of this erroneous dogma."



As to the authority of the cardinals in their decree, Polacco

asserts that, since they are the "Pope's Council" and his

"brothers," their work is one, except that the Pope is favoured

with special divine enlightenment.



Having shown that the authority of the Scriptures, of popes, and

of cardinals is against the new astronomy, he gives a refutation

based on physics.  He asks:  "If we concede the motion of the

earth, why is it that an arrow shot into the air falls back to

the same spot, while the earth and all things on it have in the

meantime moved very rapidly toward the east? Who does not see

that great confusion would result from this motion?"



Next he argues from metaphysics, as follows:  "The Copernican

theory of the earth's motion is against the nature of the earth

itself, because the earth is not only cold but contains in itself

the principle of cold; but cold is opposed to motion, and even

destroys it--as is evident in animals, which become motionless

when they become cold."



Finally, he clinches all with a piece of theological reasoning,

as follows:  "Since it can certainly be gathered from Scripture

that the heavens move above the earth, and since a circular

motion requires something immovable around which to move,... the

earth is at the centre of the universe."[66]



[66] For Chiaramonti's book and selections given, see Gebler as

above, p. 271.  For Polacco, see his work as cited, especially

Assertiones i, ii, vii, xi, xiii, lxxiii, clcccvii, and others.

The work is in the White Library at Cornell University.  The date

of it is 1644.





But any sketch of the warfare between theology and science in

this field would be incomplete without some reference to the

treatment of Galileo after his death.  He had begged to be buried

in his family tomb in Santa Croce; this request was denied.  His

friends wished to erect a monument over him; this, too, was

refused.  Pope Urban said to the ambassador Niccolini that "it

would be an evil example for the world if such honours were

rendered to a man who had been brought before the Roman

Inquisition for an opinion so false and erroneous; who had

communicated it to many others, and who had given so great a

scandal to Christendom."  In accordance, therefore, with the wish

of the Pope and the orders of the Inquisition, Galileo was buried

ignobly, apart from his family, without fitting ceremony, without

monument, without epitaph.  Not until forty years after did

Pierrozzi dare write an inscription to be placed above his bones;

not until a hundred years after did Nelli dare transfer his

remains to a suitable position in Santa Croce, and erect a

monument above them.  Even then the old conscientious hostility

burst forth:  the Inquisition was besought to prevent such

honours to "a man condemned for notorious errors"; and that

tribunal refused to allow any epitaph to be placed above him

which had not been submitted to its censorship.  Nor has that old

conscientious consistency in hatred yet fully relented:  hardly a

generation since has not seen some ecclesiastic, like Marini or

De Bonald or Rallaye or De Gabriac, suppressing evidence, or

torturing expressions, or inventing theories to blacken the

memory of Galileo and save the reputation of the Church.  Nay,

more:  there are school histories, widely used, which, in the

supposed interest of the Church, misrepresent in the grossest

manner all these transactions in which Galileo was concerned.

Sancta simplicitas! The Church has no worse enemies than those

who devise and teach these perversions.  They are simply rooting

out, in the long run, from the minds of the more thoughtful

scholars, respect for the great organization which such writings

are supposed to serve.[67]



[67] For the persecutions of Galileo's memory after his death,

see Gebler and Wohwill, but especially Th. Martin, p. 243 and

chaps. ix and x.  For documentary proofs, see L'Epinois.  For a

collection of the slanderous theories invented against Galileo,

see Martin, final chapters and appendix.  Both these authors are

devoted to the Church, but unlike Monsignor Marini, are too

upright to resort to the pious fraud of suppressing documents or

interpolating pretended facts.





The Protestant Church was hardly less energetic against this new

astronomy than the mother Church.  The sacred science of the

first Lutheran Reformers was transmitted as a precious legacy,

and in the next century was made much of by Calovius.  His great

learning and determined orthodoxy gave him the Lutheran

leadership.  Utterly refusing to look at ascertained facts, he

cited the turning back of the shadow upon King Hezekiah's dial

and the standing still of the sun for Joshua, denied the movement

of the earth, and denounced the whole new view as clearly opposed

to Scripture.  To this day his arguments are repeated by sundry

orthodox leaders of American Lutheranism.



As to the other branches of the Reformed Church, we have already

seen how Calvinists, Anglicans, and, indeed, Protestant

sectarians generally, opposed the new truth.[68]



[68] For Clovius, see Zoeckler, Geschichte, vol. i, pp. 684 and

763.  For Calvin and Turretin, see Shields, The Final Philosophy,

pp. 60, 61.





In England, among the strict churchmen, the great Dr. South

denounced the Royal Society as "irreligious," and among the

Puritans the eminent John Owen declared that Newton's discoveries

were "built on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbitrary

presumptions against evident testimonies of Scripture."  Even

Milton seems to have hesitated between the two systems.  At the

beginning of the eighth book of Paradise Lost he makes Adam state

the difficulties of the Ptolemaic system, and then brings forward

an angel to make the usual orthodox answers.  Later, Milton seems

to lean toward the Copernican theory, for, referring to the

earth, he says:



"Or she from west her silent course advance

With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps

On her soft axle, while she faces even

And bears thee soft with the smooth air along."





English orthodoxy continued to assert itself.  In 1724 John

Hutchinson, professor at Cambridge, published his Moses'

Principia, a system of philosophy in which he sought to build up

a complete physical system of the universe from the Bible.  In

this he assaulted the Newtonian theory as "atheistic," and led

the way for similar attacks by such Church teachers as Horne,

Duncan Forbes, and Jones of Nayland.  But one far greater than

these involved himself in this view.  That same limitation of his

reason by the simple statements of Scripture which led John

Wesley to declare that, "unless witchcraft is true, nothing in

the Bible is true," led him, while giving up the Ptolemaic theory

and accepting in a general way the Copernican, to suspect the

demonstrations of Newton.  Happily, his inborn nobility of

character lifted him above any bitterness or persecuting spirit,

or any imposition of doctrinal tests which could prevent those

who came after him from finding their way to the truth.



But in the midst of this vast expanse of theologic error signs of

right reason began to appear, both in England and America.

Noteworthy is it that Cotton Mather, bitter as was his orthodoxy

regarding witchcraft, accepted, in 1721, the modern astronomy

fully, with all its consequences.



In the following year came an even more striking evidence that

the new scientific ideas were making their way in England.  In

1722 Thomas Burnet published the sixth edition of his Sacred

Theory of the Earth.  In this he argues, as usual, to establish

the scriptural doctrine of the earth's stability; but in his

preface he sounds a remarkable warning.  He mentions the great

mistake into which St. Augustine led the Church regarding the

doctrine of the antipodes, and says, "If within a few years or in

the next generation it should prove as certain and demonstrable

that the earth is moved, as it is now that there are antipodes,

those that have been zealous against it, and engaged the

Scripture in the controversy, would have the same reason to

repent of their forwardness that St. Augustine would now, if he

were still alive."



Fortunately, too, Protestantism had no such power to oppose the

development of the Copernican ideas as the older Church had

enjoyed.  Yet there were some things in its warfare against

science even more indefensible.  In 1772 the famous English

expedition for scientific discovery sailed from England under

Captain Cook.  Greatest by far of all the scientific authorities

chosen to accompany it was Dr. Priestley.  Sir Joseph Banks had

especially invited him.  But the clergy of Oxford and Cambridge

interfered.  Priestley was considered unsound in his views of the

Trinity; it was evidently suspected that this might vitiate his

astronomical observations; he was rejected, and the expedition

crippled.



The orthodox view of astronomy lingered on in other branches of

the Protestant Church.  In Germany even Leibnitz attacked the

Newtonian theory of gravitation on theological grounds, though he

found some little consolation in thinking that it might be used

to support the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation.



In Holland the Calvinistic Church was at first strenuous against

the whole new system, but we possess a comical proof that

Calvinism even in its strongholds was powerless against it; for

in 1642 Blaer published at Amsterdam his book on the use of

globes, and, in order to be on the safe side, devoted one part of

his work to the Ptolemaic and the other to the Copernican scheme,

leaving the benevolent reader to take his choice.[69]



[69] For the attitude of Leibnetz, Hutchinson, and the others

named toward the Newtonian theory, see Lecky, History of England

in the Eighteenth Century, chap. ix.  For John Wesley, see his

Compendium of Natural Philosophy, being a Survey of the Wisdom of

God in the Creation, London, 1784.  See also Leslie Stephen,

Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 413.  For Owen, see his Works,

vol. xix, p. 310.  For Cotton Mather's view, see The Christian

Philosopher, London, 1721, especially pp. 16 and 17.  For the

case of Priestley, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol.

ii, p. 56, for the facts and the admirable letter of Priestley

upon this rejection.  For Blaer, see his L'Usage des Globes,

Amsterdam, 1642.





Nor have efforts to renew the battle in the Protestant Church

been wanting in these latter days.  The attempt in the Church of

England, in 1864, to fetter science, which was brought to

ridicule by Herschel, Bowring, and De Morgan; the assemblage of

Lutheran clergy at Berlin, in 1868, to protest against "science

falsely so called," are examples of these.  Fortunately, to the

latter came Pastor Knak, and his denunciations of the Copernican

theory as absolutely incompatible with a belief in the Bible,

dissolved the whole assemblage in ridicule.



In its recent dealings with modern astronomy the wisdom of the

Catholic Church in the more civilized countries has prevented its

yielding to some astounding errors into which one part of the

Protestant Church has fallen heedlessly.



Though various leaders in the older Church have committed the

absurd error of allowing a text-book and sundry review articles

to appear which grossly misstate the Galileo episode, with the

certainty of ultimately undermining confidence in her teachings

among her more thoughtful young men, she has kept clear of the

folly of continuing to tie her instruction, and the acceptance of

our sacred books, to an adoption of the Ptolemaic theory.



Not so with American Lutheranism.  In 1873 was published in St.

Louis, at the publishing house of the Lutheran Synod of Missouri,

a work entitled Astronomische Unterredung, the author being well

known as a late president of a Lutheran Teachers' Seminary.



No attack on the whole modern system of astronomy could be more

bitter.  On the first page of the introduction the author, after

stating the two theories, asks, "Which is right?" and says:  "It

would be very simple to me which is right, if it were only a

question of human import.  But the wise and truthful God has

expressed himself on this matter in the Bible.  The entire Holy

Scripture settles the question that the earth is the principal

body (Hauptkorper) of the universe, that it stands fixed, and

that sun and moon only serve to light it."



The author then goes on to show from Scripture the folly, not

only of Copernicus and Newton, but of a long line of great

astronomers in more recent times.  He declares:  "Let no one

understand me as inquiring first where truth is to be found--in

the Bible or with the astronomers.  No; I know that

beforehand--that my God never lies, never makes a mistake; out

of his mouth comes only truth, when he speaks of the structure of

the universe, of the earth, sun, moon, and stars....



"Because the truth of the Holy Scripture is involved in this,

therefore the above question is of the highest importance to

me....Scientists and others lean upon the miserable reed

(Rohrstab) that God teaches only the order of salvation, but not

the order of the universe."



Very noteworthy is the fact that this late survival of an ancient

belief based upon text-worship is found, not in the teachings of

any zealous priest of the mother Church, but in those of an

eminent professor in that branch of Protestantism which claims

special enlightenment.[70]



[70] For the amusing details of the attempt in the English Church

to repress science, and of the way in which it was met, see De

Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 42.  For Pastor Knak and his associates,

see the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868.  Of the recent Lutheran

works against the Copernican astronomy, see especially

Astronomische Unterredung zwischen einem Liebhaber der Astronomie

und mehreren beruhmten Astronomer der Neuzeit, by J. C. W. L.,

St. Louis, 1873.





Nor has the warfare against the dead champions of science been

carried on by the older Church alone.



On the 10th of May, 1859, Alexander von Humboldt was buried.  His

labours had been among the glories of the century, and his

funeral was one of the most imposing that Berlin had ever seen.

Among those who honoured themselves by their presence was the

prince regent, afterward the Emperor William I; but of the

clergy it was observed that none were present save the

officiating clergyman and a few regarded as unorthodox.[71]



[71] See Bruhns and Lassell, Life of Humboldt, London, 1873, vol.

ii, p. 411.







V.  RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO.





We return now to the sequel of the Galileo case.



Having gained their victory over Galileo, living and dead, having

used it to scare into submission the professors of astronomy

throughout Europe, conscientious churchmen exulted.  Loud was

their rejoicing that the "heresy," the "infidelity" the "atheism"

involved in believing that the earth revolves about its axis and

moves around the sun had been crushed by the great tribunal of

the Church, acting in strict obedience to the expressed will of

one Pope and the written order of another.  As we have seen, all

books teaching this hated belief were put upon the Index of

books forbidden to Christians, and that Index was prefaced by a

bull enforcing this condemnation upon the consciences of the

faithful throughout the world, and signed by the reigning Pope.



The losses to the world during this complete triumph of theology

were even more serious than at first appears:  one must

especially be mentioned.  There was then in Europe one of the

greatest thinkers ever given to mankind--Rene Descartes.

Mistaken though many of his reasonings were, they bore a rich

fruitage of truth. He had already done a vast work.  His theory

of vortices--assuming a uniform material regulated by physical

laws--as the beginning of the visible universe, though it was but

a provisional hypothesis, had ended the whole old theory of the

heavens with the vaulted firmament and the direction of the

planetary movements by angels, which even Kepler had allowed.

The scientific warriors had stirred new life in him, and he was

working over and summing up in his mighty mind all the researches

of his time.  The result would have made an epoch in history.

His aim was to combine all knowledge and thought into a Treatise

on the World, and in view of this he gave eleven years to the

study of anatomy alone.  But the fate of Galileo robbed him of

all hope, of all courage; the battle seemed lost; he gave up his

great plan forever.[72]



[72] For Descartes's discouragement, see Humboldt, Cosmos,

London, 1851, vol iii, p. 21; also Lange, Geschichte des

Materialismus, English translation, vol. i, pp. 248, 249, where

the letters of Descartes are given, showing his despair, and the

relinquishment of his best thoughts and works in order to

preserve peace with the Church; also Saisset, Descartes et ses

Precurseurs, pp. 100 et seq.; also Jolly, Histoire du Mouvement

intellectuel au XVI Siecle, vol. i, p. 390.





But ere long it was seen that this triumph of the Church was in

reality a prodigious defeat.  From all sides came proofs that

Copernicus and Galileo were right; and although Pope Urban and

the inquisition held Galileo in strict seclusion, forbidding him

even to SPEAK regarding the double motion of the earth; and

although this condemnation of "all books which affirm the motion

of the earth" was kept on the Index; and although the papal bull

still bound the Index and the condemnations in it on the

consciences of the faithful; and although colleges and

universities under Church control were compelled to teach the old

doctrine--it was seen by clear-sighted men everywhere that this

victory of the Church was a disaster to the victors.



New champions pressed on.  Campanella, full of vagaries as he

was, wrote his Apology for Galileo, though for that and other

heresies, religious, and political, he seven times underwent

torture.



And Kepler comes:  he leads science on to greater victories.

Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle scientific

reasoning entirely from the theological bias:  the doctrines of

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of

the circle had vitiated the minor features of his system, and

left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to

enter; but Kepler sees these errors, and by wonderful genius and

vigour he gives to the world the three laws which bear his name,

and this fortress of science is complete.  He thinks and speaks

as one inspired.  His battle is severe.  He is solemnly warned by

the Protestant Consistory of Stuttgart "not to throw Christ's

kingdom into confusion with his silly fancies," and as solemnly

ordered to "bring his theory of the world into harmony with

Scripture":  he is sometimes abused, sometimes ridiculed,

sometimes imprisoned.  Protestants in Styria and Wurtemberg,

Catholics in Austria and Bohemia, press upon him but Newton,

Halley, Bradley, and other great astronomers follow, and to

science remains the victory.[73]



[73] For Campanella, see Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, Naples,

1882, especially vol. iii; also Libri, vol. iv, pp. 149 et seq.

Fromundus, speaking of Kepler's explanation, says, "Vix teneo

ebullientem risum."  This is almost equal to the New York Church

Journal, speaking of John Stuart Mill as "that small sciolist,"

and of the preface to Dr. Draper's great work as "chippering."

How a journal, generally so fair in its treatment of such

subjects, can condescend to such weapons is one of the wonders of

modern journalism.  For the persecution of Kepler, see Heller,

Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 281 et seq; also Reuschle,

Kepler und die Astronomie, Frankfurt a. M., 1871, pp. 87 et seq.

There is a poetic justice in the fact that these two last-named

books come from Wurtemberg professors.  See also The

New-Englander for March, 1884, p. 178.





Yet this did not end the war.  During the seventeenth century, in

France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one

dared openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great

astronomer, never declared for it.  In 1672 the Jesuit Father

Riccioli declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments

for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it.  Even

after the beginning of the eighteenth century--long after the

demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton--Bossuet, the great Bishop of

Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever produced,

declared it contrary to Scripture.



Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that century.  In

England, John Hutchinson, as we have seen, published in 1724 his

Moses' Principia maintaining that the Hebrew Scriptures are a

perfect system of natural philosophy, and are opposed to the

Newtonian system of gravitation; and, as we have also seen, he

was followed by a long list of noted men in the Church.  In

France, two eminent mathematicians published in 1748 an edition

of Newton's Principia; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical

censure, they felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely

false.  Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of

the Jesuits, used these words:  "As for me, full of respect for

the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I

regard the earth as immovable; nevertheless, for simplicity in

explanation I will argue as if the earth moves; for it is proved

that of the two hypotheses the appearances favour this idea."



In Germany, especially in the Protestant part of it, the war was

even more bitter, and it lasted through the first half of the

eighteenth century.  Eminent Lutheran doctors of divinity flooded

the country with treatises to prove that the Copernican theory

could not be reconciled with Scripture.  In the theological

seminaries and in many of the universities where clerical

influence was strong they seemed to sweep all before them; and

yet at the middle of the century we find some of the

clearest-headed of them aware of the fact that their cause was

lost.[74]



[74] For Cassini's position, see Henri Martin, Histoire de

France, vol. xiii, p. 175.  For Riccioli, see Daunou, Etudes

Historiques, vol. ii, p. 439.  For Boussuet, see Bertrand, p. 41.

For Hutchinson, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, p. 48.  For

Wesley, see his work, already cited.  As to Boscovich, his

declaration, mentioned in the text, was in 1746, but in 1785 he

seemed to feel his position in view of history, and apologized

abjectly; Bertrand, pp. 60, 61.  See also Whewell's notice of Le

Sueur and Jacquier's introduction to their edition of Newton's

Principia.  For the struggle in Germany, see Zoeckler, Geschichte

der Beziehungenzwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. ii,

pp. 45 et seq.





In 1757 the most enlightened perhaps in the whole line of the

popes, Benedict XIV, took up the matter, and the Congregation of

the Index secretly allowed the ideas of Copernicus to be

tolerated.  Yet in 1765 Lalande, the great French astronomer,

tried in vain at Rome to induce the authorities to remove

Galileo's works from the Index.  Even at a date far within our

own nineteenth century the authorities of many universities in

Catholic Europe, and especially those in Spain, excluded the

Newtonian system.  In 1771 the greatest of them all, the

University of Salamanca, being urged to teach physical science,

refused, making answer as follows:  "Newton teaches nothing that

would make a good logician or metaphysician; and Gassendi and

Descartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle

does."



Vengeance upon the dead also has continued far into our own

century.  On the 5th of May, 1829, a great multitude assembled at

Warsaw to honour the memory of Copernicus and to unveil

Thorwaldsen's statue of him.



Copernicus had lived a pious, Christian life; he had been

beloved for unostentatious Christian charity; with his religious

belief no fault had ever been found; he was a canon of the Church

at Frauenberg, and over his grave had been written the most

touching of Christian epitaphs.  Naturally, then, the people

expected a religious service; all was understood to be arranged

for it; the procession marched to the church and waited.  The

hour passed, and no priest appeared; none could be induced to

appear.  Copernicus, gentle, charitable, pious, one of the

noblest gifts of God to religion as well as to science, was

evidently still under the ban.  Five years after that, his book

was still standing on the Index of books prohibited to

Christians.



The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexorable

toward the works of Copernicus and Galileo as its predecessors

had been; but in the year 182O came a crisis.  Canon Settele,

Professor of Astronomy at Rome, had written an elementary book in

which the Copernican system was taken for granted.  The Master of

the Sacred Palace, Anfossi, as censor of the press, refused to

allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised his work and

treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis.  On this

Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the

matter to the Congregation of the Holy Office.  At last, on the

16th of August, 182O, it was decided that Settele might teach the

Copernican system as established, and this decision was approved

by the Pope.  This aroused considerable discussion, but finally,

on the 11th of September, 1822, the cardinals of the Holy

Inquisition graciously agreed that "the printing and publication

of works treating of the motion of the earth and the stability of

the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of modern

astronomers, is permitted at Rome."  This decree was ratified by

Pius VII, but it was not until thirteen years later, in 1835,

that there was issued an edition of the Index from which the

condemnation of works defending the double motion of the earth

was left out.



This was not a moment too soon, for, as if the previous proofs

had not been sufficient, each of the motions of the earth was now

absolutely demonstrated anew, so as to be recognised by the

ordinary observer.  The parallax of fixed stars, shown by Bessel

as well as other noted astronomers in 1838, clinched forever the

doctrine of the revolution of the earth around the sun, and in

1851 the great experiment of Foucault with the pendulum showed to

the human eye the earth in motion around its own axis.  To make

the matter complete, this experiment was publicly made in one of

the churches at Rome by the eminent astronomer, Father Secchi, of

the Jesuits, in 1852--just two hundred and twenty years after the

Jesuits had done so much to secure Galileo's condemnation.[75]



[75] For good statements of the final action of the Church in the

matter, see Gebler; also Zoeckler, ii, 352.  See also Bertrand,

Fondateurs de l'Astronomie moderne, p. 61; Flammarion, Vie de

Copernic, chap. ix.  As to the time when the decree of

condemnation was repealed, there have been various pious attempts

to make it earlier than the reality.  Artaud, p. 307, cited in an

apologetic article in the Dublin Review, September, 1865, says

that Galileo's famous dialogue was published in 1714, at Padua,

entire, and with the usual approbations.  The same article also

declares that in 1818, the ecclesiastical decrees were repealed

by Pius VII in full Consistory.  Whewell accepts this; but Cantu,

an authority favourable to the Church, acknowledges that

Copernicus's work remained on the Index as late as 1835 (Cantu,

Histoire universelle, vol. xv, p. 483); and with this Th. Martin,

not less favourable to the Church, but exceedingly careful as to

the facts, agrees; and the most eminent authority of all, Prof.

Reusch, of Bonn, in his Der Index der vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn,

1885, vol. ii, p. 396, confirms the above statement in the text.

For a clear statement of Bradley's exquisite demonstration of the

Copernican theory by reasonings upon the rapidity of light, etc.,

and Foucault's exhibition of the rotation of the earth by the

pendulum experiment, see Hoefer, Histoire de l'Astronomie, pp.

492 et seq.  For more recent proofs of the Copernican theory, by

the discoveries of Bunsen, Bischoff, Benzenberg, and others, see

Jevons, Principles of Science.









VI.  THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH AFTER ITS VICTORY OVER GALILEO.





Any history of the victory of astronomical science over dogmatic

theology would be incomplete without some account of the retreat

made by the Church from all its former positions in the Galileo

case.



The retreat of the Protestant theologians was not difficult.  A

little skilful warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of that

time-honoured phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, that the

Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men

go to heaven, and a free use of explosive rhetoric against the

pursuing army of scientists, sufficed.



But in the older Church it was far less easy.  The retreat of the

sacro-scientific army of Church apologists lasted through two

centuries.



In spite of all that has been said by these apologists, there no

longer remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal infallibility

was committed fully and irrevocably against the double revolution

of the earth.  As the documents of Galileo's trial now published

show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed on with all his might the

condemnation of Galileo and of the works of Copernicus and of all

others teaching the motion of the earth around its own axis and

around the sun.  So, too, in the condemnation of Galileo in 1633,

and in all the proceedings which led up to it and which followed

it, Urban VIII was the central figure.  Without his sanction no

action could have been taken.



True, the Pope did not formally sign the decree against the

Copernican theory THEN; but this came later.  In 1664 Alexander

VII prefixed to the Index containing the condemnations of the

works of Copernicus and Galileo and "all books which affirm the

motion of the earth" a papal bull signed by himself, binding the

contents of the Index upon the consciences of the faithful.

This bull confirmed and approved in express terms, finally,

decisively, and infallibly, the condemnation of "all books

teaching the movement of the earth and the stability of the

sun."[76]



[76] See Rev. William W. Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees against

the Doctrine of the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, p. 94; and

for the text of the papal bull, Speculatores domus Israel, pp.

132, 133, see also St. George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth

Century for July, 1885.  For the authentic publication of the

bull, see preface to the Index of 1664, where the bull appears,

signed by the Pope.  The Rev. Mr. Roberts and Mr. St. George

Mivart are Roman Catholics and both acknowledge that the papal

sanction was fully given.





The position of the mother Church had been thus made especially

difficult; and the first important move in retreat by the

apologists was the statement that Galileo was condemned, not

because he affirmed the motion of the earth, but because he

supported it from Scripture.  There was a slight appearance of

truth in this.  Undoubtedly, Galileo's letters to Castelli and

the grand duchess, in which he attempted to show that his

astronomical doctrines were not opposed to Scripture, gave a new

stir to religious bigotry.  For a considerable time, then, this

quibble served its purpose; even a hundred and fifty years after

Galileo's condemnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du

Pan, in his wish to gain favour from the older Church.



But nothing can be more absurd, in the light of the original

documents recently brought out of the Vatican archives, than to

make this contention now.  The letters of Galileo to Castelli and

the Grand-Duchess were not published until after the

condemnation; and, although the Archbishop of Pisa had

endeavoured to use them against him, they were but casually

mentioned in 1616, and entirely left out of view in 1633.  What

was condemned in 1616 by the Sacred Congregation held in the

presence of Pope Paul V, as "ABSURD, FALSE IN THEOLOGY, AND

HERETICAL, BECAUSE ABSOLUTELY CONTRARY TO HOLY SCRIPTURE," was

the proposition that "THE SUN IS THE CENTRE ABOUT WHICH THE EARTH

REVOLVES"; and what was condemned as "ABSURD, FALSE IN

PHILOSOPHY, AND FROM A THEOLOGIC POINT OF VIEW, AT LEAST, OPPOSED

TO THE TRUE FAITH," was the proposition that "THE EARTH IS NOT

THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE AND IMMOVABLE, BUT HAS A DIURNAL

MOTION."



And again, what Galileo was made, by express order of Pope Urban,

and by the action of the Inquisition under threat of torture, to

abjure in 1633, was "THE ERROR AND HERESY OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE

EARTH."



What the Index condemned under sanction of the bull issued by

Alexander VII in 1664 was, "ALL BOOKS TEACHING THE MOVEMENT OF

THE EARTH AND THE STABILITY OF THE SUN."



What the Index, prefaced by papal bulls, infallibly binding its

contents upon the consciences of the faithful, for nearly two

hundred years steadily condemned was, "ALL BOOKS WHICH AFFIRM THE

MOTION OF THE EARTH."



Not one of these condemnations was directed against Galileo "for

reconciling his ideas with Scripture."[77]



[77] For the original trial documents, copied carefully from the

Vatican manuscripts, see the Roman Catholic authority, L'Epinois,

especially p. 35, where the principal document is given in its

original Latin; see also Gebler, Die Acten des galilei'schen

Processes, for still more complete copies of the same documents.

For minute information regarding these documents and their

publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana Inedita, forming

vol. xxii, part iii, of the Memoirs of the Venetian Institute for

1887, and especially pp. 891 and following.





Having been dislodged from this point, the Church apologists

sought cover under the statement that Galileo was condemned not

for heresy, but for contumacy and want of respect toward the

Pope.



There was a slight chance, also, for this quibble:  no doubt

Urban VIII, one of the haughtiest of pontiffs, was induced by

Galileo's enemies to think that he had been treated with some

lack of proper etiquette:  first, by Galileo's adhesion to his

own doctrines after his condemnation in 1616; and, next, by his

supposed reference in the Dialogue of 1632 to the arguments

which the Pope had used against him.



But it would seem to be a very poor service rendered to the

doctrine of papal infallibility to claim that a decision so

immense in its consequences could be influenced by the personal

resentment of the reigning pontiff.



Again, as to the first point, the very language of the various

sentences shows the folly of this assertion; for these sentences

speak always of "heresy" and never of "contumacy."  As to the

last point, the display of the original documents settled that

forever.  They show Galileo from first to last as most submissive

toward the Pope, and patient under the papal arguments and

exactions.  He had, indeed, expressed his anger at times against

his traducers; but to hold this the cause of the judgment

against him is to degrade the whole proceedings, and to convict

Paul V, Urban VIII, Bellarmin, the other theologians, and the

Inquisition, of direct falsehood, since they assigned entirely

different reasons for their conduct.  From this position,

therefore, the assailants retreated.[78]



[78] The invention of the "contumacy" quibble seems due to

Monsignor Marini, who appears also to have manipulated the

original documents to prove it.  Even Whewell was evidently

somewhat misled by him, but Whewell wrote before L'Epinois had

shown all the documents, and under the supposition that Marini

was an honest man.





The next rally was made about the statement that the persecution

of Galileo was the result of a quarrel between Aristotelian

professors on one side and professors favouring the experimental

method on the other.  But this position was attacked and carried

by a very simple statement.  If the divine guidance of the Church

is such that it can be dragged into a professorial squabble, and

made the tool of a faction in bringing about a most disastrous

condemnation of a proved truth, how did the Church at that time

differ from any human organization sunk into decrepitude, managed

nominally by simpletons, but really by schemers? If that argument

be true, the condition of the Church was even worse than its

enemies have declared it; and amid the jeers of an unfeeling

world the apologists sought new shelter.



The next point at which a stand was made was the assertion that

the condemnation of Galileo was "provisory"; but this proved a

more treacherous shelter than the others.  The wording of the

decree of condemnation itself is a sufficient answer to this

claim.  When doctrines have been solemnly declared, as those of

Galileo were solemnly declared under sanction of the highest

authority in the Church, "contrary to the sacred Scriptures,"

"opposed to the true faith," and "false and absurd in theology

and philosophy"--to say that such declarations are "provisory" is

to say that the truth held by the Church is not immutable; from

this, then, the apologists retreated.[79]



[79] This argument also seems to have been foisted upon the world

by the wily Monsignor Marini.





Still another contention was made, in some respects more curious

than any other:  it was, mainly, that Galileo "was no more a

victim of Catholics than of Protestants; for they more than the

Catholic theologians impelled the Pope to the action taken."[80]



[80] See the Rev. A. M. Kirsch on Professor Huxley and Evolution,

in The American Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877.  The article

is, as a whole, remarkably fair-minded, and in the main, just, as

to the Protestant attitude, and as to the causes underlying the

whole action against Galileo.





But if Protestantism could force the papal hand in a matter of

this magnitude, involving vast questions of belief and

far-reaching questions of policy, what becomes of "inerrancy"--of

special protection and guidance of the papal authority in matters

of faith?



While this retreat from position to position was going on, there

was a constant discharge of small-arms, in the shape of

innuendoes, hints, and sophistries:  every effort was made to

blacken Galileo's private character:  the irregularities of his

early life were dragged forth, and stress was even laid upon

breaches of etiquette; but this succeeded so poorly that even as

far back as 1850 it was thought necessary to cover the retreat by

some more careful strategy.



This new strategy is instructive.  The original documents of the

Galileo trial had been brought during the Napoleonic conquests to

Paris; but in 1846 they were returned to Rome by the French

Government, on the express pledge by the papal authorities that

they should be published.  In 1850, after many delays on various

pretexts, the long-expected publication appeared.  The personage

charged with presenting them to the world was Monsignor Marini.

This ecclesiastic was of a kind which has too often afflicted

both the Church and the world at large.  Despite the solemn

promise of the papal court, the wily Marini became the instrument

of the Roman authorities in evading the promise.  By suppressing

a document here, and interpolating a statement there, he managed

to give plausible standing-ground for nearly every important

sophistry ever broached to save the infallibility of the Church

and destroy the reputation of Galileo.  He it was who supported

the idea that Galileo was "condemned not for heresy, but for

contumacy."



The first effect of Monsignor Marini's book seemed useful in

covering the retreat of the Church apologists.  Aided by him,

such vigorous writers as Ward were able to throw up temporary

intrenchments between the Roman authorities and the indignation

of the world.



But some time later came an investigator very different from

Monsignor Marini.  This was a Frenchman, M. L'Epinois.  Like

Marini, L'Epinois was devoted to the Church; but, unlike Marini,

he could not lie.  Having obtained access in 1867 to the Galileo

documents at the Vatican, he published several of the most

important, without suppression or pious-fraudulent manipulation.

This made all the intrenchments based upon Marini's statements

untenable.  Another retreat had to be made.



And now came the most desperate effort of all.  The apologetic

army, reviving an idea which the popes and the Church had spurned

for centuries, declared that the popes AS POPES had never

condemned the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo; that they had

condemned them as men simply; that therefore the Church had

never been committed to them; that the condemnation was made by

the cardinals of the inquisition and index; and that the Pope had

evidently been restrained by interposition of Providence from

signing their condemnation.  Nothing could show the desperation

of the retreating party better than jugglery like this.  The fact

is, that in the official account of the condemnation by

Bellarmin, in 1616, he declares distinctly that he makes this

condemnation "in the name of His Holiness the Pope."[81]



[81] See the citation from the Vatican manuscript given in

Gebler, p. 78.





Again, from Pope Urban downward, among the Church authorities of

the seventeenth century the decision was always acknowledged to

be made by the Pope and the Church.  Urban VIII spoke of that of

1616 as made by Pope Paul V and the Church, and of that of 1633

as made by himself and the Church.  Pope Alexander VII in 1664,

in his bull Speculatores, solemnly sanctioned the condemnation of

all books affirming the earth's movement.[82]



[82] For references by Urban VIII to the condemnation as made by

Pope Paul V see pp. 136, 144, and elsewhere in Martin, who much

against his will is forced to allow this.  See also Roberts,

Pontifical decrees against the Earth's Movement, and St. George

Mivart's article, as above quoted; also Reusch, Index der

verbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp. 29 et seq.





When Gassendi attempted to raise the point that the decision

against Copernicus and Galileo was not sanctioned by the Church

as such, an eminent theological authority, Father Lecazre, rector

of the College of Dijon, publicly contradicted him, and declared

that it "was not certain cardinals, but the supreme authority of

the Church," that had condemned Galileo; and to this statement

the Pope and other Church authorities gave consent either openly

or by silence.  When Descartes and others attempted to raise the

same point, they were treated with contempt.  Father Castelli,

who had devoted himself to Galileo, and knew to his cost just

what the condemnation meant and who made it, takes it for

granted, in his letter to the papal authorities, that it was made

by the Church.  Cardinal Querenghi, in his letters; the

ambassador Guicciardini, in his dispatches; Polacco, in his

refutation;  the historian Viviani, in his biography of

Galileo--all writing under Church inspection and approval at the

time, took the view that the Pope and the Church condemned

Galileo, and this was never denied at Rome.  The Inquisition

itself, backed by the greatest theologian of the time

(Bellarmin), took the same view.  Not only does he declare that

he makes the condemnation "in the name of His Holiness the Pope,"

but we have the Roman Index, containing the condemnation for

nearly two hundred years, prefaced by a solemn bull of the

reigning Pope binding this condemnation on the consciences of the

whole Church, and declaring year after year that "all books which

affirm the motion of the earth" are damnable.  To attempt to face

all this, added to the fact that Galileo was required to abjure

"the heresy of the movement of the earth" by written order of the

Pope, was soon seen to be impossible.  Against the assertion that

the Pope was not responsible we have all this mass of testimony,

and the bull of Alexander VII in 1664.[83]



[83] For Lecazre's answer to Gassendi, see Martin, pp. 146, 147.

For the attempt to make the crimes of Galileo breach of

etiquette, see Dublin Review, as above.  Whewell, vol. i, p. 283.

Citation from Marini: "Galileo was punished for trifling with the

authorities, to which he refused to submit, and was punished for

obstinate contumacy, not heresy."  The sufficient answer to all

this is that the words of the inflexible sentence designating the

condemned books are "libri omnes qui affirmant telluris motum."

See Bertrand, p. 59.  As to the idea that "Galileo was punished

for not his opinion, but for basing it on Scripture," the answer

may be found in the Roman Index of 1704, in which are noted for

condemnation "Libri omnes docentes mobilitatem terrae et

immobilitatem solis."  For the way in which, when it was found

convenient in argument, Church apologists insisted that it WAS

"the Supreme Chief of the Church by a pontifical decree, and not

certain cardinals," who condemned Galileo and his doctrine, see

Father Lecazre's letter to Gassendi, in Flammarion, Pluralite des

Mondes, p. 427, and Urban VIII's own declarations as given by

Martin.  For the way in which, when necessary, Church apologists

asserted the very contrary of this, declaring that it was issued

in a doctrinal degree of the Congregation of the Index, and NOT

as the Holy Father's teaching," see Dublin Review, September,

1865.





This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by honest

Catholics themselves.  In 1870 a Roman Catholic clergy man in

England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently thinking that the time

had come to tell the truth, published a book entitled The

Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, and in this

exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had

committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement

of the earth.  This Catholic clergyman showed from the original

record that Pope Paul V, in 1616, had presided over the tribunal

condemning the doctrine of the earth's movement, and ordering

Galileo to give up the opinion.  He showed that Pope Urban VIII,

in 1633, pressed on, directed, and promulgated the final

condemnation, making himself in all these ways responsible for

it.  And, finally, he showed that Pope Alexander VII, in 1664, by

his bull--Speculatores domus Israel--attached to the Index,

condemning "all books which affirm the motion of the earth," had

absolutely pledged the papal infallibility against the earth's

movement.  He also confessed that under the rules laid down by

the highest authorities in the Church, and especially by Sixtus V

and Pius IX, there was no escape from this conclusion.



Various theologians attempted to evade the force of the argument.

Some, like Dr. Ward and Bouix, took refuge in verbal niceties;

some, like Dr. Jeremiah Murphy, comforted themselves with

declamation.  The only result was, that in 1885 came another

edition of the Rev. Mr. Roberts's work, even more cogent than

the first; and, besides this, an essay by that eminent Catholic,

St. George Mivart, acknowledging the Rev. Mr. Roberts's position

to be impregnable, and declaring virtually that the Almighty

allowed Pope and Church to fall into complete error regarding the

Copernican theory, in order to teach them that science lies

outside their province, and that the true priesthood of

scientific truth rests with scientific investigators alone.[84]



[84] For the crushing answer by two eminent Roman Catholics to

the sophistries cited--an answer which does infinitely more

credit to the older Church that all the perverted ingenuity used

in concealing the truth or breaking the force of it--see Roberts

and St. George Mivart, as already cited.





In spite, then, of all casuistry and special pleading, this

sturdy honesty ended the controversy among Catholics themselves,

so far as fair-minded men are concerned.



In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases

two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the

embarrassment of militant theology in the nineteenth century.



The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the days when

he was hovering between the Anglican and Roman Churches.  In one

of his sermons before the University of Oxford he spoke as

follows:



"Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary,

and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at

rest.  How can we determine which of these opposite statements is

the very truth till we know what motion is?  If our idea of

motion is but an accidental result of our present senses, neither

proposition is true and both are true:  neither true

philosophically; both true for certain practical purposes in the

system in which they are respectively found."



In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more

hopelessly skeptical.  And for what were the youth of Oxford led

into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence

of truth or any real foundation for it?  Simply to save an

outworn system of interpretation into which the gifted preacher

happened to be born.



The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and developed in

the Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman's

associates.  This argument was nothing less than an attempt to

retreat under the charge of deception against the Almighty

himself.  It is as follows:  "But it may well be doubted whether

the Church did retard the progress of scientific truth.  What

retarded it was the circumstance that God has thought fit to

express many texts of Scripture in words which have every

appearance of denying the earth's motion.  But it is God who did

this, not the Church; and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act

as to retard the progress of scientific truth, it would be little

to her discredit, even if it were true, that she had followed his

example."



This argument, like Mr. Gosse's famous attempt to reconcile

geology to Genesis--by supposing that for some inscrutable

purpose God deliberately deceived the thinking world by giving to

the earth all the appearances of development through long periods

of time, while really creating it in six days, each of an evening

and a morning--seems only to have awakened the amazed pity of

thinking men.  This, like the argument of Newman, was a last

desperate effort of Anglican and Roman divines to save something

from the wreckage of dogmatic theology.[85]



[85] For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory

of Religious Belief, sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in

Contemporary Review for January, 1892.  For the attempt to take

the blame off the shoulders of both Pope and cardinals and place

it upon the Almighty, see the article above cited, in the Dublin

Review, September 1865, p. 419 and July, 1871, pp. 157 et seq.

For a good summary of the various attempts, and for replies to

them in a spirit of judicial fairness, see Th. Martin, Vie de

Galilee, though there is some special pleading to save the

infallibility of the Pope and Church.  The bibliography at the

close is very valuable.  For details of Mr. Gosse's theory, as

developed in his Omphalos, see the chapter on Geology in this

work.  As to a still later attempt, see Wegg-Prosser, Galileo and

his Judges, London, 1889, the main thing in it being an attempt

to establish, against the honest and honourable concessions of

Catholics like Roberts and Mivart, sundry far-fetched and wire-

drawn distinctions between dogmatic and disciplinary bulls--an

attempt which will only deepen the distrust of straightforward

reasoners.  The author's point of view is stated in the words, "I

have maintained that the Church has a right to lay her

restraining hand on the speculations of natural science" (p.

167).





All these well-meaning defenders of the faith but wrought into

the hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea that there

is a necessary antagonism between science and religion.  Like the

landsman who lashes himself to the anchor of the sinking ship,

they simply attached Christianity by the strongest cords of logic

which they could spin to these mistaken ideas in science, and,

could they have had their way, the advance of knowledge would

have ingulfed both together.



On the other hand, what had science done for religion?  Simply

this:  Copernicus, escaping persecution only by death; Giordano

Bruno, burned alive as a monster of impiety; Galileo, imprisoned

and humiliated as the worst of misbelievers; Kepler, accused of

"throwing Christ's kingdom into confusion with his silly

fancies"; Newton, bitterly attacked for "dethroning Providence,"

gave to religion stronger foundations and more ennobling

conceptions.



Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Alphonso of

Castile, seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic theory, yet

knowing no other, startled Europe with the blasphemy that, if he

had been present at creation, he could have suggested a better

order of the heavenly bodies.  Under the new system, Kepler,

filled with a religious spirit, exclaimed, "I do think the

thoughts of God."  The difference in religious spirit between

these two men marks the conquest made in this long struggle by

Science for Religion.[86]



[86] As a pendant to this ejaculation of Kepler may be cited the

words of Linnaeus: "Deum ominpotentem a tergo transeuntem vidi et

obstupui."





Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for all this

resistance to science upon the Roman Church.  The Protestant

Church, though rarely able to be so severe, has been more

blameworthy.  The persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the

older Church was mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth

century; the persecution of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and

Woodrow, and Toy, and the young professors at Beyrout, by various

Protestant authorities, was near the end of the nineteenth

century.  Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly

in accordance with principles held at that time by all

religionists, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world;

these later persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of

principles which all Protestants to-day hold or pretend to hold,

and none make louder claim to hold them than the very sects which

persecuted these eminent Christian men of our day, men whose

crime was that they were intelligent enough to accept the science

of their time, and honest enough to acknowledge it.



Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for

excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic

universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while

real knowledge of geological and biological and anthropological

truth is denied or pitifully diluted in so many American

Protestant colleges and universities in the nineteenth century.



Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the

Catholic Index, and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every

really important book in the last three centuries has been

forbidden by it, so long as young men in so many American

Protestant universities and colleges are nursed with

"ecclesiastical pap" rather than with real thought, and directed

to the works of "solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry

"approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept

aloof from such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer,

Huxley, Draper, and Lecky.



It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that some of the

former strongholds of her bigotry have become liberalized; but,

on the other hand, Catholicism can point to the fact that Pope

Leo XIII, now happily reigning, has made a noble change as

regards open dealing with documents.  The days of Monsignor

Marini, it may be hoped, are gone.  The Vatican Library, with its

masses of historical material, has been thrown open to Protestant

and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has been freely

used by men representing all shades of religious thought.



As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault,

Protestant as well as Catholic.  It was not the fault of

religion; it was the fault of that short-sighted linking of

theological dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter defiance

of the words and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity,

narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever prone to substitute for

religion.  Justly is it said by one of the most eminent among

contemporary Anglican divines, that "it is because they have

mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so

often been foes of light."[87]



[87] For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic

historian of genius, as to the POPULAR demand for persecution and

the pressure of the lower strata in ecclesiastical organizations

for cruel measures, see Balmes's Le Protestantisme compare au

Catholicisme, etc., fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii.

Archbishop Spaulding has something of the same sort in his

Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, p. 22 et seq., stretches this

as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church in the

Galileo matter.  As to the various branches of the Protestant

Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of

notoriety that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders,

deacons, or vestrymen, are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-

hunting than are their better educated pastors.  As to the cases

of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy, and all the professors at

Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this series on The Fall

of Man and Anthropology.  Among Protestant historians who have

recently been allowed full and free examination of the treasures

in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions

between Catholicism and Protestantism, are von Sybel, of Berlin,

and Philip Schaff, of New York.  It should be added that the

latter went with commendatory letters from eminent prelates in

the Catholic Church in America and Europe.  For the closing

citation, see Canon Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 432.