Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/762

740 was kept on the Index; and although the papal hull 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 hy 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 vigor 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 Würtemberg, Catholics in Austria and Bohemia press upon him; but Newton, Halley, Bradley, and other great astronomers follow, and to science remains the victory.

Yet this did not end the war. During the seventeenth century, in all France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared it. In 1672 the Jesuit, Father Riccioli. declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, after the demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton, even Bossuet, the great Bishop of