Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/464

448 rights and intellectual advancement at the door of religion as it would be to lay all its outrages against religion at the door of science and government, because "the Church" has seldom slaughtered a holy martyr to the truth without employing some forms of both law and logic.

Science exists for the sake of religion, and because of religion. If there had been no love for God in the human race, there had been no study of the physical universe. The visible cosmos is God's love-letter to man, and religion seems to probe every corner of the sheet on which such love is written, to examine every phrase, and study every connection. A few upstarts of the present day, not the real men and masters of science, ignore the fact that almost every man who has made any great original contribution to science, since the revival of letters, was a very religious man; but their weak wickedness must not be charged to science any more than the wicked weakness of ecclesiastics to religion.

Copernicus, who revolutionized astronomy, was one of the purest Christians who ever lived—a simple, laborious minister of religion, walking beneficently among the poor by day, and living among the stars by night; and yet one writer of our day has dared to say, in what he takes to be the interest of science, that Copernicus was "aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth." Was anything worse ever perpetrated by theologian, or even ecclesiastic? Could any man believe in any doctrine which he knew was opposed to any truth, especially if he believed that God had revealed that truth? It were impossible, especially with a man having the splendid intellect and the pure heart of Copernicus, who died believing in his "De Orbium Cœlestium Revolutionibus," and also in the Bible. And this is the inscription which that humble Christian ordered for his tomb: "Non parem Paulo veniam requiro, gratiam Petri neque posco; sed quam in crucis ligno dederis latroni, sedulus oro."

Tycho Brahe, who, although he did not produce a system which won acceptance, did, nevertheless, lay the foundation for practical astronomy, and build the stairs on which Kepler mounted to his grand discoveries, was a most religious man. He introduces into one of his scientific works ("Astronomiæ Instauratio Mechanica," p. A) this sentence: "No man can be made happy, and enjoy immortal life, but through the merits of Christ, the Redeemer, the Son of God, and by the study of his doctrines, and imitation of his example."

John Kepler was a man in whose life the only conflict between science and religion seemed to be as to which should yield the most assistance to the other. He wrought as under Luther's motto, "Orasse est studisse." He prayed before he worked, and shouted afterward. The more he bowed his soul in prayer, the higher his intellect rose in its discoveries; and, as those discoveries thickened on