Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/80

 authorities who place Hell at the center of the world, a "common opinion of divines," because it ought to be in the lowest part of the world, that is, at the center of the sphere. Then by the Copernican hypothesis, Hell must either be in the sun; or, if in the earth, if the earth should move about the sun, then Hell within the earth would be in Heaven, and nothing could be more absurd. (5) Those authorities opposing Heaven to earth and earth to Heaven, as in Gen. I, Mat. VI, etc. Since the two are always mutually opposed to each other, and Heaven undoubtedly refers to the circumference, earth must necessarily be at the center. (6) Those authorities ("rather of fathers and divines than of the Sacred Scriptures") who declare that after the Day of Judgment, the sun shall stand immovable in the east and the moon in west.

Foscarini then lays down in answer six maxims, the first of which is that things attributed to God must be expounded metaphorically according to our manner of understanding and of common speech. The other maxims are more metaphysical, as that everything in the universe, whether corruptible or incorruptible, obeys a fixed law of its nature; so, for example, Fortune is always fickle. In concluding his defense, he claims among other things, that the Copernician is a more admirable hypothesis than the Ptolemaic, and that it is an easy way into astronomy and philosophy. Then he adds that there may be an analogy between the seven-branched candle-stick of the Old Testament and the seven planets around the sun, and possibly the arrangement of the seeds in the "Indian Figg," in the pomegranate and in grapes is all divine evidence of the solar system. With such an amusing reversion to mediæval analogy his spirited letter ends.

Some or all of these scriptural arguments appear in most of the attacks on the doctrine even before its condemnation by the Index in 1616 was widely known. Besides these objections, Aristotle's and Ptolemy's statements were endlessly repeated with implicit faith in their accuracy. Even Sir Francis Bacon (1567-1631) with all his modernity of thought, failed in this instance to recognize the value of the new idea and, despite his 72