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178 of Scripture was against accepting the theory of the earth's motion. This may have had some weight with Tycho, at least it might at first have made him indisposed openly to advocate the Copernican system, as the most narrow-minded intolerance was rampant in Denmark (as in most other countries), notwithstanding the king's more liberal disposition. But the king did not wish to be considered unorthodox, and had yielded to the importunity of his brother-in-law, the Elector of Saxony, by dismissing the distinguished theologian Niels Hemmingsen from his professorship at the University, as suspected of leaning to Calvinism. It would certainly not have been prudent for the highly-salaried and highly-envied pensioner of the king, to declare himself an open adherent of a system of the world which was supposed not to be orthodox.

How far this consideration influenced Tycho it is not easy to decide, but the supposed physical difficulties of the Copernican system and a disinclination to adopt a mere geometrical representation, in the reality of which he could not believe, led him to attempt the planning of a system which possessed the advantages of the Copernican system without its supposed defects. In a letter to Rothmann in 1589 Tycho states that he was induced to give up the Ptolemean system by finding from morning and evening observations of Mars at opposition (between November 1582 and April 1583) that this planet was nearer to the earth than the sun was, while according to the Ptolemean system the orbit of the sun intervened between that of Mars and the earth. To the modern reader who knows that the horizontal parallax of Mars can at most reach about 23″,