Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever produced, declared it contrary to Scripture.
Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly in the following 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 the censure of the Church, 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 favor that 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.[1]
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
- ↑ For Cassini's position, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xiii, p. 175. For Riccioli, see Daunou, Études Historiques, vol. ii, p. 439. For Bossuet, 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 l746, 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 Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. ii, pp. 45 et seq.
