[154]
Yet this did not end the war. During the seventeenth century, in
France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared
openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great
astronomer, never declared for it. In 1672 the Jesuit Father
Riccioli declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments
for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it. Even after
the beginning of the eighteenth century--long after the
demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton--Bossuet, the great Bishop of
Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever produced,
declared it contrary to Scripture.
Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that 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 ecclesiastical censure, they felt
obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false.
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