But in the fifteenth century that sturdy German thinker, Cardinal
Nicholas of Cusa, insisted on examining these documents and on
applying to them the same thorough research and patient thought
which led him, even before Copernicus, to detect the error of the
Ptolemaic astronomy.
As a result, he avowed his scepticism regarding this pious
literature; other close thinkers followed him in investigating it,
and it was soon found a tissue of absurd anachronisms, with endless
clashing and confusion of events and persons.
For a time heroic attempts were made by Church authorities to cover
up these facts. Scholars revealing them were frowned upon, even
persecuted, and their works placed upon the _Index_; scholars
explaining them away--the "apologists" or "reconcilers" of that
day--were rewarded with Church preferment, one of them securing for
a very feeble treatise a cardinal's hat. But all in vain; these
writings were at length acknowledged by all scholars of note, Catholic
and Protestant, to be mainly a mass of devoutly cunning forgeries.
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