miles. Light, which travels 186,000 miles in a second, requires years to come from the nearest of the fixed stars.

The book of Copernicus was a blow, not simply at the science of his day but at that human egotism that lay at the bottom of the current philosophy and theology. These rested on the assumption that the whole universe was made for man, that the flowers bloomed for his pleasure, that the fields rendered their fruits for his use, that the sun and the earth were his, and that even the universe of stars was made for his instruction and enjoyment. The conception that the human race and its place of habitation occupied a modest position in an illimitable universe of suns and planets not only was utterly distasteful to the philosophy and theology of the time but it outraged the accumulated human egotism of fifteen centuries.

Fortunately for himself, Copernicus did not live to see the storm of condemnation that fell upon his theory. The fundamentalists who were shocked at the notion of a moving earth were not confined to the rulers of the Holy Catholic Church, as we are sometimes wont to assume. Luther and Melancthon condemned the Copernican theory as heartily as the officers of the Inquisition. The assumption, said Luther, of the motion of the earth in its orbit cannot be true, since "the Holy Scriptures state that Joshua bade the sun stand still and not the earth"! The church indeed had in its hands the power to coerce men, and it did not hesitate to use it against the advocates of the Copernican theory. There are few chapters in human history more saddening than the trial of Bruno before the Inquisition for teaching the revolution of the earth and his condemnation, his handing over to the secular authorities, and his burning at the stake in February, 1600. There are few experiences in the history of human thought more humiliating than the picture of old Galileo, under threat of torture, recanting his teaching and declaring that the opinion of Ptolemy was true and indubitable. His recantation is a touching story and has been a fruitful source of controversy for nearly three centuries. It is clear that, after his discovery of the satellites of Jupiter with his little tele

In this matter of tolerance toward the theory of the earth's motion, no group of men had cause for intellectual conceit. For a hundred and fifty years, not only the Catholic and Protestant theologians but the philosophers and scientists of the world showed great hesitation in facing honestly the growing proofs of the Copernican theory. Francis Bacon, whom we rightly look upon as one of the fathers of modern scientific methods, failed to envisage the relative values of the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories, and over a series of years continued to argue against the conception of an earth rotating on its axis and circling in an orbit around the sun. In the last of his great works, he assigns reasons which to-day seem to us to contradict the very method of thought for which his name stands. "In favor," he writes, "of the earth as the centre of the world we have the evidences of our own senses and also inveterate opinion; . . . the introduction of so much immobility into nature and making the moon revolve around the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his [Copernicus] are speculations of one who considers not what fictions he

introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer." Nowhere does one find more clearly reflected than in these words of Bacon the objection of mankind to a universe in motion.

Whether William Shakespeare, the contemporary of Bacon, "out-topping knowledge," in Matthew Arnold's phrase, included the Copernican theory in the allembracing range of his vision is not clear. There is a passage in "Troilus and Cressida" which at least suggests a familiarity with the notion of the sun's primacy in our planetary system:

"Therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthron'd and sphered Amidst the others."

However ambiguous the passage may be, it would seem clear, in view of Bacon's feeling on the subject, that this reference does not afford any aid or comfort to those devoted souls who cherish the notion that Bacon wrote Shakespeare!

What was it that finally brought the world, learned and unlearned, to accept the notion of an earth revolving about a central sun?

That which brought acceptance of the Copernican theory to the thinking world was the slow, sure progress of impartial, sincere investigation. Decade by decade new proof was added. Kepler showed that the planets do not move in circles, as assumed by Copernicus, but in ellipses, with the sun at one focus, a process which at once dispensed with the complicated mass of epicycles which Copernicus had found it necessary to retain. Kepler also showed that these motions were made in accordance with a law which varied directly as the masses of the bodies and inversely as the squares of their distances. Newton proved that the force which worked according to this law was the force of gravity which we know on the earth's surface, and that the moon fell toward the earth in accordance with the same law with which a stone falls from its flight. Finally, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the principle had been discovered that a freely suspended pendulum will continue to swing in the same plane independent of any motion of the point of support, Foucault set up a great pendulum in the Panthéon at Paris

and crowds of his enthusiastic countrymen saw with their own eyes the actual motion of the earth on its axis as compared with the fixed plane in which the pendulum swung. It was the slow process of careful investigation, the gradual accumulation of exact knowledge, which in the course of two hundred years overcame all objections and brought into human thinking the conception of the moving earth as a part of the intellectual equipment of every civilized human being. It is by such steps that the truth is always reached. The process may be slow, but in the long run sincere, impartial study brings us step by step to it. The question, Where lies truth? is to be answered very much as a boy on the Gemmi Pass replied to my question, "Where is Kandersteg?" "I don't know," said he; “but there's the road to it." None of us knows where truth is, but all human experience shows that the road to it lies through hard work, through open-mindedness, through tolerance, through honest and clear thinking.

Those who recall the dramatic interest in Foucault's pendulum, set up in the Panthéon at Paris in 1851, by which a simple demonstration was made of the rotation of the earth, will be interested to know that in the rotunda of the new building of the Academy of Sciences at Washington, opposite the Lincoln Memorial, a long, freely suspended pendulum is to be attached to the roof and Foucault's demonstration will be repeated for popular instruction. The American who has some question as to the earth's daily motion on its axis can here see the actual turning of the earth with his own eyes.

The lessons of the hundred and fifty years during which the conception of Copernicus battled for acceptance are of deep significance to us to-day. It is not strange that the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hesitated to accept the Copernican theory. It was at first only a theory, it contradicted long-established belief, the mathematical and mechanical proofs which we now have were wanting. The indictment against the fundamentalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who persecuted men for entertaining the theory of Copernicus,

was not in their doubt; it lay, first of all, in their crooked thinking and secondly in their willingness to enforce intellectual obedience by force. Their mistake lay in assuming that the Copernican theory of planetary motion created a conflict between religion on the one side and science on the other. There was no such conflict. The disagreement was between the science of theology on the one hand and the science of astronomy on the other. The question whether the sun moved or the earth moved had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. When men made its acceptance a religious test and enforced that test by arbitrary and cruel authority, they were violating the very principles of the religion which they desired to serve. Religion is not a system of philosophy nor a collection of dogmas; it is the divine life in the human soul which blossoms forth, when once it takes root, into love and service to men. Theology is the science of that religion. It has the same relation to religion that astronomy has to the stars, or that botany has to the flowers. Long before there was any science of astronomy the planets described their courses around the sun and the stars moved in their giant paths through the distant systems of the universe. Long before there was any science of botany the flowers bloomed and fruited and bloomed again. Long before there was any theology the divine life in the human soul, that we call religion, bloomed and fruited. That which took place touching the theory of Copernicus and its application to the thinking of his day was not due to a difference between religion and science. It was a difference between two imperfect human sciences, the science of theology and the science of astronomy. The notion of an infallible authority, with the power to coerce men's thinking, assumed by the Mother Church, and the dogma of a literally inspired Bible as accepted by the Protestants had nothing to do with true religion. They have been the source of untold harm to men's minds and souls. Each was a fetter on the human spirit. Each was an excrescence on an imperfect human sci

ence.

To-day no body of religious men worthy of the decent respect of mankind

would pass resolutions requiring their schools to abstain from teaching the conception of a rotating and revolving earth. The literal interpretation of Joshua's stopping of the sun and of the poetical references in the Scriptures to the motions of the stars and of the constellations no longer trouble even the fundamentalists. But other matters, equally irrelevant to religion, still present themselves to many people as fundamental and insistent. It will be well for such to remember the story of Copernicus, to recall the condemnation of Bruno and Galileo, and to reflect how intolerance in theology dealt grievous wounds to religion. The truth in the end was victorious.

We live to-day in one of those periods in human history when the moral and social conceptions of men are confused. At such times there is need, above all, for a leadership that has not only the quality of human sympathy but also the quality of straight thinking. We are disposed, as human beings, to pass lightly over the intellectual sins of men if only they have the reputation of possessing kind hearts. Yet the world has suffered in the past, and suffers to-day, fully as much at the hands of those whose intentions are good but whose thinking is crooked as at the hands of those who have bad purposes. Intellectual immorality is a common vice, the result generally of intellectual indolence and complacency. The man who is unwilling to do the serious work necessary to have a just knowledge of the questions upon which he pronounces commits a moral no less than an intellectual wrong. Perhaps the man who has done most harm to our political and economic thinking these last thirty years is one whose intentions have been amiable but whose thinking has lacked that patience of hard work which alone brings understanding. A pure heart and a crooked mind do not permanently dwell together in the same human body. One will overcome the other, and in too many cases the crooked mind perverts the well-intentioned heart. Let us be fair to the fundamentalists. The world cannot do without them. In every great movement of human thought there is an essential fundamental body of truth without which the movement becomes meaningless and powerless. For

this essential fundamental truth, one must battle to the uttermost. But let us hold to a strict accounting those who assume the position of fundamentalists and yet have neither the spirit of work nor the sense of responsibility requisite to reach the truth.

If men envisaged truth as a whole there could be no difference of opinion between those who were honest and sincere. We see a part of the truth and become partisans of that fragment of which we are cognizant. In no field of human endeavor has this been more true than in theology, the science that undertakes to formulate religious truth.

In our day, as in the days of Copernicus, those who speak in the name of Christ are quick to invoke the civil power in the endeavor to enforce their conceptions of truth. No contrast could be greater than that between the methods of reformers of this type and those of the Master in Whose name they speak. He lived and taught in a small state in a half-barbarous age. Yet what He taught and the method of His teaching are true for all time and for all places. In His day, as in ours, war, slavery, drunkenness were terrible evils. He undertook no crusade against them. He made no effort to invoke the civil

power to compel obedience to His views. But He taught that love of God and of man which, if it enters into the hearts of men, makes war, and slavery, and drunkenness to cease. And it is the only power that can. He saw truth in the large, we see it in part.

To-day human thinking, in its conception of the relations and reactions of the forces of the universe, has gone far beyond that of Copernicus and of his contemporaries. It has come not only to gauge the mechanical forces under which the earth and the planets move but also to see dimly that what we call gravitation, and light, and electricity, and magnetism, are not separate and distinct forces, but that they are different manifestations of that infinite force which moves and animates the universe. And we also, as human beings, cannot doubt, as we apprehend more and more of these relations, that all these forms of activity are part of that same infinite and eternal energy in which we ourselves live and move and have our being. In the presence of such a conception of the universe, fragmentary as it may be, tolerance and patience become us best; and, most of all, the intellectual morality that comes only through faithful study.