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HISTORICAL VIEW OP THE

Reception of the new Discoveries by the Church.

The reception which the new philosophy met withamong the authorities of the church, is too remarkablea point in this period of its history to he passed overwithout a brief remark or two.

It might, at first sight, appear, that a religion pro-fessing to stand on its'own basis, could find little toaffect it one way or another in the advance of experi-mental science ; and, above all, a church like that ofRome , reposing on the claim to infallibility, it might besupposed would, of all others, he the last to feel anyalarm at researches utterly unconnected with the au-thority of that claim: but it must be borne in mind,that the pretensions of the Romish church extended tothe most unlimited authority over every thing. Inparticular, the Aristotelian philosophy had long sincebeen incorporated, as it were, into its system; and itsspeculations were so closely mixed up with the scho-lastic theology, even to its physical details *, that itconstituted almost an integrant part of the creed ofthe church: any attempt to impugn it was, therefore,heresy.

If we look at the actual treatment experienced bysome of the principal advocates of the new discoveries,there is a difference observable which, though at first,sight somewhat unaccountable, yet, upon a little consi-deration, may serve to give us a more instructive insightinto the real nature of the case. Copernicus and Fos-carinus taught the very same doctrines as Bruno, Kepler,and Galileo ; but the former were, as we have seen,received into the highest favour, while the latter werepersecuted with unrelenting severity. Yet were theynot all equally guilty of heresy, and equally dangerousenemies to religion ? Their doctrines were, indeed, thesame ; but we may have observed a considerable dif-

* For a full explanation the reader is referred to Dr. Hampden’s Bamp-ton Lectures, pp. 191. 334. Oxf. 1833.