In 1608, Lippersheim, a Hollander, so arranged lenses that objects were exaggerated.
He invented the telescope.
He gave countless worlds to our eyes, and made us citizens of the Universe.
In 1610, on the night of January 7th, Galileo demonstrated the truth of the Copernican system, and in 1632, published his work on "The System of the World."
What did the church do?
Galileo was arrested, imprisoned, forced to fall upon his knees, put his hand on the Bible, and recant. For ten years he was kept in prison—for ten years until released by the pity of death. Then the church—men filled with the Holy Ghost—denied his body burial in consecrated ground. It was feared that his dust might corrupt the bodies of those who had persecuted him.
In 1609, Kepler published his book "Motions of the Planet Mars." He, too, knew of the attraction of gravitation and that it acted in proportion to mass and distance. Kepler announced his Three Laws. He found and mathematically expressed the relation of distance, mass, and motion. Nothing greater has been accomplished by the human mind.
Astronomy became a science and Christianity a superstition.
Then came Newton, Herscheland Laplace. The astronomy of Joshua and Elijah faded from the minds of intelligent men, and Jehovah became an ignorant tribal god.
Men began to see that the operations of Nature were not subject to interference. That eclipses were not caused by the wrath of God—that comets had nothing to do with the destruction of empires or the death of kings, that the stars wheeled in their orbits without regard to the actions of men. In the sacred East the dawn appeared.