And John Quincy Adams, in a memorable discourse delivered at Cincinnati in 1843, says of Tycho Brahe, (who maintained that the earth is immovable in the centre of the universe,) "The religion of Tycho in the encounter with his philosophy obtained a triumph honorable to him, but erroneous in fact."
All which maybe very true; and if Laplace and Mr. Adams err at all, they err certainly on the side of charity and kindness.
But are we to have one standard of justice for one class of men, and a far different one for another class? Is that which is excusable in an Italian and honorable in a Danish astronomer, ignorant, bigoted, and vile in a cardinal? Or is there any good reason why that which in Denmark is a "triumph of religion" should in Rome become a "victory of ignorance"?
Tycho Brahe, in his day a profound astronomer, noble and wealthy, devoting his whole life to science in unremitting observation of the heavens, with the aid of the most complete and costly apparatus in existence at the time, might surely be supposed to have reached a safer conclusion than an ignorant churchman.
And how, moreover, could such a churchman be expected to pin his faith to the sleeve of an astronomer like Galileo, whose errors and blunders were frequent and serious, and who, when in his conjectures he stumbled upon the truth, could hardly distinguish it from error, and was therefore as likely to give a bad as a good reason for his doctrine? Or, as M. Biot admirably expresses it, "si l'état imparfait de cette science l'exposait ainsi à donner parfois de mauvaises raisons comme bonnes, il faut pardonner à ses adversaires de n'avoir pas pu toujours distinguer les bonnes des mauvaises." [Footnote 153]
[Footnote 153: "If the imperfection of this science thus made him liable to give bad reasons for good, his adversaries should surely be pardoned for not always being able to distinguish the good from the bad.">[
Anti-Catholic controversialists will persist in endowing the Galileo period with an amount of astronomical and physical science that then had no existence. Intelligent, industrious, and learned the cardinals of Galileo's day certainly were; but it is absurd to attribute to them or to their times a knowledge of the Copernican system, as afterward explained by Kepler, Newton, and two centuries of men of science. Kepler's Laws of the Universe were not published until 1619, and even then, and long years afterward, who could possibly apply them until Newton's discoveries gave them force and authority?
If our modern sciolists, who prattle so much about "the ignorant and bigoted court of Rome," knew enough to be a little modest, they might take to heart the reflection of the great English essayist, and remember it is no merit of theirs that prevents them from falling into the mistakes of a cardinal "whose pens they are not worthy to mend." It certainly was asking a great deal of men that they should abandon settled tradition, the teachings of authority, the evidence of their senses, and the warrant of Scripture, as they understood it, to embrace a strange, startling, and incomprehensible doctrine, in no degree better off in demonstration than the old one. Even the weight of scientific authority was in their favor, as is readily seen when we look at the relative strength of
Copernican and Anti-Copernican.