from their students. It is touching to hear
such boasts made then, just as it is touching now to hear sundry
excellent university authorities boast that they discourage the reading
of Mill, Spencer, and Darwin. Nor were such attempts to keep the truth
from students confined to the Roman Catholic institutions of learning.
Strange as it may seem, nowhere were the facts confirming the Copernican
theory more carefully kept out of sight than at Wittenberg--the
university of Luther and Melanchthon. About the middle of the sixteenth
century there were at that centre of Protestant instruction two
astronomers of a very high order, Rheticus and Reinhold; both of these,
after thorough study, had convinced themselves that the Copernican
system was true, but neither of them was allowed to tell this truth to
his students. Neither in his lecture announcements nor in his published
works did Rheticus venture to make the new system known, and he at
last gave up his professorship and left Wittenberg, that he might have
freedom to seek and tell the truth. Reinhold was even more wretchedly
humiliated. Convinced of the truth of the new theory, he was obliged to
advocate the old; if he mentioned the Copernican ideas, he was compelled
to overlay them with the Ptolemaic. Even this was not thought safe
enough, and in 1571 the subject was intrusted to Peucer. He was
eminently "sound," and denounced the Copernican theory in his lectures
as "absurd, and unfit to be introduced into the schools."

To clinch anti-scientific ideas more firmly into German Protestant
teaching, Rector Hensel wrote a text-book for schools entitled The
Restored Mosaic System of the World, which showed the Copernican
astronomy to be unscriptural.

Doubtless this has a far-off sound; yet its echo comes very near modern
Protestantism in the expulsion of Dr. Woodrow by the Presbyterian
authorities in South Carolina; the expulsion of Prof. Winchell by the
Methodist Episcopal authorities in Tennessee; the expulsion of Prof. Toy
by Baptist authorities in Kentucky; the expulsion of the professors at
Beyrout under authority of American Protestant divines--all for holding
the doctrines of modern science, and in the last years of the nineteenth
century.(52)

(52) For treatment of Copernican ideas by the people, see The Catholic
World, as above; also Melanchthon, ubi supra; also Prowe, Copernicus,
Berlin, 1883, vol. i, p. 269, note; also pp. 279, 280; also Madler, i,
p.167.