ouix, took refuge in verbal niceties; some, like Dr.
Jeremiah Murphy, comforted themselves with declamation. The only result
was, that in 1885 came another edition of the Rev. Mr. Roberts's work,
even more cogent than the first; and, besides this, an essay by
that eminent Catholic, St. George Mivart, acknowledging the Rev. Mr.
Roberts's position to be impregnable, and declaring virtually that the
Almighty allowed Pope and Church to fall into complete error regarding
the Copernican theory, in order to teach them that science lies outside
their province, and that the true priesthood of scientific truth rests
with scientific investigators alone.(84)

(84) For the crushing answer by two eminent Roman Catholics to the
sophistries cited--an answer which does infinitely more credit to the
older Church that all the perverted ingenuity used in concealing the
truth or breaking the force of it--see Roberts and St. George Mivart, as
already cited.

In spite, then, of all casuistry and special pleading, this sturdy
honesty ended the controversy among Catholics themselves, so far as
fair-minded men are concerned.

In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases
two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the
embarrassment of militant theology in the nineteenth century.

The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the days when he was
hovering between the Anglican and Roman Churches. In one of his sermons
before the University of Oxford he spoke as follows:

"Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and
science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How
can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth
till we know what motion is? If our idea of motion is but an accidental
result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and both are
true: neither true philosophically; both true for certain practical
purposes in the system in which they are respectively found."

In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more hopelessly
skeptical. And for what were the youth of Oxford led into such
bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence of truth or
any real foundation for it? Simply to save an outworn system of
interpretation into which the gifted preacher happened to be born.

The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and developed in the
Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman