, earnest, patient, and
God-fearing man, a deep student, an unbiassed thinker, although with no
specially brilliant or striking gifts; yet to him it was given to effect
such a revolution in the whole course of man's thoughts as is difficult
to parallel.

You know what the outcome of his work was. It proved--he did not merely
speculate, he proved--that the earth is a planet like the others, and
that it revolves round the sun.

Yes, it can be summed up in a sentence, but what a revelation it
contains. If you have never made an effort to grasp the full
significance of this discovery you will not appreciate it. The doctrine
is very familiar to us now, we have heard it, I suppose, since we were
four years old, but can you realize it? I know it was a long time before
I could. Think of the solid earth, with trees and houses, cities and
countries, mountains and seas--think of the vast tracts of land in Asia,
Africa, and America--and then picture the whole mass spinning like a
top, and rushing along its annual course round the sun at the rate of
nineteen miles every second.

Were we not accustomed to it, the idea would be staggering. No wonder it
was received with incredulity. But the difficulties of the conception
are not only physical, they are still more felt from the speculative and
theological points of view. With this last, indeed, the reconcilement
cannot be considered complete even yet. Theologians do not, indeed, now
_deny_ the fact of the earth's subordination in the scheme of the
universe, but many of them ignore it and pass it by. So soon as the
Church awoke to a perception of the tremendous and revolutionary import
of the new doctrines, it was bound to resist them or be false to its
traditions. For the whole tenor of men's thought must have been changed
had they accepted it. If the earth were not the central and
all-important body in the universe, if the sun and planets and stars
were not attendant and subsidiary lights, but were other worlds larger
and perhaps superior to ours, where was man's place in the universe?
and where were the doctrines they had maintained as irrefragable? I by
no means assert that the new doctrines were really utterly
irreconcilable with the more essential parts of the old dogmas, if only
theologians had had patience and genius enough to consider the matter
calmly. I suppose that in that case they might have reached the amount
of reconciliation at present attained, and not only have lef