t scientific
truth in peace to spread as it could, but might perhaps themselves have
joined the band of earnest students and workers, as so many of the
higher Catholic clergy do at the present day.

But this was too much to expect. Such a revelation was not to be
accepted in a day or in a century--the easiest plan was to treat it as a
heresy, and try to crush it out.

Not in Copernik's life, however, did they perceive the dangerous
tendency of the doctrine--partly because it was buried in a ponderous
and learned treatise not likely to be easily understood; partly,
perhaps, because its propounder was himself an ecclesiastic; mainly
because he was a patient and judicious man, not given to loud or
intolerant assertion, but content to state his views in quiet
conversation, and to let them gently spread for thirty years before he
published them. And, when he did publish them, he used the happy device
of dedicating his great book to the Pope, and a cardinal bore the
expense of printing it. Thus did the Roman Church stand sponsor to a
system of truth against which it was destined in the next century to
hurl its anathemas, and to inflict on its conspicuous adherents torture,
imprisonment, and death.

To realize the change of thought, the utterly new view of the universe,
which the Copernican theory introduced, we must go back to preceding
ages, and try to recall the views which had been held as probable
concerning the form of the earth and the motion of the heavenly bodies.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Homeric Cosmogony.]

The earliest recorded notion of the earth is the very natural one that
it is a flat area floating in an illimitable ocean. The sun was a god
who drove his chariot across the heavens once a day; and Anaxagoras was
threatened with death and punished with banishment for teaching that the
sun was only a ball of fire, and that it might perhaps be as big as the
country of Greece. The obvious difficulty as to how the sun got back to
the east again every morning was got over--not by the conjecture that he
went back in the dark, nor by the idea that there was a fresh sun every
day; though, indeed, it was once believed that the moon was created once
a month, and periodically cut up into stars--but by the doctrine that in
the northern part of the earth was a high range of mountains, and that
the sun travelled round on the surface of the sea behind these.
Sometimes, indeed, you find a representation of the sun being row