y, as the implications of the doctrine became apparent, the
church in self-defence took a strong stand against it. [Sidenote:
March 5, 1616] The Congregation of the Index issued a decree saying,
"Lest opinions of this sort creep in to the destruction of Catholic
truth, the book of Nicholas Copernicus and others [defending his
hypothesis] are suspended until they be corrected." A little later
Galileo was forced, under the threat of torture, to recant this heresy.
Only when the system had become universally accepted, did the church,
in 1822, first expressly permit the faithful to hold it.

The philosophers were as shy of the new light as {623} the theologians.
Bodin in France and Bacon in England both rejected it; the former was
conservative at heart and the latter was never able to see good in
other men's work, whether that of Aristotle or of Gilbert or of the
great Pole. Possibly he was also misled by Osiander's preface and by
Tycho Brahe. Giordano Bruno, however, welcomed the new idea with
enthusiasm, saying that Copernicus taught more in two chapters than did
Aristotle and the Peripatetics in all their works.

Astronomers alone were capable of weighing the evidence scientifically
and they, at first, were also divided. Erasmus Reinhold, of
Wittenberg, accepted it and made his calculations on the assumption of
its truth, as did an Englishman, John Field. [Sidenote: 1556] Tycho
Brahe, [Sidenote: Tycho Brahe, 1546-1601] on the other hand, tried to
find a compromise between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. He
argued that the earth could not revolve on its axis as the centrifugal
force would hurl it to pieces, and that it could not revolve around the
sun as in that case a change in the position of the fixed stars would
be observed. Both objections were well taken, of course, considered in
themselves alone, but both could be answered by a deeper knowledge.
Brahe therefore considered the earth as the center of the orbits of the
moon, sun, and stars, and the sun as the center of the orbits of the
planets.

The attention to astronomy had two practical corollaries, the
improvement of navigation and the reform of the calendar. Several
better forms of astrolabe, of "sun-compass" (or dial turnable by a
magnet) and an "astronomical ring" for getting the latitude and
longitude by observation of sun and star, were introduced.

[Sidenote: Reform of calendar]

The reform of the Julian calendar was needed on account