announced his three laws, they were received with
condemnation by the spiritual authorities, not because of any error they
were supposed to present or to contain, but partly because they gave
support to the Copernican system, and partly because it was judged
inexpedient to admit the prevalence of law of any kind as opposed to
providential intervention. The world was regarded as the theatre in
which the divine will was daily displayed; it was considered derogatory
to the majesty of God that that will should be fettered in any way. The
power of the clergy was chiefly manifested in the influence the were
alleged to possess in changing his arbitrary determinations. It was thus
that they could abate the baleful action of comets, secure fine weather
or rain, prevent eclipses, and, arresting the course of Nature, work all
manner of miracles; it was thus that the shadow had been made to go back
on the dial, and the sun and the moon stopped in mid-career.

In the century preceding the epoch of Newton, a great religious and
political revolution had taken place--the Reformation. Though its
effect had not been the securing of complete liberty for thought, it bad
weakened many of the old ecclesiastical bonds. In the reformed countries
there was no power to express a condemnation of Newton's works, and
among the clergy there was no disposition to give themselves any concern
about the matter. At first the attention of the Protestant was engrossed
by the movements of his great enemy the Catholic, and when that source
of disquietude ceased, and the inevitable partitions of the Reformation
arose, that attention was fastened upon the rival and antagonistic
Churches. The Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Episcopalian, the
Presbyterian, had something more urgent on hand than Newton's
mathematical demonstrations.

So, uncondemned, and indeed unobserved, in this clamor of fighting
sects, Newton's grand theory solidly established itself. Its
philosophical significance was infinitely more momentous than the dogmas
that these persons were quarreling about. It not only accepted the
heliocentric theory and the laws discovered by Kepler, but it proved
that, no matter what might be the weight of opposing ecclesiastical
authority, the sun MUST be the centre of our system, and that Kepler's
laws are the result of a mathematical necessity. It is impossible that
they should be other than they are.

But what is the meaning of all this? Plainly that the sol