r matters of
terminology than of actual perversion of accepted teaching. It was as
such that their modification was suggested. In spite of this, the {16}
impression remains that Copernicus must be considered as a
rationalizing scientist, the first in a long roll of original
scientific investigators whose work has made the edifice of
Christianity totter by removing many of the foundation-stones of its
traditional authority.

It is rather surprising, in view of this common impression with regard
to Copernicus, to find him, according to recent biographers, a
faithful clergyman in honor with his ecclesiastical superiors, a
distinguished physician whose chief patients were clerical friends of
prominent position and the great noblemen of his day, who not only
retained all his faith and reverence for the Church, but seems to have
been especially religious, a devoted adherent of the Blessed Virgin
Mother of God, and the author of a series of poems in her honor that
constitute a distinct contribution to the literature of his time.

All this should not be astonishing, however; for in the list of the
churchmen of the half century just before the great religious revolt
in Germany are to be found some of the best known names in the history
of the intellectual development of the race. This statement is so
contrary to the usual impression that obtains in regard to the
character of that period as to be a distinct source of surprise to the
ordinary reader of history who has the realization of its truth thrust
upon him for the first time. Just before the so-called Reformation,
the clergy are considered to have been so sunk in ignorance, or at
least to {17} have been so indifferent to intellectual pursuits and so
cramped in mind as regards progress, or so timorous because of
inquisition methods, that no great advances in thought, and especially
none in science, could possibly be looked for from them. To find,
then, that not only were faithful churchmen leaders in thought,
discoverers in science, organizers in education, initiators of new
progress, teachers of the New Learning, but that they were also
typical representatives and yet prudent directors of the advancing
spirit of that truly wonderful time, is apt to make us think that
surely--as the Count de Maistre said one hundred years ago, and the
Cambridge Modern History repeats at the beginning of the twentieth
century when treating of this very period--"history has been a
conspiracy