e it absolutely exact.

Such a rectification as this was obviously desirable, but there was
really no necessity for the omission of the ten days from the calendar.
The equinoctial day had shifted so that in the year 1582 it fell on the
10th of March and September. There was no reason why it should not have
remained there. It would greatly have simplified the task of future
historians had Gregory contented himself with providing for the future
stability of the calendar without making the needless shift in question.
We are so accustomed to think of the 21st of March and 21st of September
as the natural periods of the equinox, that we are likely to forget
that these are purely arbitrary dates for which the 10th might have been
substituted without any inconvenience or inconsistency.

But the opposition to the new calendar, to which reference has been
made, was not based on any such considerations as these. It was due,
largely at any rate, to the fact that Germany at this time was under
sway of the Lutheran revolt against the papacy. So effective was the
opposition that the Gregorian calendar did not come into vogue in
Germany until the year 1699. It may be added that England, under stress
of the same manner of prejudice, held out against the new reckoning
until the year 1751, while Russia does not accept it even now.

As the Protestant leaders thus opposed the papal attitude in a matter
of so practical a character as the calendar, it might perhaps have
been expected that the Lutherans would have had a leaning towards the
Copernican theory of the universe, since this theory was opposed by the
papacy. Such, however, was not the case. Luther himself pointed out with
great strenuousness, as a final and demonstrative argument, the fact
that Joshua commanded the sun and not the earth to stand still; and
his followers were quite as intolerant towards the new teaching as were
their ultramontane opponents. Kepler himself was, at various times, to
feel the restraint of ecclesiastical opposition, though he was never
subjected to direct persecution, as was his friend and contemporary,
Galileo. At the very outset of Kepler's career there was, indeed,
question as to the publication of a work he had written, because that
work took for granted the truth of the Copernican doctrine. This
work appeared, however, in the year 1596. It bore the title Mysterium
Cosmographium, and it attempted to explain the positions of the various
planetary bo