having to do with the sun's surface, almost simultaneously with
Galileo. One of these claimants was a Jesuit named Scheiner, and the
jealousy of this man is said to have had a share in bringing about that
persecution to which we must now refer.

There is no more famous incident in the history of science than the
heresy trial through which Galileo was led to the nominal renunciation
of his cherished doctrines. There is scarcely another incident that has
been commented upon so variously. Each succeeding generation has put
its own interpretation on it. The facts, however, have been but little
questioned. It appears that in the year 1616 the church became at
last aroused to the implications of the heliocentric doctrine of the
universe. Apparently it seemed clear to the church authorities that the
authors of the Bible believed the world to be immovably fixed at the
centre of the universe. Such, indeed, would seem to be the natural
inference from various familiar phrases of the Hebrew text, and what
we now know of the status of Oriental science in antiquity gives full
warrant to this interpretation. There is no reason to suppose that the
conception of the subordinate place of the world in the solar system had
ever so much as occurred, even as a vague speculation, to the authors of
Genesis. In common with their contemporaries, they believed the earth to
be the all-important body in the universe, and the sun a luminary placed
in the sky for the sole purpose of giving light to the earth. There is
nothing strange, nothing anomalous, in this view; it merely reflects the
current notions of Oriental peoples in antiquity. What is strange and
anomalous is the fact that the Oriental dreamings thus expressed could
have been supposed to represent the acme of scientific knowledge. Yet
such a hold had these writings taken upon the Western world that not
even a Galileo dared contradict them openly; and when the church fathers
gravely declared the heliocentric theory necessarily false, because
contradictory to Scripture, there were probably few people in
Christendom whose mental attitude would permit them justly to appreciate
the humor of such a pronouncement. And, indeed, if here and there a man
might have risen to such an appreciation, there were abundant reasons
for the repression of the impulse, for there was nothing humorous about
the response with which the authorities of the time were wont to meet
the expression of iconoclastic opinio