The net gain from Protestantism thus lay in the fortuitous disruption of centralized spiritual tyranny. The rents in the structure made openings for air and light at a time when new currents were beginning to blow and new light to shine. Twenty years before Luther's schism, Columbus had found the New World. Copernicus, dying in 1543, left his teaching to the world in which Protestantism had just established itself. Early in the next century Kepler and Galileo began to roll back for men the old dream-boundaries of the universe. The modern era was at its dawn; and with it Christianity had begun its era of reconsideration, revision, and slow decline. CHAPTER II PROGRESS OF ANTI-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT § 1. The Physical Sciences It was primarily the growth of physical science, from the middle of the sixteenth century, that gave solidity and permanence to the new movements of rationalistic revolt aroused by the spectacle of the Reformation and the strifes it engendered. That spectacle, and in general the wars of religion which followed, tended more to make scoffers or skeptics than to develop constructive rationalism. One of the conclusions forced on statesmanlike minds by the religious wars in France was that "a peace with two religions was better than a war with none"; and the seventeenth century there began with a strong though secretive tendency among the idle classes to what in the next century became universally known as the Voltairean temper. In the seventeenth, however, it was still almost wholly denied the use of printing; and under this disadvantage it must have fared ill were it not for the new studies which at once developed and buttressed the spirit of inquiry. They built up a new habit of mind, the surest obstacle to dogma. Were men wont to develop their beliefs logically, the teaching of Copernicus alone, when once accepted, would have broken up the orthodox faith, which at nearly every point implied the geocentric theory. Giordano Bruno, recognizing this, wove on the one hand the Copernican principle into his restatement of the ancient doctrine of the infinity of the universe, and on the other hand derided alike Catholicism and Protestantism. But a comprehensive philosophy is not the kind of propaganda that first "comes home to men's business and bosoms": the line of practical disturbance lay through exact science; and it is in the practical and experimental work of Galileo that Copernicanism begins (1616-38) strongly to stir the educated intelligence of Europe. Bacon and Bodin, like Luther, had rejected it as theoretically propounded. It was the telescopic discoveries of Galileo that staggered the skeptics and alarmed the Church.