The scene shifts, for the time being, from the earth to the heavens. The Church had barely recovered from the blow struck at her authority on matters of secular knowledge, when another dealt, and that by an ecclesiastic, Copernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, in Prussia. But before pursuing this, some reference to the revolt against the Church of Rome, which is the great event of the sixteenth century, is necessary, if only to inquire whether the movement known as the Reformation justified its name as freeing the intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as were the areas which it covered and the effects which it wrought, its quarrel with the Church of Rome was not because of that Church's attitude toward freedom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest of nobler minds against the corruptions fostered by the Papacy; in England, it was personal and political in origin, securing popular support by its anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national irritation against foreign control. But, both here and abroad, it sought mending rather than ending; "not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic." It disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole interpreter of Scripture, and contended that such interpretation was the right and duty of the individual. But it would not admit the right of the individual to call in question the authority of the Bible itself: to that book alone must a man go for knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual. So that the Reformation was but an exchange of fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bound the mind. "Learning perished where Luther reigned," said Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Reformer agreeing with his coadjutor, Melanchthon, in permitting no tampering with the written Word. Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that the earth was fixed and that sun and stars travelled round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Commentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions about the creation as narrated in that book would render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called them "locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice." Reason he denounced as the "arch whore" and the "devil's bride," Aristotle is a "prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and twice execrable." Consistently enough, Luther believed vehemently in a personal devil, and in witches; "I would myself burn them," he says, "even as it is written in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders." To him demoniacal possession was a fact clear as noonday: idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all other mental and nervous disorders were due to it. Hence, a movement whose intent appeared to be the freeing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical explanation