The divines in the Protestant Church were no more favourable than were the Catholic theologians to the Copernican theory of the universe. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Protestant teachers alike placed themselves on record as in opposition to the teachings of Copernicus and of Galileo. The great preacher in London, Dr. South, denounced as irreligious the report of the Royal Society in which the Copernican doctrine had been accepted. As late as 1724, Professor John Hutchinson of Cambridge, in a treatise entitled the _Principia of Moses_, undertook to build up from the text of the Bible a complete physical system of the universe. In this treatise, the Newtonian and Copernican theories were condemned as atheistic. In 1722, Thomas Burnett, in the sixth edition of his _Sacred Theory of the Earth_, argues for the scriptural doctrine of the earth’s stability. In Holland, the Calvinistic Church was from the outset strenuously opposed to the whole new system. The opposition of the Lutherans was continued until a very late date. In 1873, was issued by the Lutheran publishing house of St. Louis a work entitled _Astronomische Unterredung_, in which was again maintained the theory that the earth is a fixed body and the centre of the universe. These utterances from the Protestants present sufficient evidence that the old theologies as they were then interpreted could not easily be reconciled with the now accepted views of the constitution of the universe. It does not appear, however, that in any one of the Protestant realms the opposition of the divines to the new astronomy was associated with any persecution either of authors or instructors. The Church of Rome must assume the responsibility for having continued during a series of years, which ended only with the lifetime of its victim, the persecution of a great scientist whose only crime was his exceptional capacity for scientific investigation and his desire to present simply and effectively what he believed to be the truth. In 1852, two hundred and twenty years after the condemnation of Galileo, which had been brought about largely through the influence of the Jesuits, the astronomer Secchi, himself a Jesuit, presented, in one of the churches at Rome, the experiment of Foucault with the pendulum, making clear to the human eye the movement of the earth about its own axis.[204] Another noteworthy title in the Index of 1664 is that of the _Lettres Provinciales_ of Pascal. Mendham finds ground for surprise that an author who could maintain so emphatically certain of the most exacting pretensions of the Church of Rome should have been thought deserving of condemnation. In the seventeenth of the _Lettres Provinciales_, Pascal writes: