Which is the more consistent with a great, true religion--the cosmography of Cosmas, or that of Isaac Newton? Which presents the nobler food for religious thought--the diatribes of Lactantius, or the astronomical discourses of Thomas Chalmers? ASTRONOMY. The next great battle was fought on a question relating to the _position of the earth among the heavenly bodies_. On one side, the great body of conscientious religious men planted themselves firmly on the geocentric doctrine--the doctrine that the earth is the centre, and that the sun and planets revolve about it. The doctrine was old, and of the highest respectability.[18] The very name, Ptolemaic theory, carried weight. It had been elaborated until it accounted well for the phenomena. Exact textual interpreters of Scripture cherished it, for it agreed with the letter of the sacred text.[19] But, most important of all, it was stamped with the seal of St. Thomas Aquinas. The sainted theologian--the glory of the Mediæval Church, the "angelic doctor"--he to whom it was believed an image of the Crucified had spoken words praising his writings--had shown in his treatise on the Heaven and Earth, by philosophy, theology, and revelation, that the position of the earth must be in the centre.[20] Still the germs of the heliocentric theory[21] had been planted long before, and well planted; it had seemed ready even to bloom forth in the fifth century, from the mind of Martianus Capella, and in the fifteenth from the mind of Cardinal de Cusa; but it could not be forgotten that St. Thomas had elaborated the opposite view; the chill of dogmatism was still over the earth, and up to the beginning of the sixteenth century there had come to this great truth neither bloom nor fruitage.[22] Quietly, however, the soil was receiving enrichment, and the air warmth. The processes of mathematics were constantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily though silently observed; and at length appeared, afar off from the centres of thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded scholar, who first fairly uttered to the world the truth, now so commonplace, then so astounding, that the sun and planets do not revolve about the earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun, and that man was Nicholas Kopernik.[23] Kopernik had been a professor at Rome, but, as this truth grew within him, he seemed to feel that at Rome he was no longer safe.[24] To publish this thought was dangerous indeed, and for more than thirty years it lay slumbering in the minds of Kopernik and the friends to whom he had privately intrusted it.