CHAPTER VI.—CAUSES OF THE OPPOSITION.
It will be well to pause for a while to consider why the system of Copernicus should now have met with such an increase of opposition, after having been more or less tolerated or ignored for nearly eighty years, during which its most bitter opponents had been not the Roman Church nor the Jesuits, but Luther and other Reformers. It was Luther in particular who insisted on the most literal interpretation of Scripture, and he had certainly not received a liberal education, so that his attitude is quite intelligible, Copernicus being, moreover, a dignitary of the Church to which Luther was opposed.
The tendency of the Reformation, however, was to encourage men to think for themselves, and not to accept blindly the guidance of priests, even in theological matters, and this tendency was bound sooner or later to produce a reaction. It may be that Galileo's ideas, had he lived fifty years earlier, might have received general acceptance before the uneasiness due to the Reformation had created an atmosphere favourable to official Church interference. It is also quite likely that had Galileo been content to adopt Tycho Brahé's system as a working hypothesis, he might have avoided the main difficulty, since the only difference was that involving the earth's revolution round the sun, instead of the sun's round the earth. As a working formula Tycho's system is practically in use now, except that the circular motion, to which Galileo still clung even after Kepler had discovered that the
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