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The book which was introduced by this dedication laid the foundations of modern astronomy. At the time when it was written, the earth was believed by all to be the fixed centre of the universe; and although many of the arguments used by Copernicus were invalid and absurd, he was the first modern to put forth the heliocentric theory as "a better explanation."
To them must go the foreign missionaries, to teach the things which have been graciously given them on account of their innate superiority. Man's life is a succession of narrowing circles. He admits the force of the heliocentric idea, for it is the sun which gives light and heat.
A copy of it was brought to him on his death-bed. Its fate was such as he had anticipated. The Inquisition condemned it as heretical. Astronomers justly affirm that the book of Copernicus, "De Revolutionibus," changed the face of their science. It incontestably established the heliocentric theory.
If, after isolated advances during the mighty awakening of the Renaissance, it is not until the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century that we find the modern atheistic conception of the nature of the gods of the ancients established in principle and consistently applied, we can scarcely avoid connecting this fact with the advance of natural science in the seventeenth century, and not least with the victory of the heliocentric system.
Soon there was not to be found in all Europe an astronomer who had not accepted the heliocentric theory with its essential postulate, the double motion of the earth movement of rotation on her axis, and a movement of revolution round the sun.
Yet such a hold had these writings taken upon the Western world that not even a Galileo dared contradict them openly; and when the church fathers gravely declared the heliocentric theory necessarily false, because contradictory to Scripture, there were probably few people in Christendom whose mental attitude would permit them justly to appreciate the humor of such a pronouncement.
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