_cortège_ of planets, and scattered, how we know not, through infinity.
What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that Paradise to
which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden
for a moment from the eyes of his disciples. The demonstration of the
simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were
most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their
symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the
world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one
proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most
cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology. Science was
born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and religious
metaphysic was declared. Henceforth God could not be worshiped under the
forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to
the words: 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him
in spirit and in truth.' The reason of man was at last able to study the
scheme of the universe, of which he is a part, and to ascertain the
actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries and a half have
elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. It is only by
reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have since acquired, knowledge
not only infinitely curious but also incalculably useful in its
application to the arts of life, and then considering how much ground of
this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the
Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force
which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hand of astrology,
geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then,
as far as to the present moment she has never ceased to grow.
Progressive and durable, Science may be called the first-born of the
spirit of the modern world.

[1] It is to Michelet that we owe these formulæ, which have