antiquity gives full warrant to this interpretation. There is no
reason to suppose that the conception of the subordinate place of
the world in the solar system had ever so much as occurred, even
as a vague speculation, to the authors of Genesis. In common with
their contemporaries, they believed the earth to be the
all-important body in the universe, and the sun a luminary placed
in the sky for the sole purpose of giving light to the earth.
There is nothing strange, nothing anomalous, in this view; it
merely reflects the current notions of Oriental peoples in
antiquity. What is strange and anomalous is the fact that the
Oriental dreamings thus expressed could have been supposed to
represent the acme of scientific knowledge. 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. And,
indeed, if here and there a man might have risen to such an
appreciation, there were abundant reasons for the repression of
the impulse, for there was nothing humorous about the response
with which the authorities of the time were wont to meet the
expression of iconoclastic opinions. The burning at the stake of
Giordano Bruno, in the year 1600, was, for example, an
object-lesson well calculated to restrain the enthusiasm of other
similarly minded teachers.

Doubtless it was such considerations that explained the relative
silence of the champions of the Copernican theory, accounting for
the otherwise inexplicable fact that about eighty years elapsed