448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rights arid intellectual advancement at the door of religion as it would 

 be to lay all its outrages against religion at the door of science and 

 government, because " the Church " has seldom slaughtered a holy 

 martyr to the truth without employing some forms of both law and 

 logic. 



Science exists for the sake of religion, and because of religion. 

 If there had been no love for God in the human race, there had been 

 no study of the physical universe. The visible cosmos is God's love- 

 letter to man, and religion seems to probe every corner of the sheet 

 on which such love is written, to examine every phrase, and study 

 every connection. A few upstarts of the present day, not the real 

 men and masters of science, ignore the fact that almost every man 

 who has made any great original contribution to science, since the 

 revival of letters, was a very religious man ; but their weak wicked- 

 ness must not be charged to science any more than the wicked weak- 

 ness of ecclesiastics to religion. 



Copernicus, who revolutionized astronomy, was one of the purest 

 Christians who ever lived a simple, laborious minister of religion, 

 walking beneficently among the poor by day, and living among the 

 stars by night ; and yet one writer of our day has dared to say, in 

 what he takes to be the interest of science, that Copernicus was 

 " aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth." 

 Was anything worse ever perpetrated by theologian, or even ecclesi- 

 astic ? Could any man believe in any doctrine which he knew was 

 opposed to any truth, especially if he believed that God had revealed 

 that truth ? It were impossible, especially with a man having the 

 splendid intellect and the pure heart of Copernicus, who died believ- 

 ing in his "Z>e Orbium Ccelestkmi Jievolutionibus,''^ and also in the 

 Bible. And this is the inscription which that humble Christian or- 

 dered for his tomb : " Non jjarem Paulo veniam requiro, gratiam 

 Petri neque posco y sed quam in crucis ligno dederis latroni^ sedulus 

 oro.''^ 



Tycho Brahe, who, although he did not produce a system which 

 won acceptance, did, nevertheless, lay the foundation for practical 

 astronomy, and build the stairs on which Kepler mounted to his grand 

 discoveries, was a most religious man. He introduces into one of his 

 scientific works (" Astronomice Instauratio Mechanical'' p. A) this 

 sentence: "No man can be made happy, and enjoy immortal life, 

 but through the merits of Christ, the Redeemer, the Son of God, and 

 by the study of his doctrines, and imitation of his example." 



John Kepler was a man in whose life the only conflict between 

 science and religion seemed to be as to which should yield the most 

 assistance to the other. lie wrought as imder Luther's motto, 

 " Orasse est stiidisse^ He prayed before he woi-ked, and shouted 

 afterward. The more he bowed his soul in prayer, the higher his in- 

 tellect rose in its discoveries ; and, as those discoveries thickened on 



