CHAPTER XIII 



COPPERNICUS; THE TRUE SYSTEM OF 

 THE WORLD 



IF we search the later annals of mankind for its most pivotal, 

 most momentous event, we shall mark beyond doubt the voyage 

 of Columbus. There is no other single fact, no circumstance, 

 no happening, so fraught with vast issue. Its effect upon Europe 

 was simply dramatic. After the three thousand, five thousand, 

 years known to history, after perhaps ten or twenty thousand 

 years of timid groping, of piece by piece conquest and discovery, 

 wherein a chance wind or storm may have played the ruling 

 part, the ranges of the earth were suddenly doubled. In ten 

 or twenty years they had been extended thirty or forty fold ; 

 the ships of Magalhaens effected an actual circumnavigation 

 of the earth. The truth that it was a globe had been experi- 

 mentally and irrefutably demonstrated. Europe began again 

 to think, to wonder, to reason. 



The ferment was profound. The heart of the world was 

 aflame with a lust for gold, with a fever of conquest, with a 

 passion for discovery, with a longing to see, to explore, to know. 

 For centuries, for near a thousand years, the chief external 

 concern of the great body of humankind had been their souls. 

 Their speculations touched the nature of God, the remission of 

 sin, the life to come. Their thoughts turned suddenly towards 

 the new Indias beyond the sea. It was as if the curtain had 

 been drawn aside upon some wondrous prospect, some theatre 

 of the unimagined, the unsuspected, the unknown. Kings 

 dreamed of new empires ; to the peasant in the fields, to the 

 monk at his orisons, the scholar in his cloister, the spinner card- 

 ing his wool, came the vague stir of a larger life. 



The ferment, at first a confused awakening of new impulses, 

 new ideas, speedily became moral. Within twenty years of 

 Columbus' voyage, Luther had nailed his theses on the cathedral 



door of Wittenberg ; in an age of universal submission to 



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