n THE ARREST OF ENQUIRY 79 



brought the San Victoria name of happy omen 

 to anchor at St. Lucar, near Seville, on ?th 

 September 1522. Brought, too, the story of a 

 circumnavigated globe, and of new groups of stars 

 never seen under northern skies. 



The scene shifts, for the time being, from the earth 

 to the heavens. The Church had barely recovered 

 from the blow struck at her authority on matters of 

 secular knowledge, when another was dealt, and that 

 by an ecclesiastic, Copernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, 

 in Prussia. But before pursuing this, some reference 

 to the revolt against the Church of Rome, which is 

 the great event of the sixteenth century, is necessary, 

 if only to enquire whether the movement known as 

 the Reformation justified its name as freeing the 

 intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as 

 were the areas which it covered and the effects which 

 it wrought, its quarrel with the Church of Rome was 

 not because of that Church's attitude towards free- 

 dom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest 

 of nobler minds against the corruptions fostered 

 by the Papacy ; in England, it was personal and 

 political in origin, securing popular support by its 

 anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national 

 irritation against foreign control. But, both here 

 and abroad, it sought mending rather than ending ; 

 ' not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic.' It 

 disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole 

 interpreter of Scripture, and contended that such 

 interpretation was the right and duty of the indi- 

 vidual.' But it would not admit the right of the 

 individual to call in question the authority of the 

 Bible itself: to that book alone must a man go for 



