Introduction 7 



immediate effects may easily be exaggerated. The shock to 

 famiHar beliefs inHicted by the new theory was doubtless great. 

 Everything that mankind had ever said about sun and stars, day 

 and night, or the revolving year, was couched (as most of it still is) 

 in geocentric terminology. On this subject the literature of every 

 country, sacred and secular, used the language of the market-place. 

 And the language of the market-place was in perfect accord with 

 what seemed to be the plain teaching of uncontradicted observation. 

 We must not therefore be surprised that the posthumous gift of 

 Copernicus to science was an occasion of stumbling to learned and 

 simple alike. But 1 am not aware, that in Protestant countries at 

 least, where there was certainly no inclination to underrate the 

 verbal authority of Scripture, it raised any very serious religious 

 difficulties. It might, perhaps, have done so if the substitution of 

 the sun for the earth as the centre of our system had obviously 

 involved a complete change in our whole estimate of astronomical 

 magnitudes. But Copernicus only described motions ; measure- 

 ments of mass, size and distance belong to a later age. And it 

 was not, I suppose, till the discoveries of Newton had begun to 

 bear their full fruit that the material insignificance of our planet 

 in the celestial scheme was brought home to the most sluggish 

 imagination. So it came about that when men at last realised 

 that events, which they regarded as of infinite spiritual im- 

 portance, had in fact occurred on the most insignificant of cosmic 

 theatres, this result had been so gradually reached that adjustment 

 to the new point of view presented no insuperable difficulties to 

 religious thought. 



It seems clear indeed that such difficulties as there are belong 

 not so much to the sphere of thought as to the sphere of emotion. 

 They are rather aesthetic than rational ; and it is only in some 

 mood of aesthetic sentiment that we can do them j ustice. Let us 

 then conceive ourselves to be gazing on a clear and quiet night 

 upon the unveiled glory of the heavens, striving to form some 

 adequate representation of the greatness and splendour of the 

 innumerable suns which, crowded though they seem, lie far re- 

 moved from each other and from us in the unsounded depths of 

 space. And then, when imagination wearies of the effort, let us 

 consider the petty planet which for the moment is our home, and 



