When the Crescent drove the
Cross in ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust
were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the impression
that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the
West Indies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the
Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a century later,
they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas
Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New
England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in
State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he
repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the
Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano
Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 -- as science
goes on repeating to us every day -- it condemned anarchists, not
atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of
them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of
science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor
Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor
Newton, any more than Constantine the Great -- if so much --
doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies reached only
its personality.
This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of
modern history.
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