THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 46, 15 November 1900, Page 15

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.

A correspondent of the Catholic Times writes :— -If it had not been for the labors of our Catholic forefathers in the department of letters, the arts and sciences, we should be destitute of that very civilisation of which moderns are always raving. Before the ' Reformation ' was an accomplished fact Popes and Cardinals, priests and monks, had taught the rotundity and movement of the earth, the theory of tides, systematised astronomy, and kindred sciences. At the break-up of the Roman Empire it was the Church, under the Popes, that saved literature and science to Europe by founding the aiuuaotic schools and the universities W«> arp told that the tenth century was the 'darkest age'— when the Church had uuque-Lioued bvvay ! Wry good: let us take this ' <Inrk age' as an awful example. There lived at this time, then, a certain man named Gerbert. The study of the natural sciences was his speciality. He wrote several treatises on astronomy, mathematics, the formation of the astrolabe, the quadrant, and th«* sphere. He made a clock for Otho 111 which he regulaed by the polar star, which he observed through a kind ot tube — evidently tv primitive telescope. In teaching astronomy he u-ed various instruments, among them a globe with its p .les oblique to the horizon He introduced the system of decimal notation, the mis' ailed Arabic numeral*, to Christian Europe. A man of such prodigious activity of mind woull, as you may naturally suppose after reading enlightened works suchias those of MiusCoreili, Rev Price Hughes, or the Rev. Mr. Horton attract, the eye of the Roman 'uria. So he did. and was made Pope, and is called Sylvester the Second. In 814 we find Mu°va, a Catholic physician, teaching agronomy to Al-Mamun son of Harun-al-Raschiri, at B,ihylon. Yet some of our 'scientific' gentry are everlastingly talking about the services of the Arabians to science

Putting a«ide an 'ignorant monk' called Roger Bacon, from whom the ' Reformation ' Bacon stole many ideas and panned them off for his own, we come in the fifteenth century to Nicholas Cusa. In his work entitled Be Docta Jgiwrantiu he taught the movement of the earth round the ami. Of course the pnor man was lured to Rome, but only to be m ide a Cardinal. So that the system of the earth's movement was first definitely and pub'.icly taught at Rome in HLTibyaßom^n Cardinal 48 years before the birth of Copernicus, and 139 years before Galileo. Again, it was at Rome that Copernicus explained and defended his system before an audience of 200U scholars. He was made Canon of Kotnigsburg. It was to Pope Paul 111., b" it remembered, that he dedicated his work De Rtrohitioiubus Orbivm Cosiest mm. Nor is this all, for we leatn from the 'dedication ' that he sought the Papal patronage as a protection from the ridicule of his xcuntific contemporaries. >o modern a-<tronotrer with a leputation to lo«e would dream of endorsing Galileos reasons for the diurnal motion of the earth, and the heliocentric theory was publicly taught long before. Notwithstanding the many t-quabbles his quick temper and caustic pen got him into, he was pensioned by Urban VIII. and he continued to receive that pension till his death. He would have saved himself much trouble had he taken the advice of Mgr. Dinito : ' Write freely, but keep out of the sacristy.'