Newton’s merit consisted in this, that he applied the laws of dynamics to the movements of the celestial bodies, and insisted that scientific theories must be substantiated by the agreement of observations with calculations.

When Kepler announced his three laws, they were received with condemnation by the spiritual authorities, not because of any error they were supposed to present or to contain, but partly because they gave support to the Copernican system, and partly because it was judged inexpedient to admit the prevalence of law of any kind as opposed to providential intervention.  The world was regarded as the theatre in which the divine will was daily displayed; it was considered derogatory to the majesty of God that that will should be fettered in any way.  The power of the clergy was chiefly manifested in the influence the were alleged to possess in changing his arbitrary determinations.  It was thus that they could abate the baleful action of comets, secure fine weather or rain, prevent eclipses, and, arresting the course of Nature, work all manner of miracles; it was thus that the shadow had been made to go back on the dial, and the sun and the moon stopped in mid-career.

In the century preceding the epoch of Newton, a great religious and political revolution had taken place —­the Reformation.  Though its effect had not been the securing of complete liberty for thought, it bad weakened many of the old ecclesiastical bonds.  In the reformed countries there was no power to express a condemnation of Newton’s works, and among the clergy there was no disposition to give themselves any concern about the matter.  At first the attention of the Protestant was engrossed by the movements of his great enemy the Catholic, and when that source of disquietude ceased, and the inevitable partitions of the Reformation arose, that attention was fastened upon the rival and antagonistic Churches.  The Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, had something more urgent on hand than Newton’s mathematical demonstrations.

So, uncondemned, and indeed unobserved, in this clamor of fighting sects, Newton’s grand theory solidly established itself.  Its philosophical significance was infinitely more momentous than the dogmas that these persons were quarreling about.  It not only accepted the heliocentric theory and the laws discovered by Kepler, but it proved that, no matter what might be the weight of opposing ecclesiastical authority, the sun must be the centre of our system, and that Kepler’s laws are the result of a mathematical necessity.  It is impossible that they should be other than they are.

But what is the meaning of all this?  Plainly that the solar system is not interrupted by providential interventions, but is under the government of irreversible law—­law that is itself the issue of mathematical necessity.