It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.  The prohibition of astronomy would be an open contempt of a hundred texts of the Holy Scriptures, which teach us that the glory and the greatness of Almighty God are admirably discerned in all His works, and divinely read in the open book of the heavens.

III.—­FACT AND FAITH

It may be said that the doctrine of the movement of the sun and the fixity of the earth must de Fide be held for true since the Scriptures affirm it, and all the fathers unanimously accept the scriptural words in their naked and literal sense.  But it was necessary to assign motion to the sun and rest to the earth lest the shallow minds of the vulgar should be confounded, amused, and rendered obstinate and contumacious with regard to doctrines of faith.  St. Jerome writes:  “It is the custom for the pen-men of Scripture to deliver their judgments in many things according to the common received opinion that their times had of them.”  Even Copernicus himself, knowing the power of custom, and unwilling to create confusion in our comprehension, continues to talk of the rising and setting of the sun and stars and of variations in the obliquity of the zodiac.  Whence it is to be noted how necessary it is to accommodate our discourse to our accustomed manner of understanding.

In the next place, the common consent of the fathers to a natural proposition should authorise it only if it have been discussed and debated with all possible diligence, and this question was in those times totally buried.

Besides, it is not enough to say that the fathers accept the Ptolemaic doctrine; it is necessary to prove that they condemned the Copernican.  Was the Copernican doctrine ever formally condemned as contrary to the Scriptures?  And Didacus, discoursing on the Copernican hypothesis, concludes that the motion of the earth is not contrary to the Scriptures.

Let my opponents, therefore, apply themselves to examine the arguments of Copernicus and others; and let them not hope to find such rash and impetuous decisions in the wary and holy fathers, or in the absolute wisdom of him that cannot err, as those into which they have suffered themselves to be hurried by prejudice or personal feeling.  His holiness has certainly an absolute power of admitting or condemning propositions not directly de Fide, but it is not in the power of any creature to make them true or false otherwise than of their own nature and de facto they are.

In my judgment it would be well first to examine the truth of the fact (over which none hath power) before invoking supreme authority; for if it be not possible that a conclusion should be declared heretical while we are not certain but that it may be true, their pains are vain who pretend to condemn the doctrine of the mobility of the earth and the fixity of the sun, unless they have first demonstrated the doctrine to be impossible and false.