those of any man of his time, and whose idea of the collection of scientific curiosities into a great museum at Rome (which still bears his name) was one of the fertile germinal suggestions in which modern science was to find seeds for future growth.

It is often asserted that geology was one of the sciences that was distinctly opposed by churchmen; yet we shall see that the father of modern geology, one of the greatest anatomists of his time, was not only a convert to Catholicity, but became a clergyman about the time he was writing the little book that laid the foundation of modern geology. We shall see, too, that, far from religion and science clashing in him, he afterwards was made a bishop, in the hope that he should be able to go back to his native land and induce others to become members of that Church wherein he had found peace and happiness.

In the modern times biology has been supposed to be the special subject of opposition, or at least fear, on the part of ecclesiastical authorities. It is for this reason that the life of Abbot Mendel has been introduced. While working in {11} his monastery garden in the little town of Brünn in Moravia, this Augustinian monk discovered certain precious laws of heredity that are considered by progressive twentieth-century scientists to be the most important contributions to the difficult problems relating to inheritance in biology that have been made.

These constitute the reasons for this little book on Catholic clergymen scientists. It is published, not with any ulterior motives, but simply to impress certain details of truth in the history of science that have been neglected in recent years and, by presenting sympathetic lives of great clergymen scientists, to show that not only is there no essential opposition between science and religion, but on the contrary that the quiet peace of the cloister and of a religious life have often contributed not a little to that precious placidity of mind which seems to be so necessary for the discovery of great, new scientific truths.

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II.

COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES.

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All the vast and most progressive systems that human wisdom has brought forth as substitutes for religion, have never succeeded in interesting any but the learned, the ambitious, or at most the prosperous and happy. But the great majority of mankind can never come under these categories. The great majority of men are suffering, and suffering from moral as well as physical evils. Man's first bread is grief, and his first want is consolation. Now which of these systems has ever consoled an afflicted heart, or repeopled a lonely one? Which of these teachers has ever shown men how to wipe away a tear? Christianity alone has from the beginning promised to console man in the sorrows incidental to life by purifying the inclinations of his heart, and she alone has kept her promise.--MONTALEMBERT, Introduction to Life of St. Elizabeth.

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NICOLAO COPERNICO]

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II.

COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES.

The association of the name of Copernicus with that of Galileo has always cast an air of unorthodoxy about the great astronomer. The condemnation of certain propositions in his work on astronomy in which Copernicus first set forth the idea of the universe as we know it at present, in contradistinction to the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy, would seem to emphasize this suspicion of unorthodox thinking. He is rightly looked upon as one of the great pioneers of our modern physical science, and, as it is generally supposed that scientific tendencies lead away from religion, there are doubtless many who look upon Copernicus as naturally one of the leaders in this rationalistic movement. It is forgotten that scarcely any of the great original thinkers have escaped the stigma of having certain propositions in some of their books condemned, and that this indeed is only an index of the fallibility of the human mind and of the need there is for some authoritative teacher. The sentences in Copernicus's book requiring correction were but few, and were rather matters of terminology than of actual perversion of accepted teaching. It was as such that their modification was suggested. In spite of this, the {16} impression remains that Copernicus must be considered as a rationalizing scientist, the first in a long roll of original scientific investigators whose work has made the edifice of Christianity totter by removing many of the foundation-stones of its traditional authority.

It is rather surprising, in view of this common impression with regard to Copernicus, to find him, according to recent biographers, a faithful clergyman in honor with his ecclesiastical superiors, a distinguished physician whose chief patients were clerical friends of prominent position and the great noblemen of his day, who not only retained all his faith and reverence for the Church, but seems to have been especially religious, a devoted adherent of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, and the author of a series of poems in her honor that constitute a distinct contribution to the literature of his time.

All this should not be astonishing, however; for in the list of the churchmen of the half century just before the great religious revolt in Germany are to be found some of the best known names in the history of the intellectual development of the race. This statement is so contrary to the usual impression that obtains in regard to the character of that period as to be a distinct source of surprise to the ordinary reader of history who has the realization of its truth thrust upon him for the first time. Just before the so-called Reformation, the clergy are considered to have been so sunk in ignorance, or at least to {17} have been so indifferent to intellectual pursuits and so cramped in mind as regards progress, or so timorous because of inquisition methods, that no great advances in thought, and especially none in science, could possibly be looked for from them. To find, then, that not only were faithful churchmen leaders in thought, discoverers in science, organizers in education, initiators of new progress, teachers of the New Learning, but that they were also typical representatives and yet prudent directors of the advancing spirit of that truly wonderful time, is apt to make us think that surely--as the Count de Maistre said one hundred years ago, and the Cambridge Modern History repeats at the beginning of the twentieth century when treating of this very period--"history has been a conspiracy against the truth."

Not quite fifty years before Luther's movement of protest began--that is, in 1471--there passed away in a little town in the Rhineland a man who has been a greater spiritual force than perhaps any other single man that has ever existed. This was Thomas à Kempis, a product of the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, a teaching order that during these fifty years before the Protestant Revolution had over ten thousand pupils in its schools in the Rhineland and the Netherlands alone. As among these pupils there occur such names as Erasmus, Nicholas of Cusa, Agricola, not to mention many less illustrious, some idea of this old teaching institution, that has been very aptly compared to our {18} modern Brothers of the Christian Schools, can be realized.

Kempis was a worthy initiator of a great half century. He had among his contemporaries, or followers in the next generation, such men as Grocyn, Dean Colet, and Linacre in England, Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, and Copernicus in Germany. Considering the usual impression in this matter as regards the lack of interest at Rome in serious study, it is curiously interesting to