07 Dec




















Lutheran Reformers was transmitted as a precious legacy, and in the next century was made much of by Calovius. His great learning and determined orthodoxy gave him the Lutheran leadership. Utterly refusing to look at ascertained facts, he cited the turning back of the shadow upon King Hezekiah's dial and the standing still of the sun for Joshua, denied the movement of the earth, and denounced the whole new view as clearly opposed to Scripture. To this day his arguments are repeated by sundry orthodox leaders of American Lutheranism. As to the other branches of the Reformed Church, we have already seen how Calvinists, Anglicans, and, indeed, Protestant sectarians generally, opposed the new truth.(68) (68) For Clovius, see Zoeckler, Geschichte, vol. i, pp. 684 and 763. For Calvin and Turretin, see Shields, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 61. In England, among the strict churchmen, the great Dr. South denounced the Royal Society as "irreligious," and among the Puritans the eminent John Owen declared that Newton's discoveries were "built on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions against evident testimonies of Scripture." Even Milton seems to have hesitated between the two systems. At the beginning of the eighth book of Paradise Lost he makes Adam state the difficulties of the Ptolemaic system, and then brings forward an angel to make the usual orthodox answers. Later, Milton seems to lean toward the Copernican theory, for, referring to the earth, he says: "Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she faces even And bears thee soft with the smooth air along." English orthodoxy continued to assert itself. In 1724 John Hutchinson,

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