Jeniffer electronic book

Nor were such
attempts to keep the truth from students confined to the Roman
Catholic institutions of learning. Strange as it may seem, nowhere
were the facts confirming the Copernican theory more carefully kept
out of sight than at Wittenberg--the university of Luther and
Melanchthon. About the middle of the sixteenth century there were
at that centre of Protestant instruction two astronomers of a very
high order, Rheticus and Reinhold; both of these, after thorough
study, had convinced themselves that the Copernican system was
true, but neither of them was allowed to tell this truth to his
students. Neither in his lecture announcements nor in his published
works did Rheticus venture to make the new system known, and he at
last gave up his professorship and left Wittenberg, that he might
have freedom to seek and tell the truth. Reinhold was even more
wretchedly humiliated. Convinced of the truth of the new theory, he
was obliged to advocate the old; if he mentioned the Copernican
ideas, he was compelled to overlay them with the Ptolemaic.


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