In one of his sermons before the University of Oxford he spoke as follows: "Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest.

How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth till we know what motion is?
If our idea of motion is but an accidental result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and both are true: neither true philosophically; both true for certain practical purposes in the system in which they are respectively found." In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more hopelessly skeptical.

And for what were the youth of Oxford led into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence of truth or any real foundation for it?
Simply to save an outworn system of interpretation into which the gifted preacher happened to be born.
The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and developed in the Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman's associates.

This argument was nothing less than an attempt to retreat under the charge of deception against the Almighty himself.

It is as follows: "But it may well be doubted whether the Church did retard the progress of scientific truth.