217.
But Osiander's courage failed him: he dared not launch the new thought boldly.

He wrote a grovelling preface, endeavouring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis.

He declared that it was lawful for an astronomer to indulge his imagination, and that this was what Copernicus had done.
Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths--a truth not less ennobling to religion than to science--forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl.( 46) (46) Osiander, in a letter to Copernicus, dated April 20, 1541, had endeavored to reconcile him to such a procedure, and ends by saying, "Sic enim placidiores reddideris peripatheticos et theologos quos contradicturos metuis." See Apologia Tychonis in Kepler's Opera Omnia, Frisch's edition, vol.i, p.246.Kepler holds Osiander entirely responsible for this preface.

Bertrand, in his Fondateurs de l'astronomie moderne, gives its text, and thinks it possible that Copernicus may have yielded "in pure condescension toward his disciple." But this idea is utterly at variance with expressions in Copernicus's own dedicatory letter to the Pope, which follows the preface.

For a good summary of the argument, see Figuier, Savants de la Renaissance, pp.
378, 379; see also citation from Gassendi's Life of Copernicus, in Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p.124.