Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation." Father Lecazre declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology.

If the earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches.

If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam?
How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark?
How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour ?" Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school.
In addition to this prodigious theological engine of war there was kept up a fire of smaller artillery in the shape of texts and scriptural extracts.
But the war grew still more bitter, and some weapons used in it are worth examining.

They are very easily examined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other.

These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men.