During the seventeenth century, in France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared for it.

In 1672 the Jesuit Father Riccioli declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it.

Even after the beginning of the eighteenth century--long after the demonstrations of Sir Isaac Newton--Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, the foremost theologian that France has ever produced, declared it contrary to Scripture.
Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that century.

In England, John Hutchinson, as we have seen, published in 1724 his Moses' Principia maintaining that the Hebrew Scriptures are a perfect system of natural philosophy, and are opposed to the Newtonian system of gravitation; and, as we have also seen, he was followed by a long list of noted men in the Church.

In France, two eminent mathematicians published in 1748 an edition of Newton's Principia; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical censure, they felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false.
Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of the Jesuits, used these words: "As for me, full of respect for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as immovable; nevertheless, for simplicity in explanation I will argue as if the earth moves; for it is proved that of the two hypotheses the appearances favour this idea." In Germany, especially in the Protestant part of it, the war was even more bitter, and it lasted through the first half of the eighteenth century.