He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated.
Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and saturated with the ecclesiastical divinity of the schoolmen.
[Footnote 124: This theological conception of history inspired the sacred drama of the Middle Ages, known to us as Cyclical Miracle Plays.] These forces of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of his age.

Similar judgment may be passed upon his championship of the Copernican system.

That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe.

His strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, appear to modern minds superfluous.

But we must remember what a deeply-penetrating, widely-working revolution Copernicus effected in cosmology, how he dislocated the whole fabric upon which Catholic theology rested, how new and unintelligible his doctrine then seemed, and what vast horizons he opened for speculation on the destinies of man.