GIOBDAXO BEUXO AXD GALILEO GALILEI. 



123 



Galileo's second visit to Rome appeared after- 

 ward to have been the crisis of his fate ; the turn- 

 ing-point of all his after-life from prosperous to 

 adverse fortunes. The great mistake he made 

 did not consist, as Sir David Brewster would 

 have it, in any wanton disregard or defiance of 

 " the laws of the Church," nor " bold and incon- 

 siderate expression of his opinions " through the 

 channel of the press (the two documents, ad- 

 dressed, the one to Father Castelli, the other to 

 the dowager Grand-duchess of Tuscany, which 

 gave his enemies the first handle taken against 

 him, were not printed at all) ; his great mistake 

 was his too sanguine persuasion that he could 

 get those who wielded the highest powers of the 

 Church at that epoch to see that neither her laws 

 nor her honest interests were concerned in the 

 question whether the sun moved round the earth, 

 or the earth round the sun. Such was Galileo's 

 own intimate and sincere conviction ; and it was 

 his sublime confidence in the force of truth that 

 inspired his efforts to bring round popes and car- 

 dinals, who had ether objects in view, to share 

 that conviction. Sir David Brewster, following 

 Mallet Du-Pan, and other such untrustworthy au- 

 thorities, and taking no note of the facts, which 

 were not then in their entirety before the world, 

 affirms that Galileo, to be safe, needed but to 

 have abstained from turning a philosophical into 

 a theological question ; and that, had he con- 

 cluded his " System of the World " with the sage 

 peroration of his apologist Campanella, and dedi- 

 cated it to the pope, it might have stood in the 

 library of the Vatican, beside the cherished, 

 though equally heretical, volume of Copernicus. 



" The cherished, though equally heretical, vol- 

 ume of Copernicus ! " Why, the volume of Co- 

 pernicus was put on the Roman Index by a decree 

 dated the 5th of March, 1616, and remained on 

 the Index till the 16th of August, 1820! The 

 doctrine contained in that work, of the sun being 

 the centre and the earth not being the centre of 

 our system — the mobility of the latter and fixity 

 of the former in that system — had been declared, 

 in February, 1616, by the cardinals of the Roman 

 Inquisition to be " absurd, heretical, and contrary 

 to Holy Scripture." That was the position on 

 which Rome took her stand at the epoch of Gali- 

 leo's second visit. Xo other ground could be as- 

 signed for any admonitory (not to say penal) pro- 

 cedure against Galileo, than the ground laid in 

 the secret passing of that decree of the Inquisi- 

 tion, since no other offense could be imputed to 

 him than that he had founded his theory, in his 

 recently-published " Letters on the Spots in the 



Sun," on that of Copernicus. With similar se- 

 crecy, the decree of the Inquisition condemning 

 the Copernican doctrine was communicated to 

 Galileo by Cardinal Bellarmine, and a promise 

 was exacted from him that he would, in future, 

 neither hold nor teach that doctrine in any shape. 

 Bellarmine himself, and Maffeo Barberini, after- 

 ward Pope Urban VIII., were personal friends of 

 Galileo ; they had no sympathy with the ignorant 

 or hypocritical zealotry of the Caccinis and Lo- 

 rinis ; and, at the time we are speaking of, they 

 inspired the Inquisition with their own friendly 

 dispositions, so far as regarded the person of the 

 philosopher who had alarmed their orthodoxy. 

 Accordingly, Galileo's name was not even men- 

 tioned in its decree condemning Copernicus, and 

 Cardinal Barberini afterward, when pope, in 1633, 

 complained vehemently of ill-usage and ingrati- 

 tude on the part of Galileo after he had helped 

 him, as he said, out of his scrape in 1616. That 

 Galileo could not be content to hold his tongue, 

 petted and pensioned as he was both by a pope 

 and by a grand-duke, was a mystery of iniquity 

 and perversity that his too gracious holiness could 

 not have anticipated, and could not be expected 

 to pardon. 



Thosewho censure Galileo for failing to keep his 

 secret promise to Bellarmine seem to forget that, 

 for sixteen or seventeen years, he kept as much of 

 that promise as could well be expected — that is to 

 say, he forbore, though it was pain and grief to him, 

 from further publications on the obnoxious and 

 tabooed subject. It was not till his friend Maffeo 

 Barberini had climbed to the highest place in the 

 Roman hierarchy with a diplomatic dexterity only 

 equaled by his autocratical arrogance when he had 

 once reached it, that Galileo, by a second sanguine 

 mistake, supposed he might give himself license 

 to evade the inhibition which had secretly been 

 laid on him at so great a distance of time. He 

 had hastened to Rome, on the urgent advice of 

 his friend Prince Cesi, the President of the Lyn- 

 caean Academy, to congratulate Maffeo Barberini 

 on his elevation to the papal chair, and was re- 

 ceived by the new pope with an eager cordiality 

 which might well inspire confidence. The Flor- 

 entine philospher, in his single-minded devotion 

 to his main object in life, had not sufficiently 

 studied the character of the man he had now to 

 deal with. Everything depended with Urban on 

 hitting his humor or caprice of the moment. " No 

 pope," says Ranke, 1 " ever raised such arrogant 

 claims to personal respect." And nothing that 

 he could deem disrespect to aught he had ever 

 » Eanke's " History of the Popes," vol. ii., p. 559. 



