GIORDAXO BRUXO AXD GALILEO GALILEI. 



127 



Protestant canon at Windsor, who returned to the 

 Catholic Church, hut was again accused of Protes- 

 tant doctrine. Nevertheless, the sentence passed 

 in 1633 against Galileo, without exactly giving him, 

 as a ground of condemnation, the designation of a 

 relapsedheretic, implied that designation in the pre- 

 amble of the sentence and in the act of abjuration ; 

 so as, in effect, to stigmatize Galileo's doctrine as a 

 heresy, declared such in 1616, and Galileo himself 

 by consequence as a heretic, who had received a 

 secret personal warning in 1616, had relapsed after- 

 ward into heresy in 1632, and was now pardoned 

 solely on condition of abjuration and penance. If 

 Galileo had refused to abjure a doctrine thus de- 

 scribed as heretical, he would have had to fear 

 that the designation of relapsed and impenitent 

 heretic would have been applied in his case as in 

 that of Bruno, drawing like consequences after it. 

 I am convinced, indeed, that he would not have 

 undergone the last punishment for his pretended 

 crime ; neither Urban VIII. nor his inquisitors 

 would have gone quite that length. But he would 

 have been shut up for all the rest of his life, as a 

 dangerous and incorrigible innovator, in the pris- 

 ons of the Holy Office." 



The illusory pardon vouchsafed by Rome to 

 Galileo, in consideration of his not less illusory 

 abjuration, is described in all its detail of petty 

 and minute vexations in the several works before 

 us, each of which is, in its own way, worth study. 

 What Rome did to Galileo is now before the 

 world in its minutest circumstances. Let her 

 have full credit for what, by special grace and 

 favor, she left undone. An infirm old man of 

 seventy, stricken with grievous maladies, whose 

 labors and discoveries had done honor to Italy in 

 every realm of Europe, was neither burned at 

 the stake, nor thrown into the dungeons of the 

 Iloly Office, nor stretched on its rack. In other 

 respects, the sentence of condemnation passed on 

 Galileo formed no exception to the rule again 

 laid down in principle by the infallible head of 

 the infallible Church in the age we live in, 1 and 

 is no longer carried into execution by its secular 

 arm, because the secular arm is no longer at 

 Rome's disposal. 



The nine years of life, which remained for 

 Galileo after his abjuration, were employed to 

 good purpose in bringing out his " Dialoghi delle 

 Xuove Scienze," which has been generally con- 

 sidered, as it was by himself, his chef-d , aruvre, 

 though keeping entirely off the vexed question 

 of his great astronomical discoveries. Watched 



1 The foregoing observations were written before 

 the accession of the present pope, and refer, of course, 

 to the too notorious Encyclicals of bis predecessor. 



as he was by all the eyes of papal espionage, till 

 his own were closed in total blindness, Galileo 

 contrived to effect the republication, in Holland 

 and Germany, of those condemned discoveries 

 which Rome had done her best, or worst, to sup- 

 press, but of which she only, for the moment, 

 succeeded in robbing Italy of the full honor, 

 though to Italy belonged the genius that made 

 them. Galileo lived to his last hour a martyr — 

 that is to say, an unceasing and unresting wit- 

 ness to science ; and Rome may be thankful that 

 he did not directly die her martyr. But she 

 brought his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, 

 pursued him to death, and after death, with the 

 vindictive vigilance of her inquisitorial emissa- 

 ries ; and only did not because she could not ar- 

 rest, while life remained, the workings of that 

 indomitable and irrepressible intellect. 



We cannot conclude without some brief no- 

 tice of the two most recent transcripts of the 

 Vatican MSS. containing the successive proced- 

 ures in the case of Galileo, which have been 

 published since the preceding pages were written. 

 These transcripts were made in the course of 

 last year, almost simultaneously, but without 

 concert — apparently, indeed, without the one 

 writer having distinct knowledge of what the 

 other was doing — by M. Henri de l'Epinois, who 

 was first in the field in the independent investi- 

 gation of these documents, so far back as 1867, 

 and by Herr von Gebler, to whose previous pub- 

 lication, entitled " Galileo Galilei und die Romisehe 

 Curie," we have been indebted for much valuable 

 material on the subject of our present review. 



The recent history of these Vatican MSS. is 

 curious. Early in the present century, during 

 the French occupation of Rome under the first 

 Napoleon, they were abstracted from the secret 

 archives of the Vatican, and brought to Paris, 

 where they remained (to borrow M. Berti's ultra- 

 classic style) " for eight lustres and more " — that 

 is to say, for nearly half a century. The French 

 autocrat at first intended to print them, but he 

 either changed his mind from some motive con- 

 nected with the tangled web of his policy toward 

 the Holy See, or else he adopted the opinion ex- 

 pressed by the historian Denina, that they con- 

 tained nothing worth printing. After the Bour- 

 bon restoration, Pius VII. commissioned the 

 late Monsignor Marini to reclaim these MSS. as 

 papal property ; but he had to return to Rome 

 empty-handed, and without having been even able 

 to ascertain where the documents were deposited. 

 Under Louis Philippe, and just after the acces- 

 sion of Pins IX. to the papal chair, a more skill- 



