40 GALILEO AND HIS JUDGES. 



he well knew that such a prohibition would not be 

 an irrevocable act ; it might be withdrawn when the 

 conclusive proof of the forbidden opinion should be 

 established. He probably thought that the certain 

 demonstration of the opinion would only take place, 

 as mathematicians would say, at an infinitely distant 

 date ; nor was he wholly wrong, as has already been 

 remarked, for the absolute demonstration of the 

 Copernican doctrine is not, from the very nature of 

 the case, a thing to be achieved. 



Yet, if he had lived at a later period, I do not 

 doubt that he would have been satisfied with the 

 moral evidence, the mass of indirect proof, on which 

 Copernicanism rests. Many years later, the Jesuit 

 Father Fabri, who appears to have held the office of 

 Canon Penitentiary of St. Peter's, expresses himself 

 in much the same way as Bellarmine. He was 

 replying to the arguments of some Copernican 

 correspondent, possibly an Englishman, since his 

 reply was inserted in the Acts of the English Royal 

 Society in 1665, and he says: " There is no reason 

 why the Church should not understand those texts in 

 their literal sense, and declare that they should be 

 so understood so long as there is no demonstration to 

 prove the contrary. But if any such demonstration 

 hereafter be devised by your party (which I do not 

 at all expect), in that case the Church will not at all 

 hesitate to set forth that those texts are to be under- 

 stood in an improper i.e., non-literal and figurative 



