GALILEO AND HIS JUDGES. 119 



theologically unsound should be kept from persons 

 who are not specially qualified to read them without 

 injury) : "In Galileo's time all books which advo- 

 cated the truth of Copernicanism were theologically 

 unsound. And a most important service was done 

 by preserving the Catholic flock free from the plague ; 

 free from a most false, proud, irreverent, and 

 dangerous principle of Scriptural interpretation." 

 Dublin Review, October, 1865. 



I have already said that Galileo would have been 

 wiser if he had entirely left alone the question of the 

 interpretation of Scripture ; but it must always be 

 remembered that it was not he but his opponents 

 who commenced the discussion on that particular 

 head. They were weak in the astronomical argu- 

 ment ; and they tried to damage their opponent by 

 attacking him on Scriptural grounds. It is difficult 

 to understand what Dr. Ward means by the forcible 

 language I have just quoted, nor how a principle of 

 Scriptural interpretation, adopted at the present day 

 by every one, could have been in Galileo's time false, 

 proud, irreverent, and dangerous.* Dr. Ward grounds 



* Dr. Ward makes a curious mistake in one point ; he speaks 

 in one of the articles of The Dublin Review (which he then edited) 

 of Copernicanism as destroying the old ideas as to above and below ; 

 that is to say, for instance, your idea of ascending on high towards 

 heaven was thereby nullified, and ascending from the surface of 

 the earth meant going in any direction which the earth's rotation 

 might place above your head at any particular moment. But Dr. 

 Ward, who was doubtless thinking of the very old and exploded 

 notion that the earth was a flat surface, does not seem to have been 

 aware that this objection applies in principle to the Ptolemaic 



