462 NOTES TO BOOK V. 



religion, and which had rendered the Romish Church 

 more jealous of innovations in received opinions than it 

 had previously been. It appears too that the discussion 

 of such novel doctrines was, at that time at least, less 

 freely tolerated in Italy than in other countries. In 

 1597, Kepler writes to Galileo thus: "Confide Galilaee 

 et progredere. Si bene conjecto, pauci de prsecipuis Eu- 

 ropse Mathematicis a nobis secedere volent ; tanta vis est 

 veritatis. Si tibi Italia minus est idonea ad publica- 

 tionem et si aliqua habitures es impedimenta, forsan 

 Germania nobis hanc libertatem concedet." Venturi, 

 Mem. di Galileo. Vol. i. p. 19. 



I would not however be understood to assert the 

 condemnation of new doctrines in science to be either 

 a general or a characteristic practice of the Romish 

 Church. Certainly the intelligent and cultivated minds 

 of Italy, and many of the most eminent of her ecclesi- 

 astics among them, have always been the foremost in 

 promoting and welcoming the progress of science: and, 

 as I have stated, there were found, among the Italian 

 ecclesiastics of Galileo's time many of the earliest and 

 most enlightened adherents of the Copernican system. 

 The condemnation of the doctrine of the earth's motion, 

 is, so far as I am aware, the only instance in which the 

 Papal authority has pronounced a decree upon a point 

 of science. And the most candid of the adherents of 

 the Romish Church condemn the assumption of autho- 

 rity in such matters, which in this one instance, at least, 

 was made by the ecclesiastical tribunals. The author of 

 the Ages of Faith (Book vm. p. 248) says, " A congre- 

 gation, it is to be lamented, declared the new system 

 to be opposed to Scripture, and therefore heretical/' In 



