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The latter clause was to justify the Prince of Orange in his actions toward him. Rubens refused to plead guilty, even for the sake of sweet liberty, on account of the smirch to the name of the Princess. But on the earnest request of both his wife and the "co-respondent," he finally accepted the terms in the same manner that Galileo declared the earth stood still.
So the victims of the religious fury of one age become the martyrs of science in another! And what is the moral of what we have written concerning Galileo?
But the great bulk of the philosophers of the day were far from joining in the general feeling. They raised an outcry against the impudent fictions of Galileo, and one, a professor of Padua, refused repeatedly to look through the telescope, lest he should be compelled to admit that which he had pre-determined to deny.
Such stories lead one forward to the tombs of Michael Angelo and the great Galileo, which last I looked on to-day with reverence, pity, and wonder; to think that a change so surprising should be made in worldly affairs since his time; that the man who no longer ago than the year 1636, was by the torments and terrors of the Inquisition obliged formally to renounce, as heretical, accursed, and contrary to religion, the revived doctrines of Copernicus, should now have a monument erected to his memory, in the very city where he was born, whence he was cruelly torn away to answer at Rome for the supposed offence; to which he returned; and strange to tell, in which he lived on, by his own desire, with the wife who, by her discovery of his sentiments, and information given to the priests accordingly, had caused his ruin; and who, after his death, in a fit of mad mistaken zeal, flung into the fire, in company with her confessor, all the papers she could find in his study.
During the whole of the trial which had now commenced, Galileo was treated with the most marked indulgence. Abhorring, as we must do, the principles and practice of this odious tribunal, and reprobating its interference with the cautious deductions of science, we must yet admit that, on this occasion, its deliberations were not dictated by passion, nor its power directed by vengeance.
The opinion that the earth was a globe, which had been conjectured or inferred prior to the voyage of Magellan, was placed beyond a doubt by that voyage. The heavenly bodies were subjected to the calculations of man by the labours of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo.
But the same persistent hatred which, in our own day, grudged and delayed due honors at the tombs of Copernicus and Galileo among Catholics, and of Humboldt among Protestants, was still bitter against the great Venetian scholar and statesman. It could not be forgotten that he had wrested from the Vatican the most terrible of its weapons.
Torricelli and Benedetti were of the third generation after Leonardo, and Galileo, the first to make a substantial advance upon his theory, was born more than a century after him. Only two or three men appeared in a generation who, working alone, could make real progress in discovery, and even these could do little in leavening the minds of their fellowmen with the new ideas.
It ought to be widely known, though it is not, that the idea that theologians can or wish to intrude again quâ theologians in scientific disputes as to chemical, biological, or other facts, is a fantastic idea without real foundation save that of the one mistake of the kind made in the case of Galileo and never repeated a mistake, let us hasten to add, made by a disciplinary authority and as all parties admit in no way involving questions of infallibility.
In the church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S. Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa.
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