the matter discoursed of at their meetings. As this affords me an opportunity of adding one or two other 'days,' I promise to resume the arguments already adduced in favour of the said opinion, which is false and has been condemned, and to confute them in such most effectual method as by the blessing of God may be supplied to me. I pray, therefore, this sacred tribunal to aid me in this good resolution, and to enable me to put it in effect."[1]
It is hard to pass an adverse judgment on such a hero of science; and yet the man who repeatedly denies before his judges the scientific convictions for which he had striven and laboured for half a century, who even proposes in a continuation of his monumental work on the two chief systems of the world to annihilate all the arguments therein adduced for the recognition of the only true system, can never be absolved by the historical critic from the charge of weakness and insincere obsequiousness. It was, however, the century the opening of which had been ominously marked by the funeral pile of Giordano Bruno, and but eight years before, the corpse of Marc 'Antonio de Dominis,—the famous Archbishop of Spalato, who had died suddenly in the prisons of the Engelsburg during his trial before the Inquisition,—had, after the sentence of the Holy Tribunal, been taken from its resting place and publicly burnt in Rome, together with his heretical writings.
- ↑ Vat. MS. fol. 420 vo. 421 ro.
