ing the attacking party. They are poisoned weapons. They pierce the hearts of loving women; they alienate dear children; they injure man after life is ended, for they leave poisoned wounds in the hearts of those who loved him best—fears for his eternal salvation, dread of the divine wrath upon him. Of course, in these days these weapons, though often effective in vexing good men and in scaring good women, are somewhat blunted; indeed, they not infrequently injure the assailants more than the assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo; they were then in all their sharpness and venom.[1] Yet worse even than these weapons was the attack by the Archbishop of Pisa.
This man, whose cathedral derives its most enduring fame from Galileo's deduction of a great natural law from the swinging lamp before its altar, was not an archbishop after the noble mold of Borromeo and Fénelon and Cheverus. He was, sadly enough for the Church and humanity, simply a zealot and intriguer: he perfected the plan for entrapping the great astronomer.
Galileo, after his discoveries had been denounced, had written to his friend Castelli and to the Grand Duchess Christine two letters to show that his discoveries might be reconciled to Scripture. On a hint from the Inquisition at Rome, the archbishop sought to get hold of these letters and exhibit them as proofs that Galileo had uttered heretical views of theology and of Scripture, and thus to bring him into the clutch of the Inquisition. The archbishop begs Castelli, therefore, to let him see the original letter in the handwriting of Galileo. Castelli declines; the archbishop then, while, as is now revealed, writing constantly and bitterly to the Inquisition against Galileo, professes to Castelli the greatest admiration of Galileo's genius and a sincere desire to know more of his discoveries. This not succeeding, the archbishop at last throws off the mask and resorts to open attack.
The whole struggle to crush Galileo and to save him would be amusing were it not so fraught with evil. There were intrigues and counter-intrigues, plots and counter-plots, lying and spying; and, in the thickest of this seething, squabbling, screaming mass of priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, strove two popes, Paul V and Urban VIII. It is most suggestive to see in this crisis of the Church, at the tomb of the prince of the apostles, on the eve of the greatest errors in church policy the world has known, in all the intrigues and deliberations of these consecrated
- ↑ For curious exemplification of the way in which these weapons have been hurled, see lists of persons charged with "infidelity" and "atheism," in Le Dictionnaire des Athées, Paris, An. viii; also Lecky, History of Rationalism, vol. ii, p. 50. For the case of Descartes, see Saisset, Descartes et ses Précurseurs, pp. 103, 110.
