i praefuisset."[12]

There was another quarrel between Virgil and Boniface which is an
illustration. An ignorant priest had baptized "in nomine Patri_a_, et
Fili_a_ et Spiritu_a_ Sancta." Boniface declared the rite null and void:
Virgil maintained the contrary; and Zachary decided in favor of Virgil, on
the ground that the absurd form was only ignorance of Latin, and not
heresy. It is hard to believe that this man deposed a priest for asserting
the whole globe to be inhabited. To me the little information that we have
seems {35} to indicate--but not with certainty--that Virgil maintained the
antipodes: that his ignorant contemporaries travestied his theory into that
of an underground cosmos; that the Pope cited him to Rome to explain his
system, which, as reported, looked like what all would then have affirmed
to be heresy; that he gave satisfactory explanations, and was dismissed
with honor. It may be that the educated Greek monk, Zachary, knew his
Ptolemy well enough to guess what the asserted heretic would say; we have
seen that he seems to have patronized geography. The _description_ of the
earth, according to historians, was a _map_; this Pope may have been more
ready than another to prick up his ears at any rumor of geographical
heresy, from hope of information. And Virgil, who may have entered the
sacred presence as frightened as Jacquard, when Napoleon I sent for him and
said, with a stern voice and threatening gesture, "You are the man who can
tie a knot in a stretched string," may have departed as well pleased as
Jacquard with the riband and pension which the interview was worth to him.

A word more about Baronius. If he had been pope, as he would have been but
for the opposition of the Spaniards, and if he had lived ten years longer
than he did, and if Clavius, who would have been his astronomical adviser,
had lived five years longer than he did, it is probable, nay almost
certain, that the great exhibition, the proceeding against Galileo, would
not have furnished a joke against theology in all time to come. For
Baronius was sensible and witty enough to say that in the Scriptures the
Holy Spirit intended to teach how to go to Heaven, not how Heaven goes; and
Clavius, in his last years, confessed that the whole system of the heavens
had broken down, and must be mended.

The manner in which the Galileo case, a reality, and the Virgil case, a
fiction, have been hawked against the Roman see are enough to show tha