es had clearly taken the Copernican theory out of the list
of hypotheses, and had placed it before the world as a truth. Against
him, then, the war was long and bitter. The supporters of what was
called "sound learning" declared his discoveries deceptions and his
announcements blasphemy. Semi-scientific professors, endeavouring to
curry favour with the Church, attacked him with sham science;
earnest preachers attacked him with perverted Scripture; theologians,
inquisitors, congregations of cardinals, and at last two popes
dealt with him, and, as was supposed, silenced his impious doctrine
forever.(55)

(55) A very curious example of this sham science employed by theologians
is seen in the argument, frequently used at that time, that, if the
earth really moved, a stone falling from a height would fall back of a
point immediately below its point of starting. This is used by Fromundus
with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the
matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has
mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies,
as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See
Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, second edition, 1877.

I shall present this warfare at some length because, so far as I can
find, no careful summary of it has been given in our language, since the
whole history was placed in a new light by the revelations of the trial
documents in the Vatican Library, honestly published for the first
time by L'Epinois in 1867, and since that by Gebler, Berti, Favaro, and
others.

The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when he announced
that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter. The
enemy saw that this took the Copernican theory out of the realm of
hypothesis, and they gave battle immediately. They denounced both
his method and its results as absurd and impious. As to his method,
professors bred in the "safe science" favoured by the Church argued that
the divinely appointed way of arriving at the truth in astronomy was
by theological reasoning on texts of Scripture; and, as to his
results, they insisted, first, that Aristotle knew nothing of these new
revelations; and, next, that the Bible showed by all applicable types
that there could be only seven planets; that this was proved by the
seven golden candlesticks of the Apocalypse, by the seven-branched
candlestick of the ta