another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from
thinking Pope Urban would allow what his predecessors would not.

The matter had become a public scandal.

Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it.

An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done.

Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense.
These were refused, and an order of torture was issued. It was not a
trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant--the matter was
all written out--he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought
to the torture-chamber.

Legend and fact separate here.

There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned.
One writer has even tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope
and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo
was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out, and his old broken-down
form tortured on the wheel.

Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We
have official record of the case written out at the time for the
Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture
issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to
enforce it: it may have been only a "war measure."

Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might
realize which course was best for him to pursue--oppose the Church or
uphold it.

Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined
daily with the Pope."

That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows.
The official records are in the Vatican, and the attempt to conceal them
longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the
blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies
of the Church have ever been o'er-zealous Churchmen."

On bended knees, Galileo, a man of threescore and ten, broken in health,
with spirit crushed, repeated after a priest these words: "I, Galileo
Galilei, being in my seventieth year, a prisoner, on my knees before
your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes
the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do
abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the
earth."

He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees,
legend declares that he said, "Yet the earth does move!"

It is hardly probable that th