e sun and moon and all the host of heaven
as on the old Ptolemaic system, or again by stopping only the sun and
not any of the other bodies, and so throwing astronomy all wrong.

This reads to us like satire, but no doubt it was his genuine opinion.

These Scriptural reconciliations of his, however, angered the religious
authorities still more. They said it was bad enough for this heretic to
try and upset old _scientific_ beliefs, and to spoil the face of
_Nature_ with his infidel discoveries, but at least he might leave the
Bible alone; and they addressed an indignant remonstrance to Rome, to
protect it from the hands of ignorant laymen.

Thus, wherever he turned he encountered hostility. Of course he had many
friends--some of them powerful like Cosmo, all of them faithful and
sincere. But against the power of Rome what could they do? Cosmo dared
no more than remonstrate, and ultimately his successor had to refrain
from even this, so enchained and bound was the spirit of the rulers of
those days; and so when his day of tribulation came he stood alone and
helpless in the midst of his enemies.

You may wonder, perhaps, why this man should excite so much more
hostility than many another man who was suffered to believe and teach
much the same doctrines unmolested. But no other man had made such
brilliant and exciting discoveries. No man stood so prominently forward
in the eyes of all Christendom as the champion of the new doctrines. No
other man stated them so clearly and forcibly, nor drove them home with
such brilliant and telling illustrations.

And again, there was the memory of his early conflict with the
Aristotelians at Pisa, of his scornful and successful refutation of
their absurdities. All this made him specially obnoxious to the
Aristotelian Jesuits in their double capacity both of priests and of
philosophers, and they singled him out for relentless official
persecution.

Not yet, however, is he much troubled by them. The chief men at Rome
have not yet moved. Messages, however, keep going up from Tuscany to
Rome respecting the teachings of this man, and of the harm he is doing
by his pertinacious preaching of the Copernican doctrine that the earth
moves.

At length, in 1615, Pope Paul V. wrote requesting him to come to Rome to
explain his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of
Cardinal Barberino--an accomplished man in high position, who became in
fact the next Pope. Galileo showed c