rtyr! Yes, indeed! But be it remembered,
that if he possessed not the moral courage of a Huss, a Savonarola, or a
Luther, he was not called to exercise it in so high a cause. The
assertion and support of a religious truth is impressed with far deeper
obligations than the advocacy of a scientific one, however well
maintained by analogy, and confirmed by reason.

Still there was a deep devotional sentiment that pervaded the character
of Galileo. Before he died, he became totally blind; yet he did not
despair. Like Milton, he labored on for mankind--nay, pursued his
scientific studies, inventing mechanical substitutes for his loss of
vision, to enable him still to pursue his arduous researches.

It is true he was shut out, like the elder Herschel, from the view of
that glorious company, toward which his spirit had so often soared. Well
might his friend Castelli say, in allusion to his infirmity, "that the
noblest eyes were darkened which nature had ever made--eyes so
privileged, and gifted with such rare qualities, that they might be said
to have seen more than all those who had gone before him, and to have
opened the eyes of all who were to come." Galileo himself bore noble
tribute to his friend, when he exclaimed,

"Never, never will I cease to use the senses which God has left me; and
though this heaven, this earth, this universe, be henceforth shrunk for
me into the narrow space which I myself fill, so it please God, it shall
content me."

The malice of his enemies long survived his death. The partisans of Rome
disputed his right to make a will. They denied him a monument for which
large sums had been subscribed.

A hundred years afterward, when a splendid memorial was about to be
erected to his memory, the President of the Florentine Academy descended
into his grave, and desecrated his remains, by bearing off, as _relics
for a museum_, the thumb of his right hand, and one of his vertebrae! So
the victims of the religious fury of one age become the martyrs of
science in another!

And what is the moral of what we have written concerning Galileo? Is
there no teaching that may instruct our own times, especially when we
see how, through scorn and persecution, and this world's contumely, and
through the gloom and shadows of ignorance and fear, the form and
substance of mighty Truth rises, slowly and dimly, perchance, at first,
but grandly and majestically ere long? Little more than two hundred
years have passed since