to which, no less than
to his participation in their hardships, his sympathy with their
feelings, and his great military talents, he owed, under God, his
success and renown. That his military fame was well founded, that no
series of accidents could have produced success, at once so splendid and
so uniform, we must have believed, though all professional authorities
had been silent; but the special merit of no other commander has been
more generally acknowledged by those of his own craft. His most
celebrated living rival and the greatest conqueror of modern times have
both set their seals to it. Wallenstein on two separate occasions
pronounced him the greatest captain of his age; and among the eight best
generals whom, in his judgment, the world had ever seen, Napoleon gave a
place to Gustavus Adolphus.

RECANTATION OF GALILEO

A.D. 1633

SIR OLIVER LODGE

From Socrates to Galileo, as from the Church's early martyrs to
its latest victims, runs the same story of conflict between the
free human spirit and the repressive environment of custom
acting through personal will or through constituted power.

When in 1633 Galileo, standing before the Inquisition at Rome,
denied his own great work and swore that earth stood still,
science staggered under the heavy blow. Galileo was being
punished, not directly for the great astronomical discoveries
he had made with his telescope, but for asserting that they
proved, or that he believed in, the Copernican system. This
declared that the earth moved, while the churchmen had
interpreted the Bible to mean that it did not.

Thus science, threatened in the person of its greatest leader,
terrified by his sufferings, no longer dared proclaim the thing
it saw. Descartes and many another thinker, though throbbing
with the eagerness of the new dawning light, hushed their
voices, hid their views. They were philosophers, not martyrs.
What this newly roused vigor of thought might have accomplished
except for the repressive hand of the Church we cannot tell. As
it was, the supremacy of intellect passed away from Catholic
Italy, turned from the South to the North, from Galileo to
Newton and Leibnitz. The forced recantation of the great
astronomer thus stands out as one of the events which have
changed the course of destiny.

In 1615 Pope Paul V wrote requesting Gal