ardinals and others his telescope,
and to as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter's satellites
and his other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked, he
harangued, he held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at
once, confounding his opponents and putting them to shame.

His method was to let the opposite arguments be stated as fully and
completely as possible, himself aiding, and often adducing the most
forcible and plausible arguments against his own views; and then, all
having been well stated, he would proceed to utterly undermine and
demolish the whole fabric, and bring out the truth in such a way as to
convince all honest minds. It was this habit that made him such a
formidable antagonist. He never shrank from meeting an opposing
argument, never sought to ignore it, or cloak it in a cloud of words.
Every hostile argument he seemed to delight in, as a foe to be crushed,
and the better and stronger they sounded the more he liked them. He knew
many of them well, he invented a number more, and had he chosen could
have out-argued the stoutest Aristotelian on his own grounds. Thus did
he lead his adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately
overwhelm them in a more hopeless rout. All this in Rome too, in the
heart of the Catholic world. Had he been worldly-wise, he would
certainly have kept silent and unobtrusive till he had leave to go away
again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission
it was to proclaim them even in this centre of the world and of the
Church.

Well, he had an audience with the Pope--a chat an hour long--and the two
parted good friends, mutually pleased with each other.

He writes that he is all right now, and might return home when he liked.
But the question began to be agitated whether the whole system of
Copernicus ought not to be condemned as impious and heretical. This view
was persistently urged upon the Pope and College of Cardinals, and it
was soon to be decided upon.

Had Galileo been unfaithful to the Church he could have left them to
stultify themselves in any way they thought proper, and himself have
gone; but he felt supremely interested in the result, and he stayed. He
writes:--

"So far as concerns the clearing of my own character, I might
return home immediately; but although this new question regards me
no more than all those who for the last eighty years have supported
those opinions