ushers to the chamber of intolerance. In
silence and in mystery commenced the preparations. The familiars of the
office advanced to the astronomer, and arrayed him in the penitential
garment; and as he approached, with a slow and measured step, the
tribunal, cardinals, and prelates noiselessly assembled, and a dark
circle of officers and priests closed in, while, as if conscious that
the battle had commenced in earnest between mind and power, all the pomp
and splendor of the hierarchy of Rome--that system which had hitherto
possessed a sway unlimited over the fears and opinions of mankind--was
summoned up to increase the solemnity and significance of the judgment
about to be pronounced against him.

To the tedious succession of technical proceedings, mocking justice by
their very assumption of formality, it would be needless to refer.
Solemnly, however, and by an authority which it was fatal to resist,
Galileo was called on to renounce a truth which his whole life had been
consecrated to reveal and to maintain, "The motion through space of the
Earth and Planets round the Sun."

Then, immediately, assuming he had nothing to allege, would attempt no
resistance, and offer no defense, came the sentence of the tribunal,
banning and anathematizing all who held the doctrine, that the sun is
the centre of the system, as a tenet "philosophically false, and
formally heretical."

And then they sentenced the old and infirm philosopher--this band of
infallibles!--they bade him abjure and detest the said errors and
heresies. They decreed his book to the flames, and they condemned him
for life to the dungeons of the Inquisition, bidding him recite, "once a
week, seven penitential psalms for the good of his soul!"

Did Galileo yield? Did he renounce that theory now affording such ample
proof of the beauty and order of the universe; to whose very laws
Kepler, the friend and contemporary of the philosopher, was even then,
though unconsciously, bearing evidence, by his wonderful theorem of
velocities and distances, a problem which Newton afterward confirmed and
illustrated?

Did Galileo yield? He did. Broken by age and infirmity, importuned by
friends more alarmed than himself, perhaps, at the terrors of that
merciless tribunal, he signed his abjuration; yielded all his judges
demanded; echoed their curse and ban, as their superstition or their
hate required. There is a darker tale dimly hinted by those familiar
with the technicalit