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adversaries had done, since they desired the prohibition of a book [meaning Copernicus's], permitted so many years by the Church without having seen it, much less read and understood it. And concerning Copernicus, he continues, that he was a Catholic and canon of the Church, called to the last Lateran Council under Leo X., to assist in a reform of the Calendar, and that he settled every thing upon the new system, and dedicating the book in which it appeared to Paul III., without exciting any scruples; and now the good monks reward his labours by getting him declared a heretic. But the jest of the charge was, that he (Galileo) had the credit of a doctrine which belonged, not to a living Florentine, but to a dead German, who published it seventy years ago, dedicating the work to the chief pontiff. The writer, before he closes, expresses his supreme submission to his superiors.
Galileo had the odium philosophicum, as well as the odium theologicum, to contend with, of both of which he complains with some warmth in letters written in 1616.[1]
- ↑ Dr. Priestley, in the Preface to the first volume of his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, writes, "The most
