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If the Church punishes in one age, it condones in another. Pope Leo XIII. removed from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum the two works of Galileo—De Revolutionibus and The Dialogues on Motion, one of which asserted that "the earth was not the centre of the universe, nor immovable, but that it moves even with diurnal motion," this being considered "a proposition absurd and false in philosophy and erroneous in faith." Sentence was pronounced on 22nd June 1633, so that the master's great works have been forbidden to the faithful two hundred and sixty-eight years! The whole proceeding was strange and irregular. Pope Urban VIII. did not sign the condemnation. Copernicus (1473-1543), a priest, taught the same doctrine; and Kepler (1571-1630), by his planetary laws, had founded the new astronomy. Galileo (1564-1642) only confirmed what they had taught. The year that he died Newton was born, in a land where no Inquisition could stay inquiry. Moreover, in England the Copernican theory created no religious alarm! . . . More imperishable than the marble monument in Santa Croce are the two books liberated from the Index. . . . Cavendish performed a monumental feat in weighing the earth, although one which would have brought him before the members of the Inquisition had he lived in Italy or Spain in the sixteenth century!