A word more about Baronius. If he had been pope, as he would have been but for the opposition of the Spaniards, and if he had lived ten years longer than he did, and if Clavius, who would have been his astronomical adviser, had lived five years longer than he did, it is probable, nay almost certain, that the great exhibition, the proceeding against Galileo, would not have furnished a joke against theology in all time to come. For Baronius was sensible and witty enough to say that in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit intended to teach how to go to Heaven, not how Heaven goes; and Clavius, in his last years, confessed that the whole system of the heavens had broken down, and must be mended. The manner in which the Galileo case, a reality, and the Virgil case, a fiction, have been hawked against the Roman see are enough to show that the Pope and his adherents have not cared much about physical philosophy. In truth, orthodoxy has always had other fish to fry. Physics, which {36} in modern times has almost usurped the name _philosophy_, in England at least, has felt a little disposed to clothe herself with all the honors of persecution which belong to the real owner of the name. But the bishops, etc. of the Middle Ages knew that the contest between nominalism and realism, for instance, had a hundred times more bearing upon orthodoxy than anything in astronomy, etc. A wrong notion about _substance_ might play the mischief with _transubstantiation_. The question of the earth's motion was the single point in which orthodoxy came into real contact with science. Many students of physics were suspected of magic, many of atheism: but, stupid as the mistake may have been, it was _bona fide_ the magic or the atheism, not the physics, which was assailed. In the astronomical case it was the very doctrine, as a doctrine, independently of consequences, which was the _corpus delicti_: and this because it contradicted the Bible. And so it did; for the stability of the earth is as clearly assumed from one end of the Old Testament to the other as the solidity of iron. Those who take the Bible to be _totidem verbis_ dictated by the God of Truth can refuse to believe it; and they make strange reasons. They undertake, _a priori_, to settle Divine intentions. The Holy Spirit did not _mean_ to teach natural philosophy: this they know beforehand; or else they infer it from finding that the earth does move, and the Bible says it does not. Of course, ignorance apart, every word is truth, or the writer did not mean truth. But this puts the whole book on its trial: for we never can find out what the writer meant, until we otherwise find out what is true. Those who like may, of course, declare for an inspiration over which they are to be viceroys; but common sense will either accept verbal meaning or deny verbal inspiration. * * * * * {37} A BUDGET OF PARADOXES. VOLUME I. THE STORY OF BURIDAN'S ASS.