If this recantation had brought any comfort or peace into his life it might have been hard to forgive Galileo's perjury of himself. His persecution, however, continued to the end. He was exiled from his family and friends, and, even when he had become blind and wasted by sorrow and disease, he was still closely watched lest he might utter the awful heresy that the earth moved. A hundred years later than this, when Buffon attempted to teach the simple truths of geology, he was deposed from his high position and made to recant by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. The man who promulgated geological principles, as firmly established to-day as that of the rotation of the earth upon its axis, was forced to write: "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." Such are the more heinous examples of the persecution of the men who discovered the truths of science. To these should be added the wholesale persecution of witches and magicians, for unusual knowledge of any sort ran the chance of being regarded as contrary to biblical teaching and of being attributed to the machinations of the Prince of Darkness. Every new step made in the direction of scientific truth has had thus to face the most determined opposition. Persecution by torture and death died out, but up to the nineteenth century, and well on through it, denunciation, excommunication, suppression, the loss of honorable positions have all been used as weapons by church or university in the attempt to stamp out whatever it considered dangerous and subverting doctrines of science. The decisive battle was not to be inaugurated until the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the advent in the field of such names in science as Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall and Huxley, and such names in biblical criticism as Strauss and Renan. The outposts, it is true, had been won by advancing scientific thought, for step by step the Church had compromised, and had admitted one scientific doctrine after another as not incompatible with biblical truth. But now, not only theology, the imperfect armor in which the spirit had been clothed, was attacked, but the very existence of spirit itself was to be questioned. The thinking world was to be divided into materialists and supernaturalists. Now, at last, mind and spirit, who in the ages long gone had been brothers, were to stand face to face as enemies. Was this mortal combat to end in the annihilation of either, or would this, too, end in a compromise leading to harmony?