EINSTEIN: This is clearly a slight exaggeration. Mathematico-physical and astronomical works have never been attacked by the Papal courts, but, on the contrary, have been much encouraged by them down to the present day. This is abundantly clear from the fact that we can set up a whole list of Brothers of Orders, particularly Jesuits, who have made eminent discoveries in natural science. From my personal knowledge of you, I foresee that you will one day sketch a fantastic trial, in which the new world-system will have to defend itself against the _Sanctum Officium_. M.: This would be a very grateful task, judged from the literary point of view. What a splendid colouring could be obtained by bringing these two worlds of thought into conflict with one another, the Relative against the Absolute, which has been established in tradition and dogma. But we need not even call the historical fancy into action, for, actually, the theory of the structure of the world is even now still at variance with traditional ideas, that act with dogmatic violence. There is no need to deny the fact that every person of education, who makes the acquaintance of Lorentz's, Minkowski's, Einstein's ideas for the first time, feels excited to offer contradictions, and becomes involved in a tumult of pros and cons, and each one experiences in himself the excitement of an inquisitorial tribunal. The triumph of the new theory passes over the corpses of conceptions that lie at the cross-roads of thought and, long after, retain a ghostly existence. Only very few of us are aware of the further inner revolution that awaits us along the line of development of Einsteinian ideas; we have only vague presentiments that whisper to us that the end of forms of thought once considered as irrefragable is drawing nigh. When once the principle of causality has been set on a relative base, and all "properties" have been resolved into occurrence, and all that is three-dimensional has come to be recognized as an abstraction from the four-dimensional world that is alone valid, then the time will have come to arrange for, the death procession of all the philosophies that once served as the main pillars of thought. A retrospect of the trials of Giordano Bruno and of Galileo Galilei offers certain parallels other than those usually discovered by scholars. And if, to-day, we proclaim Einstein as the Galilei of the twentieth century, it must be added that in character he is fortunately a Bruno and not a Galilei. For it is not true that the latter came out of the persecution as a moral victor with an _eppur si muove_, rather, in spite of the protection of influential prelates and dignitaries, even of the entourage of the Pope, he lacked courage and bowed his head, betraying his science and denying himself as well as Copernicus. Are we to picture how Einstein would have acted under similar circumstances, even if they cannot recur again?