In studying with attention this portion of scientific history, the reader will not fail to perceive that the church of Rome was driven into a dilemma from which the submission and abjuration of Galileo could alone extricate it. He who confesses a crime and denounces its atrocity, not only sanctions but inflicts the punishment which is annexed to it. If Galileo had declared his innocence, and avowed his sentiments; and if he had appealed to the past conduct of the church itself, to the acknowledged opinions of its dignitaries, and even to the acts of its pontiffs, he would have at once confounded his accusers, and escaped from their toils. After Copernicus, himself a catholic priest, had _openly_ maintained the motion of the earth, and the stability of the sun: after he had dedicated the work which advocated these opinions to pope Paul III., on the express ground that the _authority of the pontiff_ might silence the calumnies of those who attacked these opinions by arguments drawn from Scripture: after the cardinal Schonherg and the bishop of Culm had urged Copernicus to publish the new doctrines; and after the bishop of Ermeland had erected a monument to commemorate his great discoveries; how could the church of Rome have appealed to its pontifical decrees as the ground of persecuting and punishing Galileo? Even in later times, the same doctrines had been propagated with entire toleration; nay, in the very year of Galileo's first persecution, Paul Anthony Foscarinus, a learned Carmelite monk, wrote a pamphlet, in which he illustrates and defends the mobility of the earth, and endeavours to reconcile to this new doctrine the passages of Scripture which had been employed to subvert it. This very singular production was dated from the Carmelite convent at Naples; was dedicated to the very reverend Sebastian Fantoni, general of the Carmelite order; and, sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities, it was published at Florence, three years before the second persecution of Galileo. By these acts, tolerated for more than a century, the decrees of the pontiffs against the doctrine of the earth's motion were virtually repealed; and Galileo might have pleaded them with success in arrest of judgment. Unfortunately, however, for himself and for science, he acted otherwise. By admitting their authority, he revived in fresh force these obsolete and obnoxious enactments; and, by yielding to their power, he riveted for another century the almost broken chains of spiritual despotism.