Meanwhile the reports which Galileo was constantly receiving from his friends at Rome tended to increase his confidence in the favourable influence which Urban’s personal liking for him, and his taste for art and science, were likely to exercise on tolerance of the Copernican system. Thus his devoted adherent Guiducci, in several letters of 6th, 13th and 24th September, 1624,[207] told him, that through the mediation of the Jesuit father, Tarquinio Galuzzi, he had had several interviews with Galileo’s former bitter adversary, Father Grassi, who had said that Galileo’s theory that the phenomena of the tides were to be attributed to the double motion of the earth “was very ingenious,” and that when the truth of these opinions was unanswerably established, the theologians would bestir themselves to alter the interpretation of those passages of Scripture which refer to the earth as being stationary! The guileless Guiducci added confidentially, quite taken with this Jesuit’s amiability, that he had not noticed any great aversion to the new system in Grassi, indeed he did not despair of estranging “Lothario Sarsi” from Ptolemy. Two months later, however, the same correspondent told Galileo that a violent harangue had been delivered in the Jesuit College at Rome against the adherents of the new doctrine, by Father Spinola, and some time afterwards he sent him a copy of it;[208] but as it attacked all those who did not profess to be followers of an antiquated Peripateticism, it made but little impression on Galileo, and that little was entirely effaced when Mgr. Ciampoli wrote to him, on 28th December, 1625, that he had acquainted the Pope with several passages of his reply to Ingoli, and that he had highly approved them.[209]