The pitiful impotence of an Italian ruler of that day in face of the Roman hierarchy is obvious in this letter. His sovereign does not dare to protect the philosopher—the greatest of whom Italy can boast—from papal persecution, but was obliged to give him up to the dreaded Inquisition. It must not, however, be supposed that the young Ferdinand, then only twenty-two, because he had been brought up in the strictest Romish fashion by the two Grand Duchesses and Cioli, acted otherwise than any other Italian ruler would have done in the like situation. Not one of them would have had courage, nor have been independent enough of Rome, to put an energetic veto on a papal mandate like this. The Venetian Republic, in which it had been established as an axiom by Paolo Sarpi that “the power of rulers is derived immediately from God, and spiritual as well as temporal things are subject to it,” was the only State of Italy which would have asserted its sovereignty and would never have delivered up one of its officials to the Roman will. Galileo now suffered a bitter penalty for his former thankless conduct to the Free State. The grand ducal orders had to be unconditionally obeyed; and as any further delay might entail the worst consequences, Galileo fixed 20th January for his departure.[323] Before setting out, however, on the 15th of the month, he addressed a long letter to the celebrated jurist and advocate in the parliament of Paris, Elia Diodati (not to be confounded with Johannes Diodati, the translator of the Bible), who corresponded with the most learned men of the time, and took a lively interest in Galileo’s studies and fate. Some parts of this letter show how well this strictly theistic, or more properly, Roman Catholic _savant_, knew how to bring the modern astronomy into agreement with Christian philosophy and the Bible, and this from real conviction, for this letter to his friend at Paris was quite private. From this we may conclude that even his celebrated demonstrations to Father Castelli, of 21st December, 1613, and the still more elaborate ones to the Grand Duchess Christine, 1615, were the result of honest conviction, and were not, as his enemies maintained, mere dialectic fencing, intended to bring Scripture and the Copernican theory into agreement. We give these interesting passages of the letter as well as those which refer to Galileo’s unhappy situation:—