“As I have said, I do not hope for any amelioration, and this because I have not committed any crime. I might expect pardon and favour if I had done wrong, for wrong-doing affords rulers occasion for the exercise of clemency and pardon, while towards an innocent man under condemnation, it behoves them to maintain the utmost severity, in order to show that they have proceeded according to law. But believe me, revered sir, and it will console you to know it, this troubles me less than would be supposed, for two grounds of consolation continually come to my aid: one of these is, that in looking all through my works, no one can find the least shadow of anything which deviates from love and veneration for the Holy Church; the other is my own conscience, which can only be fully known to myself on earth and to God in heaven. He knows that in the cause for which I suffer, many might have acted and spoken with far more learning and knowledge, but no one, not even among the holy fathers, with more piety and greater zeal for the Holy Church, nor altogether with purer intentions. My sincerely religious, pious spirit would only be the more apparent if the calumnies, intrigues, stratagems, and deceptions, which were resorted to eighteen years ago to deceive and blind the authorities, were brought to the light of day.”[499] If the issue of the assumed stringent prohibition of 1616 were admitted, this letter would be a piece of hypocrisy as glaring as it was purposeless; for in that case Galileo would not have been an innocent man under condemnation, who had committed no crime, and his conscience could not have consoled him in his painful situation. What he wrote to Peiresc about his religious spirit was also quite true, Galileo really was a truly religious man; his own revolutionary discoveries had not for a moment given rise to any doubts in his mind of supernatural mysteries as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. All his letters, even to his most intimate friends, proclaim it indisputably. He also perfectly well knew how to make his researches and their results agree with the dogmas of his religion, as is clear from his explanations to Castelli, Mgr. Dini, and the Grand Duchess Christine. The strangest contradictions were continually arising from this blending of a learned man striving to search out the truths of nature, and a member of the only true Church bound in the fetters of illusive credulity. Thus, at the end of 1633, he did not hesitate to act in opposition to his solemn oath, literally construed, by secretly sending a copy of his condemned and prohibited “Dialogues” to Diodati, at Paris, that they might be translated into Latin, and thus be more widely circulated. In 1635 the work really appeared in a Latin translation, from the press of the Elzevirs, in Holland, edited by a Strasburg professor, Mathias Bernegger, in order