The first criticisms of the Donation are of the fifteenth century, coming from Peacock, Bishop of Chichester, and Valla in Italy. They make no pretence to being heretical; they have no connection with any effort to destroy the unity of the Church; they are not particularly convincing--especially the latter.[2] What exploded the Donation of Constantine as an historical document was a much longer process of examination and criticism, which does not reach its final conclusions till the seventeenth century. During that process you will find many who, after the breakdown of unity in the sixteenth century, were frankly enemies of the Church from without, not historical critics from within, using the unauthenticity of the Donation as a weapon for attacking the whole Catholic scheme; but I doubt if you will find one case of a believer who regarded the gradual establishment of the truth as in any way shaking the doctrine of Papal supremacy. Yet you have plenty of critics within the Catholic Church examining the problem in full liberty, and permitted to come to a right decision upon it. You have to-day, and you will have throughout the centuries to come, an indefinitely large body of men with the fullest historical confidence, great scholars and experts in this particular point, who are fully convinced of the legendary character of the Donation, and yet to whose minds it is inconceivable (as I confess it is to mine) that anyone should think the establishment of that historical detail a cause for doubt in the plain and most ancient doctrine of Roman supremacy with which it was for some six centuries out of twenty adventitiously connected. Now for the Galileo case. It is so continually quoted, it is so much the accepted type of such things, that I might be tempted to go into it at greater length; on the contrary, I shall deal with it more briefly, because the points at issue are as restricted as they are evident, and the complete misunderstanding upon which the accusation is based may be exposed by the most elementary statement of it. The accusation runs thus: “Galileo, having discovered by indubitable physical proof the motion of the earth, was condemned by the Catholic Church for stating the same, and her condemnation remained in force until the nineteenth century, when she was compelled to allow the matter to lapse.” That assertion, the commonest made in all this department of historical attack upon the Faith, contains two elementary and decisive historical errors. First, the error that Galileo was condemned for teaching a then novel particular doctrine which he proved true; secondly, the error that Galileo was condemned by authority of the Catholic Church upon a point of doctrine: that is, that the Catholic Church affirmed in the seventeenth century by her Infallible Authority as a point in doctrine that the earth did not move.