Invoking the name of our Saviour, they declare, that Galileo had made himself liable to the suspicion of heresy, by believing the doctrine, contrary to Scripture, that the sun was the centre of the earth’s orbit, and did not move from east to west; and by defending as probable the opinion that the earth moved, and was not the centre of the world; and that he had thus incurred all the censures and penalties which were enacted by the church against such offences;—but that he should be absolved from these penalties, provided he sincerely abjured and cursed all the errors and heresies contained in the formula of the church, which should be submitted to him. That so grave and pernicious a crime should not pass altogether unpunished, that he might become more cautious in future, and might be an example to others to abstain from such offences, they decreed that his Dialogues should be prohibited by a formal edict,—that he should be condemned to the prison of the Inquisition during pleasure,—and that, during the three following years, he should recite once a week the seven penitential psalms. This sentence was subscribed by seven cardinals; and on the 22d June, 1633, Galileo signed an abjuration humiliating to himself and degrading to philosophy. At the age of seventy, on his bended knees, and with his right hand resting on the Holy Evangelists, did this patriarch of science avow his present and his past belief in all the dogmas of the Romish Church, abandon as false and heretical the doctrine of the earth’s motion and of the sun’s immobility, and pledge himself to denounce to the Inquisition any other person who was even suspected of heresy. He abjured, cursed, and detested those eternal and immutable truths which the Almighty had permitted him to be the first to establish. What a mortifying picture of moral depravity and intellectual weakness! If the unholy zeal of the assembly of cardinals has been branded with infamy, what must we think of the venerable sage whose gray hairs were entwined with the chaplet of immortality, quailing under the fear of man, and sacrificing the convictions of his conscience and the deductions of his reason at the altar of a base superstition? Had Galileo but added the courage of the martyr to the wisdom of the sage,—had he carried the glance of his indignant eye round the circle of his judges,—had he lifted his hands to heaven, and called the living God to witness the truth and immutability of his opinions, the bigotry of his enemies would have been disarmed, and science would have enjoyed a memorable triumph.