The new work met with prodigious success; it put new weapons into the hands of the supporters of the Copernican theory. The preface only embittered the contest; it was laughed at from one end of Europe to the other as ironical. This aroused the enemy. The Jesuits, Dominicans, and the great majority of the clergy, returned to the attack more violent than ever; and Pope Urban VIII., his personal pride being touched, after some halting joined the clerical forces. The first important piece of strategy was to forbid the sale of the work; but the first edition had already been exhausted and spread throughout Europe. Urban now became angry, and both Galileo and his works were placed in the hands of the Inquisition. In vain did the good Benedictine Castelli urge that Galileo was entirely respectful to the Church; in vain did he say that "nothing that could be done could now hinder the earth from revolving." He was dismissed, and Galileo was forced to appear in the presence of the dread tribunal without defender or adviser. There, as was so long concealed but as is now fully revealed, he was menaced with torture by express order of Pope Urban, and, as is now thoroughly established by documentary evidence, forced to abjure under threats, and subjected to imprisonment by command of Urban, the Inquisition deferring in the most servile manner to the papal authority. The rest of the story the world knows by heart; none of the recent attempts have succeeded in mystifying it. The whole world will remember forever how Galileo was subjected certainly to indignity and imprisonment equivalent to physical torture;[53] how he was at last forced to pronounce publicly, and on his knees, his recantation as follows: "I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth." He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in the face of all coming ages, to perjure himself; and, to complete his dishonor, he was obliged to swear to denounce to the Inquisition any other man of science whom he should discover to be supporting heresy--the "heresy of the movement of the earth."