Inquisition. He was old and ill, and the humiliations which he had to
endure are a painful story. He would probably have been more severely
treated, if one of the members of the tribunal had not been a man of
scientific training (Macolano, a Dominican), who was able to appreciate
his ability. Under examination, Galileo denied that he had upheld the
motion of the earth in the Dialogues, and asserted that he had shown the
reasons of Copernicus to be inconclusive. This defence was in accordance
with the statement in his preface, but contradicted his deepest
conviction. In struggling with such a tribunal, it was the only line
which a man who was not a hero could take. At a later session, he forced
himself ignominiously to confess that some of the arguments on the
Copernican side had been put too strongly and to declare himself ready
to confute the

[90] theory. In the final examination, he was threatened with torture.
He said that before the decree of 1616 he had held the truth of the
Copernican system to be arguable, but since then he had held the
Ptolemaic to be true. Next day, he publicly abjured the scientific truth
which he had demonstrated. He was allowed to retire to the country, on
condition that he saw no one. In the last months of his life he wrote to
a friend to this effect: “The falsity of the Copernican system cannot be
doubted, especially by us Catholics. It is refuted by the irrefragable
authority of Scripture. The conjectures of Copernicus and his disciples
were all disposed of by the one solid argument: God’s omnipotence can
operate in infinitely various ways. If something appears to our
observation to happen in one particular way, we must not curtail God’s
arm, and sustain a thing in which we may be deceived.” The irony is
evident.

Rome did not permit the truth about the solar system to be taught till