22
recovering lost or declining reputation, in order that an impenitent and incorrigible deceiver may continue her spiritual impositions with less impediment, we hardly know whether it is to the feeling of grief or to that of indignation that we should give way.
If any hope of repelling the charge of enmity to science, by any of the means made use of, were for a moment entertained, it would at once be laid prostrate by the necessity under which certain Romish editors of Newton felt themselves, to use the mask suggested in the censure of Copernicus, and hold out the appearance of disbelieving a doctrine which it was their business and their manifest design to teach and recommend: — and that, let the reader well observe, not because the fate of Galileo, as respects the proceedings of the Inquisition, deterred them, (although that would be a reasonable apprehension, and the consequent caution natural,) but because they had before their eyes the terror of the sentence still in force in the Index, with its rules and penalties against all who taught, at least publicly, the condemned doctrine of Copernicus respecting the solar system. They were expressly the Decrees of the high pontiffs in the
