There was another quarrel between Virgil and Boniface which is an illustration. An ignorant priest had baptized "in nomine Patria, et Filia et Spiritua Sancta." Boniface declared the rite null and void; Virgil maintained the contrary; and Zachary decided in favour of Virgil, on the ground that the absurd form was only ignorance of Latin, and not heresy. It is hard to believe that this man deposed a priest for asserting the whole globe to be inhabited. To me the little information that we have seems to indicate—but not with certainty—that Virgil maintained the antipodes: that his ignorant contemporaries travestied his theory into that of an underground cosmos; that the Pope cited him to Rome to explain his system, which, as reported, looked like what all would then have affirmed to be heresy; that he gave satisfactory explanations, and was dismissed with honour. It may be that the educated Greek monk, Zachary, knew his Ptolemy well enough to guess what the asserted heretic would say; we have seen that he seems to have patronised geography. The description of the earth, according to historians, was a map; this Pope may have been more ready than another to prick up his ears at any rumour of geographical heresy, from hope of information. And Virgil, who may have entered the sacred presence as frightened as Jacquard, when Napoleon I. sent for him and said, with a stern voice and threatening gesture, 'You are the man who can tie a knot in a stretched string,' may have departed as well pleased as Jacquard with the riband and pension which the interview was worth to him.
A word more about Baronius. If he had been pope, as he would have been but for the opposition of the Spaniards, and if he had lived ten years longer than he did, and if Clavius, who would have been his astronomical adviser, had lived five years longer than he did, it is probable, nay almost certain, that the great exhibition, the proceeding against Galileo, would not have furnished a joke against theology in all time to come. For Baronius was sensible and witty enough to say that in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit intended to teach how to go to Heaven, not how Heaven goes; and Clavius, in his last years, confessed that the whole system of the heavens had broken down, and must be mended.
The manner in which the Galileo case, a reality, and the Virgil case, a fiction, have been hawked against the Roman see are enough to show that the Pope and his adherents have not eared much about physical philosophy. In truth, orthodoxy has
