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for truth and justice: and by opportune submission Galileo might have passed smoothly through all. But this is a very distinct thing from the real and declared ground of the condemnation, as we shall soon see more fully. I am not disposed to deny neither, that the new doctrine would be likely to be ill received, when it was, or those, who knew better, affected to believe it to be, new, and strange, and anti-scriptural. The Church of Rome was committed to an external, exoteric defence of her own most reverenced writers, who were all Ptolemaics. We may even sympathise with her hard necessity, when we recollect the ingenious hesitation with which a man, who had no great fear or love of Rome, and no extravagant respect for any other opinion than his own, expresses himself in a poem which is rewarded with a just immortality. Read the beginning of the eighth book of Milton's Paradise Lost.[1] But temptation to an act
- ↑ Milton evidently inclines to the Copernican system, and as evidently strives to appear to prefer the Ptolemaic. The whole, which discovers the versatility and vigour of his powers in ornamenting a subject generally contenta doceri, closes with the moral, good, where better applied, of not disturbing ourselves with speculations beyond the sphere of our capacities, and not directly or vitally connected with our actual duty and happiness.
