jure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and every other error and heresy" in a prescribed form. But as a warning to himself and others, the book is to be prohibited by public edict, Galileo is to be formally imprisoned in the Inquisition at the judge's pleasure, and is to recite once a week for three years, by way of penance, the seven penitential psalms, the judges reserving the right to mitigate the penalties. Only seven of the ten Cardinal Inquisitors signed the decree, so that it does not seem to have been unanimous.
Galileo then knelt before the Inquisition, read aloud the prescribed form of abjuration, and signed it. This must have been the climax of the moral torture of the last ten months. We may acquit the Inquisition of having inflicted physical torture, and Galileo's actual imprisonment could only have been for the three days, June 21 to 24, and was probably not even in a dungeon. It seems as if a very little harshness of this kind at the beginning of the trial would have been enough to kill the old man, who was already ill, but he would then have escaped practically all the punishment intended. The moral bullying to which he was subjected is very, like the physical twisting of a boy's arm, until he admits that his tormentor is a "perfect gentleman," or some such obvious falsehood. So generally has the abjuration been regarded as compulsory perjury on the part of Galileo, that more than a century after his death a story was invented that immediately after his public denial of the earth's motion he muttered "Eppur si muove," but though doubtless he thought something of the kind, it is absolutely certain that the story is false.
True to his promise to Niccolini, the Pope substituted banishment to one of the Grand Duke's villas near Rome, for imprisonment in the Inquisition buildings, but we cannot acquit him of personal responsibility for much, if
