our holy faith." After this ingenious introduction, and an assurance that he had no intention whatever of representing the forbidden doctrine as true, he proceeds with equal politeness and vigour to refute all Ingoli's objections.[1]
In spite of this diplomatic introduction, however, his friends at Rome, well aware of the malice of his enemies, and having had but a few months before to defend "Il Saggiatore," urgently dissuaded him from having this rather warm defence of a forbidden doctrine printed.[2] He gave heed to their warnings, and so this reply was only circulated in numerous copies among the learned world in Italy.
Meanwhile the reports which Galileo was constantly receiving from his friends at Rome tended to increase his confidence in the favourable influence which Urban's personal liking for him, and his taste for art and science, were likely to exercise on tolerance of the Copernican system. Thus his devoted adherent Guiducci, in several letters of 6th, 13th and 24th September, 1624,[3] told him, that through the mediation of the Jesuit father, Tarquinio Galuzzi, he had had several interviews with Galileo's former bitter adversary, Father Grassi, who had said that Galileo's theory that the phenomena of the tides were to be attributed to the double motion of the earth "was very ingenious," and that when the truth of these opinions was unanswerably established, the theologians would bestir themselves to alter the interpretation of those passages of Scripture which refer to the earth as being stationary! The guileless Guiducci added confidentially, quite taken with this Jesuit's amiability, that he had not noticed any great aversion to the new system in Grassi, indeed he did not despair of estranging "Lothario Sarsi" from Ptolemy.
Two months later, however, the same correspondent told Galileo that a violent harangue had been delivered in the
