These and many other beautiful telescopic discoveries tended to the establishment of the truth of the Copernican theory and gave unbounded alarm to the Church.  By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds.  Some affirmed that the telescope might be relied on well enough for terrestrial objects, but with the heavenly bodies it was altogether a different affair.  Others declared that its invention was a mere application of Aristotle’s remark that stars could be seen in the daytime from the bottom of a deep well.  Galileo was accused of imposture, heresy, blasphemy, atheism.  With a view of defending himself, he addressed a letter to the Abbe Castelli, suggesting that the Scriptures were never intended to be a scientific authority, but only a moral guide.  This made matters worse.  He was summoned before the Holy Inquisition, under an accusation of having taught that the earth moves round the sun, a doctrine “utterly contrary to the Scriptures.”  He was ordered to renounce that heresy, on pain of being imprisoned.  He was directed to desist from teaching and advocating the Copernican theory, and pledge himself that he would neither publish nor defend it for the future.  Knowing well that Truth has no need of martyrs, be assented to the required recantation, and gave the promise demanded.

For sixteen years the Church had rest.  But in 1632 Galileo ventured on the publication of his work entitled “The System of the World,” its object being the vindication of the Copernican doctrine.  He was again summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, accused of having asserted that the earth moves round the sun.  He was declared to have brought upon himself the penalties of heresy.  On his knees, with his hand on the Bible, he was compelled to abjure and curse the doctrine of the movement of the earth.  What a spectacle!  This venerable man, the most illustrious of his age, forced by the threat of death to deny facts which his judges as well as himself knew to be true!  He was then committed to prison, treated with remorseless severity during the remaining ten years of his life, and was denied burial in consecrated ground.  Must not that be false which requires for its support so much imposture, so much barbarity?  The opinions thus defended by the Inquisition are now objects of derision to the whole civilized world.

One of the greatest of modern mathematicians, referring to this subject, says that the point here contested was one which is for mankind of the highest interest, because of the rank it assigns to the globe that we inhabit.  If the earth be immovable in the midst of the universe, man has a right to regard himself as the principal object of the care of Nature.  But if the earth be only one of the planets revolving round the sun, an insignificant body in the solar system, she will disappear entirely in the immensity of the heavens, in which this system, vast as it may appear to us, is nothing but an insensible point.