Page:Galileo (1918).djvu/40

34 would have been politic of Galileo to have waited for more convincing proofs before allowing any question of "theology" to be raised. It is easy to say that he did not raise these questions himself, and only responded to challenges, but if his temperament had been less argumentative he could have avoided the plain issue. He considered himself a faithful son of the Church, which required unquestioning obedience; and yet, when his position was pronounced untenable on theological grounds, he was not sufficiently humble to retire gracefully, but maintained his argument and endeavoured to prove that it was not irreconcilable with Scripture. Such an attitude in a layman was bound to raise fierce opposition, apart from the prejudice of certain of the Jesuits. The net result was that the doctrines themselves suffered for the time from his enthusiastic advocacy, and, as we have seen, some works, which might otherwise have been ignored, were placed under the ban of the Inquisition. He himself retired to Florence with an uneasy feeling that he must be more circumspect in dealing with the Copernican system, but hardly aware that anything definitely forbidding it had been said to him.