He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun answered the purposes of fact.
As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the Court were valueless. He was a disgraced and silenced man.
He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes, and try to make himself either commonplace or amusing.
We can imagine the reply—Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the heavens above.
o the years went by, and Galileo, sixty-seven years old, was impoverished and forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of ambition. He believed in himself; he believed in the sacredness of his one mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban the Eighth. Years before, Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had come from his old colleague, and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters. Galileo thought that Urban was his friend, and he knew that Urban, in his heart, believed in the theory of Copernicus.
Galileo then emerged from his seclusion and began teaching and speaking in Florence. He also fitted up an observatory and invited the scholars to make use of his telescope.
Father Melchior hereupon put forth a general denunciation, aimed especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous: the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred.
"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves."
In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two Galileo put forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the ideas of Copernicus in popular form.