It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it, so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and taught."
Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and dine on fricasseed crow.
They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.
And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.
He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and the rabies of setting straight the scientific world, for its own good, was upon him.
That he was wrong in the correction of his elders, he would not for a moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land, as into the hull of the enemy.
He also decorated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and limb.
Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor in a monarchy, though the monarchy be a republic. Galileo was cut off the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency, that he might find employment.
He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a position on a silver platter; and the Paduans made much dole about how unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at Padua--alas! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief attraction.
From a position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that same interval of time, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth!