When the judges of the Inquisition condemned him, to die, Bruno
said proudly: "You are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I
am to receive it."
To him succeeded Galileo, whose character as a man of science is
almost eclipsed by that of the martyr. Denounced by the priests
from the pulpit, because of the views he taught as to the motion
of the earth, he was summoned to Rome, in his seventieth year, to
answer for his heterodoxy. And he was imprisoned in the
Inquisition, if he was not actually put to the torture there. He
was pursued by persecution even when dead, the Pope refusing a
tomb for his body.
Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk, was persecuted on account of his
studies in natural philosophy, and he was charged with, dealing in
magic, because of his investigations in chemistry. His writings
were condemned, and he was thrown into prison, where he lay for
ten years, during the lives of four successive Popes. It is even
averred that he died in prison.
Ockham, the early English speculative philosopher, was
excommunicated by the Pope, and died in exile at Munich, where he
was protected by the friendship of the then Emperor of Germany.
The Inquisition branded Vesalius as a heretic for revealing man to
man, as it had before branded Bruno and Galileo for revealing the
heavens to man. Vesalius had the boldness to study the structure
of the human body by actual dissection, a practice until then
almost entirely forbidden.
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