Other opponents were less considerate, for works appeared attacking his ideas--works all the more unmanly, since their authors knew that Galileo was restrained by force from defending himself.

Then, too, as if to accumulate proofs of the unfitness of the Church to take charge of advanced instruction, his salary as a professor at the University of Pisa was taken from him, and sapping and mining began.
Just as the Archbishop of Pisa some years before had tried to betray him with honeyed words to the Inquisition, so now Father Grassi tried it, and, after various attempts to draw him out by flattery, suddenly denounced his scientific ideas as "leading to a denial of the Real Presence in the Eucharist." For the final assault upon him a park of heavy artillery was at last wheeled into place.

It may be seen on all the scientific battlefields.
It consists of general denunciation; and in 1631 Father Melchior Inchofer, of the Jesuits, brought his artillery to bear upon Galileo with this declaration: "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; argument against the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the incarnation, should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves." From the other end of Europe came a powerful echo.
From the shadow of the Cathedral of Antwerp, the noted theologian Fromundus gave forth his famous treatise, the Ant-Aristarclius.

Its very title-page was a contemptuous insult to the memory of Copernicus, since it paraded the assumption that the new truth was only an exploded theory of a pagan astronomer.

Fromundus declares that "sacred Scripture fights against the Copernicans." To prove that the sun revolves about the earth, he cites the passage in the Psalms which speaks of the sun "which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber." To prove that the earth stands still, he quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes, "The earth standeth fast forever." To show the utter futility of the Copernican theory, he declares that, if it were true, "the wind would constantly blow from the east"; and that "buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such a rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them to hold fast to the earth's surface." Greatest weapon of all, he works up, by the use of Aristotle and St.
Thomas Aquinas, a demonstration from theology and science combined, that the earth MUST stand in the centre, and that the sun MUST revolve about it.( 62) Nor was it merely fanatics who opposed the truth revealed by Copernicus; such strong men as Jean Bodin, in France, and Sir Thomas Browne, in England, declared against it as evidently contrary to Holy Scripture.
(62) For Father Inchofer's attack, see his Tractatus Syllepticus, cited in Galileo's letter to Deodati, July 28, 1634.