Then a reaction set in.

He remembered those childish ecstasies before the Eucharist: he recalled the pictures of a burning hell his Jesuit teachers had painted; he heard the trumpets of the Day of Judgment, and the sentence 'Go ye wicked!' On the brink of heresy he trembled and recoiled.

The spirit of the coming age, the spirit of Bruno, was not in him.

To all appearances he had not heard of the Copernican discovery.

He wished to remain a true son of the Church, and was in fact of such stuff as the Catholic Revival wanted.