i8o THE WORLD MACHINE 



He is human ; he offers to recant and forswear. It is not 

 enough. For six long years he languishes in prison. There, 

 from the visions of the stake the terror falls ; his soul grows 

 great and strong. When he stands at last in Rome before his 

 judges to receive their decree, he answers it with splendid 

 courage : " It is you that tremble at your sentence more than 

 I." In the customary formula, he is handed over to the civil 

 authorities, "to be dealt with as mercifully as possible and 

 without the shedding of blood." Lest there should be any 

 confusion, it should be noted that the civil government of Rome 

 was still in the hands of the Church : the governor was a 

 monseigneur. 



They burn him in the Campo di Fiori, the flower-market ; 

 the day is a fete for the populace. A ghastly crowd of prelates 

 hovers round to see him die. The Pope from the distant palace by 

 St. Peter's watches the curling smoke. But his agony brings 

 not one shriek ; his tongue was bound lest in the end he should 

 blaspheme. In the flower-market to-day stands the slender, 

 hooded figure of this knight-errant of the truth, looking with 

 mournful and relentless eyes over across the river towards this 

 same palace of the popes. They could give his slight and 

 quivering frame to the flames ; but the message had gone forth. 

 The hand of the monster has been struck with a palsy ; it will 

 burn no Brunos now. 



Bruno was truly a martyr to the new world system. He 

 taught a plurality of worlds, and it was this, and not the 

 Coppernican ideas of the motion of the earth, which was 

 absolutely irreconcilable with the teachings of the Church. The 

 inhabitants of distant planets could hardly all be derived from 

 Adam ; it could hardly be for them that the Son of God had 

 been crucified. The purely Coppernican ideas of the earth's 

 motion, though they involved essentially the conception of the 

 grandeur of the sun, the comparative insignificance of the earth, 

 might still be entertained perhaps without utter discredit to 

 the Hebraic teaching. In the whirling cosmos sketched by 

 Bruno, the idea of a Fall and Redemption became simply 

 grotesque. It must have been this that aroused the churchly 

 guardians ; they were not yet awake to the danger that 

 threatened them. It is not until sixteen years after the murder 

 of Bruno that the work of Coppernicus was put upon the Index. 



It is tragic to reflect that Bruno's frightful fate seemed to 



