58 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



temple-builders or priests of truth : but Bruno's words 

 have a ring of sincerity, proving that his sympathy was 

 really aroused for the Lutherans. " When the world 

 was infected by that strong man armed with key and 

 sword, fraud and force, cunning and violence, hypocrisy 

 and ferocity, at once fox and lion, and vicar of the 

 tyrant of hell, infected with a superstitious worship 

 and an ignorance more than brutal, under the name of 

 divine wisdom and of a God-pleasing simplicity ; and 

 there was no one to oppose or withstand the voracious 

 beast, or dispose an unworthy and abandoned generation 

 to better and happier state and condition, what other 

 part of Europe or the world could have brought forth for 

 us that Alcides, stronger than Hercules himself, in that 

 he did greater things with less effort and with fewer 

 instruments, destroying a greater and far more deadly 

 monster than ever any of the past centuries had to suffer ? 

 Here in Wittenberg he dragged up that three-headed 

 Cerberus with its threefold tiara from its pit of dark- 

 ness : you saw it, and it the sun. Here that dog of 

 Styx was compelled to vomit forth its poison. Here 

 your Hercules, your country's Hercules, triumphed over 

 the adamantine gates of hell, over the city girt about 

 with its threefold wall, and defended by its nine 

 windings of the Styx." 



To this temple Bruno, eager in his pursuit of the 

 ever-eluding Truth, had come, "a foreigner, an exile, 

 a fugitive, the sport of fortune, meagre in body, slender 

 of means, destitute of favour, pursued by the hatred of 

 the multitude and the contempt of fools and the base," 

 and could on leaving say to its people that he had 

 become " an occasion, or matter, or subject in whom 

 they unfolded and demonstrated to the world the beauty 

 and wealth of their virtues of moderation, urbanity, and 



