ii BRUNO'S RELIGION 297 



her prayers, for to the mind of the infinite the small 

 is as important as the great ! " The least things are 

 just as much a care to the gods as the principal things, 

 for the greatest and chtefest cannot subsist without 

 the least and lowliest." The minutest trifle in the 

 order of the universe is important, for great things are 

 composed of little, little things of least things, and 

 these of atoms and minima. 1 The act of the divine 

 knowledge is the substance of all things : all are there- 

 fore known, ordained, foreseen. " Divine knowledge 

 is not as human, which comes after things, but is 

 before and in all things, and if it were not so, things 

 could not be causes or agents, either proximate or 

 secondary." 2 



Thus the order of nature is fixed and eternal, 

 ordained and foreknown from all time. We have 

 seen that Bruno rejected the superstitious idea that 

 comets and other heavenly wonders had a super- 

 natural meaning ; and that he found the truest signs 

 of divinity in the orderly course of nature. 3 Miracles 

 he explained either through imposture or through 

 sympathetic magic. Along with these he rejected also 

 what may be called the morbid side of mediaeval 

 Christianity its constant dwelling upon the physical, 

 sensational aspects of Christ's life, sufferings, and 

 death, 4 its appeal to the hysterical in man. Against a 

 religion of incoherent personal emotion and brute 

 ignorance, he would set one of humane love and of 

 reasoned knowledge. The chief value of the New 

 Testament, in his eyes, was its preaching of "the 

 Gospel law of mutual love," which the tyranny of 



1 Lag. 455. 35. Cf. De Immense, ii. 13. 310, 311. 2 Lag. 456. 7. 



3 Cf. the mockery of Momus in the Spaccio (sub Orion, Lag. p. 543). 



4 Sig. Sig. Op. Lot. ii. 2. 190. 



