"They chain him to the stake. He remains silent. Will he not pray for mercy? Will he not recant? Now the last hour has arrived--will he die in his obstinacy, when a little hypocrisy would save him from so much agony? It is even so; he is stubborn and unalterable. They light the faggots; the branches crackle; the flame ascends; the victim writhes--and now we see him no more. The smoke envelopes him; but not a prayer, not a plaint, not a single cry escapes him. In a little while the wind has scattered the ashes of Giordano Bruno." (G. H. Lewes's "History of Philosophy.") "What a contrast between this scene of manly honor, of unshaken firmness, of inflexible adherence to the truth, and that other scene which took place more than fifteen centuries previously by the fireside in the hall of Caiaphas the high priest, when the cock crew, and 'the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.' (Luke 22 : 61.) And yet it is upon Peter that the church has grounded her right to act as she did to Bruno. "But perhaps the day is approaching when posterity will offer an expiation for this great ecclesiastical crime, and a statue of Bruno be unveiled under the dome of St. Peter's at Rome." (Draper's "Conflict Between Religion and Science.") "A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man." (Draper's "Conflict Between Religion and Science.") Torture. "The system (of mediæval tortures) was matured under the mediæval habit of thought, it was adopted by the inquisitors, and it received its finishing touches from their ingenuity. In every prison the crucifix and the rack stood side by side, and in almost every country the abolition of torture was at last effected by a movement which the church opposed, and by men whom she cursed." (Lecky's "Rationalism in Europe," vol. 1, p. 333.)