Underlying this cult of humanity one cannot but feel the robust naturalism of the Renaissance, which in Bruno's mind is apart altogether from the mystical exclusive intellectualism of his more characteristic philosophy. It is with man as a natural being, living out his earthly life, and gathering such fruits as may be of kindliness and love from his fellow-creatures, that the practical philosophy is concerned. The religion attacked was one that struck at the root of this human love, and made of earth a purgatory for the sake of the uncertain life to come. Hence the emphasis laid on _sincerity_, _faithfulness_, or _truthfulness_, as high among the virtues. "Without it every contract is uncertain and doubtful, all intercourse is dissolved, all social life at an end." Bruno is as rigid as Kant in regard to the keeping of faith; even promises made to the wicked may not be broken. It was "a law of some Jew or Saracen, brutal and barbarian, not of civilised and heroic Greek or Roman, that sometimes, and with certain kinds of people, faith might be pledged for individual gain, and for an opportunity of deception, making it the servant of tyranny and treachery."[460] The antipathy of Bruno towards the Jews is to be explained by the same principle of social life and progress; it is not, as Lagarde supposes,[461] an offspring of his hatred towards the Church, regarded as a direct descendant of Judaism. So far as it is not an expression of an unreasoning anti-Semitic wave of feeling, such as occasionally overwhelms some of the European peoples, it may have had three grounds: the reputed avarice of the Jew:[462] his exclusiveness, unsociability;--"a race always base, servile, mercenary, solitary, incommunicative, shunning intercourse with the Gentiles, whom they brutally despise, and by whom in their turn, and with good reason, they are contemned":[463]--or his religion, which appeared to Bruno a corruption of the nobler Egyptian religion. Thus in _Spaccio_[464] the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers is said to be found only among Barbarians, and first among the Jews, "a race so pestilent, leprous, and generally pernicious that it should be effaced from the earth."[465] [Sidenote: Temperance.]