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 supernatural meaning; and that he found the truest signs of divinity in the orderly course of nature.[538] Miracles he explained either through imposture or through sympathetic magic. Along with these he rejected also what may be called the morbid side of mediæval Christianity--its constant dwelling upon the physical, sensational aspects of Christ's life, sufferings, and death,[539] 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 Rome had violated.[540] The religion to which he gave his adherence was that which raised the dead, healed the sick, gave to the poor; not the contrary form to which the Inquisition had brought the Church in Catholic lands. [Sidenote: Man and God.] [Sidenote: The Bible,--not science but morality its aim.] With great boldness Bruno drew from his conception of the Infinite the consequence that there can be no action of the finite upon the infinite, no change or effect in God produced through man. A practical corollary of this was the argument for freedom of thought. The virtue of _Judgment_, in the _Spaccio_, has entrusted to it the defence of the true law, and the removal of unjust or false laws, dictated by enmity to the peace and happiness of the human commonwealth. It shall kindle and fan the appetite for glory in the human breast, as the only sure stimulus for inciting men to the heroic deeds that increase, maintain, or strengthen republics. But it shall not pay heed to what men _imagine_ or _think_, provided their words and deeds do not corrupt the peace of the realm. Deeds are its only concern, and it has to judge the tree, not by the fineness, but by the goodness of its fruits. Heaven is not interested in any way in what does not interest man; it is moved and angered, not by anything done, said, or thought by men, except in so far as the welfare of republics is endangered. Gods would not be gods if they were either pleased or displeased, grieved or delighted, by what men did or thought; they would be more needy than men, would be as dependent on men as men are on themselves for utility and profit.[541] The gods are beyond all passion: they have _active_ anger and pleasure only, not passive. Therefore they do not threaten punishment or promise reward for good or evil that results in _them_, but for that committed on peoples and in the human societies which they foster by their divine laws and statutes, since human laws do not suffice. The gods do not seek the reverence, fear, love, worship, or respect of men, for any other end or utility than that of men themselves.