highest, the true wisdom unattainable by man. Here among men wisdom has built herself a house of reason and of thought (which comes _after_ the world), in which we see the shadow of the first, the archetypal and ideal house (which is _before_ the world), and the image of the second, the sensible and natural house, which _is_ the world. The seven columns of the house or temple are the seven Arts--Grammar, Rhetoric (with poetry), Logic, Mathematics, Physics, Ethics, and Metaphysics, and the temple was built first among the Egyptians and Assyrians, viz. in the Chaldeans, then among the Persians, with the Magi and Zoroaster, third the Indians with their Gymnosophists; ... seventhly, in our time, among the Germans." So far has Bruno come from taking the Germans as mere beer-bibbers, as he had written of them in England.[94] "Since the empire (of wisdom) devolved upon you there have risen amongst you new arts and great minds, the like of which no other nations can shew." In the category of German temple-builders are Albertus Magnus, Nicolas of Cusa, Copernicus, Palingenius, Paracelsus; "among humanists many, apt imitators of the Attic and Ausonian muses, and among them one greater than the rest who more than imitates, rather rivals, the ancient muses" (Erasmus). It is not unnatural that, in his own Wittenberg, Luther should be praised, as among the 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 darkness: 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."