The first great infidel was Giordano Bruno. He was born in the year of grace 1550. He was a Dominican friar--Catholic--and afterwards he changed his mind. The reason he changed was because he had a mind. He was a lover of nature, and said to the poor hermits in their caves, to the poor monks in their monasteries, to the poor nuns in their cells: "Come out in the glad fields; come and breathe the fresh, free air; come and enjoy all the beauty there is in the world. There is no God who can be made happier by you being miserable; there is no God who delights to see upon the human face the tears of pain, of grief, of agony. Come out and enjoy all there is of human life; enjoy progress, enjoy thought, enjoy being somebody and belonging to yourself." He revolted at the idea of transubstantiation; he revolted at the idea that the eternal God could be in a wafer. He revolted at the idea that you could make the Trinity out of dough--bake God in an oven as you would a biscuit. I should think he would have revolted. The idea of a man devouring the creator of the universe by swallowing a piece of bread. And yet that is just as sensible as any of it. Those who, when smitten on one cheek turn the other, threatened to kill this man. He fled from his native land and was a vagabond in nearly every nation of Europe. He declared that he fought not what men really believed, but what they pretended to believe. And, do you know, that is the business I am in? I am simply saying what other people think; I am furnishing clothes for their children, I am putting on exhibition their offspring, and they like to hear it, they like to see it. We have passed midnight in the history of the world. Bruno was driven from his native country because he taught the rotation of the earth; you can see what a dangerous man he must have been in a well regulated monarchy. You see he had found a fact, and a fact has the same effect upon religion that dynamite has upon a Russian czar. A fellow with a new fact was suspected and arrested, and they always thought they could destroy it by burning him, but they never did. All the fires of martyrdom never destroyed one truth; all the churches of the world have never made one lie true. Germany and France would not tolerate Bruno. According to the Christian system, this world was the center of everything. The stars were made out of what little God happened to have left when He got the world done. God lived up in the sky, and they said this earth must rest upon something, and finally science passed its hand clear under, and there was nothing. It was self-existent in infinite space. Then the church began to say they didn't say it was flat--not so awful flat--it was kind of rounding. According to the ancient Christians God lived from all eternity, and never worked but six days in His whole life, and then had the impudence to tell us to be industrious. I heard of a man going to California over the plains, and, there was a