We left the great idea at the moment, when, having pierced the heavens, it had come to realize the consequences of its act. The gentle meaning of Christ, the sterner pagan wisdom of God and man had been lost in an infinity that knew no enclosing heaven, in a dreary waste of sameness that knew no distinction, not even that between man and God. Bruno the philosopher was not one to let this work of scientific devastation go on unchallenged. What if there were a God who could dwell just as clearly in a heaven that was everywhere as in a Heaven that was above? What if man could have an interest for and could serve this God, not because he was different in kind from the ant, but because he was, or rather in proportion as he was, different in degree? Does not the life that quickens an animate thing pervade that thing? Is it not the same life which in me beckons with my finger, beats with my heart, thinks with my brain? What then if this infinite world of ours were one great living thing made up of other living things, as our body is made up of finger, and heart, and brain, each of which in doing its own work does consciously or unconsciously the work of the whole? “Natura est Deus in rebus.” This is one of the phrases Bruno found in trying to express his philosophy. Nature is God in things, or let us put it--God is the life; suns and planets, men and ants, falling rain and mounting mist are but the gestures of this life. Each thinks it does what it does for its own sake, but those who think clearest realize that the joy of their doing as well as the solace of their undoing is the part they play in working out the ideal of the whole. “And He lives in me as I live in my hand”--the phrase is Von Hofmannsthal’s, the thought is Bruno’s, and it is the whole thought of Bruno the Pantheist. * * * * * The end of this life is told in a letter written by one Gaspard Schopp (a converted Lutheran) to his friend Rittershausen, rector of the University of Altdorf: “If I write to you now, it is because this very day Giordano Bruno was publicly burned for heresy in the Field of Flowers in front of the theater of Pompey.... If you were in Rome, you would learn from each and every Italian that a Lutheran was burned, and so you would be not a little strengthened in your opinion of our savage hatred. But you must know, my Rittershausen, that our Italians do not draw a sharp line between heretics and heretics, nor do they know fine distinctions, but if any one is a heretic they take him for a Lutheran, in which simplicity I pray that God may continue them....