Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this sinner: “He has expressed the intention of making himself the founder of a new sect under the name of the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin could not have brought a child into the world, and that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against the majesty of God; that it would be better to suppress the largesses of wrangling friars because they befoul the world; that they are all asses and that our common opinions are the teaching of asses; that we have no proof that our faith has merit with God; that the simple rule of not doing unto others what we would not have done unto us is sufficient for right living.”... Perhaps I may stop here. Evidently one who could be guilty of all these follies would be ingenious in inventing others, and Mocenigo’s letter may run endlessly on. While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in a room of Mocenigo’s house. “I had thought to learn from him,” Mocenigo explains, “not knowing him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all these things to lay before your Very Reverend Paternity, and fearing that he would take his departure as he said he wished to do, I have locked him in a room at your disposal. As I think him possessed of the devil, I hope you will decide quickly what is to be done with him....” * * * * * It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came to accept the invitation of Mocenigo to take up his residence in Venice. Italy was for him a place of such peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured to set foot in it. “Tell me one thing more,” concludes a letter written in this same year 1592 by a gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua, “tell me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living among you just now at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, which he left in exile as he himself used to confess? I wonder, I wonder. I cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have it on good authority. You shall tell me whether it is true.” And history has wondered all the more seeing that Bruno himself had long before prophesied the result. “Torches,” he had written, “fifty or a hundred, will not fail me though the march be at noonday should it be my fate to die in a Catholic country.”