He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before him had braved the dangers of those ancient mountain passes that they might find freedom in the mighty fortress which the new faith had erected at the junction of the Rhone and the Arve! And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted when they discovered that here as there it was the inner spirit which guided the hearts of men and that a change of creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart and mind. Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months. The town was full of Italian refugees. These brought their fellow-countryman a new suit of clothes and found him a job as proof-reader. In the evenings he read and wrote. He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed too that the world could not progress until the tyranny of the medieval text-books was broken. Bruno did not go as far as his famous French teacher and did not believe that everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by words and sentences that were written in the fourth century before the birth of Christ? Why indeed? “Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of the orthodox faith answered him. “What have we to do with our grandfathers and what have they to do with us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the young iconoclast answered. And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and suggested that he had better pack his satchels and try his luck elsewhere. Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in search of a place where he might live and work in some degree of liberty and security. He never found it. From Geneva he went to Lyons and then to Toulouse. By that time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had become an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a dangerous step in an age when all the contemporary Bryans brayed, “The world turning around the sun! The world a commonplace little planet turning around the sun! Ho-ho and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?” Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France, walking to Paris. And next to England as private secretary to a French ambassador. But there another disappointment awaited him. The English theologians were no better than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps. In Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when he committed an error against the teachings of Aristotle. They fined him ten shillings. Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly dangerous bits of prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political nature in which the entire existing order of things was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a minute but none too flattering examination. And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject, astronomy.