o his judges, "Perhaps it is with greater fear
that you pass the sentence upon me than I receive it." The sentence was
carried into effect, and he was burnt at Rome, February 16th, A.D. 1600.

No one can recall without sentiments of pity the sufferings of those
countless martyrs, who first by one party, and then by another, have
been brought for their religious opinions to the stake. But each of
these had in his supreme moment a powerful and unfailing support. The
passage from this life to the next, though through a hard trial, was the
passage from a transient trouble to eternal happiness, an escape from
the cruelty of earth to the charity of heaven. On his way through the
dark valley the martyr believed that there was an invisible hand that
would lead him, a friend that would guide him all the more gently and
firmly because of the terrors of the flames. For Bruno there was no
such support. The philosophical opinions, for the sake of which he
surrendered his life, could give him no consolation. He must fight the
last fight alone. Is there not something very grand in the attitude of
this solitary man, something which human nature cannot help admiring, as
he stands in the gloomy hall before his inexorable judges? No accuser,
no witness, no advocate is present, but the familiars of the Holy
Office, clad in black, are stealthily moving about. The tormentors and
the rack are in the vaults below. He is simply told that he has brought
upon himself strong suspicions of heresy, since he has said that there
are other worlds than ours. He is asked if he will recant and abjure
his error. He cannot and will not deny what he knows to be true, and
perhaps--for he had often done so before--he tells his judges that they,
too, in their hearts are of the same belief. What a contrast between
this scene of manly honor, of unshaken firmness, of inflexible adherence
to the truth, and that other scene which took place more than fifteen
centuries previously by the fireside in the hall of Caiaphas the
high-priest, when the cock crew, and "the Lord turned and looked upon
Peter" (Luke xxii. 61)! And yet it is upon Peter that the Church has
grounded her right to act as she did to Bruno. But perhaps the day
approaches when posterity will offer an expiation for this great
ecclesiastical crime, and a statue of Bruno be unveiled under the dome
of St. Peter's at Rome.

CHAPTER VII.

CONTROVERSY RESPECTING THE AGE OF THE EARTH.

Scriptu