sis"; but with his murder by the Inquisition at Rome
this idea seemed utterly to disappear--dissipated by the flames which in
1600 consumed his body on the Campo dei Fiori.

Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the world was led
into a new realm of thought in which an evolution theory of the visible
universe was sure to be rapidly developed. For there came, one after
the other, five of the greatest men our race has produced--Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton--and when their work was done
the old theological conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious
firmament on high"--"the crystalline spheres"--the Almighty enthroned
upon "the circle of the heavens," and with his own lands, or with angels
as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the benefit
of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of heaven," letting down
upon the earth the "waters above the firmament," "setting his bow in the
cloud," hanging out "signs and wonders," hurling comets, "casting forth
lightnings" to scare the wicked, and "shaking the earth" in his wrath:
all this had disappeared.

These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world; and
through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception, destined to
be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had shown throughout the
universe, in place of almighty caprice, all-pervading law. The bitter
opposition of theology to the first four of these men is well known;
but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply
religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged
against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took
from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him
in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he
"substituted gravitation for Providence."

But, more than this, these men gave a new basis for the theory of
evolution as distinguished from the theory of creation.

Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes,
erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the lack of
physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to weaken the
old conception. His theory of a universe brought out of all-pervading
matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by movements in accordance with
physical laws--though it was but a provisional hypothesis--had done much
to draw men's minds from the old theological vie