ughtful men of the times, was led into heresy on the doctrine of
transubstantiation. Not concealing his opinions, he was persecuted,
fled, and led a vagabond life in foreign countries, testifying that
wherever he went he found scepticism under the polish of hypocrisy, and
that he fought not against the belief of men, but against their
pretended belief. [Sidenote: He teaches the heliocentric theory,] For
teaching the rotation of the earth he had to flee to Switzerland, and
thence to England, where, at Oxford, he gave lectures on cosmology.
Driven from England, France, and Germany in succession, he ventured in
his extremity to return to Italy, and was arrested in Venice, where he
was kept in prison in the Piombi for six years without books, or paper,
or friends. Meantime the Inquisition demanded him as having written
heretical works. He was therefore surrendered to Rome, and, after a
farther imprisonment of two years, tried, excommunicated, and delivered
over to the secular authorities, to be punished "as mercifully as
possible, and without the shedding of his blood," the abominable formula
for burning a man alive. He had collected all the observations that had
been made respecting the new star in Cassiopeia, 1572; he had taught
that space is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and
opaque worlds, many of them inhabited--this being his capital offence.
He believed that the world is animated by an intelligent soul, the cause
of forms but not of matter; that it lives in all things, even such as
seem not to live; that every thing is ready to become organized; that
matter is the mother of forms and then their grave; that matter and the
soul of the world together constitute God. His ideas were therefore
pantheistic, "Est Deus in nobis." In his "Cena de le Cenere" he insists
that the Scripture was not intended to teach science, but morals only.
The severity with which he was treated was provoked by his asseverations
that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor
belief. This was the aim of his work entitled "The triumphant Beast."
[Sidenote: and is burnt alive as a heretic.] He was burnt at Rome,
February 16, 1600. With both a present and prophetic truth, he nobly
responded, when the atrocious sentence was passed upon him, "Perhaps it
is with greater fear that ye pass this sentence upon me than I receive
it." His tormentors jocosely observed, as the flames shut him out
forever from view, that