ians, and
civil magistrates, his heresies were first recited. Then he was
excommunicated, and degraded from his priestly and monastic offices.
Lastly, he was handed over to the secular arm, 'to be punished with all
clemency and without effusion of blood.' This meant in plain language to
be burned alive. Thereupon Bruno uttered the memorable and monumental
words: 'Peradventure ye pronounce this sentence on me with a greater
fear than I receive it.' They were the last words he spoke in public. He
was removed to the prisons of the State, where he remained eight days,
in order that he might have time to repent. But he continued obdurate.
Being an apostate priest and a relapsed heretic, he could hope for no
remission of his sentence. Therefore, on February 17, he marched to a
certain and horrible death. The stake was built up on the Campo di
Fiora. Just before the wood was set on fire, they offered him the
crucifix.[119] He turned his face away from it in stern disdain. It was
not Christ but his own soul, wherein he believed the Diety resided, that
sustained Bruno at the supreme moment.

[Footnote 119: We may remember that while a novice at Naples, he first
got into trouble by keeping the crucifix as the only religious symbol
which he respected, when he parted with images of saints.]

No cry, no groan, escaped his lips. Thus, as Scioppius affectedly
remarked, 'he perished miserably in flames, and went to report in those
other worlds of his imagination, how blasphemous and impious men are
handled by the Romans.'

Whatever we may think of the good taste of Bruno's sarcasms upon the
faith in which he had been bred--and it is certain that he never rightly
apprehended Christianity in its essence--there is no doubt he died a
valiant martyr to the truth as he conceived it. 'His death like that of
Paleario, Carnesecchi, and so many more, no less than countless exiles
suffered for religious causes, are a proof that in Italy men had begun
to recognize their obligation to a faith, the duty of obedience to a
thought: an immense progress, not sufficiently appreciated even by
modern historians.'[120] Bruno was a hero in the battle for the freedom
of the conscience, for the right of man to think and speak in
liberty.[121]

[Footnote 120: These pregnant words are in Berti's _Vita di G.B._ p.
299.]

[Footnote 121: He well deserves this name, in spite of his recantation
at Venice; for it seems incredible that he could not by concessions