There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an easy and agreeable target.
I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end.
It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.
Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may read carefully through the assembled works of Giordano Bruno and by the patient collection of all sentences containing such sentiments as “the state has no right to tell people what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he may be able to write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) and the principles of religious freedom.”
But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters must approach the subject from a different angle.
There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number of devout men who were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism of their day, by the yoke under which the people of all countries were forced to exist, that they rose in revolt. They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a place to sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up and down the land they traveled, talking and writing, drawing the learned professors of learned academies into learned disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country folk in humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good will, of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and down the land they traveled in their shabby clothes with their little bundles of books and pamphlets until they died of pneumonia in some miserable village in the hinterland of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a Scotch hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial borough of France.
And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not mean to imply that he was the only one of his kind. But his life, his ideas, his restless zeal for what he held to be true and desirable, were so typical of that entire group of pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.
The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an average Italian boy of no particular promise, followed the usual course and went into a monastery. Later he became a Dominican monk. He had no business in that order for the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms of persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their contemporaries called them. And they were clever. It was not necessary for a heretic to have his ideas put into print to be nosed out by one of those eager detectives. A single glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders were often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into contact with the Inquisition.
How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning obedience, turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures for the works of Zeno and Anaxagoras, I do not know. But before this strange novice had finished his course of prescribed studies, he was expelled from the Dominican order and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.
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!