at least the
quality of its authority in the eyes of intelligent believers. This
process of Biblical criticism has been conducted mainly in a Protestant
atmosphere and the new position in which the Bible was placed by the
Reformation must be held partly accountable. In these ways,
Protestantism was adapted to be a stepping-stone to rationalism, and
thus served the cause of freedom.

[83]

That cause however was powerfully and directly promoted by one sect of
Reformers, who in the eyes of all the others were blasphemers and of
whom most people never think when they talk of the Reformation. I mean
the Socinians. Of their far-reaching influence something will be said in
the next chapter.

Another result of the Reformation has still to be mentioned, its
renovating effect on the Roman Church, which had now to fight for its
existence. A new series of Popes who were in earnest about religion
began with Paul III (1534) and reorganized the Papacy and its resources
for a struggle of centuries. [2] The institution of the Jesuit order,
the establishment of the Inquisition at Rome, the Council of Trent, the
censorship of the Press (Index of Forbidden Books) were the expression
of the new spirit and the means to cope with the new situation. The
reformed Papacy was good fortune for believing children of the Church,
but what here concerns us is that one of its chief objects was to
repress freedom more effectually. Savonarola who preached right living
at Florence had been executed (1498) under Pope Alexander VI who was a
notorious profligate. If Savonarola had lived

[84] in the new era he might have been canonized, but Giordano Bruno was
burned.

Giordano Bruno had constructed a religious philosophy, based partly upon
Epicurus, from whom he took the theory of the infinity of the universe.
But Epicurean materialism was transformed into a pantheistic mysticism
by the doctrine that God is the soul of matter. Accepting the recent
discovery of Copernicus, which Catholics and Protestants alike rejected,
that the earth revolves round the sun, Bruno took the further step of
regarding the fixed stars as suns, each with its invisible satellites.
He sought to come to an understanding with the Bible, which (he held)
being intended for the vulgar had to accommodate itself to their
prejudices. Leaving Italy, because he was suspected of heresy, he lived
successively in Switzerland, France, England, and Germany, and in 1592,
induced by a false