it less conceivable in any literal sense.  Some of the main points on which the early Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas through the course of centuries—­such, for instance, as the Ascension and the Second Advent—­ceased to have their old significance.  In a world where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.  The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost intelligibility and value, when God had to be thought no longer as the Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.  It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno’s that the dogmas of the Church were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous physical notions.  Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological constructions of the Middle Ages.  The Church, adopting their science, gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and popular conceptions of the religious sense.  The naif hopes and romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms and ossified in the huge fabric of the Summa.  But Aristotle and Ptolemy were now dethroned.  Bruno, in a far truer sense than Democritus before him,

                            extra
    Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth, he denied that the universe had ‘flaming walls’ or any walls at all.  That ‘immaginata circonferenza,’ ‘quella margine immaginata del cielo,’ on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic.  What, then, rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn from it.  He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still apprehend it.  Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the hypotheses, which Bruno’s extension of the Copernican theory, and his application of it to pure thought, suggested to his penetrating and audacious intellect, Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not suffer from the new philosophy.  Larger horizons extended before the human intellect.