They could not accommodate their faith to any of the compromises suggested by the Reformation.  Even when they left their country in a spirit of rebellion, they felt ill at ease both with Lutherans and Calvinists.  Like Bernardino Ochino and the Anti-Trinitarians of the Socinian sect, they wandered restlessly through Europe, incapable of settling down in communion with any one of the established forms of Protestantism.  Calvin at Geneva instituted a real crusade against Italian thinkers, who differed from his views.  He drove Valentino Gentile to death on the scaffold; and expelled Gribaldi, Simone, Biandrata, Alciati, Negro.  Most of these men found refuge in Poland, Transylvania, even Turkey.[10]

There were bold speculators in Italy enough, who had practically abandoned the Catholic faith.  But the majority of these did not think it worth their while to make an open rupture with the Church.  Theological hair-splitting reminded them only of the mediaeval scholasticism from which they had been emancipated by classical culture.  They were less interested in questions touching the salvation of the individual or the exact nature of the sacraments, than in metaphysical problems suggested by the study of antique philosophers, or new theories of the material universe.

[Footnote 10:  See Berti’s Vita di G. Bruno, pp. 105-108.]

The indifference of these men in religion rendered it easy for them to conform in all external points to custom.  Their fundamental axiom was that a scientific thinker could hold one set of opinions as a philosopher, and another set as a Christian.  Their motto was the celebrated Foris ut moris, intus ut libet.[11] Nor were ecclesiastical authorities dissatisfied with this attitude during the ascendancy of humanistic culture.  It was, indeed, the attitude of Popes like Leo, Cardinals like Bembo.  And it only revealed its essential weakness when the tide of general opinion, under the blast of Teutonic revolutionary ideas, turned violently in favor of formal orthodoxy.  Then indeed it became dangerous to adopt the position of a Pomponazzo.

[Footnote 11:  This maxim is ascribed to the materialistic philosopher Cremonini.]

The mental attitude of such men is so well illustrated by a letter written by Celio Calcagnini to Peregrino Morato, that I shall not hesitate to transcribe it here.  It seems that Morato had sent his correspondent some treatise on the theological questions then in dispute; and Calcagnini replies: 

’I have read the book relating to the controversies so much agitated at present.  I have thought on its contents, and weighed them in the balance of reason.  I find in it nothing which may not be approved and defended, but some things which, as mysteries, it is safer to suppress and conceal than to bring before the common people, inasmuch as they pertained to the primitive and infant state of the Church.  Now, when the decrees of the fathers and long usage have