He was charged by his accusers with corrupting the youth of Athens by inciting them to despise the tutelary deities of the state.

He had the moral courage to brave not only the tyranny of the judges who condemned him, but of the mob who could not understand him.

He died discoursing of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; his last words to his judges being, "It is now time that we depart--I to die, you to live; but which has the better destiny is unknown to all, except to the God." How many great men and thinkers have been persecuted in the name of religion! Bruno was burnt alive at Rome, because of his exposure of the fashionable but false philosophy of his time.

When the judges of the Inquisition condemned him, to die, Bruno said proudly: "You are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to receive it." To him succeeded Galileo, whose character as a man of science is almost eclipsed by that of the martyr.

Denounced by the priests from the pulpit, because of the views he taught as to the motion of the earth, he was summoned to Rome, in his seventieth year, to answer for his heterodoxy.