thought, could not escape from God's presence? Who should note the
crime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit,
which could have made no misshapen births? In proportion as man
raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him,
just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There
were no weeds, no "tares," in the endless field. The truly
illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would.
Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had ever been the
precept, which the larger theory of "inspiration" had bequeathed to
practice. "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat! If
you take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! And I think
that I, too, have the spirit of God."

Bruno, the citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn
off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its
proper speculative limits. But a kind of secresy, an ambiguous
atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the
doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters,
the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel reign of the
spirit--what it might actually be--would hardly fail to find in
Bruno's theories a method of turning poison into food, to live and
thrive thereon; an art, surely, no less opportune in the Paris of
that hour, intellectually or morally, than had it related to physical
poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or
practical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in
his very manner of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, which
seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of
fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose
sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable
maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art,