Our aim is, by freeing the mind of man from superstition to relieve him from the practical abuses it entails.  As it is impossible to examine any fiscal or industrial problem without discovering that the chief obstacle to improvement lies in the Church’s countless privileges and exemptions, so in every department of human activity we find some inveterate wrong taking shelter under the claim of a divinely-revealed authority.  This claim demolished, the stagnant current of human progress will soon burst its barriers and set with a mighty rush toward the wide ocean of truth and freedom...”

That general belief in the perfectibility of man which cheered the eighteenth-century thinkers in their struggle for intellectual liberty coloured with a delightful brightness this vision of a renewed humanity.  It threw its beams on every branch of research, and shone like an aureole round those who laid down fortune and advancement to purchase the new redemption of mankind.  Foremost among these, as Odo now learned, were many of his own countrymen.  In his talks with Vivaldi he first explored the course of Italian thought and heard the names of the great jurists, Vico and Gravina, and of his own contemporaries, Filangieri, Verri and Beccaria.  Vivaldi lent him Beccaria’s famous volume and several numbers of the “Caffe,” the brilliant gazette which Verri and his associates were then publishing in Milan, and in which all the questions of the day, theological, economic and literary, were discussed with a freedom possible only under the lenient Austrian rule.

“Ah,” Vivaldi cried, “Milan is indeed the home of the free spirit, and were I not persuaded that a man’s first duty is to improve the condition of his own city and state, I should long ago have left this unhappy kingdom; indeed I sometimes fancy I may yet serve my own people better by proclaiming the truth openly at a distance than by whispering it in their midst.”

It was a surprise to Odo to learn that the new ideas had already taken such hold in Italy, and that some of the foremost thinkers on scientific and economic subjects were among his own countrymen.  Like all eighteenth-century Italians of his class he had been taught to look to France as the source of all culture, intellectual and social; and he was amazed to find that in jurisprudence, and in some of the natural sciences, Italy led the learning of Europe.

Once or twice Fulvia showed herself for a moment; but her manner was retiring and almost constrained, and her father always contrived an excuse for dismissing her.  This was the more noticeable as she continued to appear at the meetings of the Honey-Bees, where she joined freely in the conversation, and sometimes diverted the guests by playing on the harpsichord or by recitations from the poets; all with such art and grace, and withal so much simplicity, that it was clear she was accustomed to the part.  Odo was thus driven to the not unflattering conclusion