During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
seen the beauty of the world or had seen it only to cross himself, and
turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like S. Bernard traveling along
the shores of the Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this
monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had
scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing.
Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man
fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell
everlasting, heaven hard to win; ignorance is acceptable to God as a
proof of faith and submission; abstinence and mortification are the only
safe rules of life: these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval
Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick
veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world,
and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own
nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in
the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man
strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his
privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation
of the reason from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the
inner world.

An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
the ancient mind which followed upon what is called the Revival of
Learning. The fall of the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the