comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic literature
was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
and emancipated from the thralldom of unproved traditions. The force to
judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
minds of the Italians assimilated Paganism. In their hatred of mediæval
ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the north to Puritanism,
in the south to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected
under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that
most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
imperiled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
retarded by the reaction it produced.

The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
the reason has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
yet by any means accomplished. On the one side Descartes and Bacon,
Spinoza and Locke, are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found