philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon or as a mere
effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits in the
region of religious thought and national politics what the Renaissance
displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the recovered
energy and freedom of the reason. We are too apt to treat of history in
parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the
biography of the human race. To observe the connection between the
several stages of a progressive movement of the human spirit, and to
recognize that the forces at work are still active, is the true
philosophy of history.

The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
mediæval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
successfully combated in North Italy, France, and Bohemia were the
precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
Germany, Aleander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity, as
distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between the human soul
and God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established.
Thus the principles involved in what we call the Reformation were
momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of