of the most dangerous and wicked atheists.  He was really a deist; but in those days, and long after, no one scrupled to call a non-Christian deist an atheist.  His book would doubtless have been suppressed and he would have suffered but for the support of King Henry IV.  It has a particular interest because it transports us directly from the atmosphere of the Renaissance, represented by Montaigne, into the new age of more or less aggressive rationalism.

What Humanism did in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, at first in Italy, then in other countries, was to create an intellectual atmosphere in which the emancipation of reason could begin and knowledge could resume its progress.  The period saw the invention of printing and

[76] the discovery of new parts of the globe, and these things were to aid powerfully in the future defeat of authority.

But the triumph of freedom depended on other causes also; it was not to be brought about by the intellect alone.  The chief political facts of the period were the decline of the power of the Pope in Europe, the decay of the Holy Roman Empire, and the growth of strong monarchies, in which worldly interests determined and dictated ecclesiastical policy, and from which the modern State was to develop.  The success of the Reformation was made possible by these conditions.  Its victory in North Germany was due to the secular interest of the princes, who profited by the confiscation of Church lands.  In England there was no popular movement; the change was carried through by the government for its own purposes.

The principal cause of the Reformation was the general corruption of the Church and the flagrancy of its oppression.  For a long time the Papacy had had no higher aim than to be a secular power exploiting its spiritual authority for the purpose of promoting its worldly interests, by which it was exclusively governed.  All the European States based their diplomacy on this assumption.  Since the fourteenth century every one acknowledged

[77] the need of reforming the Church, and reform had been promised, but things went from bad to worse, and there was no resource but rebellion.  The rebellion led by Luther was the result not of a revolt of reason against dogmas, but of widely spread anti-clerical feeling due to the ecclesiastical methods of extorting money, particularly by the sale of Indulgences, the most glaring abuse of the time.  It was his study of the theory of Papal Indulgences that led Luther on to his theological heresies.

It is an elementary error, but one which is still shared by many people who have read history superficially, that the Reformation established religious liberty and the right of private judgment.  What it did was to bring about a new set of political and social conditions, under which religious liberty could ultimately be secured, and, by virtue of its inherent inconsistencies, to lead to results at which its leaders would have shuddered.  But nothing was further from the minds of the leading Reformers than the toleration of doctrines differing from their own.  They replaced one authority by another.  They set up the authority of the Bible instead of that of the Church, but it was the Bible according to Luther or the Bible according to Calvin.  So far as the spirit of intolerance went, there