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 mediaeval 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 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.