The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its mediaeval 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 texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism.  Connected on the other side with the intolerance of mere authority it led to what has since been named rationalism—­the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the conceptions of the popular religious consciousness.  Again, by promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national politics, the reformation was linked historically to the revolution.  It was the Puritan Church in England stimulated by the patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty, and introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men.  This high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the last century, was externalized in the French Revolution.  The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—­the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world, and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.  The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages.  Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance.  The problem for the present and the future is how through education to render knowledge accessible to all—­to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes.  Whether the Utopia of a modern world, in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political,