of Italy had been the genesis of the Renaissance, the development of modern culture.  And the tendencies of the Renaissance were worldly:  its ideal of human life left no room for a pure, and ardent intuition into spiritual truth.  Scholars occupied with the interpretation of classic authors, artists bent upon investing current notions with the form of beauty, could hardly be expected to exclaim:  ’The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding.’[1] Materialism ruled the speculations no less than the conduct of the age.  Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine, with the plausible reservation of Salva Fide, which then covered all.  The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile irreconcilables by fusing philosophy and theology, while they distinguished truths of science from truths of revelation.  It seems meanwhile to have occurred to no one in Italy that the liberation of the reason necessitated an abrupt departure from Catholicism.  They did not perceive that a power antagonistic to mediaeval orthodoxy had been generated.  This was in great measure due to indifference; for the Church herself had taught her children by example to regard her dogmas and her discipline as a convenient convention.  It required all the scourges of the Inquisition to flog the nation back, not to lively faith, but to hypocrisy.  Furthermore, the political conditions of Italy were highly unfavorable to a profound religious revolution.  The thirst for national liberty which inspired England in the sixteenth century, impelling the despotic Tudors to cast off the yoke of Rome, arming Howard the Catholic against the holy fleet of Philip, and joining prince and people in one aspiration after freedom, was impossible in Italy.  The tone of Machiavelli’s Principe, the whole tenor of Castiglione’s Cortigiano, prove this without the need of further demonstration.

[1] It is well known that Savonarola’s objection to classical culture was based upon his perception of its worldliness.  It is very remarkable to note the feeling on this point of some of the greatest northern scholars.  Erasmus, for example, writes:  ’unus adhuc scrupulus habet animum meum, ne sub obtentu priscae literaturae renascentis caput erigere conetur Paganismus, ut sunt inter Christianos qui titulo paene duntaxat Christum agnoscunt, ceterum intus Gentilitatem spirant’—­Letter 207 (quoted by Milman in his Quarterly article on Erasmus).  Ascham and Melanchthon passed similar judgments upon the Italian scholars.  The nations of the north had the Italians at a disadvantage, for they entered into their labors, and all the dangerous work of sympathy with the ancient world, upon which modern scholarship was based, had been done in Italy before Germany and England came into the field.

Few things are more difficult than to estimate the exact condition of a people at any given period with regard to morality and religion.  And this difficulty