free criticism
of religion reappear, the world in which they manifest themselves is new.
Fresh races have been introduced, institutions unknown to the ancient
civilization have been mingled with or have replaced the old; and the
ancient language of the Roman empire has dissolved into the Romance
tongues. But Christianity has lived through the deluge, and been the ark
of refuge in the storm; and its claims are now tested by the young world
which emerged into being when the waters of confusion had retired. The
silence of reason in this interval was not the result of the abundance of
piety, but of the prevalence of ignorance; a sign of the absence of
inquiry, not of the presence of moral and mental satisfaction.(251) Even
when speculation revived, and reason re-examined religion, the literary
monuments in which expression is given to doubt are so few, that it will
be possible in the present lecture not only to include the account of the
second and third crises which mark the course of free thought in church
history, but even to pass beyond them, and watch the dawn of unbelieving
criticism caused by the rise of the modern philosophy which ushers in the
fourth of the great crises named in a previous lecture.(252)

The former of these periods which we shall now examine, the second in the
general scheme, may be considered to extend from A.D. 1100 to 1400. Its
commencement is fixed by the date at which the scholastic philosophy began
to influence religion, its close by the revival of classical learning. The
history of free thought in it is complicated, by being to some extent the
struggle of deeds as well as of ideas, a social as well as a religious
struggle. It was the period which witnessed both the dissolution of
feudalism and the theocratic centralization in the popedom; and while
reason struggled on the one side against the dogmatic system, it struggled
on the other to assert the rights of the state against the church, and to
put restraints upon the privileges, dominion, and wealth, of the pope and
clergy. The social struggle, to vindicate the liberty of the state against
the undue power of the church, so far as it is the effect of free thought,
appertains to our subject, in the same manner as was the case with the
early attempts of a converse character of the Roman emperors to deny due
liberty to the church, whenever, as in the case of Julian, they were the
result of a deliberate examination of religion. Free thought in the