the
study of science and philosophy, that dared to think beyond the limits
of the Church's doctrine, were crushed out. There was no free
philosophy, there was no free study of science, there was no free
anything for a thousand years. The secular armed forces of Europe, with
penalties of imprisonment, of the rack, of the fagot, of torture of
every kind, were enlisted against anything like liberty of thinking.

So you need not wonder, then, that there was neither any science nor
any Unitarianism to be heard of until the Renaissance. What was the
Renaissance? It was the rising again of human liberty, the possibility
once more of man's freedom to think and study. Though the armed forces
of Europe were for a long time against it, the rising tide could not be
entirely rolled back, and so it gained on human thought and human life
more and more. And out of this the Renaissance came, the new birth of
science, on the one hand, and on the other, issuing in the
Reformation's assertion of the right of thought and of private judgment
in matters of religion; and along with this latter the rebirth of
Unitarianism, its reappearance again as a force in the history of the
world.

During this Reformation period there are many names of light and power,
among them being Servetus, whom Calvin burned because he was a
Unitarian; Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Bernardino Ochino, Blandrata,
and Francis David; and, more noted in some ways than any of them,
Giordano Bruno, the man who represents the dawn of the modern world
more significantly than any other man of his age, not entirely a
Unitarian, but fighting a battle out of which Unitarianism sprung,
freedom of thought, the right of private judgment, the scientific study
of the universe, the attempt, unhampered by the Church's dogma or
power, to understand the world in which we live.

As a result of this Renaissance, what happened? Let me run over very
rapidly the condition of things in Europe at the present time, with
some glances back, that you may see that Unitarianism has played just
as large a part as you could expect it to play, larger and grander than
you could expect it, considering the conditions.

In Hungary, one of the few countries where freedom of thought in
religion has been permitted, there has been a grand organization of the
Unitarian Church for more than three hundred years, not only churches,
but a Unitarianism that has controlled colleges and universities and
directed the