ls. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand
by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
and will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
religion of the gospel.

"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
so wonderfully strange--Caesar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or
neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
been insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles
nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure
literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative
convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function
simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.
The Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It
re-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it
insisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent
and fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised
church, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to
man, was to