et of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are
eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just
begun his career. To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal
Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. It was
proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the
clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity. This was refused
on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and
refused in language of the utmost violence. It was stated that the
real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in
Rome. Indulgences were branded as blood-letting.

When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a
match to a heap of inflammable material. The whole nationalist
movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches
of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous
separatist tendencies.

SECTION 7. THE HUMANISTS

But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the
intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides. The
revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the
Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval
standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The Renaissance
stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called
"Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of the
fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth.

The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as far as Dante
[Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements,
such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of
the universe. His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on
the _Summa theologiae_ of Aquinas; it is all about the other world.
The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch,
1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit
dawned on them. Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed
incompatible with faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world
as Dante was a prophet of the next. [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375]
Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was
instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting himself
to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial
delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, r