in the later schoolmen, like Biel and
Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger
rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages.
The general economic antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change
in the system of production from gild and barter to that of money and
wages. This produced three secondary results, which in turn operated
as causes: the rise of the moneyed class, individualism, and
nationalism.

All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the religious, the
political and the intellectual, produced the Reformation and its
sisters, the Renaissance and the Social Revolution of the sixteenth
century. The Reformation--including in that term both the Protestant
movement and the Catholic reaction--partly occupied {744} all these
fields, but did not monopolize any of them. There were some religious,
or anti-religious, movements outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran
impulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the intellectual and
political fields, primarily occupied by Renaissance and Revolution.

[Sidenote: Religious aspect]

(1) The _gene_ felt by many secular historians in the treatment of
religion is now giving way to the double conviction of the importance
of the subject and of its susceptibility to scientific study. Religion
in human life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard all
theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rationalist[1] has remarked,
it is usually priests who have freed mankind from taboos and
superstitions. Indeed, in a religious age, no effective attack on the
existing church is possible save one inspired by piety.

[Sidenote: Parallels to the Reformation]

Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be found both in
Christian history and in that of other religions; they all markedly
show the same consequences of the same causes. The publication of
Christianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the Roman world
and its accentuation of faith against the ceremonialism of the Jewish
church, resembled that of Luther's "gospel." Marcion with his message
of Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a second-century
Reformer. The iconoclasm and nationalism of the Emperor Leo furnish
striking similarities to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started
by the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics Wyclif and Huss,
rehearsed the religious drama of the sixteenth century. Many revivals