revealed to
_Calvin_, they will die rather than embrace it. And so also, saith he,
you see the _Calvinists_, they stick where he left them: a misery much to
bee lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their
times, yet God hath not revealed his whole will to them: And were they
now living, saith hee, they would bee as ready and willing to embrace
further light, as that they had received." [8] Static methods of
thinking are here evidently going to pieces before the impact of a
distinctly unstatic world. They were looking for "more truth and light
yet to breake forth out of his holy Word" [9] because they lived in a
time when new things had been happening at an exhilarating rate and when
pioneering adventure and general travel in a world of open avenues were
already beginning to have that liberating effect which has increased with
every passing century.

Closely allied with the two elements already noted is a third: the
increase of knowledge, which, as in the case of astronomy, threw
discredit upon the superior claims of antiquity and made modern men seem
wiser than their sires. For ages the conviction had held the ground that
the ancients were the wisest men who ever lived and that we, their
children, were but infants in comparison. When, therefore, the
Copernican astronomy proved true, when the first terrific shock of it had
passed through resultant anger into wonder and from wonder into stupefied
acceptance, and from that at last into amazed exultation at the vast, new
universe unveiled, the credit of antiquity received a stunning blow. So
far was Aristotle from being "the master of those who know" whom the
medievalists had revered, that he had not even known the shape and motion
of the earth or its relation with the sun. For the first time in history
the idea emerged that humanity accumulates knowledge, that the ancients
were the infants, that the moderns represent the age and wisdom of the
race. Consider the significance of those words of Pascal in the
seventeenth century: "Those whom we call ancient were really new in all
things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have
joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have
followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that
we revere in others." [10] For the first time in history men turned
their faces, in their search for knowledge, not backward but forward, and
began to experien