sent phase, may be briefly shown.

Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great
lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost
interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the
many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven
and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated
class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual
beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new
birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell;
worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity
which Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit
of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and
early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the
aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.

The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church,
either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be
maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a
peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had
sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was
originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own
experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit
was possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But neither
Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality.
Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas,
divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional,
absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to
the Bible only. A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of
ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of
the hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it
seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed
and bitterness that followed. The gain, as we see it, was that half of
Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that
church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states
the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually,
as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular
temper in the state ro