nd
dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into
various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany
numerous principalities sprang into preeminence; and though the nation
was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was
acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of
which the king could say, "_L'etat c'est moi_." England developed her
complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the
same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of
transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like the king the
pope began to say, "_L'Eglise c'est moi_." This merging of the mediaeval
state and mediaeval church in the personal supremacy of king and pope may
be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which
preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary milieu was
prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling
of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual
despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the
Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.

Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the
reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of
the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three
men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari,
the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses