n nations. The publication of his
_Adagia_ in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective
spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture
was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to
judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval
ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the North, of
Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation
effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity,
that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
retarded by the reaction it produced.

The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and
Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found
philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
Rena