m of the
Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and
introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This
high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by
criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the
eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work
that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the
organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the
spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of
self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the
body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in
religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the
principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the
Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the
Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through
education, to render culture accessible to all--to break down that
barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and
which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and
ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men
shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be
realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity,
from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy
the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between
individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be
impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will
lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God
has made him.

It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
s