vot, they worked; now
opening, now closing, now threatening to curve round at their extremes
and compress paganizing Christendom in their clasp; then, through the
convulsive throes of the nations they had inclosed, receding from one
another and quivering throughout their whole length, but receding only
for an instant, to shut more closely again.

It was as if from the hot sands of Africa invisible arms were put forth,
enfolding Europe in their grasp, and trying to join their hands to give
to paganizing Christendom a fearful and mortal compression. There were
struggles and resistances, but the portentous hands clasped at last.
Historically, we call the pressure that was then made the Reformation.

Not without difficulty can we describe the convulsive struggles of
nations so as to convey a clear idea of the forces acting upon them. I
have now to devote many perhaps not uninteresting, certainly not
uninstructive, pages to these events.

In this chapter I begin that task by relating the consequences of the
state of things heretofore described--the earnestness of converted
Germany and the immoralities of the popes.

[Sidenote: The Germans insist on a reform in the papacy.] The Germans
insisted on a reformation among ecclesiastics, and that they should lead
lives in accordance with religion. This moral attack was accompanied
also by an intellectual one, arising from another source, and amounting
to a mutiny in the Church itself. In the course of centuries, and
particularly during the more recent evil times, a gradual divergence of
theology from morals had taken place, to the dissatisfaction of that
remnant of thinking men who here and there, in the solitude of
monasteries, compared the dogmas of theology with the dictates of
reason. Of those, and the number was yearly increasing, who had been
among the Arabs in Spain, not a few had become infected with a love of
philosophy.

[Sidenote: Reappearance of philosophy.] Whoever compares the tenth and
twelfth centuries together cannot fail to remark the great intellectual
advance which Europe was making. The ideas occupying the minds of
Christian men, their very turn of thought, had altogether changed. The
earnestness of the Germans, commingling with the knowledge of the
Mohammedans, could no longer be diverted from the misty clouds of
theological discussion out of which Philosophy emerged, not in the
Grecian classical vesture in which she had disappeared at Alexandria,
but in