re
momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of
texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on
the other side with the intolerance of mere authority it led to what has
since been named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious
tradition with the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie
the conceptions of the popular religious consciousness. Again, by
promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself
with national politics, the reformation was linked historically to the
revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England stimulated by the
patriotism 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 last 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 knowledge 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