e Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constituted
their culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It was
naturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism
principally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken
philosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it
was a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious
vested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the
path of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be
easily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which
for a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism,
instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to
sincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to
experience--scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation,
which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how
artificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism,
under such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it was
not favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain to
penetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age,
would naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or ideal
ambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; either
the gay world to suit the Church's primitive austerity and asceticism,
or the Church to suit the world's profane and general interests. The
latter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists who
would have abated the clergy's wealth and irrational authority, advanced
polite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity--for why
should an ancestral religion be changed?--would have retained it as a
form of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life.
This movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformation
and the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met with
many a check from the Church's sincere zealots; but it could have
overcome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason's battle with
reason's weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenment
without dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and national
passions, or vitiating philosophy.

[Sidenote: The Reformation and counter-reformation.]

It was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and soften