modest prediction can be
hazarded that nothing short of the substitution of Catholicism for
science and of Jesuitry for truth in the European mind will work a
general revolution in their favor.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

The main Events of European History--Italy in the
Renaissance--Germany and Reformation--Catholic Reaction--Its
Antagonism to Renaissance and Reformation--Profound Identity of
Renaissance and Reformation--Place of Italy in European
Civilization--Want of Sympathy between Latin and Teutonic
Races--Relation of Rome to Italy--Macaulay on the Roman Church--On
Protestantism--Early Decline of Renaissance Enthusiasms--Italy's
Present and Future.

I.

The four main events of European history since the death of Christ are
the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization, the triumph of Christianity as
a new humanizing agency, the intrusion of Teutonic and Slavonic tribes
into the comity of nations, and the construction of the modern world of
thought by Renaissance and Reformation.

As seems to be inevitable in the progress of our species, each of these
changes involved losses, compensated by final gains; for humanity moves
like a glacier, plastically, but with alternating phases of advance and
retreat, obeying laws of fracture and regelation.

It would thus be easy to deplore the collapse of that mighty and
beneficent organism which we call the Roman Empire. Yet without this
collapse how could the Catholic Church have supplied inspiration to
peoples gifted with fresh faculties, endowed with insight differing from
that of Greeks and Romans?

It is tempting to lament the extinction of arts letters, and elaborated
habits of civility, which followed the barbarian invasions. Yet without
such extinction, how can we imagine to ourselves the growth of those new
arts, original literatures, and varied modes of social culture, to which
we give the names of mediaeval, chivalrous, or feudal?

It is obvious that we can quarrel with the Renaissance for having put an
end to purely Christian arts and letters by imposing a kind of pagan
mannerism on the spontaneous products of the later mediaeval genius. But
without this reversion to the remaining models of antique culture, how
could the European races have become conscious of historical continuity;
how could the corrupt system of Papal domination have been broken by
Reform; how, finally, could Science, the vital principle of our