present
civilization, have been evolved?

In all these instances it appears that the old order must yield place to
the new, not only because the new is destined to incorporate and
supersede it, but also because the old has become unfruitful. Thus, the
Roman Empire, having discharged its organizing function, was decrepit,
and classical civilization, after exhibiting its strength in season, was
decaying when the Latin priesthood and the barbarians entered that
closed garden of antiquity, and trampled it beneath their feet.
Mediaeval religion and modes of thought, in like manner, were at the
point of ossifying, when Humanism intervened to twine the threads of
past and present into strands that should be strong as cables for the
furtherance of future energy.

It is incontestable that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation,
each of them on different grounds antagonistic to the Renaissance,
appear to have retarded that emancipation of the reason, begun by
Humanism, which is still in progress. Nevertheless, the strife of
Protestantism and Catholicism was needed for preserving moral and
religious elements which might have been too lightly dropped, and for
working these into the staple of the modern consciousness. The process
of the last three centuries, attended as it has been by serious
drawbacks to the Spanish and Italian peoples, and by a lamentable waste
of vigor to the Teutonic nations, has yet resulted in a permeation of
the modern compost with the leaven of Christianity. Unchecked, it is
probable that the Renaissance would have swept away much that was
valuable and deserved to be permanent. Nor, without the flux and reflux
of contending principles by which Europe was agitated in the
Counter-Reformation period, could the equipoise of reciprocally
attracting and repelling States, which constitutes the modern as
different from the ancient or the mediaeval groundwork of political
existence, have been so efficiently established.

II.

Permanence and homogeneity are not to be predicated of 'anything that's
merely ours and mortal.' We have missed the whole teaching of history if
we wail aloud because Greek and Roman culture succumbed to barbarism,
out of which mediaeval Christianity emerged; because the revival of
learning diverted arts and letters in each Occidental nation from their
home-plowed channels; because Protestant theologians and Spanish Jesuits
impeded that self-evolution of the reason which Italian huma