mpire, adopted Christianity, and profoundly modified what still
survived of Latin civility among the Occidental races. A new factor was
thus introduced into the European community, which had to be assimilated
to the old; and the genius of the Italian people never displayed itself
more luminously than in the ability with which the Bishops of Rome
availed themselves of this occasion. They separated the Latin from the
Greek Church, and, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire, cemented
Southern and Northern Europe into an apparently cohesive whole. After
the year A.D. 800, Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean,
acknowledged a dual headship; Papacy and Empire ranking as ideals under
which the unity of Christendom subsisted in a multiplicity of separate
and self-evolving nations.

The concordat between Latin Church and German Empire, the one
representing traditions of antique intelligence and southern habits of
State organization, the other introducing the young energies of
half-cultivated peoples and the chivalry of the North, was never
perfect. Yet, incomplete as the fusion between Roman and Teuton actually
was, it had a common basis in religion, and it enabled the federated
peoples to maintain recognized international relations. What we now call
Renaissance and Reformation revealed still unreconciled antagonisms
between Southern and Northern, Latin and German, factors in this
mediaeval Europe. Italy, freed for a while from both Papacy and Empire,
expressed her intellectual energy in the Revival of Learning, developing
that bold investigating spirit to which the names of Humanism or of
Rationalism may be given. The new learning, the new enthusiasm for
inquiry, the new study of the world and man, as subjects of vital
interest irrespective of our dreamed-of life beyond the grave,
stimulated in Italy what we know as Renaissance; while in Germany it led
to what we know as Reformation. The Reformation must be regarded as the
Teutonic counterpart to the Italian Renaissance. It was what emerged
from the core of that huge barbarian factor, which had sapped the Roman
Empire, and accepted Catholicism; which lent its vigor to the mediaeval
Empire, and which now participated in the culture of the classical
Revival. As Italy restored freedom to human intelligence and the senses
by arts and letters and amenities of refined existence, so Germany
restored freedom to the soul and conscience by strenuous efforts after
religious since