ment in the lives of the Clergy or of the Monks, which by its awful sanctity might rebuke the vulgar and natural interpretation of these Indulgences. The antagonism of the more enlightened intellect to the doctrines of the medieval Church was slower, more timid, more reluctant. It was as yet but doubt, suspicion, indifference; the irreligious were content to be quietly irreligious; the religious had not as yet found in the plain Biblical doctrines that on which they could calmly and contentedly rest their faith. Religion had not risen to a purer spirituality to compensate for the loss of the materialistic worship of the dominant Church. The conscience shrunk from the responsibility of taking cognisance of itself; the soul dared not work out its own salvation. The clergy slept on the brink of the precipice. So long as they were not openly opposed they thought all was safe. So long as unbelief in the whole of their system lurked quietly in men's hearts, they cared not to inquire what was brooding in those inner depths.

Revival of
Letters,

II. The second omen at once and sign of change was the cultivation of classical learning. Letters almost at once ceased to be cloistral, hierar chical, before long almost to be Christian. In Italy, indeed, the Pope had set himself at the head of this vast movement; yet Florence vied with Rome. Cosmo de' Medici was the rival of Nicolas V. But, notwithstanding the Pope's position, the clergy rapidly ceased

i The irrefragable testimony to the universal misinterpretation, the natural, inevitable misinterpretation of the language of the Indulgences, the misinterpretation riveted on the minds of men by their profligate vendors, is the

solemn, reiterated epudiation of those notions by Councils and by Popes. The definitions of the Council of Trent and of Pius V. had not been wanted, if the Church doctrine had been the belief of mankind.

to be the sole and almost exclusive depositaries of letters. The scholars might condescend to hold canonries or abbeys as means of maintenance, as honours, or rewards (thus, long before, had Petrarch been endowed), but it was with the tacit understanding, or at least the almost unlimited enjoyment, of perfect freedom from ecclesiastical control, so long as they did not avowedly enter on theological grounds, which they avoided rather from indifference and from growing contempt, than from respect. On every side were expanding new avenues of inquiry, new trains of thought: new models of composi tion were offering themselves. All tended silently to impair the reverence for the ruling authorities. Men could not labour to write like Cicero and Cæsar without imbibing something of their spirit. The old ecclesiastical Latin began to be repudiated as rude and barbarous. Scholasticism had crushed itself with its own weight. When monks or friars were the only men of letters, and monastic schools the only field in which intellect encountered intellect, the huge tomes of Aquinas, and the more summary axioms of Peter Lombard, might absorb almost the whole active mind of Christendom. But Plato now drove out the Theologic Platonism, Aristotle the Aristotelism of the schools. The Platonism, indeed, of Marsilius Ficinus, taking its interpretation rather from Proclus and Plotinus and the Alexandrians, would hardly have offended Julian himself by any obtrusive display of Christianity. On his deathbed Cosmo de' Medici is attended by Ficinus, who assures him of another life on the authority of Socrates, and teaches him resignation in the words of Plato, Xenocrates, and other Athenian sages. The cultivation of Greek was still more fatal to Latin domination. Even the familiar study of the Greek Fathers (as far as an imposing ritual

and the monastic spirit consistent with those of the Latin Church) was altogether alien to the scholasticism dominant in Latin Theology. They knew nothing of the Latin supremacy, nothing of the rigid form, which many of its doctrines, as of Transubstantiation, had assumed. Greek revealed a whole religious world, extraneous to and in many respects oppugnant to Latin Christianity. But the most fatal result was the revelation of the Greek Testament, necessarily followed by that of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the dawn of a wider Biblical Criticism. The proposal of a new translation of the Scriptures at once disenthroned the Vulgate from its absolute exclusive authority. It could not but admit the Greek, and then the Hebrew, as its rival, as its superior in antiquity. Biblical Criticism once begun, the old voluminous authoritative interpreters, De Lyra, Turrecremata, and the rest, were thrown into obscurity. Erasmus was sure to come; with Erasmus a more simple, clear, popular interpretation of the divine word. The mystic and allegoric comment on the Scriptures, on which rested wholly some of the boldest assertions of Latin Christianity, fell away at once before his closer, more literal, more grammatical study of the Text. At all events, the Vulgate receded, and with the Vulgate Latin Christianity began to withdraw into a separate sphere; it ceased to be the sole, universal religion of Western Christendom.

Modern

III. The growth of the modern languages not merely into vernacular means of communication, but Languages. into the vehicles of letters, of poetry, of oratory, of history, of preaching, at length of national documents,

The Paraphrase and Notes of Erasmus, in my judgement, was the most important Book even of his day.

We must remember that it was almost legally adopted by the Church of England.

still later of law and of science, threw back Latin more and more into a learned dialect. It was relegated into the study of the scholar, into books intended for the intercommunication only of the learned, and for a certain time for the negotiations and treaties of remote kingdoms, who were forced to meet on some common ground. It is curious that in Italy the revival of classical learning for a time crushed the native literature, or at least retarded its progress. From Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, to Ariosto and Machiavelli, excepting some historians, Malespina, Dino Compagni, Villani, there is almost total silence: silence, at least, unbroken by any powerful voice. Nor did the liberal patronage of Nicolas V. call forth one work of lasting celebrity in the native tongue. The connexion of the development of the Transalpine, more especially the Teutonic languages, has been already examined more at length. Here it may suffice to resume, that the vernacular translation of the Bible was an inevitable result of the perfection of those tongues. In Germany and in England that translation tended most materially, by fixing a standard in general of vigorous, noble, poetic, yet idiomatic language, to hasten and to perpetuate the change. It was natural that as soon as a nation had any books of its own, it should seek to have the Book of Books. The Church, indeed, trembling for the supremacy of her own Vulgate, and having witnessed the fatal perils of such Translations in the successes of all the earlier Dissidents, was perplexed and wavered in her policy. Now she thundered out her awful prohibition; now endeavoured herself to supply the want which would not remain unsatisfied, by a safer and a sanctioned version. But the mind of man could not wait on her hesitating movements. The free, bold, untrammelled version had possession of the national mind and national

language; it had become the undeniable patrimony of the people, the standard of the language.

Printing and
Paper.

IV. Just at this period the two great final Reformers, the inventor of printing and the manufacturer of paper, had not only commenced, but perfected at once their harmonious inventions. Books, from slow, toilsome, costly productions, became cheap, were multiplied with rapidity which seemed like magic, and were accessible to thousands to whom manuscripts were utterly unapproachable. The power, the desire, increased with the facility of reading. Theology, from an abstruse recondite science, the exclusive possession of an Order, became popular; it was, ere long, the general study, the general passion. The Preacher was not sought the less on account of this vast extension of his influence. His eloquent words were no longer limited by the walls of a Church, or the power of a human voice; they were echoed, perpetuated, promulgated over a kingdom, over a continent. The fiery Preacher became a pamphleteer; he addressed a whole realm; he addressed mankind. It was no longer necessary that man should act directly upon man; that the flock should derive their whole knowledge from their Pastor, the individual Christian from his ghostly adviser. The man might find satisfaction for his doubts, guidance for his thoughts, excitement for his piety in his own chamber from the silent pages of the theological treatise. To many the Book became the Preacher, the Instructor, even the Confessor. The conscience began to claim the privilege, the right, of granting absolution to itself. All this, of course, at first timidly, intermittingly, with many compunctious returns to the deserted fold. The Hierarchy endeavoured to seize and bind down to their own service these unruly powers. Their presses at Venice, at Florence, at Rome,