their heroism in their struggle for independence, and their love of knowledge in the tolerant reasonableness that made them a home for the persecuted of all lands. In Scotland William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas, and David Lindsay shed lustre upon the early decades of the century, while in its later years Reformers like Knox and scholars like Andrew Melville trained up a people who had imagination enough to love and achieve liberty without neglecting letters. The thought which at once effected and reflected so immense a revolution can be here traced only in the broadest outlines.
We are met at the threshold by a two-fold difficulty-one which concerns the included thought, and another which concerns the thought excluded. The sixteenth century is great in religion rather than philosophy, and stands in remarkable contrast to its immediate successor, which is great in philosophy rather than religion. With the latter, the great modern intellectual systems may be said to begin; and to it belong such names as Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz, Gassendi and Malebranche. But without the earlier century the later would have been without its problems and therefore without its thinkers. The preeminence of the one in religion involved the preeminence of the other in thought; for what exercises the spirit tends to emancipate speculation and raises issues that reason must discuss and resolve before it can be at peace with itself and its world. Hence the thought whose course we have to follow is thought in transition, dealing with the old questions, yet waking to the new, quickened by what is behind to enquire into what is within and foreshadow what is before. But, while the thought that is to concern us may thus be described as moving in the realm of our ultimate religious ideas, the thought that is not to concern us moves in the realm of political and social theory. The two realms touch, indeed, and even interpenetrate; yet they are distinct. The ideal of human society is a religious ideal; but it is a consequence or a combination of religious ideas rather than one of the ideas themselves. Hence, though certain of the most potent thinkers of the sixteenth century occupied themselves with the constitution and order of human society, with the actual or ideal State both in itself and in relation to the actual or ideal Church, yet they must here be rigorously excluded, and our view confined to the thought that had to do with the religious interpretation of man and his Universe.
It is customary to distinguish the Renaissance, as the revival of letters, from the Reformation as the revival of religion. But the distinction is neither formally correct nor materially exact. The Renaissance was not necessarily secular and classical-it might be, and often was, both religious and Christian; nor was the Reformation essentially religious and moral-it might be and often was political and secular. Of the two revivals the one is indeed in point of time the
