but the inevitable outcome of minds quickened by the Italian air and made creative by the vision of a vast inheritance. The Teutonic mind, on the contrary, had no classical world behind it; its pagan past was remote, dark, infertile, without art or literature, or philosophy, or history, or any dream of a universal empire which had once held sway over civilised man. In a word, its conscious life, its social being, its struggles for empire and towards civilisation, its chivalry, its crusades, its mental problems and educational processes, all stood rooted in the Christian religion. Behind this the memory of men did not go, and into the darkness beyond the eye could as little penetrate as the vision of the man can trace the growth of knowledge in his own infant mind.
Now these differing conditions made it as natural that the Teutonic Renaissance should concern itself with the early Christian ideal as that the Latin should with the ancient classical literature; and, where they touched religion, that the one should be more occupied with its intellectual side and the other with its institutional; for where the Roman Empire had lived the Roman Church now governed. The literature which the , Teutonic mind mainly loved and studied and edited was patristic and Christian; but the literature which the Latin mind chiefly cultivated was classical and pagan. The Latin taught the Teuton how to read, to edit, and to handle ancient books; but nature taught both of them the logic that binds together letters and life. As a consequence, the Latin Renaissance became an attempt to think again the thoughts, and live again the life, embalmed in the literature of Greece and Rome; while the German Renaissance became an attempt to reincarnate the apostolical mind. The Latin tendency was towards classical Naturalism, but the Teutonic tendency was towards the ideals of the Scriptures, both Hebrew and Greek. Among the Latins almost every philosophical system of antiquity reappeared, though in an instructively inverted order; but among the Teutons the field was occupied by theologies based on Augustine and Paul, while philosophy began as an interpretation, not of literary thought or societies, but of man, individual and social, as he had lived and was living.
Hence, in the region of belief the Latins were the more critical and the Teutons the more positive. The thought which the Latins studied was that of a world into which Christ had not entered, though it was one in which Caesar had reigned; but the thought which the Teutons cultivated had Christ as its source and God as its supreme object. The Latin Renaissance thus produced two most dissimilar yet cognate phenomena: intellectual systems affecting mainly the notion of Deity, and Orders like the Society of Jesus, organised for the work of conservation and reaction. On the other hand, the parallel phenomena produced by the Teutonic Renaissance were attempts either to revive the religion of the apostolic literature, or to found the Protestant Churches and States. What concerns us here is the new thought, and not the
