BEFOBMATION 470 REFORMATION fion that by the end of the 15th century the clergy had become often illy, some- times grossly, unfit to be the spiritual guides of the people. The sources of in- tellectual life had equally failed where- ever the old philosophy authorized by the Church continued to be the subject of teaching and study. In the later half of the 15th century scholasticism had become the veriest casuistry which ever engaged the mind of man. In all the in- terests of man's well-being, therefore, a renaissance was needed to evoke new motives and supply new ideals which should lift humanity to a higher plane of endeavor. Such a renaissance came and evolutionally the Church did not prove equal to suppressing this second burst of life as it had suppressed that of the 12th and 13th centuries. It was again in Italy that the new life first declared itself. While N. of the Alps scholasticism reigned in all the schools, the movement known as the Renaissance had in Italy been in full course for above a century. In itself the Renaissance was as far as possible from leading men to higher ideals in religion, yet in two of its results it gave a direct impetus to the Reformation. In- spired by the life of antiquity, the hu- manism of the Renaissance paganized the Church and quickened that moral disintegration which was the prime cause of the religious revolution. On the other hand, through its opening of men's minds by new studies, and new rneasures of things, the Renaissance lightened the load of tradition, and made a new departure in the life of Christen- dom a less formidable conception. In Erasmus (1467-1536), who has always been regarded as a true nursing father of the Reformation, we clearly discern these two results of the revival of the ancient literatures. In so many words he states his grave fears lest the Church should be wholly paganized by the uni- versal imitation of classical modes of thought and speech; while his own un- sparing criticism of the Church and it3 traditions proves how much he owed to the so-called "new learning." The very zeal with which the revival of antiquity was pursued in Italy was itself a countercheck to religious reform in the country that of all others needed it the most. All contemporary literature proves that during the later part of the 15th and the opening of the 16th century the court of Rome was as profoundly immoral as that of any of the heathen emperors had been in the same city. The spiritual claims of the papacy were the jest of ecclesiastics themselves. "This fable of Christ," a certain digni- tary of the Church is reported to have said in the Vatican, "has been to us a source of great gain." Among the Italian people, however, there was never the slightest indication of a national movement toward any serious breach with the papacy. The religious melodrama enacted by Savonarola at Florence (1489-1498) never struck at the central ideas of papal Christianity; and Savonarola, besides, never like Luther or Knox woke a deep response in the national consciousness. While in Italy, thei'ef ore, there was no widespread re- ligious quickening as in other countries of Christendom, there was no political reason such as elsewhere produced a breach with the papacy. For the Italian people the Pope was not a foreign prince with temporal interests of his own con- flicting with those of the nation at large. The different republics which partitioned the country might at times regard the Pope as an enemy to their individual ambitions ; but the nation as a whole was fully conscious of the honor of having the vicar of God in their midst, and as in the past they had stood by him against the emperors, so in the great religious revolution of the 16th century they also remained faithful to him throughout the gradual dismemberment of his spiritual dominion. Of the countries N. of the Alps Ger- many was the first to be widely influ- enced by that revival of learning which had its origin in Italy. In Germany, however, the new spirit wrought under fundamentally different con- ditions, and lighted the way to vastly different issues. There was every reason why Germany should lead the way in the schism from Rome. Outside Italy Germany was the country where every abuse of the mediaeval Church was seen in its fatalest form. The ignorance and sensuality of the clergy, the scan- dalous sale of livings, the disproportion- ate papal exactions — all these evils came to be vividly realized by the quickened consciousness of the nation. Between Rome and Germany, moreover, an an- tagonism existed in the very conditions from which mediaevalism had sprung. It was in virtue of the mutual understand- ing between Pope and emperor that the Church came to fill the place it did in western Europe. But almost from the first the interests of Rome and the empire had been in collision, so that Pope and emperor came to be mere rivals for the first place among the Western powers. It was natural, therefore, that in Germany Rome should be regarded with a jealousy and suspicion which might easily grow into irreconcilable hostility. These workings of the national mind
