or wrong to gratify their passions of rage, lust, malice, ambition. And this they do till they come upon their death-bed; and then there follow more ceremonies-confession upon confession, more unction still, the eucharists are administered, if they are to be had for love or money; orders are given for a magnificent funeral; and then comes another solemn contract-when the man is in the agony of death, there is one stands by bawling in his ear, and now and then despatches him before his time, if he chance to be a little in drink, or have better lungs than ordinary. Now, although these things may be well enough, as they are done in conformity with ecclesiastical customs, yet there are some more internal impressions which have an efficacy to fortify us against the assaults of death by filling our hearts with joy, and helping us to go out of the world with a Christian assurance.1

Again, as regards education and taste, Erasmus takes up a middle position, the effect of which is to restore the study of Rhetoric to its right place in the Christian course, whence it had been driven by the encroachments of Logic. He by no means shared the sentiments of Bembo, who recommended a friend not to read St. Paul's Epistles lest he should spoil his style. Sophronius, one of the interlocutors in The Religious Banquet, asks:

What book is that, Eulalius, you take out of your pocket? It seems to be a very neat one, it is gilded all over. Eul. It is more valuable for the inside than the out. It is St. Paul's Epistles, that I always carry about with me as my beloved entertainment, which I take out now upon the occasion of something you said, which minds me of a plan that I have beat my brains about a long time, and I am not come to a full satisfaction in yet.2

But of the higher class of the Litera Humaniores he entertains an opinion very different from that held either by Tertullian or the contemporary Schoolmen :

Eul. Whatsoever is pious and conduces to good manners ought not to be called profane. The first place must indeed be given to the authority of the Scriptures; but, nevertheless, I sometimes find some things said or written by the ancients, nay, even by the heathens, nay, by the poets themselves, so chastely, so holily, so divinely, that I cannot persuade myself but that when they wrote them they were divinely inspired; and perhaps 2 Ibid. vol. i. p. 178.

1 Colloquies of Erasmus, vol. i. pp. 186, 187.

the spirit of Christ diffuses itself farther than we imagine; and there are more saints than we have in our catalogue. To confess freely among friends, I cannot read Tully on Old Age, On Friendship, his Offices, or his Tusculan Questions, without kissing the book and veneration for that divine soul. And, on the contrary, when I read some of our modern authors, treating of politics, economics, and ethics, good God! how cold they are in comparison of these! Nay, how insensible they seem of what they write themselves. So that I had rather lose Scotus and twenty more such as he, than one Cicero or Plutarch. Not that I am wholly against them neither, but because by the reading of the one I find myself become better; whereas I rise from the other I know not how coldly affected to virtue, but most violently inclined to cavil and contention.1

Sane and witty and admirable as all this, we cannot but feel that a mind like that of Erasmus was mainly of the critical order. He could point out, by means of reason and ridicule, the existence of disease in the midst of European ✓ society; he could not supply the spirit which was required to renew the life of the ancient order. The Catholic system had been the growth of centuries; it had adapted itself step by step to many of the spiritual wants of mankind; but, in doing this, it had paid so much attention to machinery that it had come to identify it with the very life of the soul. Hence the deeper and more passionate desires of human nature found in the sixteenth century no nourishment in the religious system of the Church about them. By a natural reaction in the contrary direction they sought to obtain for themselves outlets which were destructive of the very existence of the Church, regarded as an external society.

No one can read the treatise of Luther on Christian Liberty without perceiving that the doctrines it contains are practically incompatible with any system of external Christian unity, and also that they contain the germs out of which the various forms of schismatic Church government have since been developed. For to Luther the one primal

1 Colloquies of Erasmus, vol. i. p. 182.

2 See First Principles of the Reformation, or The Ninety-five Theses and the Three Primary Works of Dr. Martin Luther, p. 95. Translated into English. Edited by Henry Wace, D.D., and C. A. Buchheim, Ph.D.

VOL. II

D

necessity of being was precisely that which had been smothered by the materialisation of the mediaval Church -the reconciliation of the individual soul to God. In pursuit of this absorbing object he reached his great fundamental doctrine of justification by faith; and from this again he proceeded to two conclusions, both of which were fatal to the unity of the Church, at least as then existing; first, the unessential nature of rites and ceremonies; and, secondly, the merely representative nature of all Church government. It matters not that Luther modified his own logic by his strong common-sense; that he himself had, in the first instance, no more wish than Erasmus to overturn the basis of the existing order. A logical idea once started must run its course; and it was inevitable that, from the new Scholasticism, the doctrine of justification by faith, and the corollaries deduced from it, would arise the democratic form of Church government as formulated by Calvin, and the anarchical individualism of the Anabaptists of Munster.

At every single point the high spiritual reasonings of Luther encountered the high logic of the Schoolmen. Three centuries before, the Mystical Theology of St. Bonaventura, which was precisely of the same character -however different in doctrine-as that of Luther, could coexist harmoniously with the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas. Now, the mystical theology was endeavouring to make itself the basis for external action, and the consequence was the rupture of Christian unity. Nor was it only within the sphere of religion that the new doctrines of Luther affected the life of Europe; they exercised a vital influence on the course of education and art. Luther directed some of his most violent attacks against the system of philosophical education pursued in the schools, and among the books which excited his fiercest dislike was the Ethics of Aristotle !! In itself the Reformation tended to revive the teaching of Tertullian, and, except in places where it was in close alliance with the Renaissance, its tendencies were un1 Luther's Address to the Nobility (Wace and Buchheim), pp. 78, 79.

doubtedly hostile to the study of classical literature. And
beyond this, the great Teutonic religious movement
represented by Luther, in turning the eye of the soul
inward upon itself, and away from mere external things,
enormously affected the whole movement of the imagina-
tion. The soul, the conscience, the relation of man to
God, became subjects of meditation to minds which had
previously been accustomed to move among the beliefs
of the Church as matters settled by authority and logic; ✓
and though it was long before the poet discarded the forms
which he had evolved under the old system of education,
these were modified sensibly by the new current of ideas.

supreway

1

of the Shunch

Turning from the east to the west of Europe, we find three great monarchies in a state of sufficient organisation to assimilate the new ideas with the national system. Of these Spain closed her gates resolutely against all influences coming to her from the north of Europe. Catholicism pain was, with her, the first instinct of national life. Through the Middle Ages the larger part of her energies had been absorbed in a home struggle with the Infidel. When the victory was achieved, the question of national unity presented itself, and after this had been settled by the junction of the Crowns of Castile and Arragon, the cardinal principles of Ferdinand the Catholic were to suppress liberty of individual thought by means of the Inquisition, and to crush the power of the local nobility by methods which resembled those of Cæsar Borgia. Hence he is praised by Machiavelli as the most sagacious prince of his time, and doubtless the intense energy with which the mind of the nation followed the lead of its monarch in these directions, helped to make Spain the predominant political power in Europe for more than a century. But such conditions were unfavourable to the production of great results in the sphere of art and philosophy. A faint impulse from without was communicated to Spanish thought by the connection between Arragon and Naples, the most definite result of whichat least as far as the rest of Europe was concerned-was perhaps a tendency to make experiments in language,

which stimulated similar movements in other countries, and notably in England. But the native Spanish genius was always darkened by the influence of a living fanaticism, or haunted by the memory of a vanished past. In days when the trouvères and troubadours beyond the Pyrenees were being inspired by the enthusiasm of the Crusades, the Spaniards were writing ballads about their own struggle with the Infidels; when this struggle ended chivalry was dying in the north of Europe. It was in the Spanish peninsula, accordingly, that the sentimental ideal peculiar to the later Romances first appeared, furnishing the basis for an extravagant conception of adventure, and preparing the way alike for the immortal satire of Cervantes, and for the intricacy of plot and action which is the main characteristic of the Spanish drama. It will be seen in the sequel that the Spanish conception of romance contributed an important element to the pastoral and dramatic poetry of England.

appeared first in ¿pain

England

But in the early part of the sixteenth century the imagination of Englishmen was turned rather in a political direction. The overthrow of the ancient feudal order by the Wars of the Roses had made way for the growth of a mitigated absolutism in administration, but had left untouched the national customs and laws, which are the best foundation of individual liberty. As the reflective minds in the nation gazed on the ruins around them, and observed the effects of the new principles which were at work on the Continent, they contemplated the reconstruction of order in a universal system in which the constitution of their own country should occupy its proper place. Among these thinkers stands eminent the noble mind of Sir Thomas More.

Probably the first philosophic conception of the manner in which the unity of Christendom might be expanded so as to satisfy modern requirements is to be found in More's Utopia. It is exceedingly important to appreciate accurately the character of this work. Utopia is not like the Republic of Plato-the picture of an ideal state; for not only is the western commonwealth supposed