æval conception of a homogeneous civilisation under the inspiration and regulation of religion; and however widely they differed about the relation of church and state, none of them dreamed of such a thing as the separation of church and state,' or of a secular culture in which philosophy, science, literature, art, are pursued for their own sake. For this reason all the churches of the Reformation, no less than the old church, regarded education as a function of the church, and endeavoured to exercise complete control over it from bottom to top.

The ideal of uniformity in doctrine and discipline was as strongly fixed in the minds of the Reformers as of their opponents, but the sphere of this uniformity was narrowed to the boundaries of a nation, a principality, or a city, or, at the largest, to a confederation of such religious sovereignties; and because the sphere was thus limited, and because everything was new, there was far less room for variety than in the medieval Catholic church. The idea of liberty of conscience, as we understand it, was not for a moment admitted by any of them.2 Toleration of sects and heresies by the civil authority was, in the eyes of the Protestant churches quite as much as in the Catholic, a manifest sin. Servetus was burned in Geneva with as good a conscience as he would have been burned by the Inquisition in Lyons, if he had not broken jail. The moderate Unitarian, Biandrata, got the radical Unitarian, David Francis, sentenced to life imprisonment in Transylvania, and in prison the obstinate man who would not worship Christ died. Quakers and Baptists were flogged and banished from the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay with as stern a resolve to maintain the purity of the gospel and the unity of the faith as they would have been under the laws of Anglican uniformity. The Catholic, Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded because he would not confess Henry VIII the supreme head of the church in England, was solitary in

1 The Anabaptists and kindred sects are an exception.
2 This notion also was confined to the Anabaptists.

imagining, in his Utopia,1 an ideal commonwealth, in which complete religious freedom existed and no man was subject to pains and penalties for his belief.

The Protestant churches declared the word of God in Scripture to be the only authority in faith and practice, and in theory held that the right of interpretation belongs, not to the church, or its ministers and professors, but to every Christian. The eccentric results this liberty of interpretation produced were alarming, and they soon found themselves under the necessity of bridling the freedom of private judgment by confessions and catechisms which prescribed how the Scripture must be interpreted, and had therefore in fact an authority superior to the Scripture; precisely as the Catholic Church had been compelled to do from the days of the Gnostics on.

1 Appropriately named "Land of Nowhere."

CHAPTER XV

CHRISTIANITY

MODERN TENDENCIES

The Copernican Astronomy-Its Condemnation in Galileo-Francis Bacon-The Philosophy of Descartes-Locke and Hume-Kant and the Idealistic Philosophies-Modern Science-Historical Criticism-Progressive Dissolution of Protestant Theology-Influence of Modern Thought in the Catholic Church-The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries-Pius IX-The Syllabus of Errors-Dogma of the Immaculate Conception-The Vatican Council-Infallibility of the Pope-Conflict with Modernism.

THE intellectual movement of the Renaissance was essentially secular. The very names humanists and the humanities are in conscious antithesis to divines and divinity. Few of the representatives of this movement put themselves in opposition to the church, but they went their independent way without concerning themselves about the bearing of their studies and thinking upon the doctrines of the church. Many of them, as we have seen, hoped for reforms in the church, not only external but internal, through the progress of knowledge and enlightenment. This movement was interrupted by the Reformation. Within a few years after Luther posted his famous theses the attendance at the universities had greatly fallen off, and the interest in humanistic studies greatly declined. For a century or more religion was the absorbing subject of thought and controversy, and religion was more and more completely identified with doctrine. But although secular intellectual interests were thus thrust into the background, they were not wholly superseded. While the Reformation was gaining its first great successes in Germany and Switzerland, and the world was ringing with the names of Luther and Zwingli, a Polish astronomer, Copernicus, was undermining one of the cor

ner-stones of the medieval combination of Aristotelian cosmology and ontology with divine revelation on which both Catholic and Protestant theologians rested their conception of the universe. Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Cælestium," substantially finished in 1530, came from the press, with a dedication to Pope Paul III, as the author lay on his death-bed in 1543. The observations of Tycho Brahe, interpreted by the mathematical genius of Kepler, corrected the so-called Copernican theory and established it upon a firm basis. It was enthusiastically embraced by Giordano Bruno, who, breaking the shell Copernicus had left about the universe, revelled in the infinity of the universe, an endless multitude of solar systems, which, waxing and waning in the endless course of time, manifest throughout an enduring life.

The Copernican astronomy was condemned in the process of Galileo, who was denounced to the Inquisition in 1615, and compelled to promise for the future neither to defend nor teach that theory. The famous sentence of the Inquisitors ran: "That the sun is in the centre of the universe and motionless is a proposition absurd and false in philosophy, and formally heretical, because it is in express contradiction to Holy Scripture. That the earth is not the centre of the universe, and not motionless, but has also a diurnal motion, is likewise a proposition absurd and false in philosophy, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in matter of faith." The publication of his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Principal Theories of the Universe," the Ptolemaic and the Copernican (1632), brought him into the hands of the Inquisition again, and he was made to abjure, curse, and detest these errors and heresies.

The full significance of this dislocation of the universe was not at once recognised. But with the new astronomy, the beginning was made in the modern world of an observation and investigation of nature whose object is solely to discover and interpret the phenomena of nature by the exact methods of science, independent of tradition, philosophy,

and theology-in other words, of a religiously disinterested science, which sets for itself its own goal and pursues it in its own way.

Of this movement Francis Bacon is a conspicuous exponent, not so much through any notable contributions of his own to science, as by his clear conception and exposition of the nature, end, and methods of science. Knowledge of nature is to be gathered from nature itself by observation and induction, proceeding from the particular to the general, ascending from the fact to the principle or law, not descending from general principles a priori, borrowed from metaphysics. The results of such research, being the answer of nature itself to the inquiry of the investigator, are not subject to review in the alien forum of philosophy or theology.

In philosophy the new era began with Descartes,1 who attempted to establish philosophy on a demonstrative, that is, a mathematical basis. In Descartes, as in Bacon, the important thing, from our point of view, is not his philosophy itself, but the fact that he completely set aside the systems of the ancients and their mediæval successors, and addressed himself to his task with new, primarily mathematical methods; and that in his endeavour to construct an intellectual system of the universe, Descartes was as unconcerned about the consequences to Christian theology as Copernicus with his revolutionary theory of the physical universe. This indifference, indeed, is the characteristic of both natural science and philosophy in this period; they moved, as it were, in another sphere, and let the theologians revolve or stand still-untroubled in their own.

Descartes laid in mathematics and physics the foundation of a mechanist philosophy of the universe, including not only inorganic nature but organic, and halting only at mind in man. Newton, by his investigations in physics and astronomy, above all by his discovery of the laws of gravitation, made such a construction of the physical universe

11596-1650.