CHAP. § 4. The Italian Renais sance. generation. Nor were other ideals readily at hand. Reverence paid to woman had given place to bargaining, in which the future wife was estimated like a beast in the market, at her money's worth. The king was no longer a gracious lord for whom one would be ready to die, but a mere guarantee against loss, like a fireinsurance office in modern times. Such a state of things could not last. A society with no ideal but self-preservation is doomed to dissolution. It needs an aim to set before it, an object for which to strive, a common bond calling into sympathetic activity those higher powers which have been developed in the course of its past history. Such an aim and such a bond was offered by the great movement which spread over Western Europe from Italy under the name of the Renaissance.. It was the intellectual and artistic reversal of the characteristic doctrine of the Middle Ages. Asceticism carried to exaggerated lengths had become ridiculous or disgusting. The wearisome conventual discipline, the renunciation of the duties of life had become a mere form for most even of the monks themselves. Men turned to human life and beauty, to human art and science. To enjoy the world, to learn all that the wisest of past generations had to teach, and to employ the legacy of the past for the benefit of the future, grew to be the objects which alone were worth striving for. Therefore the powers of men must not be repressed but strengthened and encouraged. The body of man was no longer the husk to be peeled away that the grain within might be prepared for a life beyond the grave, but the very instrument of power through which the living soul might work whilst yet there was time. It is never among the people who give birth to new ideas that those ideas attain to their healthiest development. The new thought takes possession of them too exclu sively, and quickens one side of their nature into too onesided a life. So it had been in the early Middle Ages with the monasticism of the East. So it was when the Middle Ages drew to a close with the humanism of Italy. What Benedict of Nursia was to Simeon Stylites, Colet and More were to Pulci and Machiavelli. The Italians had before them the lees of medieval Christianity in their foulest corruption. Their reverence for humanity grew to be mere pampering of the intellect or of the senses. In England, as the evil was less intense, the reaction was less intense also. The old Church life lives on in the words of Colet, interpenetrated with a new spirit of inquiry and a new longing for a reign of justice rather than for self-mortification. In More we have the old political life living on with fresh and increased reverence for the poor and the oppressed. 'The Prince' of Machiavelli is appalling for its cruelty and its cynicism. The 'Utopia' blends the spirit of reasoned kindliness and the spirit of reasoned self-denial, with the reverence for men simply as men apart from their piety or their virtue. Sir Thomas More goes forth to the highways and the hedges in search of the vagrant and the robber, to win them not for the life to come, but for the honest citizenship of the present world. Nor was it only in such men as More that the many-sidedness of English life was manifested. Those aims which with him were blended together in sweet harmony are to be found side by side incoherently in Henry VIII. With all the love of pleasure of an Alexander VI., he never gave himself so entirely over to vice as that most unblushing of the Italian popes. With all the cruel wilfulness of Cæsar Borgia, he never equalled the shameless villanies of that most atrocious of Italian tyrants. He preferred to satisfy his lust under the forms of marriage, and to satisfy his wrath under the forms of СНАР. VI. СНАР. § 5. The Separation from Rome. Growth of legal procedure. He may not have been consciously self-seeking. He took a real interest in learning. He may have had a vague desire to live uprightly and honourably, though his effort only led to a disgraceful satisfaction with the appearance of truth and justice, whilst their reality was trodden under foot. The separation from Rome was effected in a way in which such a man was likely to effect it. It sprang from a purely personal and even a sensual motive. Henry threw off the authority of the Pope simply because he was tired of a staid and elderly wife, and had fallen in love with a flighty young woman. But the moment the thing was done, he justified his acts to himself in reforming the Church according to the ideas of the better men around him. There was to be no change in the doctrine preached, but there was to be a change in the habits of those by whom it was preached. The clergy were to cease to be untruthful and vicious. The monasteries, already partly emptied by the growing unpopularity of the monastic life, were to be destroyed as abodes of sloth and corruption. Images were to be destroyed, not because their use was wrong, but because they had been made the instruments of fraud by their cheating owners. Henry did not purpose to go further than to purify the old Christianity by an admixture of intellectual criticism and moral earnestness. § 6. By placing himself at the head of such a work, Despotism. Henry rendered himself more despotic than he had been before. The destruction of the monasteries, the compulsory obedience of the clergy to the king as Supreme Head of the Church, and their separation from the See of Rome, from which they had once derived their union and their force, combined to leave him unassailable by ecclesiastical resistance. The great temporal lords who still remained were smitten down, and their places taken by new families from among the lower gentry living upon his favour, looking to him for a share in the plunder of the monks, and dependent upon that plunder for the means of supporting a life of ostentatious profusion. Many of the great houses of modern England, the Russells, the Herberts, the Wriothesleys, owe their origin to that splendid court. Over them all towered the king's stately form, 'the majestic lord that broke the bonds of Rome,' and whose course through life was accompanied by the frequent thud of the executioner's axe. Before the bare enunciation of the royal will all resistance was silenced. The spirit of the Renaissance, of the new learning, as it was called in England, was not a spirit of liberty. Those who like Sir Thomas More and Fisher refused to lay their honour in the dust before the royal despot, had to fall back on the old traditional standing-point of Anselm and Becket, and to defy the commands of Henry in the name of the papal authority. Others amongst the representatives of the new learning floated with the stream, made themselves the instruments of the king's will, like Cromwell or like Cranmer, and, whilst applying their faculties to the criticism of the received theology, took care never, even in thought, to raise a protest against the deeds of the sovereign who had become to them as one in the place of God. The protest of Sir Thomas More was made in the name of a system which it was impossible to revive. But unless the spirit of Anselm could live again, England, in spite of the new learning, was doomed to corruption and to the catastrophe which is the natural result of corruption. If there was to be any heroism amongst men, any selfdevotion, any power of resistance to tyranny and wrong, there must be something more awakened in them than a reverence for human nature, and for the pleasures of СНАР. VI. СНАР. § 7. The Protestants. the flesh and the intellect. Unless the sense of individual responsibility could be called out, unless the spiritual powers could be quickened into new life, there might be progress in knowledge, but there would be no moral growth. To the ideal of the new learning must be added the ideal of Protestantism. Protestantism was far more than a change of doctrine. It was a reversal of the poles of religious thought and feeling. In the Medieval Church each man aimed at casting off his individuality, at bringing himself under definite rules, till he reached the absolute self-renunciation of the perfect monk. The Protestant spirit strengthened each man's individuality by the direct contemplation of One who was higher and holier than himself. Man was to be made righteous by faith-by fixing the eye of the spirit on Him who was all righteous ;-to be made pure by faith-by fixing the eye of the spirit on Him who was all pure. The guiding clue of life was to be found within and not without. Forms and ceremonies, ecclesiastical institutions and persons, were rather interruptions than assistants to one who was endued with the full spirit of Protestantism. Its English disciples derived their faith from Zwingli rather than from Luther. They not merely threw off respect for the pope and the papal church, but for all the institutions to which men had become habituated. Even the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper retained its place in their respect only by the mental associations quickened by it. If such a religion had much in common with the new learning, it was opposed to it in many points. Like the new learning, its strength lay in the cultivation of the powers of man, not in their destruction. Like the new learning it cherished the development of intelligence and reason. But it did not, like the new learning, regard culture as an end in itself; still less did |