re also ages in which the Church had exerted supreme authority,
antagonism was not to be averted. The endeavour was not only to make
the range of men's thought more comprehensive, but to enrich it with
the rejected wisdom of paganism. Religion occupied a narrower space
in the new views of life than in those of Dante and the preceding
time. The sense of sinfulness was weaker among the Humanists, the
standard of virtue was lower; and this was common to the most
brilliant of the Italian prelates, such as Aeneas Sylvius, with the
king of the Renaissance, Erasmus himself.

Lorenzo Valla, the strongest of the Italian Humanists, is also the one
who best exhibits the magnitude of the change that was going on in the
minds of men. He had learnt to be a critic, and, what was more rare,
a historical critic. He wrote against the belief in the writings of
Dionysius the Areopagite, which was one of the fixed positions of
theology, then and long after. When the Greeks at the Council of
Florence declared themselves unacquainted with the Apostles' Creed,
Valla warned the Latins not to speak of it as an apostolic
composition. During a war between Rome and Naples, Valla, in the
Neapolitan service, attacked the Donation of Constantine as the basis
of the temporal power, and exhorted Pope Eugenius to abandon what was
a usurpation, and a usurpation founded on fraud. Formidable in all
the armour of the new learning, he did more than any other man to
spread the conviction that the favourite arguments of the clergy were
destined to go down before the better opinion of profane scholars.
Valla is also the link between Italy and Germany. His critical essay
on the New Testament in the Vulgate influenced Erasmus, who published
it in 1505. His tract against the Donation, as the title-deed of the
temporal sovereignty, was printed by Ulrich von Hutten, and spread
that belief that the Pope was an antichrist, which was afterwards an
important article of the Huguenot Church. He was also a forerunner of
the Reformation by his tract on the Freedom of the Will. This man,
who displayed so conspicuously the resentful and iconoclastic spirit,
the religious scepticism, the moral indifference, the aversion for the
papal sovereignty, the contempt for the laws and politics of
feudalism, the hope and expectation of a mighty change, was an
official in the Pope's household.

After the discussion with the Greeks at Florence it was clear to all
men that the