st
in which all the nations of Europe by degrees took some part. Thus the
war forms to a certain extent a centre around which the movements of the
age are grouped. England also had her great religious strife, her
Puritan revolution, which collapsed in 1660. Yet on the whole the age is
political even more than religious, and the ablest statesman of the day,
Richelieu, the most successful guardian France has ever known, reaped
for his own land all the benefits of the world-wide turmoil. France,
which had so often seemed on the point of assuming the foremost place in
Europe and had been so often checked, now advanced definitely to the
front. The Bourbons, descendants of Henry IV, took the rank of the
decaying Hapsburg family as the chief rulers of Europe. Historians often
call this the age of Richelieu.

DECAY OF THE HAPSBURG POWER

Spain and Austria, the two great Hapsburg states, both decayed in power.
Italy, the Hapsburg dependent, lost the last vestiges of her ancient
intellectual supremacy. Everywhere the South of Europe gave place to the
North.

The blight of the Inquisition was upon Spain. The Moors were banished,
the Jews were banished; and it had been the industry of these two races
which had largely supported the pride and laziness of the hidalgos. In
Italy, too, the Inquisition held sway. Galileo with his telescope
revealed facts which proved the theories of Copernicus, and made
impossible the ancient idea that our earth was the centre of the
universe.[1] All Europe rang with his discoveries; but the Church
refused to understand, forbade him to teach doctrines which it declared
heretical. For a time the astronomer's mouth was closed, but not so the
minds of those who had listened to him. In England, where thought was
free, Harvey founded medical science by his proof of the circulation of
the blood;[2] the Lord Chancellor Bacon wrote his celebrated _Novum
Organum_, pointing out to modern investigators the methods they must
follow. In Germany Comenius revitalized the dead world of education.[3]
In France Descartes created within his own mind a revolution scarce less
important than that of Luther. He freed philosophy from its thraldom to
religion. He bade the mind of man to stand by itself, lone in the midst
of an unmeasured universe, and discover of what one thing it could feel
assured by its own unbiassed thought. His famous first conclusion, "I
think, therefore I exist," stands as the corner-stone of modern