e
civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed; that
there was an end of that palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of
body and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete forms, which
made men endure every degree of evil and believe every degree of
absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all
political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own
thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the
ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it
in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to
reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo and
Raphael.

The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for this
intellectual freedom and self-cognizance which they not only enjoyed
themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the
loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown
aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in
traditional institutions, they had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild.
In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught
them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been
called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered
that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had
been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and
judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose;
to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had
been taught and worshipped; to those priests and monks who themselves
most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be
a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so
much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of
error; so many innocent things had been denounced as sins that sinful
ones at length ceased to be reprobated; people had so often found
themselves sympathizing with supposed criminals, that they soon lost
their horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated from moral
indignation: it was the retribution, not of the unnatural and immoral,
but of the unlawful; and unlawful with respect to a law made without
reference to reason and instinct. As reason and instinct were thus set
at defiance, but could not be silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in
w