d to which of them
he should leave the ring, he promised it to each of them privately, and
then in order to satisfy them all caused a goldsmith to make two other
rings so closely resembling the true ring that he was unable to
distinguish them himself. On his death-bed he gave each of them a ring,
and each claimed to be his heir, but no one could prove his title
because the rings were indistinguishable, and the suit at law lasts till
this day. It is even so, my lord, with the three religions, given by God
to the three peoples. They each think they have the true religion, but
which of them really has it, is a question, like that of the rings,
still undecided." This sceptical story became famous in the eighteenth
century, when the German poet, Lessing, built upon it his drama Nathan
the Sage, which was intended to show the unreasonableness of
intolerance.

CHAPTER IV

PROSPECT OF DELIVERANCE

(THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION)

THE intellectual and social movement which was to dispel the darkness of
the

[72] Middle Ages and prepare the way for those who would ultimately
deliver reason from her prison, began in Italy in the thirteenth
century. The misty veil woven of credulity and infantile naivete which
had hung over men's souls and protected them from understanding either
themselves or their relation to the world began to lift. The individual
began to feel his separate individuality, to be conscious of his own
value as a person apart from his race or country (as in the later ages
of Greece and Rome); and the world around him began to emerge from the
mists of mediaeval dreams. The change was due to the political and
social conditions of the little Italian States, of which some were
republics and others governed by tyrants.

To the human world, thus unveiling itself, the individual who sought to
make it serve his purposes required a guide; and the guide was found in
the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. Hence the whole
transformation, which presently extended from Italy to Northern Europe,
is known as the Renaissance, or rebirth of classical antiquity. But the
awakened interest in classical literature while it coloured the
character and stimulated the growth of the movement, supplying new
ideals and suggesting new points of view, was only the form in which the
change of spirit

[73] began to express itself in the fourteenth century. The change might
conceivably have taken some other shape. Its true name