ny a common
speech and a common Bible. It was little wonder that in such times the
old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into
fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there
developed--at any rate in England and in Germany--a national Church. The
unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone.
_Cuius regio eius religio_. To each region its religion; and to each
nation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begun
as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan
representative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years
after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and
Lope de Vega in Spain.

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind.
It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain: England was seeking to
maintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a world
with which we are familiar--a world of national languages, national
religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State
behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity.
But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend the
bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz,
fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; and
a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the
French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenth
century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet
serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it
could play the part of an international university, and provide a common
centre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity of
the Middle Ages was gone--gone past recall. Between those days and the
new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much was
lost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to the
currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. It
would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which
should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the
new world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the old
world was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will say
in his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evil
spirits--nationalism and commerc