es which
were now beginning to operate.(300)

The fifteenth century was a remarkable period for Europe, and preeminently
for Italy. During several ages Italy had grown great by means of commerce
and religion. The crusades, which had impoverished the rest of Europe, had
enriched her; and the subjugation of the nations to the court of Rome had
made her the treasury of Europe. Material wealth permitted the
encouragement of the study of literature, which relations of commerce or
of conquest with the Greek empire had been the means of reviving.
Manuscripts were collected, and the remains of monuments of classic art
were studied. The love of antiquity gave perfection to art, and influenced
literature. The work which centuries had slowly prepared now came to
perfection. The scholastic philosophy declined; the sources of
ecclesiastical education and of the existing religion were weakened; and
by the close of the fifteenth century the tone of the age was in all
respects changed. The devotion which had expressed itself in the great
Gothic works of devotion of early ages was expiring, at least in Italy,
and art itself gradually became secular, and expressed ideas more earthly.

When such a moment of material prosperity, combined with intellectual and
social change, ensues immediately on the movement previously sketched, we
should expect to find religion subjected to re-examination, and placed in
temporary peril. The history confirms the supposition. If we regard this
crisis as embracing about two centuries and a quarter,(301) comprehending
the classical revival, the opening of a new geographical world, and the
great religious changes of the Reformation,--a period commencing with the
Renaissance, and closed by the creation of modern philosophy;--we shall
find two principal movements of unbelief for investigation, the one caused
by literature, a return to a spirit of heathenism analogous to that
already described in Julian; the second caused by philosophy, a revival of
pantheism. The first belonged especially to the close of the fifteenth
century, and had its seat for the most part in Tuscany and Rome; the
second to the sixteenth, and was represented in the university of Padua.
In both these movements, especially in the former, the open expression of
unbelief in literature is rare, though the incidental proofs of its
existence are abundant. It was a time of the dissolution of faith, not of
overt attack. Unbelief was Epicurean indiff