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et of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just begun his career. To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. It was proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity. This was refused on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and refused in language of the utmost violence. It was stated that the real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in Rome. Indulgences were branded as blood-letting. When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a match to a heap of inflammable material. The whole nationalist movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous separatist tendencies. SECTION 7. THE HUMANISTS But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides. The revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The Renaissance stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called "Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of the fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth. The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as far as Dante [Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements, such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of the universe. His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on the _Summa theologiae_ of Aquinas; it is all about the other world. The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch, 1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit dawned on them. Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed incompatible with faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world as Dante was a prophet of the next. [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375] Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting himself to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, r
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