t thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the
state, both of which started on their paths of conquest then, are now
attacked.

Again, the application of any statistical method makes the former ages
seem to shrink in comparison {698} with the present. In population and
wealth, in war and in science we are immeasurably larger than our
ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than had Henry VIII,
and many a college boy knows more astronomy than did Kepler. But if we
judge the greatness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from
us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets dreamed and by what
its strong men accomplished, the importance of the sixteenth century
can be appreciated.

[Sidenote: An age of aspiration]

It was an "experiencing" age. It loved sensation with the greediness
of childhood; it intoxicated itself with Rabelais and Titian, with the
gold of Peru and with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was a
daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for spiritual liberty, or
they gave their lives with Magellan to compass the earth or with Bruno
to span the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed with
Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ-like, or with More of the
place where they should be just; or with Michelangelo it pondered the
meaning of sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. And of
this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, was born the
world's supreme poet with an eye to see the deepest and a tongue to
tell the most of the human heart. Truly such a generation was not a
poor, nor a backward one. Rather it was great in what it achieved,
sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in ripe wisdom and in heroic
deeds; full of light and of beauty and of life!

{699}

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be classified in
a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or
by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our
present purpose it will be convenient to classify them, according to
their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for
want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the
Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like
all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most,
historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When
dif