eventy. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.

The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic
church. They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church,
claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its
morals, as in the matter of the indulgences. They found courage to do
it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of
pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the
church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly
without the church's intervention. That was one side of the revolt: the
other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong
enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be
impatient of any foreign control.

But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a
little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended
with the authority of the Roman priesthood. Theirs was in no sense an
intellectually creative movement. Politically and socially it had great
effects. Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_.
Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly. The early Protestants
found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human
nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by the
sense that authority was weakening. They saw no other resource, their
own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought
no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural
world. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its
spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught;
its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute. The traditional Protestant
orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled.
Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the
imagination is less strong.

But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a
supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on
the minds of men. Shakspere paints the most various, active, and
passionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark
with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost
unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's
brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a
hereafter soothes