s of truth which were most needed to
give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in
the din and confusion of party warfare.

There was a short but glorious period--the years from 1517 to
1523--during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual
travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth
of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating
forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the
Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They
had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval
mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more
than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics
and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right
of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he
has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had
failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary
culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness
of life which the newly discovered classical literature revealed as
having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful
comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable
passion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new
models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered.
First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had
carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer
recognize the double world scheme--a divine realm set over against an
undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the
spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the
world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the
flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by
contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and
liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in classical
literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they
studied the New Testament documents themselves and became freed from
the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message
dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the
key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of
Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics.