issance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a
mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits,
in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the
Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the
recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of
history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached
chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection
between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human
spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is
the true philosophy of history.

The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
mediaeval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
successfully combated in North Italy, in France, and in Bohemia were the
precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as
distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and
God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The
principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous.
Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it
opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other
side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been
named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with
the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the
conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating
the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national
politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It
was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotis