to a despotism, by right of which the king
could say, 'L'Etat c'est moi.' England developed her complicated
constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the same time
the Latin Church underwent a similar process of transformation. The
Papacy became more autocratic. Like the king, the Pope began to say,
'L'Eglise c'est moi.' This merging of the mediaeval State and mediaeval
Church in the personal supremacy of King and Pope may be termed the
special feature of the last age of feudalism which preceded the
Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary conditions and external
circumstances were prepared. The organization of the five great nations,
and the leveling of political and spiritual interests under political
and spiritual despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of
which the Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.

Meanwhile, it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
Far from that: within the middle age itself, over and over again, the
reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
lips, and cried that 'the Gospel of the Father was past, the Gospel of
the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit was to be.' These three
men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
ready to resume their sway. The premature civilization of that favored
region, so cruelly extinguished by the Church, was itself a reaction of
nature against the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical discipline;
while the songs of the wandering students, known under the title of
_Carmina Burana_, indicate a revival of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling
in the very stronghold of mediaeval learning. W