the Renaissance

The Mediaeval Attitude.

When due regard is paid to these miscellaneous evidences of intellectual and sensual freedom dur ing the middle ages, it will be seen that there were by no means lacking elements of native vigour ready to burst forth. What was wanting was not vitality and licence, not audacity of speculation, not lawless instinct or rebellious impulse. It was rather the right touch on life, the right feeling for human independence, the right way of approaching the materials of philosophy, religion, scholar ship and literature that failed. The courage that is born of knowl edge, the calm strength begotten by a positive attitude of mind, face to face with the dominant over-shadowing sphinx of theology, were lacking. We may fairly say that natural and untaught people had more of the just intuition that was needed than learned folk trained in the schools. But these people were rendered licentious in revolt or impotent for salutary action by ignorance, by terror, by uneasy dread of the doom declared for heretics and rebels.

The massive vengeance of the Church hung over them, like a heavy sword suspended in the cloudy air. Superstition and stu pidity hedged them in on every side, so that sorcery and magic seemed the only means of winning power over nature or insight into mysteries surrounding human life. The path from darkness to light was lost ; thought was involved in allegory ; the study of nature had been perverted into an inept system of grotesque and pious parable-mongering; the pursuit of truth had become a game of wordy dialectics The other world, with its imagined heaven and hell, haunted the conscience like a nightmare. However sweet

this world seemed, however fair the flesh, both world and flesh were theoretically given over to the devil. It was not worth while to master and economize the resources of this earth, to utilize the good and ameliorate the evils of this life, while every one agreed, in theory at any rate, that the present was but a bad prelude to an infinitely worse or infinitely better future. To escape from these preoccupations and prejudices except upon the path of con scious and deliberate sin was impossible for all but minds of rarest quality and courage ; and these were too often reduced to the recantation of their supposed errors no less by some secret clinging sense of guilt than by the Church's iron hand. Man and the actual universe kept on reasserting their rights and claims, announcing their goodliness and delightfulness, in one way or another ; but they were always being thrust back again into Cim merian regions of abstractions, fictions, visions, spectral hopes and fears, in the midst of which the intellect somnambulistically moved upon an unknown way.