arose between these two powers and designs. The council summoned John Huss and Jerome of Prague to Constance, and condemned them as heretics and revolutionists. These events are perfectly intelligible to us at the present day. We can very well understand this simultaneousness of separate reforms-enterprises undertaken, one by the governments, the other by the people, opposed to one another, and yet emanating from the same cause and tending to the same end, and, in fine, although at war with each other, still concurring to the same result. This is what occurred in the fifteenth century. The popular reform of John Huss was for the instant stifled; the war of the Hussites broke forth three or four years after the death of the irmaster. It lasted long, and was violent, but the Empire finally triumphed. But as the reform of the councils had failed, as the end which they pursued had not been attained, the popular reform ceased not to ferment. It watched the first opportunity, and found it at the commencement of the sixteenth century. If the reform undertaken by the councils had been well carried out, the Reformation might have been prevented. But one or the other must have succeeded; their coincidence shows a necessity.

This, then, is the state in which Europe was left by the fifteenth century with regard to religious matters—an aristoeratical reform unsuccessfully attempted, and a popular reform commenced, stifled, and always ready to re-appear. But it was not to the sphere of religious creeds that the fermentation of the human mind at this epoch was confined. It was in the course of the fourteenth century, as you all know, that Greek and Roman antiquity were, so to speak, restored in Europe. You know with what eagerness Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and all their contemporaries sought for the Greek and Latin manuscripts, and published and promulgated them, and what noise and transports the least discovery of this kind excited.

In the midst of this excitement, a school was commenced in Europe which has played a very much more important part in the development of the human mind than has generally been attributed to it: this was the classical school. Let me warn you from attaching the same sense to this word which we give to it in the present day; it was then a very different thing from a literary system or contest. The classical school of that period was inflamed with admiration, not only

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for the writings of the ancients, for Virgil and Homer, but for the whole of ancient society, for its institutions, opinions, and philosophy, as well as for its literature. It must be confessed that antiquity, under the heads of politics, philosophy, and literature, was far superior to the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It cannot therefore be wondered at that it should exercise so great a sway, or that for the most part elevated, active, refined, and fastidious minds, should take a disgust at the coarse manners, confused ideas, and barbarous forms of their own times, and that they should devote themselves with enthusiasm to the study, and almost to the worship of a society at once more regular and developed. Thus was formed that school of free thinkers which appeared at the commencement of the fifteenth century, and in which prelates, jurisconsults, and scholars, met together.

Amidst this excitement happened the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the fall of the Eastern empire, and the flight into Italy of the Greek fugitives. They brought with them a higher knowledge of antiquity, numerous manuscripts, and a thousand new means of studying ancient civilization. The redoubled admiration and ardour with which the classical school was animated may easily be imagined. This was the time of the most brilliant development of the high clergy, particularly in Italy, not as regards political power, properly speaking, but in point of luxury and wealth; they abandoned themselves with pride to all the pleasures of a voluptuous, indolent, elegant, and licentious civilization to the taste for letters and arts, and for social and material enjoyments. Look at the kind of life led by the men who played a great political and literary part at this epoch-by Cardinal Bembo, for instance; you will be surprised at the mixture of sybaritism and intellectual development, of effeminate manners and hardihood of mind. One would think, indeed, when we glance over this epoch, when we are present at the spectacle of its ideas and the state of its moral relations, one would think we were living in France in the midst of the eighteenth century. There is the same taste for intellectual excitement, for new ideas, for an easy, agreeable life; the same effeminateness and licentiousness; the same deficiency in political energy and moral faith, with a singular sincerity and activity of mind. The

literati of the fifteenth century were, with regard to the prelates of the high church, in the same relation as men of letters and philosophers of the eighteenth century with the high aristocracy; they all had the same opinions and the same manners, lived harmoniously together, and did not trouble themselves about the commotions that were in preparation around them. The prelates of the fifteenth century, commencing with Cardinal Bembo, most certainly no more foresaw Luther and Calvin than the people of the court foresaw the French revolution. The position, however, was analogous.

Three great facts, then, present themselves at this epoch in the moral order: first, an ecclesiastical reform attempted by the church herself; secondly, a popular religious reform; and finally an intellectual reform, which gave rise to a school of free thinkers. And all these metamorphoses were in preparation amidst the greatest political change which had taken place in Europe, amidst the work of centralization of people and governments.

This was not all. This also was the time of the greatest external activity of mankind; it was a period of voyages, enterprises, discoveries, and inventions of all kinds. This was the time of the great expeditions of the Portuguese along the coast of Africa, of the discovery of the passage of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco de Gama, of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and of the wonderful extension of European commerce. A thousand new inventions came forth; others already known, but only within a narrow sphere, became popular and of common use. Gunpowder changed the system of war, the compass changed the system of navigation. The art of oil painting developed itself, and covered Europe with masterpieces of art: engraving on copper, invented in 1460, multiplied and promulgated them. Linen paper became common; and lastly, from 1436 to 1452, printing was invented; printing, the theme of so much declamation and so many common-places, but the merit and effects of which no common-place nor any declamation can ever exhaust.

You see what was the greatness and activity of this century—a greatness still only partially apparent, an activity, the results of which have not yet been fully developed.

Violent reforms seem unsuccessful, governments strengthened, and nations pacified. It might be thought that society was preparing to enjoy a better order of things, amidst a more rapid progress. But the powerful revolutions of the sixteenth century were impending: the fifteenth had been preparing them. They will be the subject of my next lecture.

TWELFTH LECTURE.

Object of the lecture-Difficulty of distinguishing general facts in modern history-Picture of Europe in the sixteenth century-Danger of precipitate generalization-Various causes assigned to the Reformation-Its dominant character was the insurrection of the human mind against absolute power in the intellectual order-Evidences of this fact-Fate o the Reformation in different countries-Weak side of the ReformationThe Jesuits-Analogy between the revolutions of religious society and those of civil society.

We have often deplored the disorder and chaos of European society; we have complained of the difficulty of understanding and describing a society thus scattered, incoherent, and broken up; we have longed for, and patiently invoked, the epoch of general interests, order, and social unity. We have now arrived at it; we are entering upon the epoch when all is general facts and general ideas, the epoch of order and unity. We shall here encounter a difficulty of another kind. Hitherto we have had much trouble in connecting facts with one another, in making them co-ordinate, in perceiving whatever they may possess in common, and distinguishing some completeness. Everything reverses itself in modern Europe; all the elements and incidents of social life modify themselves, and act and react on one another; the relations of men among themselves become much more numerous and complicated. It is the same in their relations with the government of the state, the same in the relations of the states among themselves, the same in ideas and in the works of the human mind. In the times which we have gone through, a large number of facts passed away isolated, foreign to one another, and without reciprocal influence.