The Chief End of Man | Page 7

history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of strong personalities.
No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the present phase, may be briefly shown.
Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell; worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity which Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church, either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit was possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But neither Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality. Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas, divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional, absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to the Bible only. A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of the hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed and bitterness that followed. The gain, as we see it, was that half of Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually, as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular temper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religious freedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securely established.
Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possible that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the great positive factor in modern advance. Step by step men have learned to know the condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world in which they live and the social world of which they are a part. The bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual life has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; then at times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming it with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals. Of the latest chapters in the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity, divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely natural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general trend of the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement, under the name of Evolution.
Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present its ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction of all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought. The moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to the church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists, reformers, statesmen, each after his thought. Out of the conflict and confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last appearing. More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before the universe may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos,--a beautiful order.
This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we study certain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives of succeeding generations. Our conventional division of centuries will serve as a convenient framework for four groups.
In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting