the superstitious, the schools and schoolmen, on scholastic science, theology and its divines." Erasmus's exceeding severity to the latter shows that he had suffered much from them. "Their pride and irritability are such that they will come down upon me with their 600 conclusions and compel me to recant or declare me a heretic forthwith. They explain to their own satisfaction the most hidden mysteries; how the universe was constructed and arranged; through what channels the stain of original sin descends to posterity; how the miraculous birth of Christ was effected; how in the Eucharistic wafer the accidents can exist without a substance, and so forth; and they think themselves equal to the solutions of questions such as these: Whether God could have taken upon Himself the nature of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone, and how in that case a gourd could have preached, worked miracles, and be nailed to the cross; what Peter would have consecrated if he had consecrated the Eucharist at the moment when the body of Christ was hanging on the Cross." If Erasmus could boldly hold up to ridicule things which his education had taught him were the most sacred of all mysteries,—the reverence for which he had hardly shaken off when he came to England, being shocked and astonished at Colet's anger against Thomas Aquinas and his servile followers,his satire on ecclesiastical, social, and political affairs could not surely be wanting in candour and impartiality. The monks he places in a body among the goats on the left hand of God; his satire ascends even to the personality generally considered the most sacred and above criticism. The Pope Julius II. is alluded to as a decrepit old man, delighting in war. His remarks on the duty of kings must have been a commentary far from pleasant on the action of Henry VIII. He says "it is the duty of kings to seek their public and not their private good; but princes cast such care to the world, and only care for their own pleasure." When the memory of Empson and Dudley and of Henry VII. was fresh, words like the following were full of meaning: "They think they fill the position well if they hunt with diligence, if they keep good houses, if they can make gain to themselves by the sale of offices and places, if they can daily devise some new means of undermining the wealth of citizens and raking it into their own exchequer, disguising the iniquity of such proceedings by some specious pretence and show of legality." His views on the Pope are no less to the point, and enunciated with no less boldness.

Julius II., then on the Papal throne, marks an important

epoch in the history of the papacy—an epoch for which the great Hildebrand had in earlier times paved the way. Hildebrand had endeavoured to revive the spiritual supremacy of the papacy; he had tried to realise his ambitious conception of the Papal prerogative; he attempted to make the Pope in very truth the spiritual head of Christendom, the ruling power in that universal and mystic monarchy of which the Roman Emperor was supposed to be the temporal head. But in attempting to spiritualise the world he secularised the papacy. The line between the spiritual and temporal powers was vaguely defined, and Hildebrand brought these two powers into collision by the attempt to extend the spiritual dominion of the Church. Then began that duel of the Emperor and the Pope which destroyed for ever the theory and practice of a universal Roman empire, and gradually degraded the spiritual prestige of the papacy in Europe. The Pope had to seek for allies in the struggle with the Emperor: he divided Europe against itself, and sunk more and more to the position of a temporal monarch. Discredited by his immediate predecessors, it was ruined by Julius II. when he bent his energies to making the papacy a temporal Christian principality,-when, as Von Ranke says, "he devoted himself to the gratification of that innate love of war and conquest which was indeed the ruling passion of his life." Where was now the priesthood that could say, Lo! we have left all and followed thee? "And although," says Erasmus, war be a thing so savage that it becomes wild beasts rather than men, -so frantic that the poets feigned it to be the work of the furies, so pestilent that it blights at once all morality, so unjust that it can be best waged by the worst of ruffians, so impious that it has nothing in common with Christ, yet to the neglect of everything else he devotes himself to war alone." War was not only the condition of the papacy, it was also that of Europe. For Europe was in a state of transition, no longer recognising the Pope as spiritual head, or even as arbiter in international quarrels, and yet not so fully recognising its own existence as a system of contiguous states as to formulate rules of international intercourse. War was the only method of settling the claims of these growing states, each intent on self-aggrandisement, and thinking the prosperity of one nation must be grounded on the ruin of another. Emperor was intriguing by marriage to gain Hungary and Bohemia, to annex the Netherlands, Franche Comté and Artois, Castile and Aragon; and what aggrandisement he could not effect by marriage he tried to effect by arms, and to make what

The

he gained independent of Papal interference and hereditary in the house of Hapsburg. Louis of France was laying claim to a great part of Italy. Henry VIII., besides aiming at the conquest of France, was ready to be a candidate for the empire, and was plotting to secure the papacy for Wolsey. The neglect of national interests for what appeared to be but the selfish personal aims of kings, the absence of all international morality, the shameless breaches of faith continually occurring between the crowned heads, could not fail to rouse Erasmus. The political allusions in the Praise of Folly were but the prelude to his more serious political work, The Christian Prince.

In The Christian Prince, published 1516, Erasmus develops his theory of the duties of a prince in marked contrast to the practice he observed: "If you find you cannot defend your kingdom without violating justice, without shedding much human blood, without much injury to religion, lay it down and retire from it . . . a good prince never enters upon war at all unless after trying all possible means to avoid it." These views suggest by way of contrast those of Machiavelli in The Prince, written in 1513, with the same object, but in a far different spirit. “A prince," says Machiavelli, "should have but one object, one thought, one art the art of war;" and the comparison_brings out the intense dissimilarity between the course of the Renaissances in England and in Italy. In Italy the effort after the union of faith and reason had been given up. The Christian enthusiasm roused by Savonarola had passed away; thwarted, scorned, and disgraced, stripped of his friar's frock by the Bishop of Vasona, he had died amid the apparent ruin of all he had striven for, saying only "Christ did more for me." The spiritual and philosophic enthusiasm of Ficino and Pico had vanished. It was the fashion to scoff at Christianity, to believe only in the philosophy of Pliny and Aristotle. Machiavelli in The Prince had codified the maxims of the dominant anti-Christian school of politics; he boldly formulated the theory which all Europe was tacitly carrying into practice. He had the great quality of frankness, or, in other words, he had that shamelessness which denies to virtue even the faint compliment of belief. Hegel says it was necessity which drove him to it; it was his sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down the principles on which alone he thought a state could be formed under the circumstances "and though our idea of freedom is incompatible with the means which he proposes, both as the only available and also as wholly justifiable, including as these

do the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like, yet we must confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no other way, inasmuch as indomitable lawlessness and perfect depravity were thoroughly engrained in them." Macaulay believes in the "generous heart of Clement;" he quotes the rhetoric of the patriotic appeal to Lorenzo de Medici, for whom the treatise was penned, animated with the spirit of the prophecy of Petrarch, with which it closes :

"Lo! valour against rage

Shall take up arms, nor shall the fight be long,

For that old heritage

Of courage in Italian hearts is stout and strong."

But even the sum of Machiavelli's virtues cannot suffice to raise him out of the rank of depraved human nature. What makes a man great is not his capacity for understanding human nature as it is, but his capacity for understanding its possibilities, what it might be and what it can be, his capacity for connecting conduct with a high idea of duty, however depraved and degenerate be the world in which he has to live and act. But simplicity and goodness were to Machiavelli synonymous with ignorance and foolishness. The souls of those who, like Peter Soderini, could be guileless in a world of sin, were fit only to go to the limbo of babes. He is the true representative of Italian thought and action at this epoch, wanting in beliefs, wanting in ideals, in the conditions of healthy progress. He stands out in strong contrast to the men of the English school-men wanting, perhaps, in his subtlety and keenness of his thought, but whose morality was not determined by the force of existing circumstances, who were capable of energetic protest and free healthy criticism suggested by reverence for ideals. Of the political and social ideas of the English school More, stimulated probably by Erasmus, is the representative, as Colet is of its religious and educational aims. In his Utopia we have an exposition of the social and political aims of the New Learning, as in Colet's sermons and treatises we have the expression of its religious views.

PART II.-Its Work in Social and Political Criticism. MORE, Thomas, b. 1478; at Canterbury College, Oxford, 1492-93; studies at New Inn, 1494-95; enters Lincoln's Inn, 1496; meets Erasmus, 1498; enters Parliament, 1504; made under-sheriff, 1509; life at Court commences, 1518; made Lord Chancellor, 1529; resigns his office, 1532; executed, 1535.-Second part of Utopia written, 1515.—First, 1516.

More stands out not only as a representative of the New Learning on its political and social side, but as one of the most sincere and genial souls that have ever embodied their thoughts in literature. To no one can he better be compared than to Charles Lamb, possessing a nature charming in its simplicity and its spontaneity, yet capable at the same time of the most unflinching purpose and of the greatest heroism; guiding his conduct by a high idea of duty, yet neither "reproving other men's lives nor glorying in his own." No gratified sense of superiority is at the root of his satire: "it is animated by that loving laughter in which the only recognised superiority is the ideal self, the god within, holding the mirror and the Scourge for our pettiness as well as our neighbour's." He was born in 1478. His father, a successful lawyer, placed him, according to the custom of the times, in domestic service with the Archbishop and Cardinal Morton, a man of whom More speaks with enthusiasm in the first book of Utopia, who was celebrated as the friend of Edward IV. and the enemy of Richard III.; influential in raising Henry VII. to the throne, in promoting his schemes; known to posterity as the author of that obnoxious tax called "Morton's Fork." Here he imbibed culture and the ideas of courtly life, and so quick was his wit and so promising his intellect that the Cardinal entertained the highest hopes for his future. "This child here, waiting at table," he said one day, "whoever will live to see it, shall prove a marvellous man." When he was at Oxford in 1492-93 he first met Colet, who, though twelve years older, was then studying Greek under Grocyn and Linacre. Colet's opinion corroborated that of the Cardinal: More in his eyes was "the one genius of whom England can boast." He is "the sweetest Thomas," of whom Erasmus says: "When did nature mould a character more gentle, more endearing, more happy." His college career was prematurely cut short. His father, fearing that the study of the Greek language and philosophy, which had evidently a great charm for him, would deter him from that rigid and