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Everywhere the modern centralised. bureaucratic nation was being developed. In France the long and fierce wars of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions gave opportunity for the consolidation of the monarchy, at last effected, as above said by Louis XI., the forerunner of the most successful king of France and the last successful one-Louis XIV. In England the Wars of the Roses were not so bitter as the French wars, and the people took small part in them, except as vassals or retainers of the households of the contending nobles; but they nevertheless played their part in the disruption of feudality, not only by the thinningout of the nobles slain in battle or on the scaffold, but also by helping directly to draw England into the world-market.

Under the medieval system the workmen, oppressed and protected by the lords of the manor and the guilds, were not available for the needs of commerce. The serfs ate up the part of the produce spared them by their lords; the guild craftsmen sold the produce of their own hands to their neighbours without the help of a middleman. In neither case

was there anything left over for the supply of a great market.

But England, one of the best pasture countries of the world, had in her even then capacities for profit-grinding, if the tillage system of the manor and the yeoman's holdings could be got rid of. The landowners, ruined by their long war, saw the demand for English wool, and set themselves to the task of helping evolution with much of the vigour and unscrupulous pettifogging which has since won for their race the temporary command of the world-market. The tenants were rack-rented, the yeomen were expropriated, the hinds were driven off the land into the towns, there to work as "free" labourers. England thus contributed her share to commerce, paying for it with nothing more important than the loss of the rough joviality, plenty, and independence of spirit, which once attracted the admiration of foreigners more crushed by the feudal system and by its abuses than were the English.

CHAPTER VII

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE

REFORMATION

THUS all over Europe commercialism was rising. New needs were being discovered by men who were gaining fresh mastery over nature, and were set free from old restraints to struggle for individual pre-eminence. A fresh intelligence and mental energy was shedding its light over the more sordid side of the period of change. The study of the Greek literature at first hand was aiding this new intelligence among cultivated men, and also, since they did but half understand its spirit, was warping their minds into fresh error. For the science of history and the critical observation of events had not yet been born; and to

the ardent spirits of the Renaissance, there had never been but two peoples worth notice-to wit, the Greeks and Romans, whom their new disciples strove to imitate in every thing which was deemed of importance at the time.

Now also, as at all periods of intellectual ferment, Occultism, that is the magical conception of nature, obtained a numerous following. This, of course, was partly the result of the study of the recently-discovered writings of the last period of transition,—that of the early Christian centuries, the Neo-Platonic and other Hermetic literature, joined to the fact that science, in the modern acceptation of the word, was in its first dawning. The science of the Renaissance is mainly a systematisation of mediæval traditional science, with an admixture of the later classical and oriental theories, to which no doubt is added a certain amount of the results of genuine observation. It is represented by such men as Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and Cornelius Agrippa, and, we may add, by the mythical Dr. Faustus.

Amidst all this it is clear that the old

religion would no longer serve the new spirit of the times. The mediæval church, the kingdom of heaven on earth, in full sympathy with the temporal hierarchy, in which also every one had his divinely appointed place, and which restricted commerce and forbade usury, such was no religion for the new commercialism; the latter's creed must have nothing to do with the business of this world; so the individualist ethics of early Christianity, which had been kept in the background during the period of the medieval church, were once more brought to the front, and took the place of the corporate ethics of that church, of which each one of the "faithful" was but a part.

A new form of Christianity, therefore, had to be found to suit the needs of the new Europe which was being born: but this adaptation of Christianity took two shapes, so widely different from each other that they have usually been opposed as contrasting religions, which is an inaccurate view to take of the matter, since they are but two sides of the same shield.

These two forms were Protestantism, and modern or Jesuitised Catholicism;

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