LIBERTY OF THOUGHT. 6 7 



and civilization tended to generate mental freedom from prejudice and 

 from authority. 



We also have help to free thought in the revival of classical learn- 

 ing. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, among the many compli- 

 cated causes which it would be difficult to trace, a general revival of 

 Latin literature took place, which greatly modified the mental state of 

 Europe. For the first time in centuries we find, feeble though it be, 

 an uprising against the universal credulity and against the universal 

 passion for theology. There was a strong desire for secular learning 

 beginning to stir the mind of Europe. A taste was developed for 

 philosophy, science, letters, and classical learning, an intellectual life 

 which, while more or less suppressed in one land or another, one gen- 

 eration or .another, by civil or ecclesiastical despotism, was destined 

 to increase all over Europe and to continue until the present. Men 

 thronged the universities to study not only theology, but also philoso- 

 phy, law, medicine, science, belles-lettres, and the old literature of 

 Greece and Rome. A desire arose among men to think for themselves 

 in every sphere of thought. At this revival there was introduced into 

 literature that principle of freedom to think which the Reformation 

 brought into religion, and which principle Cartesianism brought next 

 into philosophy ; and, next, the French Revolution, four centuries 

 from the beginning of the general movement, brought into politics. 



Again, we have the rise of free thought in religion. Church tyr- 

 anny was encountered by a resistance within the Church itself, which 

 resistance could not be overcome. Many could not be restrained, con- 

 fined, and controlled by the Church. ^Nowhere, in fact, did individual 

 reason more boldly assert itself than in heresies and sects in the Church 

 in their denial of the infallibility of creeds, councils, and popes. 

 The long rule of orthodoxy was broken through by many heresies, 

 which, though often repressed, broke out again as often, and with new 

 force and consistency. The minds of the learned were perplexed by 

 sudden doubts concerning the leading doctrines of faith. 



Every sort of new opinion in religion was entertained, notwith- 

 standing ecclesiastical authority. An impartial philosophy was pro- 

 claimed by Abelard. A stern and uncompromising infidelity was 

 taught in Seville and in Cordova, which infidelity began to overshadow 

 the mind of Christendom. A passion for astrology and for the fatal- 

 ism it implies revived, though there was, as yet, no general disposition 

 to rise above the traditional teachings and fixed systems of the 

 Church. - 



The Reformation was, among other things, an assertion of liberty of 

 thought ; was a partial emancipation of the mind of Western Christen- 

 dom from bondage ; was a teaching man to think for himself in the 

 specific instance of the claims of the Romish Church to control all in 

 religion ; was, if not a complete emancipation, at least a great increase 

 of liberty. This, in Germany, Denmark and Holland, England and 



