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systems, opinions, and prejudices against which 

 his gigantic effort was made. For, brilliant as 

 was the promise of the Renascence, yet in the 

 time of Harvey, and in the generation immediately 

 before him, the decay of the scholastic methods 

 and the worldliness of the Church, which in the 

 first half of the sixteenth century had favoured 

 the advance of secular culture, had led to a re- 

 action, not against Luther only but also against 

 all liberal learning and science. In the Vatican, 

 in the Sorbonne, in the Consistory, and even in the 

 courts of justice it was proclaimed that as these 

 studies make government more difficult, it were ill 

 to encourage them ! We have seen that the Faith, 

 though undermined and no longer catholic, was 

 aroused, and was terrible still ; orthodoxy was 

 crushing free thought in Italy; Alva was in Flanders, 

 and had been visited by Catherine de Medici at 

 Bayonne ; in France the ruthless religious wars 

 ended in the triumph of Rome ; Europe was over- 

 run by Dominicans and Franciscans; Trent was 

 long pregnant with anathema. Contrary sects 

 alike defied liberal culture ; and four years before 

 Harvey's birth the wolf, hidden under another 

 cloak, had torn Servetus Servetus who shared 

 with Colombo the honour of preparing the way for 



