80 Timehri. 



and Italy was the first land they came to in which they could settle. Even 

 more momentous was the fact that the Turks now blocked the highways 

 between Europe and the East, and new trade routes had to be found. 

 Necessity being the mother of invention, Columbus in his attempt to find 

 a new trade routf discovered America in 1492, and Vasco da Gama got 

 round the Cape of Good Hope to India some five years later. 



(5) Reaction. An unprogressive condition of things cannot last forever 

 without producing a revolt, and the mental stagnation of the middle ages 

 could not satisfy the aspirations of men whose minds were now being 

 stimulated by all these causes. 



Such then were the opening phases and the immediate causes affect- 

 ing them. But before being able to appreciate them, it is necessary to 

 understand the condition of Europe in the Middle Ages. 



Contrasts are always attractive, and the easiest way to understand 

 the movement now in progress is to look upon the Middle Ages as a 

 period of unrelieved gloom and stagnation, and the Renaissance as the 

 sudden appearance of light and progress. The most striking features of 

 the Middle Ages are four : — (1) Power of the Church. (2) Submissiveness 

 to Authority. (3) Unity of Social and Political Organisation. (4) 

 Absence of Joyousness, Vitality and Vigour. 



The power of the mediaeval Church was very great, and so long as the 

 Church occupied itself with Religion, and the monks and clergy with good 

 works, they kept within their province and were a tremendous factor for 

 good. In the 11th century the Church was at its greatest, but gradually 

 the monasteries degenerated into a state of selfish lethargy or paid more 

 attention to business and intellectual pursuits than devotion to saintliness 

 and unselfishness. In the higher spheres of the Church, immense spiri- 

 tual authority brought it into conflict with temporal princes and we see 

 Pope Pius solemnly deposing Queen Elizabeth in his Bull of 1570. In its 

 effort to uphold a good moral standard and to combat heresy, the Church 

 adopted too great a rigidity of rul6. Its authority was unquestioned. It 

 discouraged interest in the physical lest the spiritual should suffer ; hence 

 science made no progress because scientific research was not tolerated. 

 Religion and philosophy suffered, because theological criticism was for- 

 bidden once the Church had spoken. The study of the human body was 

 forbidden, hence art and the appreciation of beauty were checked. 

 Naturally this produced a reaction.' This leads us to the second feature : 

 all must bow to authority, whether of Pope, convention or tradition. 

 Criticism was anathema ; the dislike of anything new, unusual or contrary 

 to past practice, seemed ingrained in the minds of men. Roger Bacon and 

 Galileo were persecuted not so much because their views were disliked, as 

 because such treatment of the authors of novelties was quite in accord 

 with public opinion of that time. Then we have the principle of Unity 

 underlying the social and political organisation. The world was looked 

 upon not as a collection of individual nations, but as one great political 

 society, and was based on the theory of universal monarchy. That God 

 meant the world to be ruled as one great state by His Representative was 



