312 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



men throughout the world proceed from a like beginning; consist of, and are 

 nourished by like elements, draw from the same principle the same vital 

 breath, enjoy the same care of heaven, pass through life alike, and alike die."* 

 To which I shall only add, that, as Christianity is the most perfect kind of 

 knowledg:e, it must essentially produce the most perfect kind of happiness. 

 It is the golden everlasting chain let down from heaven to earth ; the ladder 

 that appeared to the patriarch in his dream ; when he beheld Jehovah at its 

 top, and the angels of God ascending and descending with messages of grace 

 to mankind. 



LECTURE XIII. 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



In the last lecture, we continued our progress through that general history 

 of science and literature, which we had commenced in the lecture that pre- 

 ceded it; and having, in the first of these studies, brought dovvn the subject 

 from the most celebrated times of Athens and Rome to the decline « the 

 Roman empire, we waded, in the second, through the barren and cheerless 

 period of the dark or middle ages, extending from the fall of Rome before the 

 barbarous arms of the Goths, in the fifth century, to the fall of Constan- 

 tinople before the no less barbarous arms of the Turks, in the fifteenth cen- 

 tury ; — exploring our way as well as we were able, by the occasional guidance 

 of a few transitory and uncertain beacons, amid the desolate realms of men- 

 tal darkness and chaos by which we were surrounded, till we reached the 

 auspicious hour in which the voice of the Almighty once more exclaimed 

 throughout the dead and dreary waste, " Let there be light ! — and there 



WAS LIGHT !" 



The period of the revival of letters in Christendom is, in many respects, 

 one of the most brilliant eras in human history. Without the intervention 

 of a miracle we behold a flood of noonday bursting all at once over every 

 quarter of the horizon, and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years ; we 

 behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian moun- 

 tains to the Pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, waking as from a 

 profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure ; ignorance falling pros- 

 trate before advancing knowledge ; brutality and barbarism giving way to 

 science and polite letters; vice and anarchy to order and moral conduct; and 

 idolatry, hypocrisy, and superstition to the pure simplicity of Christian truth, 

 Hence, in some places, we trace the fall of feudal slavery and vassalage — in 

 others of popish tyranny and imposition — and in every place a juster sense of 

 relative duties and of the real dignity of man. Hence the origin of those im- 

 portant inventions, paper and clock-making, printing, telescopes, and gunpow- 

 der ; and hence, too, the first insight into the modern doctrine of the circula- 

 tion of the blood ; and the wonderful discoveries of the mariner's compass, the 

 sphericity of the earth's surface, and the revolution of the planets around the 

 sun. Hence, Portugal, with a bold and adventurous canvass, doubled the Cape 

 of Good Hope, and realized a maritime passage to India; Spain explored and 

 established herself in a new world ; and England, in the person of the intre- 

 pid Drake, for the first time circumnavigated the globe ; while Galileo, by the 

 marvellous invention and application of his telescope, unfolded to us not 

 another world alone, but systems of worlds upon worlds in endless succession 

 throughout the heavens ; all which astonishing series of splendid facts and 

 transactions, together with various others of nearly equal importance, crowd 

 ijpon each other within the short period to which we are now confining our 



» I>e Nugis Curialium; Harris, il 525. 



