352 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



SO mean as to contaminate the blood of their families by such base alliances 

 for the sake of the rich dowries which they brought. 



" Through the blind devotion and munificence of princes and nobles, 

 monasteries, those nurseries of superstition and idleness, had greatly mul- 

 tiplied in the nation ; and though they had universally degenerated, and 

 were notoriously become the haunts of lewdness and debauchery, it was 

 deemed impious and sacrilegious to reduce their number, abridge their 

 privileges, or alienate their funds. 



" The Ignorance of the clergy respecting religion was as gross as the dis- 

 soluteness of their morals. Even bishops were not ashamed to confess 

 that they were unacquainted with the canon of their faith, and had never 

 read any part of the sacred Scriptures, except what they met with in their 

 missals."* 



It is not, then, to be wondered at, that, under so repugnant and scan- 

 dahzing a state of things, notwithstanding the darkness and deformity of 

 the times, mankind should in every part of Europe be growing ripe for a 

 change, and, that the still small voice of the conscientious few, who exposed 

 and resisted the corruption around them, should be working with a whole- 

 some ferment amidst the general mass ; that that elastic power of the 

 human mind, which, in our own day, we have seen in Spain, in Russia, in 

 Germany, and may yet, perhaps, see in France,t rising with indignant re- 

 coil against the domestic or foreign tyranny by which it had been long 

 bowed down, should be swelling, and labouring, and maturing to the same 

 effect, in the case before us ; co-operating with the intrepid voice of Wyck- 

 liff in our own country, and with the ashes of Huss and Jeremy of Prague, 

 that were not in vain sprinkled over the guilty soil of Switzerland, and ef- 

 fecting that important revolution, which reason, religion, and common 

 sense, equally vilified and insulted, equally called aloud for and sanctioned. 



II. At this very period^ in the year of our own era 1445, Constantino- 

 .ple, the delight and glory of Constantino, who founded and named it 

 after his own name ; the metropolis of the eastern empire ; the rival of 

 ancient Rome ; the seat of elegance, refinement, and luxury ; the asylum 

 of science upon its banishment from the west of Europe, by the savage 

 incursions of the northern tribes ; where the language of Homer, and 

 Herodotus, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Sophocles, and Demosthenes, 

 was still spoken as the common tongue, and their writings still studied and 

 idolized, — fell prostrate before the haughty banners of the Turks, the most 

 enterprising, but, at the same time, the rudest and most barbarous of all 

 ' the Saracen powers. All Europe trembled at the intelligence, and an titter 

 extinction was predicted to the little learning and virtue which were now 

 beginning to glimmer in the midst of the general darkness. 



The fear, however, was witiiout foundation ; and the very event which 

 was apprehended, and with much reason, to be most fatal to the cause of 

 true religion and science, proved most propitious to their promotion. Thus 

 inscrutable are the ways of Providence, in a thousand instances, to the cal- 

 culations of man, and thus triumphant the Divine government when it seems 

 most trampled upon. The career of the Crescent, though it overran the 

 most delightful provinces of the Greek empire, and spread to an enormous 

 extent]tQwards the East, did not, except in a few instances, advance farther 

 in a north-western direction than the borders of Transylvania and Hun- 



♦ Life of John Knox, pp. 14-28. 

 leon'^^^^eis''''^****" fulfiUed. The passa^^e was delivered, during the usurpation of Napo- 



