Progress From the First to the Fourteenth Century - James Aitken Wylie

with the authority of the Word of God. The long
and dismal obscuration of centuries they dispelled,
that the twin stars of liberty and knowledge might
shine forth, and that, conscience being unbound,
the intellect might awake from its deep
somnolency, and human society, renewing its
youth, might, after its halt of a thousand years,
resume its march towards its high goal.
We repeat the question — Whence came this
principle? And we ask our readers to mark well the
answer, for it is the key-note to the whole of our
vast subject, and places us, at the very outset, at the
springs of that long narration on which we are now
entering.
Protestantism is not solely the outcome of
human progress; it is no mere principle of
perfectibility inherent in humanity, and ranking as
one of its native powers, in virtue of which when
society becomes corrupt it can purify itself, and
when it is arrested in its course by some external
force, or stops from exhaustion, it can recruit its
energies and set forward anew on its path. It is
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