Christendom at the Opening of the Sixteenth Century - James Aitken Wylie

continued to watch over the development of their
manners, the formation of their language, and the
growth of their literature and their art, of their laws
and their government; and thus, in the slow course
of the centuries, were laid firm and broad the
foundations of a new order of things. These tribes
had no past to look back upon. They had no storied
traditions and observances which they trembled to
break through. There was no spell upon them like
that which operated so mischievously upon the
Greek and Latin races. They were free to enter the
new path. Daring, adventurous, and liberty-loving,
we can trace their steady advance, step by step,
through the convulsions of the tenth century, the
intellectual awakening of the twelfth, and the
literary revival of the fifteenth, onward to the great
spiritual movement of the sixteenth.
It is at this great moral epoch that we are now
arrived. It will aid us if we pause in our narrative,
and glance for a moment at the constitution of
Europe, and note specially the spirit of its policy,
the play of its ambitions, and the crisis to which
matters were fast tending at the opening of the
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