No mode of mental activity could escape the play of perversion. Hooker's appeal to reason in Church policy was forever clouded by unreasoning resort to ancient texts. Bacon, complaining of the theological mortmain on all mental life, tacitly endorsed it by using the same tactic. With such standards in force at the upper levels of thought, a superstitious populace invited to find its sole light in the half-comprehended lore of ancient Palestine could make no progress on its own part towards knowledge of nature, of man's past, or of man's possibilities. Religious literature meant the semblance of culture without the reality. The sole measurable gains were æsthetic, and that mainly on the literary side; for the Biblical temper was hostile to the plastic arts, though men of religion could not but play their part in developing the instrument of language. Science was at a discount till men wearied of theological debate. By reaction, some similar results accrued within the scope of Catholicism in France and Italy. It is significant that "the importance of the anatomical description of the heart by Vesalius was not thoroughly comprehended by investigators for seventy-three years (1543 to 1616); and the uses of the valves of the veins remained unknown for more than half a century." This was the period of the wars of religion in France, and of the theologians in Germany. Servetus had gone far on the way to the theory of the circulation of the blood in his Christianismi Restitutio (not in his work on the Trinity, as is often asserted), but the fact remained absolutely unknown in Switzerland and Germany. Scotland, which just before the Reformation had in the works of Dunbar and Lyndsay what might have been the beginning of a great literature, fell into a theological delirium which lasted two hundred years, and from which the nation emerged with its literary and intellectual continuity destroyed, and needing new tillage from foreign thought to yield any new life. It was only after the period of devout Protestantism had been succeeded by strife-weariness, toleration and doubt, that Protestant Holland and Switzerland began to count for anything in science and scholarship; and Germany and Scandinavia had to wait still longer for a new birth.