In the midst of this movement occurred the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the settling of the fugitive Greeks in Italy. They brought with them an increased knowledge of antiquity, numerous manuscripts, and a multitude of fresh means by which the ancient civilisation might be more thoroughly studied. The classical school became animated with redoubled admiration and ardour. This was the period of the most brilliant development of the aristocratic church, especially in Italy, not in point of political power, so much as in luxuriousness and wealth. It abandoned itself with lordly pride to all the pleasures of a voluptuous, effeminate, elegant, and licentious civilisation, to a taste for letters and arts, for social and material enjoyments. See the sort of life led by men who bore an important part in politics and literature at that epoch--by Cardinal Bembo, for example. We are astonished at so singular a medley of refined sensuality and intellectual development, of enervated manners and hardihood of mind. We might imagine, in fact, when we survey that era, and behold its ideas and social relations, that we are in the middle of the French eighteenth century. We perceive the same zeal for intellectual movement and for new ideas, the same taste for a soft and agreeable life; in a word, the same effeminacy and libertinism, the same deficiency in political energy and in moral doctrines, accompanied by a remarkable candour and activity of mind. The literati of the fifteenth century were, in regard to the prelates of the church, in the same relation as the men of letters and the philosophers of the eighteenth with respect to the great aristocrats; they were all imbued with the same opinions, all pursued the same course of life, mingled harmoniously together, and looked with indifference on the agitation that was brewing around them. The prelates of the fifteenth century, commencing with Cardinal Bembo, assuredly no more foresaw the rising of Luther and Calvin, than the courtiers had any preconception of the French Revolution. The situation was analogous. Three great facts, therefore, of the moral order present themselves at this epoch. First, an ecclesiastical reform attempted by the church itself; secondly, a popular movement for religious reform; and lastly, an intellectual revolution, which formed the school of freethinkers. And all these changes were progressing amid the greatest political alteration which had previously occurred in Europe, amid the working towards centralisation in nations and governments.