In the study of this movement the attention of the historian has ordinarily been centered on the literary, artistic, and intellectual phases of the revival, while the ethical phase has been given but slight attention or has been dismissed with the facile observation that the movement induced a revival of pagan immorality. This is true. But the really significant thing was not the revival of pagan _immorality_ but the revival of pagan _morality_. For just as this classical revival meant a new enthusiasm for the artistic, literary, and cultural elements of the earlier Greco-Roman civilization, so did it also mean a new enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman ideal of character. To many it was no longer the Church ideal but the classical that seemed the embodiment of what is ethically most noble and worthy. Such persons gave up the practice of the distinctively Christian theological virtues, or, if they still outwardly observed the Church code, this was merely insincere conformity suggested by prudence or policy; the code of morals which their minds and hearts approved and which they observed, if they observed any at all, was the code of pagan antiquity. It is in this secularization of the ethical ideal, in this divorce of morality from theology, in this announcement of the freedom and autonomy of the individual spirit, that is to be sought the real significance of the classical revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the moral history of the Western world. In two ways chiefly did the Renaissance exert its transforming influence upon European morals: first, by awakening a new intellectual life, for, as we have had repeatedly shown us, a new mental life means a new moral life; and second, by the direct introduction of various elements of Greco-Roman morals into the Christian ideal of character. Thus at the same time that the cultural life of Europe was being enlarged and enriched by the incorporation of those literary and art elements of classical civilization which had been rejected or underestimated by the Middle Ages, the moral life of Christendom was being profoundly modified by the incorporation of those ethical elements which constituted the precious product of the moral aspirations and achievements of the best generations of the ancient world. The conscience of those persons in the modern world who are imbued with the true scientific spirit, that is to say, with the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance, is quite as largely Greek as Hebraic. A recent writer reviewing the life of a distinguished personage (Julia Ward Howe) recognized this mingling in modern culture of these diverse elements in these words: “She has blended and lived, as no other eminent American woman, the humanistic and the Christian ideals of life. She has preached love and self-sacrifice, and she has loved beauty and self-realization.” [Sidenote: Theological morality: the ethics of persecution]