The means adopted for counteracting the movement were similar to those used in former periods, viz. an intellectual argument and a spiritual awakening. In some instances, indeed, in accordance with the spirit of the time, or more truly with the spirit of human nature, material force and cruelty were employed, and the unbeliever was silenced by martyrdom. But neither material power nor the autocratic unity of the Roman church was able to repress the growth of the human mind. Conviction must be directed, not crushed. The revival of books of evidences, as soon as printing became common, about the close of the fifteenth century, which were designed to confirm faith, was a more lawful form of warfare.(330) They were constructed however on a basis unsuited to an age when first principles were being reconsidered, being an attempt to establish the authority of the church and the duty of submission to an external form of faith, and lacked the surer basis adopted in Protestant works of evidence, which is found in the external divine authority of the Bible rather than the church. The creation of the order of the Jesuits, though directed more against Protestantism than against unbelief, was a witness, like the previous reactionary movement of the scholastic writers in the thirteenth century, to the wish to wrest the use of learning out of the hands of the opponents of the church, and to employ the weapons of reason in defence of it. The judgment formed on this epoch of free thought, when we have separated from it the Protestantism which craves other satisfaction for the human mind than that which is implied in submission to human authority, and the scepticism which was merely transitional doubt, must be condemnatory. The unbelief was indeed a phase of the general improvement; but one which is instructive as a warning rather than as an example, illustrating the abuse not the use of free thought. The evil nevertheless was temporary, and belongs to the past; the good was eternal: and the elements of real intellectual improvement contained in the struggle have been taken up into the constitution of modern thought and society. ------------------------------------- We have now considered three great epochs in the history of free thought, and watched Christianity in contact or conflict with the old heathen philosophy, with the thought Scholastic or Mahometan of the middle ages, and with the revival of classical learning. It remains to enter upon the consideration of the fourth, and to observe it in relation to modern science. The seventeenth century introduced as striking a revolution in philosophy as the corresponding ones which the two preceding ages had produced in literature and religion.