Other causes besides the classical revival were operating to stimulate activity of mind and freedom of inquiry. It was an age in which the great system of the middle ages was finally dissolving. The discovery of new worlds seemed at once to call to Europe to break connexion with the old centre of ecclesiastical centralization; and to invite to that study of nature which should elevate, and as it were emancipate the mind, by teaching physical truth and the true method of discovery.(314) Political circumstances too, contributed toward the creation of ecclesiastical autonomy. The European nations had gradually grown into united families, and were now ready for cooperation in a system of balance of power.(315) The northern nations, long galled under the power of Rome, were panting for freedom; Germany first reforming her religion, and then throwing off her subjection; England first throwing off her subjection, and then compelled to reform herself. The old systems of thought were at an end. The change, like all social ones, was not abrupt, but it was decisive and final. It was the earthquake which shattered for ever the crust of error which had fettered thought. It is a matter of wonder that the great revolutions just named passed with so little development of scepticism. In the nations north of the Alps there is hardly a trace. The charge of deism, directed in the fifteenth century against Pecock,(316) bishop of Chichester, appears to have been unfounded. The contest which Ulrich von Hütten carried on against the monks and schools of Cologne was literary rather than religious;(317) Hütten being the literary and political reformer rather than the sceptic. Even the most advanced spirits of the reformers,(318) Servetus and the Sozini, came forth from Italy, as from the centre of free thought. Nor were they unbelievers in the reality of a revelation; and they met with no support from the northern reformers. Servetus was martyred at Geneva, and the Sozini were banished into Poland. It was the spiritual earnestness which mingled with the intellectual movement in the Reformation, which prevented free thought from producing rationalism or unbelief. Protestantism was a form of free thought; but only in the sense of a return from human authority to that of scripture. It was equally a reliance on an historic religion, equally an appeal to the immemorial doctrine of the church with Roman Catholicism; but it conceived that the New Testament itself contained a truer source than tradition for ascertaining the apostolic declaration of it.(319)