[Sidenote: Antiquity of American civilization.] Lastly, there is another point to which I will with brevity allude. It has been widely asserted that Mexican and Peruvian civilization was altogether a recent affair, dating at most only two or three centuries before the conquest. It would be just as well to say that there was no civilization in India before the time of the Macedonian invasion because there exist no historic documents in that country anterior to that event. The Mexicans and Peruvians were not heroes of a romance to whom wonderful events were of common occurrence, whose lives were regulated by laws not applying to the rest of the human race, who could produce results in a day for which elsewhere a thousand years are required. They were men and women like ourselves, slowly and painfully, and with many failures, working out their civilization. The summary manner in which they have been disposed of reminds us of the amusing way in which the popular chronology deals with the hoary annals of Egypt and China. Putting aside the imperfect methods of recording events practised by the autochthons of the Western world, he who estimates rightly the slowness with which man passes forward in his process of civilization, and collates therewith the prodigious works of art left by those two nations--an enduring evidence of the point to which they had attained--will find himself constrained to cast aside such idle assertions as altogether unworthy of confutation, or even of attention. CHAPTER VI. APPROACH OF THE AGE OF REASON IN EUROPE. IT IS PRECEDED BY THE RISE OF CRITICISM. _Restoration of Greek Literature and Philosophy in Italy.--Development of Modern Languages and Rise of Criticism.--Imminent Danger to Latin Ideas._ _Invention of Printing.--It revolutionizes the Communication of Knowledge, especially acts on Public Worship, and renders the Pulpit of secondary importance._ THE REFORMATION.--_Theory of Supererogation and Use of Indulgences.--The Right of Individual Judgment asserted.--Political History of the Origin, Culmination, and Check of the Reformation.--Its Effects in Italy._ _Causes of the Arrest of the Reformation.--Internal Causes in Protestantism.--External in the Policy of Rome.--The Counter-Reformation. --Inquisition.--Jesuits.--Secession of the great Critics.--Culmination of the Reformation in America.--Emergence of Individual Liberty of Thought._ [Sidenote: The rise of criticism.] In estimating the influences of literature on the approach of the Age of Reason in Europe, the chief incidents to be considered are the disuse of Latin as a learned language, the formation of modern tongues from the vulgar dialects, the invention of printing, the decline of the power of the pulpit, and its displacement by that of the press. These, joined to the moral and intellectual influences at that time predominating, led to the great movement known as the Reformation.