[Sidenote: Higher requirements in evidence.] As we have just said, it was impossible to look in any direction on the latter half of the fifteenth century without recognizing the wonderful change. It had become obviously useless any longer to assert an immobility of humanity when men were standing face to face with the new forms into which it had been transposed. New ideas had driven out old ones. Natural phenomena could not again be likened to human acts, nor the necessities of man regarded as determining the movements of the universe. A better appreciation of the nature of evidence was arising, perhaps in part through the influence of the lawyers, but in part through a commencing taste for criticism. We see it in such facts as the denial that a miracle can be taken as the proof of anything else than the special circumstances with which it is connected; we see it in the assertion that the martyrdom of men in support of a dogma, so far from proving its truth, proves rather its doubtfulness, no geometer having ever thought it worth his while to die in order to establish any mathematical proposition, truth needing no such sacrifices, which are actually unserviceable and useless to it, since it is able spontaneously to force its own way. [Sidenote: Disbelief setting in in Italy.] In Italy, where the popular pecuniary interests were obviously identical with those of the Church, a dismal disbelief was silently engendering. And now occurred an event the results of which it is impossible to exaggerate.