And it must be said, for the honour of mankind, that from period to period, fresh and courageous adversaries have arisen against each error, and each encroachment of the priestly power. In an early age, Vigilantius, and Claude of Turin; then, the Vaudois and the Albigenses; then, the Wickliffites, the Hussites, and the Brethren of Moravia and Bohemia—small and feeble communities—were crushed by the popes leagued with the princes, but who from their scaffolds and their stakes, transmitted to each other the sacred flame of primitive faith, until, reared aloft by the powerful hand of Luther, it spread afar its rays over the Christian world. Another protestation, parallel to the preceding, and which has been styled Catholic Protestantism, had constantly manifested itself in the bosom of the Church itself, particularly after the appearance of the mystics of the Middle Age. Among the theologians, Bernard de Clairvaux, Gerson d’Ailly, Nicholas de Clémangis; among the poets, Dante and Petrarch; even councils held at Pisa, Constance, and Basle; men the most renowned for their piety and their character, for their genius and their learning, had raised the same cry: “A reform, a reform in the Church! A reform in the head and the members, in the faith and the manners!” But this Catholic movement always failed; because it never attacked the root of the evil. The secret of obtaining all—is it not that of desiring and daring all? Whilst the Papacy persecuted the former of these protestations, and tried to seduce the other, a new enemy presented itself: the most redoubtable of all, because it could assume the most diverse forms; because it displayed itself everywhere at the same moment; because neither artifices nor tortures could subdue it. And what was this antagonist?—The human mind itself awakening from its long sleep. The fifteenth century had restored to it the books of antiquity. It suddenly felt itself animated with an intense want of investigation and renewal; and resuming, at the same time, philosophy, history, poetry, the sciences, the arts, all the wonders of the most flourishing ages of Greece and ancient Rome, it was aware that it could and would march onward in its independence.