The first half of the sixteenth century was the epoch of a great transformation to the people of Europe; there had been nothing like it since the introduction of Christianity. During the middle ages, the pope was the guardian of Christendom, and the people were infants, who, not having attained the necessary age, could not act for themselves. The pontificial hierarchy opened or shut the gates of heaven, laid down what every man ought to believe and do, dominated in the councils of princes, and exercised a powerful influence over all public institutions. But a wardship is always provisional. When a man attains his majority, he enters into the enjoyment of his property and rights, and having to render an account to none but God, he walks without guardians by the light which his conscience gives him. There is also a time of majority for nations, and Christian society attained that age in the sixteenth century. From that moment it ceased to receive blindly all that the priests taught; it entered into a higher and more independent sphere. The teaching of man vanished away; the teaching of God began again. Once more those words were heard in Christendom which Paul of Tarsus had uttered in the first century: ‘_I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say_.’[669] But it must be carefully observed that it was by throwing open the Bible to their generation that the reformers realized this sentence. If they had not restored a heavenly torch to man, if they had left him to himself in the thick shadows of the night, he would have remained blind, uneasy, restless, and unsatisfied. The holy emancipation of the sixteenth century invited those who listened to it to draw freely from the divine Word all that was necessary to scatter the darkness of their reason and fill up the void in their hearts. Elevating them above the goods of the body, above even arts, literature, science, and philosophy, it offered to their soul eternal treasures—God himself. The Gospel, then restored to the world, gave an unaccustomed force to the moral law, and thus conferred on the people who received it two boons,—order and liberty,—which the Vatican has never possessed within its precincts. [Sidenote: Alarm And Joy.]