Self-abasement was superseded by self-reverence; and abstinence by temperance. The dignity of the individual, long lost in the mediaeval worship of authority, was restored; the glorification of man succeeded to the glorification of the Kingdom of God on earth. The beauty of the naked human body was once more recognised and its cult revived. Fecundity and not chastity became the ideal virtue. And what the poets described in warm, impassioned melody, the artists of a later day depicted in no less warm and impassioned colour. Dante’s ethereal love for Beatrice would have been shocked at Raphael’s Madonna: Madonna the mother; no longer Madonna the maiden. Nor was the new cult confined to profane poets, artists, and scholars. The divines of the Roman Church were also carried away by it. Rationalism invaded the Vatican, was petted by the priests, and promulgated from the pulpit. In sermons preached before the Pope and his cardinals the dogmas of Christianity were blended with the doctrines of ancient philosophy, and Hebrew theology was identified with heathen mythology. Christ’s self-sacrifice was compared to that of Socrates and of other great and good men of antiquity who had laid down their lives for the sake of truth and the benefit of mankind. Pontifical documents were couched in pagan phraseology; the Father and the Son appeared as Jupiter and Apollo; and the Holy Virgin as Diana, or even as Venus with the child Cupid; while sacred hymns were solemnly addressed by pious Catholics to the deities of Olympus. These and other vagaries were seriously indulged in, after a fashion abundantly grotesque, but none the less instructive. When pruned of its absurd extravagances and picturesque ineptitudes, this enthusiasm for paganism can be regarded both as the fruit and as the cause of an essentially healthy growth. The Italians of the fifteenth century succeeded where Julian the Apostate had failed in the fourth; and to that success may be traced all the subsequent developments of European culture.