THE love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child--the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. Papacy was the enemy of both. Individual Popes nourished the elder movement and thus unwittingly prepared an example and an ally for the other. While Nicholas I., Pius II., and Leo X. dallied with the infant giant in Italy, its brother across the Alps was training and arming for the fray. The revolt against the autocracy of the Roman Court was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century by Wickliffe, and was continued by Huss. The licentiousness of the pontiffs and cardinals, of priests and monks, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invigorated the spirit of the rebels and brought fresh recruits to their ranks; and the German princes, who had long chafed against the fetters imposed upon them by Papal and Imperial interference, took the Reformers under their protection, thus supplying that secular side without which no holy war has ever been. In Erasmus--“the glory of the priesthood and the shame”--the two movements found a common champion and spokesman. In him the Renaissance crossed the Alps, and in his famous _Praise of Folly_ the Latin hostility to the intellectual tyranny of the Church is found united with the Teutonic hostility to her spiritual tyranny. The vows and the vigils, the self-abasement, the penances and the mournfulness of Catholicism are attacked not less unsparingly than the worldliness, the immorality and the hypocrisy of its ministers. But, if Erasmus marks the meeting, he also marks the parting of the ways.