An indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery for indiscriminate license. Whatever might be the vigilance of the Church, or however strenuous the exercise of legitimate authority, nothing in the usual course of human society could prevent its becoming a prolific soil for the propagation of every species of error. And, as during three hundred years the intellectual and educational powers of Europe followed this course, the law of evolution asserted itself in many directions. On the one side, those tens of thousands of Christian youths, who were aiming at all the posts of influence in Church and State, and who, entering their native university, or journeying to foreign ones, began life there at as early an age as twelve or fourteen years, to remain in this environment some nine or twelve years more, became, as was natural, the living, swarming members of a state of society so dissolute, that successive occupants of the Papal See depicted the condition of things as one of moral contagion. In the manner of thought and mind which prevailed, no form of theoretic error was wanting. In philosophy, there was scepticism; in theology, heresy; while, in politics, Cæsarism and absolutism became rife. Then, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance came; and one of the first things, which it expressly and formally did, was to renew in life, art, and politics, the same old paganism, upon the ruins of which, so many centuries before, Christianity had begun its upward and laborious ascent. Newly fashioning then much of what was old, Christianity had augmented all this with so much which was new, that in a thousand years it had made a Renaissance possible. And now the form of this Renaissance threatened its own ascendancy in morals and in life. On the other hand, the old spirit of conservatism in religion, and of preservation in the matter of morals, maintained itself for a time, through those bodies of religious men and clergymen, who had left the cloister or the seminary, to take up their abode in the secular seats of learning. It was this spirit which originated the latest and best development of the universities, that of the "college" system, established in their midst. Salamanca had twenty colleges; Louvain, forty; Paris, fifty. Still, in the final issue, there was now scarcely any reserve force of cloistral or episcopal learning behind the universities, and outside of them. And the religious and the clergy themselves, who at best were not a little out of their element from the moment they migrated into the secular environment, conformed insensibly to the conditions in which they found themselves, and so far ceased to be the power they had been.