This chance connection between Jerome, the ardent scholastic reformer, and Poggio, the cynical forerunner of the New Learning—between the old order and the new, is remarkable and prophetic. The movement towards change, which Jerome of Prague represented, whether it was a conservative movement as interpreted by Gerson and D’Ailly, or radical as it became in the hands of Wycliffe and Hus, definitely failed. The mediæval system had indeed been challenged by that movement, which had resulted from the glaring scandals of Avignon and the papal Schism; but the system, though severely shaken, yet remained; and pontiffs such as Martin V, Eugenius IV and Pius II were able by politic means to bolster it up through a restoration of influence, mainly of a temporal nature, to the Papacy. The Conciliar method of ecclesiastical reform failed for a variety of reasons—partly because of defects in organization and policy, still more because of a natural failure to recognize the great significance of national differences and the need, or at least the demand, for variety of treatment as between states, which produced the Pragmatic Sanctions of Bourges and Mainz, of the years 1438 and 1439 respectively; yet more, precisely because the attempted reforms were not sufficiently far-reaching and thorough in character, a tinkering, not a renewal. The movements of Wycliffe and Hus were also abortive of really direct results. Lollardy certainly lived on, but, as has been already noted, probably did not have any considerable influence among the various forces which brought about the English Reformation. The influence of Hus in Bohemian history is far greater and the triumphs of Ziska and Prokop in the wars that are known after the name of the great heresiarch won national and religious independence for the Czechs up to the time of the battle of the White Mountain in the Thirty Years War. It is true also that Luther expressed his own indebtedness to Hus, declaring, ‘We have all been Husites without knowing it.’ Nevertheless, the decisive influences which brought about the complete overthrow of the mediæval system and the substitution of the modern belong to the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These influences were the humanism, which in its Italian form became critical, pagan, drawing its influence from the Greek world to which all the ‘ages of faith’ had been as an opaque curtain; which in its German form had a theological bias and a moral aim, as interpreted by Reuchlin and the school of Deventer. The other influence was the apotheosis of a cynical nationalism, whose exponent is Machiavelli, which produced the secularization of politics and the segregation of Church and State.