Outside the Church there was constant warfare within and among newly risen nations. Neither rulers nor the people themselves had time to give their attention to the advancement of culture. The education of the knights was essentially military; that of the masses, limited chiefly to the training naturally offered by home occupations and trades. The settlement of nations, the rise of free cities, more peace and prosperity, necessarily tended to arouse an interest in culture. Contact with the Hellenic and Eastern civilizations through the crusades, the discovery of America, the expansion of foreign trade, all could not but broaden the mental horizon and vitalize the soul. The dialectic education of scholasticism, although formal, had sharpened the reasoning powers of men. With a new explosion of self-consciousness and life impulse, Europe keenly realized the pressure of the Church, its dogmatism and asceticism. The revolt against its dogmatism was the Reformation, the revolt against its asceticism was Humanism. The Humanistic movement started as the revival of the ancient classics. Tired of the dry, attenuated Latin of church scholasticism, the student wanted to return to the naïve, simple, yet beautiful literature of the old Roman and Hellenic masters. Weary of the sophistical interpretation and disputation of the Greek philosophers, he desired to drink directly from their untainted source. This Renaissance, though mainly literary at its beginning, brought back the seemingly exterminated spirit and ideals of the ancient world, especially of Athens. Man, liberated from the bondage of monastic spirituality, returned to the human. The beauty and joy of life and the arts were again restored; learning came to be pursued for its own sake.