But if there were room to imagine that the first spread of Christianity was owing rather to an accidental conjuncture of favoring circumstances than to its real power over the human mind, or if it might be thought that any such peculiar virtue was all spent and exhausted in its first expansive effort, then it is natural to look to the next occasion on which the opinions of mankind were put in fermentation, and to watch in what manner the system of the Bible then rode over the high billows of political, religious, and intellectual commotion. It was a fair trial for Christianity, and a trial essentially different from its first, when, in the fifteenth century, after having been corrupted in every part to a state of loathsome ulceration, it had to contend for existence, and to work its own renovation, at the moment of the most extraordinary expansion of the human intellect that has ever happened. At that moment, when the splendid literature of the ancient world started from its tomb, and kindled a blaze of universal admiration; at that moment, when the first beams of sound philosophy broke over the nations; and when the revival of the useful arts gave at once elasticity to the minds of the million, and a check of practical influence to the minds of the few; at the moment when the necromancy of the press came into play to expose and explode necromancy of every other kind; and when the discovery of new continents, and of a new path to the old, tended to supplant a taste of whatever is visionary, by imparting a vivid taste for what is substantial; at such a time, which seemed to leave no chance of continued existence to aught that was not in its nature vigorous, might it not confidently have been said—This must be the crisis of Christianity? if it be not inwardly sound, if it have not a true hold of human nature, if it be a thing of feebleness and dotage, fit only for cells, and cowls, and the precincts of spiritual despotism; if it be not adapted to the world of action, if it have no sympathy with the feelings of men—of freemen; nothing can save it: no power of princes, no devices of priests, will avail to rear it anew, and to replace it in the veneration of the people; at least not in any country where has been felt the refreshing gale of intellectual life. The result of this crisis need not be narrated. It may even be doubted, had not Christianity been fraught with power, if all the influence of kings, or craft of priests, could have upheld it in any part of Europe, after the revival of learning; and certainly not in those countries which received, at one and the same time, the invigoration of political liberty, of science, and of commerce.