Meanwhile, what gave its deep importance to the classical revival, was the emancipation of the reason, consequent upon the discovery that the best gifts of the spirit had been enjoyed by the nations of antiquity. An ideal of existence distinct from that imposed upon the Middle Ages by the Church, was revealed in all its secular attractiveness. Fresh value was given to the desires and aims, enjoyments and activities of man, considered as a noble member of the universal life, and not as a diseased excrescence on the world he helped to spoil. Instead of the cloistral service of the 'Imitatio Christi,' that conception of communion, through knowledge, with God manifested in His works and in the soul of man, which forms the indestructible religion of science and the reason, was already generated. The intellect, after lying spell-bound during a long night, when thoughts were as dreams and movement as somnambulism, resumed its activity, interrogated nature, and enjoyed the pleasures of unimpeded energy. Without ceasing to be Christians (for the moral principles of Christianity are the inalienable possession of the human race), the men of the Revival dared once again to exercise their thought as boldly as the Greeks and Romans had done before them. More than this, they were now able, as it were, by the resuscitation of a lost faculty, to do so freely and clear-sightedly. The touch upon them of the classic spirit was like the finger of a deity giving life to the dead. That more and nobler use was not made of the new light which dawned upon the world in the Revival; that the humanists abandoned the high standpoint of Petrarch for a lower and more literary level; that society assimilated the Hedonism more readily than the Stoicism of the ancients; that scholars occupied themselves with the form rather than the matter of the classics; that all these shortcomings in their several degrees prevented the Italians from leading the intellectual movement of the sixteenth century in religion and philosophy, as they had previously led the mind of Europe in discovery and literature--is deeply to be lamented by those who are jealous for their honour. For the rest, no words can be found more worthy to express their high conception of man, regarded as a free yet responsible personality, sent into the world to mould his own nature, and by this power of self-determination severed from both brutes and angels, than the following passage from Pico della Mirandola's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man.' It combines antique liberty of thought with Christian faith in a style distinctive of the Renaissance at its best; nor is its note of mediæval cosmology uncharacteristic of an age that divined as yet more than it firmly grasped the realities of modern science. Here, if anywhere, may be hailed the Epiphany of the modern spirit, contraposing God and man in a relation inconceivable to the ancients, unapprehended in its fulness by the Middle Ages. 'Then the Supreme