No man dislikes more than do I the ambition, avarice and effeminacy of the priests, not only because these vices are hateful in themselves but because they are especially unbecoming to men who have vowed a life dependent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness for my own advantage. But for this consideration I should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, so that they might live either without vices or without power. From this precious text we learn much of the inner history of contemporary Italy. As far as the Italian mind was liberated in religion it was atheistic, as far as it was reforming it went no further than rejection of the hierarchy. The enemies to be dreaded by Rome were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, [Sidenote: Alamanni, 1495-1556] not Luther and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness, avarice, ambition, sensuality and gluttony. The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestantism in Italy was not Catholicism but the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] Deeply imbued with the tincture of classical learning, naturally speculative and tolerant, the Italian mind had already advanced, in its best representatives, far beyond the intellectual stage of the Reformers. The hostility of the Renaissance to the Reformation was a deep and subtle antithesis of the interests of this world {374} and of the next. It is notable that whereas some philosophical minds, like that of the brilliant Olympia Morata, who had once been completely skeptical, later came under the influence of Luther, there was not one artist of the first rank, not one of the greatest poets, that seems to have been in the least attracted by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile. [Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures as a devastating monster.