Magellan's crew continued their voyage amid hardships and perils, and at length, on Sept. 10th, 1522, the good ship, _San Vittoria_, sailed into the very port from which she had departed just three years and twenty-seven days before. She had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the {92} human race. She had circumnavigated the earth. Magellan lost his life in his great enterprise, but he made his name immortal. His lieutenant Sebastian d'Elcano received the proudest and noblest medal ever given to a sailor. It was a golden globe belted with this inscription, _Primus circumdedisti me_--"Thou hast first circumnavigated me." At the present time it is almost impossible to conceive the effect of Magellan's voyage had upon the public mind. One of the leading dogmas of Rome had been that the earth was flat. Now it was proved that the earth was indeed a vast ball. If Rome had been in error in this case, where was her infallibility? Might not some of her other teachings be equally false? Many leading minds began to doubt her authority. Even Pope Leo X., is said to have become skeptical. At all events he chose to spend his leisure time in his library reading to his sister out of the beautiful new printed books which were then throwing a flood of intellectual light on all grades of society. The philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, the poems of Homer and Virgil, the sciences of the Saracens and the narratives of the adventures of Columbus and Vasco de Gama had more charms for him than burning and torturing heretics as his predecessors had done. While science was undermining the influence of Rome in one direction, religious thought was busy at work in another. That great religious revolution commonly called the Reformation had long been gathering its forces; and already sounded from behind the Alps the loud clarion of battle. The memory of John Huss and Jerome of Prague was still fresh in the minds of the populace. Huss had been burned at Constance, in A. D. 1415, and Jerome the year following. When the news of these barbarous executions reached Bohemia, it threw the whole kingdom into confusion and a civil war was kindled from the ashes of the martyrs. John Ziska, the leader of the populace, collected an army of forty thousand men and defeated the emperor, Sigismund, in several battles. When Ziska found that he was dying, he gave orders that his skin should be made into a drum which was long the symbol of victory to his followers. {93} [Image: The Rack.] The Waldenses also who dwelt in the valleys of Switzerland and Piedmont had lively memories of cruel wrongs. Their ancestors had been destroyed by Pope Innocent III., and as late as A. D. 1487, they had been driven to the mountains and obliged to wander there until their feeble and little ones were {94} left buried in the Alpine snows. No wonder they chanted that grand old Hymn, commencing: