Passing by the Middle Ages, which, _mutatis mutandis_, appropriated this scheme, we pause over the significance of the Renaissance period. Two things are uppermost in one's mind and as one thinks of the tumultuous beginnings of modern life which characterized the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. For one thing, the Renaissance was the culmination of a long period of absorption in which men had been gradually working their way back, by intellectual assimilation, towards the beginnings of the rich tradition which Church and Empire had stored up. This period of absorption was that five hundred years during which pagan hordes that had conquered Rome were conquered by the knowledge, faith, custom, civilization of their victims. From the cultural standpoint the new nations were hungry, the larder of the old civilization was replete, and hence authority on one side and absorption on the other became natural and inevitable. Thus, the philosophical preconceptions, the cosmological ground-principles, the whole general attitude toward life's problems of the whole old world were fastened upon the mind of the young European peoples. _It must not be forgotten_ that all this was _aat_ the _hatural_ achievement of the new European life and genius, but as foreign to it, as inherited (and at first as cherished) as grandfatherly ideas are in the mind of a child. If some day the child must shake off the old conceptions because he hears the call of life to go forth and achieve his own inner world, it would be only natural to expect that this young European giant should some day struggle to cast aside his intellectual inheritance and go forth to conquer reality for himself, in his own way, with his own weapons. Well--and this is the second matter--it was just that very thing that was happening in the early "teens" of our era. The young western world began to look at life for itself, and a curious, astonished, wild-eyed look it was. Europe had learned at its mother's knee to say: "The true world is fixed and final. Reality is static." But looking out now in wonderment, seeing farther than the ancient world had ever seen, the new world said: "Ah, no! The world is not static. The world _moves_. Things change." Two well-known anecdotes are told of Galileo, which, if not authentic, are well invented. The one tells how, in the dome at Pisa during worship, the litany or the sermon boring him, he observed the cathedral chandelier move by the wind and, studying its vibrations, discovered a basic law of mechanics. The profound meaning of this anecdote is, obviously, that God spoke to the man more effectively through the _self-moving_ pendulum than in the rigid, immobile litany from a rigid, immobile, hieratic heart; and that, if we do not understand such litany, and it bores us, we may still devoutly worship by meditating upon what we can understand.