The sixteenth century has been rightly called the era of the Renaissance. Then learning and religion revived; the fine arts received a fresh development. Then a new spirit breathed upon the nations, and the people began to feel that they were intended to be something better than hewers of wood and drawers of water--mere beasts of burden or tribute-paying machines for the use of their lords. The great Reform movement had been preparing from afar. Had Constantinople never fallen, had Eastern learning not been driven to seek an asylum in the West, the religious revolution might have been retarded; it could not have been prevented. In the hour when Guttenberg printed the first sheet of his Bible the spiritual despotism of Rome began to totter. It was a strange period of excitement, when Vasco de Gama made his way to India round the Cape of Storms, and when Columbus returned triumphant from the discovery of a new world. A spirit of restlessness and scepticism pervaded all Europe. Monks in their cloisters, hermits in their cells, barons in their castles, lawyers in their courts, priests in their rural parsonages, all felt it alike. Princes on the throne doubted the infallibility of the Church, or drove the Holy Father from his capital. There seemed to be nothing sacred against the attacks of the wits and scholars of the day. Rabelais, under the mask of his cynical buffoonery, made the clergy a laughing-stock. Erasmus, with a satire as keen as Voltaire’s, assailed the most prominent abuses of the Church. Ulrich von Hutten, in his “Epistles of Obscure Men,” attacked the same abuses, with less polished weapons but in a more popular style. But if the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century had used no other arms than wit and satire, and done no more than brand the vicious lives and extortionate practices of the clergy, they would never have reformed the world. The doctrines of the Church had degenerated into an empty formalism leaving the heart untouched, the life unchanged. On a sudden, as if by mutual arrangement, a new race of preachers sprang up in Europe. Lefevre in France, Zuingle in Switzerland, Tyndale in England, and Luther in Germany, all taught the same doctrine. In each country the Reformation assumed a peculiar form, though preserving the same general characteristics; and just in the proportion as Protestantism has yielded to, and in its turn moulded these characteristics, it has survived and flourished to the present time. If the Reform was almost crushed out in France, it was because it took too little account of national character. And yet the French Reformation was exclusively of native growth. Lefevre and his disciple Farel began to preach, some years before Luther, that great doctrine of justification by faith which was the foundation-stone of the new Church.