The continent of Europe in the year fifteen hundred was culturally far inferior to Asia. Compared to the civilization of Greece and Rome, all Christendom was barbarian. The wave of interest in education which in the thirteenth century had caused the universities to become crowded, while it had not passed, had subsided into a dull scholastic dialectic. Education had little effect upon the life of the masses or their rulers. In Italy art and letters were breaking away from religious tradition, but the new spirit which prevailed at Florence, Padua, and Rome had little sway north of the Alps. Mediæval Christianity had reached its culmination and was in a period of moral and intellectual decline. Thoughtful men everywhere were dissatisfied. The time was soon to come when this dissatisfaction could no longer be held in restraint, when throughout a century of bloodshed, civil war, and violence and hatred such as Europe had never known, the Church would be torn asunder and anarchy and terror reign until modern nationalism and industrialism could painfully emerge from the smouldering ruins. It is said that when Leo X ascended the Papal throne, there was placed above his head in Latin the inscription, “_Nunc tempora Pallas habet_,”--Now Athene reigns. Not many years were to pass before the sacred walls, which had under the Pontificate of his predecessor been decorated by Michelangelo and Raphael, were to echo the sound of church bells ringing out the tidings of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Soon all over Europe the floodgates would be open and Christendom would be inundated by torrents of fury. Soon in defense of the sacred Gospel, Christians would tear at Christians’ throats. With instruments of iron, tongues would be wrenched from the mouths of men and women, eyes gouged from their sockets, limbs broken on the rack. The bed of torture and the heap of burning faggots would become commonplace spectacles for the public to gaze upon. For a hundred years and more Europe was to be ablaze with war on every hand, until it should sink exhausted by the mutual destruction of Christian armies into almost unimaginable misery and poverty. And this struggle which was destined to breed hatreds and sectarian divisions lasting even till today, might have been avoided, probably could have been averted, could the spirit of Erasmus have prevailed. Protestants hold the Catholics responsible for the horrors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Catholics hold the Protestants responsible. Both were equally guilty, for they were equally ignorant and barbarous and deluded with superstition. This is the kind of thing that happens and always will happen when ignorance breaks loose in the world. Then in the general madness even learned men like Melanchthon and Œcolampadius and the Medicis lose their poise and become partisans.