Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be proven nor contradicted? Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla. He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery. Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians, carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side of this planet? What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was the center of the universe, what were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to contain some rather serious errors? I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment. Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue, like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste. But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.