Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/742

 i.e. where it is nothing but a mere probability, it is a folly to spill human blood for it.

God is unknown even in religion; as many as the nations of men so many are the forms under which He is worshipped. And when they try to conceive and name Him, they degrade Him to their own level. God is made in the image of man rather than man in the image of God; to the Ethiopian He is black, to the Greek He is white, and lithe and graceful; to the brute He would be bestial and to the triangle triangular. Man, then, is so surrounded with contradictions that he cannot say what is or is not true. Wisdom was with Sextus Empi-ricus when he said: "iravrl \6ya) Xoyoç IVoç àvTiKelrai. Il n'y a nulle raison qui n'en ait une contraire, dit le plus sage parti des philosophes-" Where man so doubts he is too paralysed to fight or to affirm. Montaigne's sympathies might be with those who worked and suffered for a new heaven and a new earth; but his egoism inclined to the conventional and followed the consuetudinary. Prevost-Paradol termed him "une perpétuelle leçon de tempérance et de modération." But this is a lesson which men of culture may read contentedly; while those who struggle to live or to make life worth living will hardly find in it the Gospel they need.

We turn now to the Teutonic Renaissance. Like the Latin, it began as a revolt against the sovereignty of Aristotle; but, unlike the Latin, its literary antecedents were patristic and Biblical rather than classical. They were, indeed, so far as patristic, specifically Augustinian, and, so far as Biblical, Pauline. With Augustine, the underlying philosophy was Neo-Platonic, with a tendency to theosophy and mysticism; with Paul, the theology involved a philosophy of human nature and human history. This does not mean that other Fathers or other Scriptures were ignored, but rather that Paul was interpreted through Augustine, and Christ through Paul. This fundamental difference involved two others. In the first place, a more religious and more democratic temper, the religious being seen in the attempt to realise the new ideals, and the democratic in the strenuous and combatant spirit by which alone this could be accomplished. The thought which lived in the Schools could not resist the authority that spoke in the name of the Church and was enforced by the penalties of the State; but the thought which interpreted God to the conscience was one that bowed to no authority lower than His. In the second place, Teutonic was more theological than Latin thought. The categories, which the past had formulated for the interpretation of being, it declined to accept; and so it had to discover and define those which it meant to use in their stead. The God with whom it started was not an abstract and isolated but a living and related Deity; and man it conceived sub specie aetermtatis, as a being whom God had made and ruled. The very limitation of its field was an enlargement of