Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/748

 the Reformation as fully as the literary Revival which preceded it. Theodore Beza is a man whose fame as a Genevan legislator and divine has eclipsed his name as a scholar and educator; but it ought not to be forgotten that he was an elegant humanist before he became a convinced reformer and his most fruitful work was done in the provinces of sacred learning and exegesis. The Estiennes, Robert and Henry, are potent names in the history of Greek and Roman letters; they accomplished much for the languages and the literatures which they loved;-Robert, in particular, standing out as a devoted friend of religion and of science, for both of which he made immense sacrifices. Our teactus receptus and its division into verses are witnesses to his zeal. Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon had the merit of awakening the envy, which was but inverted admiration, and the supple hate, which was like the regret of the forsaken, of the society whose mission it was to roll back the advancing tide of the freer thought that had come to quicken interest in letters; while Gerard Jan Vossius construed the classical mythology through religion, and both through Old Testament history in a way that contributed to form comparative science in the regions of thought, religion, and language. Protestant scholars had a larger and more realistic way of looking at classical problems than the men of the earlier Renaissance, and by its dissociation from polity and custom Teutonic thought even while it seems narrower in scope, is yet far wider in outlook and interest than Latin. It goes into a more distant past, and rises to higher altitudes. It came as a revolt, but it grew into a development; it continued free from the authority that would have suppressed it, and used its freedom to achieve results which the more fettered Latin mind panted after in vain. France continued in the seventeenth century the literary activity of Italy in the sixteenth; but speculation loves freedom, and refused to live where it could not be free. The events, which emancipated England from monotonous uniformity in religion, set the problems that have been the main factors in her historical development, and the chief causes of her philosophical activity and her literary greatness, Modern thought is the achievement of Northern and Central Europe, but it is the possession of universal man.