The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom; and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring universe, a harmonious universe.
In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge. Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the actual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and the spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval. With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle, but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.
Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of whatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual injuries, degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of strong personalities.
No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the present phase, may be briefly shown.
Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell; worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity which Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.