“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.
“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance.
“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find salvation for thy soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was the warning of the Reformation.
And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe in the possession of a new freedom which was infinitely more embarrassing than the thralldom of his former days.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made her peace with the established order of things. The successors of Phidias and Horace discovered that a belief in the established Deity and outward conformity to the rules of the Church were two very different things and that one could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets with complete impunity if one took the precaution to call Hercules, John the Baptist, and Hera, the Virgin Mary.
They were like tourists who go to India and who obey certain laws which mean nothing to them at all in order that they may gain entrance to the temples and travel freely without disturbing the peace of the land.
But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most trifling of details at once assumed enormous importance. An erroneous comma in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As for a misplaced full stop in the Apocalypse, it called for instant death.
To people like these who took what they considered their religious convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise of the Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.
As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company, never to meet again.