No Account Of The Renaissance Can Be

Every Intellectual Product Must Be Judged From The Point Of View Of The Age And The People In Which It Was Produced.

Such Discussions Help Us Very Little To Enjoy What Has Been Well Done In Art Or Poetry, To Discriminate Between What Is More And What Is Less Excellent In Them, Or To Use Words Like Beauty, Excellence, Art, Poetry, With A More Precise Meaning Than They Would Otherwise Have.

And The Fifteenth Century Was An Impassioned Age, So Ardent And Serious In Its Pursuit Of Art That It Consecrated Everything With Which Art Had To Ad As A Religious Object.

It Is With A Rush Of Home-sickness That The Thought Of Death Presents Itself.... Such Sentiment Is The Eternal Stock Of All Religions, Modified Indeed By Changes Of Time And Place, But Indestructible, Because Its Root Is So Deep In The Earth Of Man's Nature. The Breath Of Religious Initiators Passes Over Them; A Few "rise Up With Wings As Eagles" [isaiah 40:31], But The Broad Level Of Religious Life Is Not Permanently Changed. Religious Progress, Like All Purely Spiritual Progress, Is Confined To A Few.

No Account Of The Renaissance Can Be Complete Without Some Notice Of The Attempt Made By Certain Italian Scholars Of The Fifteenth Century To Reconcile Christianity With The Religion Of Ancient Greece.