It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through
Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to
root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means
of the Papacy, and its instruments.105 Nevertheless, in the earlier
religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth
century down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive
religious doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the
Huguenots, failed to achieve success only because circumstances were
against it. Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their
details, their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the
philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be
demonstrated. The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes,
its expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our
eyes, since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it,
never all of them together.
The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the
Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of
deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward
ecclesiastical customs which entered into daily life, and of a sense of
dependence on sacraments and ceremonies. The great personal influence
of religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of Italy.
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