which it aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was
accomplished in what is called the eclaircissement of the
eighteenth century, or in our own generation; and what really
belongs to the revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading
instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with this very
question of the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the
religion of Christ. A modern scholar occupied by this problem
might observe that all religions may be regarded as natural
products, that, at least in their origin, their growth, and decay,
they have common laws, and are not to be isolated from the other
movements of the human mind in the periods in which they
respectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the
human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its
sentiment concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual
product must be judged from the point of [34] view of the age
and the people in which it was produced. He might go on to
observe that each has contributed something to the development
of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the
gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of
each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world
would thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the
human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root,
and in which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of
childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in
the experience of the individual.

Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the
fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic
sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a
world unlike one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation