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CHAPTER X · and of intelligence.

It may be worth while to pause here, and inquire into some of the causes of this rapid spread of the doctrines of the Reformation after the long period of comparative stagnation preceding. One of these was undoubtedly the astonishing progress of letters in France during the last forty years. From being neglected and rough, the French language, during the first half of the sixteenth century, became the most polite of the tongues spoken in Western Europe—thanks to a series of eminent prose writers and poets who graced the royal court. The generation reaching manhood in the latter years of the reign of Henry the Second were far better educated than the contemporaries of Francis the First. The public mind, through the elevating tendencies of schools fostered by royal bounty, was to a considerable degree emancipated from the thraldom of superstition. It repudiated the silly romanese, passing for the lives of the saints, with which the public had formerly been satisfied. It scrutinized minutely every pretended miracle of the papal churches and convents, and exposed the trickery by which a corrupt clergy sought to maintain itself in popular esteem. Thus the growing intelligence and widening information of the people prepared them to appreciate the merits of the great doctrinal controversy now occupying the attention of enlightened minds. Interest in the discussion of the most important themes that can occupy the human contemplation was both stimulated and gratified by a constant influx of religious works from the teeming presses of Strasbourg, Basle, Lausanne, Neufchâtel, and especially Geneva. And the verdict of the great majority of readers and thinkers was favorable to the Swiss and German controversialists.