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§ 1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference between them.

§ 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said, whether we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the nineteenth century the “good time” is supposed to be “coming,” but in the sixteenth century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian scholars gazed with admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and longed to restore the old languages, and as much as possible the old world, so that such works might be produced again. Many were suspected, not altogether perhaps without reason, of wishing to uproot Christianity itself,[8] that they might bring back the Golden Age of Pericles.

§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the age of the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened that the scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest importance to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as they thought, through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into the bygone world in which their soul delighted.