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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.
The Reformation did not directly touch the question of the true character of God's church.
It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.
In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.
A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.
This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths.
What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.
When the British became Christian, Christianity in no way altered their political organisation.