reduce to the One the new world which swam into men’s ken.  Still more burdened with fate for the future generations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on a national basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell.  Meanwhile, men had begun to think and to write in national languages.  Already by the reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which was spoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literary language in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation.  Still earlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than a century after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germany a common speech and a common Bible.  It was little wonder that in such times the old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there developed—­at any rate in England and in Germany—­a national Church.  The unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone. Cuius regio eius religio.  To each region its religion; and to each nation, we may add, its national culture.  The Renaissance may have begun as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan representative.  It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and Lope de Vega in Spain.

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind.  It was engaged in war.  France was fighting Spain:  England was seeking to maintain the balance:  Turkey was engaged in the struggle.  It is a world with which we are familiar—­a world of national languages, national religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity.  But unity was not entirely dead.  Science might still transcend the bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz, fill the European stage.  Religion, which divided, might also unite; and a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot.  Leyden in the seventeenth century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it could play the part of an international university, and provide a common centre of medical science and classical culture.  But the old unity of the Middle Ages was gone—­gone past recall.  Between those days and the new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry.  Much was lost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to the currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance.  It would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the new world was a better thing than the old.  One will cry that the old world was the home of clericalism and