This high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the last century, was externalized in the French Revolution.

The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.
Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world, and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages.

Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance.

The problem for the present and the future is how through education to render knowledge accessible to all--to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes.