In theology the notion of salvation by the faith of the individual, and not through the fact of belonging to a corporate organization, which was the mediaeval conception, was latent in the minds of multitudes of religious persons before expression was given to it by Luther.

The aversion to scholasticism, bred by the revived knowledge of the older Greek philosophies in the original, produced a curious amalgam; but scholastic habits of thought were still dominant through it all.

The new theories of nature amounted to little more than old superstitions, systematized and reduced to rule, though here and there the later physical science, based on observation and experiment, peeped through.

In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by the final conquest of the Roman civil law, in its spirit, where not in its forms, over the old customs, pre-feudal and feudal.
The subject of Germany during that closing period of the Middle Ages, characterized by what is known as the revival of learning and the Reformation, is so important for an understanding of later German history and the especial characteristics of the German culture of later times, that we propose, even at the risk of wearying some readers, to recapitulate in as short a space as possible, compatible with clearness, the leading conditions of the times--conditions which, directly or indirectly, have moulded the whole subsequent course of German development.
Owing to the geographical situation of Germany and to the political configuration of its peoples and other causes, mediaeval conditions of life as we find them in the early sixteenth century left more abiding traces on the German mind and on German culture than was the case with some other nations.

The time was out of joint in a very literal sense of that somewhat hackneyed phrase.