"The Modern era was brought in, not by the Reformation, but by the Renaissance, which preceded it in time and greatly exceeded it in scope and dignity. The Renaissance was reversion to the spacious paganism of Greece and Rome; as someone has well said, it was a bouleversement of all principles of Christianity. Its test for ideas was not the authority behind them but the probability in them. It was immensely curious, ingenious, skeptical and daring—in brief, everything that Christianity was not. Unfortunately, its intuitions ran far ahead of its knowledge, and so, while it left all enlightened men convinced that Christian theology was a farrago of absurdities, all it had to offer in place of that theology was a body of exact facts, explaining the cosmos and man's place in it in rational terms. The task of accumulating those facts fell upon the Seventeenth Century, and the light began to dawn toward its close. One by one the basic mysteries yielded to a long line of extraordinarily brilliant and venturesome men—Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Harvey, and Leeuwenhoek among them. The universe ceased to be Yahweh's plaything and became a mechanism like any other, responding to the same immutable laws. The world dwindled to the estate of what A. J. Balfour called "one of the meanest of planets." Man became an animal—the noblest of them all, but still an animal. Heaven and Hell sank to the level of old wives' tales, and there was a vast collapse of Trinities, Virgin Births, Atonements and other such pious phantasms. The Seventeenth Century, and especially the latter half thereof, saw greater progress than had been made in the twenty centuries preceding—almost as much, indeed, as was destined to be made in the Nineteenth and Twentieth."