ABSTRACT
The records of German and English trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civilization. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive Christianity.
