ABSTRACT
In Poland and Lithuania the Greek and Roman Churches confronted each other, and a similar situation was found in the Balkans, in the mountainous territory in Bosnia. The advance of Christianity was slower than it had been, and in the hands of politicians rather than evangelists. The fear of engulfment by the Turk gave urgency to the old problem of ecclesiastical relations between Rome and Constantinople. A sound and aggressive religious spirit is as likely to urge reform as is one beset by doubts. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries certainly afford plenty of examples of men and women who were dissatisfied with the role of religion in their lives and with the structure of the organized Church. The reality of religion in concrete forms was doubtless encouraged by both art and drama. The Italian primitives and the Flemish primitives conveyed with an immediacy which must at the time have been startling the lives of Christ, of the Virgin and saints.
