Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Ysel. He

was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born
in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis.

At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where
Gerhard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of

Paris, Cologne and Prague, and famous as a wandering
preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers of the

Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who
tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ

while working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house-
painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent

school, that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught
the wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this school,

little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and
how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had

put his little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to
Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a

turbulent world which did not attract him.
Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden

death. In central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of
Johannus Huss, the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the

English reformer" target="_blank" title="n.改革者；革新者">reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the death
of their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake by order of

that same Council of Constance, which had promised him a safe-conduct
if he would come to Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope,

the Emperor, twenty-three cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops,
one hundred and fifty abbots and more than a hundred princes and

dukes who had gathered together to reform their church.
In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that

she might drive the English from her territories and just then was
saved from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc.

And no sooner had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy
were at each other's throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death

for the supremacy of western Europe.
In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of

Heaven down upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon,
in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the

far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the
Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final

crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.
But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never

heard. He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts and
he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little

volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has since
been translated into more languages than any other book

save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people
as ever studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the

lives of countless millions. And it was the work of a man
whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the simple

wish that ``he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little
corner with a little book.''

Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the
Middle Ages. Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the

victorious Renaissance, with the humanists loudly proclaiming
the coming of modern times, the Middle Ages gathered

strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks
gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straightforward

and honest men, by the example of their blameless
and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of

righteousness and humbleresignation to the will of God. But
all to no avail. The new world rushed past these good people.

The days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of
``expression'' had begun.

Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use
so many ``big words.'' I wish that I could write this history in

words of one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot
write a text-book of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse

and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped. You
simply have to learn what those words mean or do without

mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually
be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of

Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now?
When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression,

I mean this: People were no longer contented to be the
audience and sit still while the emperor and the pope told

them what to do and what to think. They wanted to be actors
upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving ``expression''

to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be interested
in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo

Macchiavelli, then he ``expressed'' himself in his books which
revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient

ruler. If on the other hand he had a liking for painting, he
``expressed'' his love for beautiful lines and lovely colours in

the pictures which have made the names of Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Rafael and a thousand others household words wherever

people have learned to care for those things which express
a true and lasting beauty.

If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with
an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo

da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with
his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the

Lombardian plains and ``expressed'' his joy and interest in all
things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in

sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of
gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and

the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture
and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out

of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church
of St. Peter, the most concrete ``expression'' of the glories

of the triumphant church. And so it went.
All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with

men and women who lived that they might add their mite to
the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and

beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, Johann
zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann Gutenberg, had

just invented a new method of copying books. He had studied
the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual

letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that
they formed words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost

all his money in a law-suit which had to do with the original
invention of the press. He died in poverty, but the ``expression''

of his particular inventive genius lived after him.
Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in

Antwerp and Froben in Basel were flooding the world with
carefully edited editions of the classics printed in the Gothic

letters of the Gutenberg Bible, or printed in the Italian type
which we use in this book, or printed in Greek letters, or in

Hebrew.
Then the whole world became the eager audience of those

who had something to say. The day when learning had been
a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end. And the

last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world, when
Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his cheap and popular

editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and
Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and

philosophers and scientists, offered to become man's faithful
friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had

made all men free and equal before the printed word.
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN
THROUGH THE BONDS OF THEIR NARROW

MEDIAEVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO
HAVE MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDERINGS.

THE EUROPEAN WORLD HAD
GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBITIONS.

IT WAS THE TIME OF THE GREAT
VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

THE Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travelling.
But very few people had ever ventured beyond the well-

known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffe. In the
thirteenth century the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice,

had wandered across the great Mongolian desert and after
climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their

way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty
emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name

of Marco, had written a book about their adventures, which
covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished

world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of
the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of

spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that
they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was

too far and too dangerous and so they stayed at home.
Of course, there was always the possibility of making the

voyage by sea. But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle
Ages and for many very good reasons. In the first place, ships

were very small. The vessels on which Magellan made his
famous trip around the world, which lasted many years, were

not as large as a modern ferryboat. They carried from twenty
to fifty men, who lived in dingy quarters (too low to allow any

of them to stand up straight) and the sailors were obliged to
eat poorly cooked food as the kitchen arrangements were very

bad and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the
least bit rough. The mediaeval world knew how to pickle herring

and how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods
and fresh vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as