First Sentence

"THE Renaissance was at once the precursor and the parent of the Revolution; a voice crying in that wilderness which mediaeval Christianity had made of the world, crying against asceticism and against superstition; pleading for a restoration of the true, the real, the natural; proclaiming, though sometimes with stammering lips, the divinity of nature; preparing the way for the Revolution; and yet, like the Baptist of old, unconscious of what it was the forerunner."