The Italian who had heard Pomponazzi, and lived under the easy rule of the Renaissance popes, smiled to find Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII keeping all the marvelous dogmas of the medieval creed—a God-dictated Bible, a triune deity, predestination, creation by divine fiat, original sin, incarnation, virgin birth, atonement, the last judgment, heaven, and hell—and rejecting precisely those elements of medieval Christianity—the worship of the Virgin, a God of love and mercy, the invocation of intercessory saints, a ritual adorned with all the arts—which had given to that faith a tenderness,
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