[14] "With this noble protest was laid the keystone of the
Reformation. The pontifical hierarchy shook to its centre, and the
great cause of truth and regenerate religion spread with electric
speed. The marble tomb of ignorance and error gave way, as it were, of
a sudden; a thousand glorious events and magnificent discoveries
thronged upon each other with pressing haste to behold and
congratulate the mighty birth, the new creation, of which they were
the harbingers, when, with a steady and triumphant step, the peerless
form of human intellect rose erect, and, throwing off from its
freshening limbs the death-shade and the grave-clothes by which it was
enshrouded, ascended to the glorious resurrection of that noontide
lustre which irradiates the horizon of our own day, rejoicing like a
giant to run his race."--John Mason Good's _Book of Nature_, p. 321.