Excerpt from Universal World History, Vol. 7: Written by One Hundred Fifty of the Foremost Living Authorities in All Branches of Historical Knowledge; Pages 1857-2166, the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, 1492-1660 With the close of our Sixth Era we reach the point at which, by general consent, 'modern History' opens: the moment when the two halves of the world, hitherto unaware of each other, became suddenly conscious of each other's existence; when the hitherto pathless ocean became for the first time a highway and a battlefield, because the adventurous peoples of the West had discovered at once new outlets for expansion and new fields of rivalry, even at the moment when new intellectual and moral horizons were revealing themselves, and Europe politically was organizing itself upon the Great Powers basis. The Seventh Era is the first phase of the new order. In it the most prominent feature is the struggle which vainly hurled nations against each other and divided them against themselves for the mastery of one or the other of two rival religious ideals, only to learn that neither could be mastered by the other; while the oceanic expansion was less conspicuously shaping the lines on which future rivalries were to develop. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.