supreme authority of the Scriptures, to which Protestants of every
denomination have since professed to cling. They may differ in the
interpretation of texts,--and thus sects and parties gradually
arose, who quarrelled about their meaning,--but none of them deny
their supreme authority. All the issues of Protestants have been
on the meaning of texts, on the interpretation of the Scriptures,--
to be settled by learning and reason. It was not until rationalism
arose, and rejected plain and obvious declarations of Scripture, as
inconsistent with reason, as interpolations, as uninspired, that
the authority of the Scriptures was weakened; and these
rationalists--and the land of Luther became full of them--have gone
infinitely beyond the Catholics in undermining the Bible. The
Catholics never have taken such bold ground as the rationalists
respecting the Scriptures. The Catholic Church still accepts the
Bible, but explains away the meaning of many of its doctrines; the
rationalists would sweep away its divine authority, extinguish
faith, and leave the world in night. Satan came into the
theological school of the Protestants, disguised in the robes of
learned doctors searching for truth, and took away the props of
religious faith. This was worse than baptizing repentance with the
name of penance. Better have irrational fears of hell than no
fears at all, for this latter is Paganism. Pagan culture and Pagan
philosophy could not keep society together in the old Roman world;
but Mediaeval appeals to the fears of men did keep them from crimes
and force upon them virtues.
The triumph of Luther at Leipsic was, however, incomplete. The
Catholics rallied after their stunning blow. They said, in
substance: "We, too, accept the Scriptures; we even put them above
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the councils. But who can
interpret them? Can peasants and women, or even merchants and
nobles? The Bible, though inspired, is full of difficulties; there
are contradictory texts. It is a sealed book, except to the
learned; only the Church can reconcile its difficulties. And what
we mean by the Church is the clergy,--the learned clergy,
acknowledging allegiance to their spiritual head, who in matters of
faith is also infallible. We can accept nothing which is not
indorsed by popes and councils. No matter how plain the Scriptures
seem to be, on certain disputed points only the authority of the
Church can enlighten and instruct us. We distrust reason,--that
is, what you call reason,--for reason can twist anything, and
pervert it; but what the Church says, is true,--its collective
intelligence is our supreme law [thus putting papal dogmas above
reason, above the literal and plain declarations of Scripture].
Moreover, since the Scriptures are to be interpreted only by
priests, it is not a safe book for the people. We, the priests,
will keep it out of their hands. They will get notions from it
fatal to our authority; they will become fanatics: they will, in
their conceit, defy us."
Then Luther rose, more powerful, more eloquent more majestic than
before; he rose superior to himself. "What," said he, "keep the
light of life from the people; take away their guide to heaven;
keep them in ignorance of what is most precious and most exalting;
deprive them of the blessed consolations which sustain the soul in
trial and in death; deny the most palpable truths, because your
dignitaries put on them a construction to bolster up their power!
What an abomination! what treachery to heaven! what peril to the
souls of men! Besides, your authorities differ. Augustine takes
different ground from Pelagius; Bernard from Abelard; Thomas
Aquinas from Dun Scotus. Have not your grand councils given
contradictory decisions? Whom shall we believe? Yea, the popes
themselves, your infallible guides,--have they not at different
times rendered different decisions? What would Gregory I. say to
the verdicts of Gregory VII.?
"No, the Scriptures are the legacy of the early Church to universal
humanity; they are the equal and treasured inheritance of all
nations and tribes and kindreds upon the face of the earth, and
will be till the day of judgment. It was intended that they should
be diffused, and that every one should read them, and interpret
them each for himself; for he has a soul to save, and he dare not
intrust such a precious thing as his soul into the keeping of
selfish and ambitious priests. Take away the Bible from a peasant,
or a woman, or any layman, and cannot the priest, armed with the
terrors and the frauds of the Middle Ages, shut up his soul in a
gloomy dungeon, as noisome and funereal as your Mediaeval crypts?
And will you, ye boasted intellectual guides of the people,
extinguish reason in this world in reference to the most momentous
interests? What other guide has a man but his reason? And you
would prevent this very reason from being enlightened by the
Gospel! You would obscure reason itself by your traditions, O ye
blind leaders of the blind! O ye legal and technical men,
obscuring the light of truth! O ye miserable Pharisees, ye bigots,
ye selfish priests, tenacious of your power, your inventions, your
traditions,--will ye withhold the free redemption, God's greatest
boon, salvation by the blood of Christ, offered to all the world?
Yea, will you suffer the people to perish, soul and body, because
you fear that, instructed by God himself, they will rebel against
your accursed despotism? Have you considered what a mighty crime
you thus commit against God, against man? Ye rule by an infernal
appeal to the superstitious fears of men; but how shall ye
yourselves, for such crimes, escape the damnation of that hell into
which you would push your victims unless they obey YOU?
"No, I say, let the Scriptures be put into the hands of everybody;
let every one interpret them for himself, according to the light he
has; let there be private judgment; let spiritual liberty be
revived, as in Apostolic days. Then only will the people be
emancipated from the Middle Ages, and arise in their power and
majesty, and obey the voice of enlightened conscience, and be true
to their convictions, and practise the virtues which Christianity
commands, and obey God rather than man, and defy all sorts of
persecution and martyrdom, having a serene faith in those blessed
promises which the Gospel unfolds. Then will the people become
great, after the conflicts of generations, and put under their feet
the mockeries and lies and despotisms which grind them to despair."
Thus was born the third great idea of the Reformation, out of
Luther's brain, a logical sequence from the first idea,--the right
of private judgment, religious liberty, call it what you will; a
great inspiration which in after times was destined to march
triumphantly over battle-fields, and give dignity and power to the
people, and lead to the reception of great truths obscured by
priests for one thousand years; the motive of an irresistible
popular progress, planting England with Puritans, and Scotland with
heroes, and France with martyrs, and North America with colonists;
yea, kindling a fervid religions life; creating such men as Knox
and Latimer and Taylor and Baxter and Howe, who owed their
greatness to the study of the Scriptures,--at last put into every
hand, and scattered far and wide, even to India and China. Can
anybody doubt the marvellous progress of Protestant nations in
consequence of the translation and circulation of the Scriptures?
How these are bound up with their national life, and all their
social habits, and all their religious aspirations; how they have
elevated the people, ten hundred millions of times more than the
boasted Renaissance which sprang from apostate and infidel and
Pagan Italy, when she dug up the buried statues of Greece and Rome,
and revived the literature and arts which soften, but do not save--
for private judgment and religious liberty mean nothing more and
nothing less than the unrestricted perusal of the Scriptures as the
guide of life.
This right of private judgment, on which Luther was among the first
to insist, and of which certainly he was the first great champion
in Europe, was in that age a very bold idea, as well as original.
It flattered as well as stimulated the intellect of the people, and
gave them dignity; it gave to the Reformation its popular
character; it appealed to the mind and heart of Christendom. It
gave consolation to the peasantry of Europe; for no family was too
poor to possess a Bible, the greatest possible boon and treasure,--
read and pondered in the evening, after hard labors and bitter
insults; read aloud to the family circle, with its inexhaustible
store of moral wealth, its beautiful and touching narratives, its
glorious poetry, its awful prophecies, its supernal counsels, its
consoling and emancipating truths,--so tender and yet so exalting,
raising the soul above the grim trials of toil and poverty into the
realms of seraphic peace and boundless joy. The Bible even gave
hope to heretics. All sects and parties could take shelter under
it; all could stand on the broad platform of religion, and survey
from it the wonders and glories of God. At last men might even
differ on important points of doctrine and worship, and yet be
Protestants. Religious liberty became as wide in its application
as the unity of the Church. It might create sects, but those sects
would be all united as to the value of the Scriptures and their
cardinal declarations. On this broad basis John Milton could shake
hands with John Knox, and John Locke with Richard Baxter, and
Oliver Cromwell with Queen Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon with William
Penn; and Bishop Butler with John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards with
Doctor Channing.
This idea of private judgment is what separates the Catholics from
the Protestants; not most ostensibly, but most vitally. Many are
the Catholics who would accept Luther's idea of grace, since it is
the idea of Saint Augustine; and of the supreme authority of the
Scriptures, since they were so highly valued by the Fathers: but
few of the Catholic clergy have ever tolerated religious liberty,--
that is, the interpretation of the Scriptures by the people,--for
it is a vital blow to their supremacy, their hierarchy, and their
institutions. They will no more readily accept it than William the
Conqueror would have accepted the Magna Charta; for the free
circulation and free interpretation of the Scriptures are the
charter of human liberties fought for at Leipsic by Gustavus
Adolphus, at Ivry by Henry IV. This right of worshipping God
according to the dictates of conscience, enlightened by the free
reading of the Scriptures, is just what the "invincible armada" was
sent by Philip II. to crush; just what Alva, dictated by Rome,
sought to crush in Holland; just what Louis XIV., instructed by the
Jesuits, did crush out in France, by the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. The Satanic hatred of this right was the cause of most of
the martyrdoms and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. It was the declaration of this right which emancipated
Europe from the dogmas of the Middle Ages, the thraldom of Rome,
and the reign of priests. Why should not Protestants of every
shade cherish and defend this sacred right? This is what made
Luther the idol and oracle of Germany, the admiration of half
Europe, the pride and boast of succeeding ages, the eternal hatred
of Rome; not his religious experiences, not his doctrine of
justification by faith, but the emancipation he gave to the mind of
the world. This is what peculiarly stamps Luther as a man of
genius, and of that surprising audacity and boldness which only
great geniuses evince when they follow out the logical sequence of
their ideas, and penetrate at a blow the hardened steel of vulcanic
armor beneath which the adversary boasts.
Great was the first Leo, when from his rifled palace on one of the
devastated hills of Rome he looked out upon the Christian world,
pillaged, sacked, overrun with barbarians, full of untold
calamities,--order and law crushed; literature and art prostrate;
justice a byword; murders and assassinations unavenged; central
power destroyed; vice, in all its enormities, vulgarities, and
obscenities, rampant and multiplying itself; false opinions gaining
ground; soldiers turned into banditti, and senators into slaves;
women shrieking in terror; bishops praying in despair; barbarism
everywhere, paganism in danger of being revived; a world
disordered, forlorn, and dismal; Pandemonium let loose, with
howling and shouting and screaming, in view of the desolation
predicted alike by Jeremy the prophet and the Cumaean sybil;--great
was that Leo, when in view of all this he said, with old patrician
heroism, "I will revive government once more upon this earth; not
by bringing back the Caesars, but by declaring a new theocracy, by
making myself the vicegerent of Christ, by virtue of the promise
made to Peter, whose successor I am, in order to restore law,
punish crime, head off heresy, encourage genius, conserve peace,
heal dissensions, protect learning; appealing to love, but ruling
by fear. Who but the Church can do this? A theocracy will create
a new civilization. Not a diadem, but a tiara will I wear, the
symbol of universal sovereignty, before which barbarism shall flee
away, and happiness be restored once more." As he sent out his
legates, he fulminated his bulls and established tribunals of
appeal; he made a net-work of ecclesiastical machinery, and
proclaimed the dangers of eternal fire, and brought kings and
princes before him on their knees. The barbaric world was saved.
But greater than Leo was Luther, when--outraged by the corruptions
of this spiritual despotism, and all the false and Pagan notions
which had crept into theology, obscuring the light of faith and
creating an intolerable bondage, and opposing the new spirit of
progress which science and art and industry and wealth had invoked
--he courageously yet modestly comes forward as the champion of a
new civilization, and declares, with trumpet tones, "Let there be
private judgment; liberty of conscience; the right to read and
interpret Scripture, in spite of priests! so that men may think for
themselves, not only on the doctrines of eternal salvation but on
all the questions to be deduced from them, or interlinked with the
past or present or future institutions of the world. Then shall
arise a new creation from dreaded destruction, and emancipated
millions shall be filled with an unknown enthusiasm, and advance
with the new weapons of reason and truth from conquering to
conquer, until all the strongholds of sin and Satan shall be
subdued, and laid triumphantly at the foot of His throne whose
right it is to reign."
Thus far Luther has appeared as a theologian, a philosopher, a man
of ideas, a man of study and reflection, whom the Catholic Church
distrusts and fears, as she always has distrusted genius and manly
independence; but he is henceforth to appear as a reformer, a
warrior, to carry out his ideas and also to defend himself against
the wrath he has provoked; impelled step by step to still bolder
aggressions, until he attacks those venerable institutions which he
once respected,--all the dexterous inventions of Mediaeval
despotism, all the machinery by which Europe had been governed for
one thousand years; yea, the very throne of the Pope himself, whom
he defies, whom he insults, and against whom he urges Christendom
to rebel. As a combatant, a warrior, a reformer, his person and
character somewhat change. He is coarser, he is more sensual-
looking, he drinks more beer, he tells more stories, he uses harder
names; he becomes arrogant, dogmatic; he dictates and commands; he
quarrels with his friends; he is imperious; he fears nobody, and is
scornful of old usages; he marries a nun; he feels that he is a
great leader and general, and wields new powers; he is an executive
and administrative man, for which his courage and insight and will
and Herculean physical strength wonderfully fit him,--the man for
the times, the man to head a new movement, the forces of an age of
protest and rebellion and conquest.
How can I compress into a few sentences the demolitions and
destructions which this indignant and irritated reformer now makes
in Germany, where he is protected by the Elector from Papal
vengeance? Before the reconstruction, the old rubbish must be
cleared away, and Augean stables must be cleansed. He is now at
issue with the whole Catholic regime, and the whole Catholic world
abuse him. They call him a glutton, a wine-bibber, an adulterer, a
scoffer, an atheist, an imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the
scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is
prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors
alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and
pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible.
See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of
vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age
was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old weapons
of the Gregorys and the Clements. But they are impotent as the
darts of Priam; Luther laughs at them, and burns the Papal bull
before a huge concourse of excited students and shopkeepers and
enthusiastic women. He severs himself completely from Rome, and
declares an unextinguishable warfare. He destroys and breaks up
the ceremonies of the Mass; he pulls down the consecrated altars,
with their candles and smoking incense and vessels of silver and
gold, since they are the emblems of Jewish and Pagan worship; he
tears off the vestments of priests, with their embroideries and
their gildings and their millineries and their laces, since these
are made to impose on the imagination and appeal to the sense; he
breaks up monasteries and convents, since they are dens of infamy,
cages of unclean birds, nurseries of idleness and pleasure, abodes
at the best of narrow-minded, ascetic Asiatic recluses, who rejoice
in penance and self-expiation and other modes of propitiating the
Deity, like soofists and fakirs and Braminical devotees. In
defiance of the most sacred of the institutions of the Middle Ages,
he openly marries Catherine Bora and sets up a hilarious household,
and yet a household of prayer and singing. He abolishes the old
Gregorian service; and for Mediaeval chants, monotonous and gloomy,
he prepares hymns and songs,--not for boys and priests to intone in
the distant choir, but for the whole congregation to sing, inspired
by the melodies of David and the exulting praises of a Saviour who
redeems from darkness into light. How grand that hymn of his,--
"A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing."
He makes worship more heartfelt, and revives apostolic usages:
preaching and exhortation and instruction from the pulpit,--a
forgotten power. He appeals to reason rather than sense; denounces
superstitions, while he rebukes sins; and kindles a profound
fervor, based on the recognition of new truths. He is not fully
emancipated from the traditions of the past; for he retains the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and keeps up the holidays of the
Church, and allows recreation on the Sabbath. But what he thinks
the most of is the circulation of the Scriptures among plain
people. So he translates them into German. And this, not the
first but the best translation, is done so well that it becomes the
standard of the German language, as the Bible of Tindale helped to
form the English tongue; and not only so, but it has remained the
common version in use throughout Germany, even as the authorized
King James version, made nearly a century later by the labor of
many scholars and divines, has remained the standard English Bible.
Moreover, he finds time to make liturgies and creeds and hymns, and
to write letters to all parts of Christendom,--a Jerome, a
Chrysostom, and an Augustine united; a kind of Protestant pope, to
whom everybody looks for advice and consolation. What a wonderful
man! No wonder the Germans are so fond of him and so proud of
him,--a Briareus with a hundred arms; a marvel, a wonder, a prodigy
of nature; the most gifted, versatile, hard-working man of his
century or nation!
At last, this great theologian, this daring innovator, is summoned
by imperial, not papal, authority before the Diet of the empire at
Worms, where the Emperor, the great Charles V., presides, amid
bishops, princes, cardinals, legates, generals, and dignitaries.
Thither Luther must go,--yet under imperial safe conduct,--and
consummate his protests, and perhaps offer up his life. Painters,
poets, historians, have made that scene familiar,--the most
memorable in the life of Luther, as well as one of the grandest
spectacles of the age. I need not dwell on that exciting scene,
where, in the presence of all that was illustrious and powerful in
Germany, this defenceless doctor dares to say to supremest temporal
and spiritual authority, "Unless you confute me by arguments drawn
from Scripture, I cannot and will not recant anything . . . Here I
stand; I cannot otherwise: God help me! Amen." How superior to
Galileo and other scientific martyrs! He is not afraid of those
who can kill only the body; he is afraid only of Him who hath power
to cast both soul and body into hell. So he stands as firm as the
eternal pillars of justice, and his cause is gained. What if he
did not live long enough to accomplish all he designed! What if he
made mistakes, and showed in his career many of the infirmities of
human nature! What if he cared very little for pictures and
statues,--the revived arts of Greece and Rome, the Pagan
Renaissance in which he only sees infidelity, levities, and
luxuries, and other abominations which excited his disgust and
abhorrence when he visited Italy! HE seeks, not to amuse and adorn
the Papal empire, but to reform it; as Paul before him sought to
plant new sentiments and ideas in the Roman world, indifferent to
the arts of Greece, and even the beauties of nature, in his
absorbing desire to convert men to Christ. And who, since Paul,
has rendered greater service to humanity than Luther? The whole
race should be proud that such a man has lived.
We will not follow the great reformer to the decline of his years;
we will not dwell on his subsequent struggles and dangers, his
marvellous preservation, his personal habits, his friendships and
his hatreds, his joys and sorrows, his bitter alienations, his
vexatious, his disappointments, his gloomy anticipations of
approaching strife, his sickened yet exultant soul, his last days
of honor and of victory, his final illness, and his triumphant
death in the town where he was born. It is his legacy that we are
concerned in, the inheritance he left to succeeding generations,--
the perpetuated ideas of the Reformation, which he worked out in
anguish and in study, and which we will not let die, but will
cherish in our memories and our hearts, as among the most precious
of the heirlooms of genius, susceptible of boundless application.
And it is destined to grow brighter and richer, in spite of
counter-reformation and Jesuitism, of Pagan levities and Pagan
lies, of boastful science and Epicurean pleasures, of material
glories, of dissensions and sects and parties, as the might and
majesty of ages coursing round the world regenerates institutions
and nations, and proclaims the sovereignty of intelligence, the
glory and the power of God.
AUTHORITIES.
Ranke's Reformation in Germany; D'Aubigne's History of the
Reformation; Luther's Letters; Mosheim's History of the Church;
Melancthon's Life of Luther: Erasmi Epistolae; Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
THOMAS CRANMER.
A. D. 1489-1556.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.
As the great interest of the Middle Ages, in an historical point of
view, centres around the throne of the popes, so the most prominent
subject of historical interest in our modern times is the revolt
from their almost unlimited domination. The Protestant
reformation, in its various relations, was a movement of
transcendent importance. The history of Christendom, in a moral, a
political, a religious, a literary, and a social point of view, for
the last three hundred years, cannot be studied or comprehended
without primary reference to that memorable revolution.
We have seen how that great insurrection of human intelligence was
headed in Germany by Luther, and we shall shortly consider it in
Switzerland and France under Calvin. We have now to contemplate
the movement in England.