At this time superstition and dense ignorance were widespread. Stories
of magic were constantly told and believed, and the miracles with which
the church offset them were hardly less absurd. Other terrors were
added. Public justice was administered so imperfectly that private and
arbitrary violence took its place; while the tribunals which formerly
sat in the open sunlight before the people now covered themselves with
night and secrecy. “The Holy Feme” sprang up in Westphalia. Originally
a public tribunal of the city, such as is found in Brunswick, and
in other places, it afterward spread far and wide, but in a changed
form. Its members held their sessions in secret and by night. Unknown
messengers of the tribunal summoned the accused. Disguised judges,
volunteer officers, from among “the knowing ones,” gave judgment, often
in wild, desolate places, and often in some ancient seat of justice, as
at the Linden-tree at Dortmund. The sentence was executed, even if the
criminal had not appeared or had made his escape. The dagger, with the
mark of the Feme, found in the dead body, told how surely the avenging
arm had struck in the darkness. It was a fearful time, when justice,
like crime, must walk in disguise.
The habits of thought which made possible such beliefs and actions
as these were part of the same movement to which the corruption of
church doctrine and government must also be referred. The perverted
Roman Christianity from which the Reformation was a revolt was not
the Christianity of Charlemagne, nor even that of Hildebrand. Hasty
readers sometimes imagine that the church, for many centuries before
the Reformation, had firmly held the doctrines which Luther rejected.
But, in fact, most of them were recent innovations. Peter the Lombard,
Bishop of Paris in the twelfth century, was the first theologian to
enumerate “the Seven Sacraments,” and Eugene IV., in 1431, was the
first of the popes to proclaim them. The doctrine of transubstantiation
was first embodied in the church confession by the Lateran Council of
November, 1215, the same which first required auricular confession of
all the laity. It was more than a century later before the celibacy of
the clergy and the denial of the sacramental cup to all but priests
became established law, and the idea that the pope is the vicar of
Christ upon earth, and the bearer of divine honors, was accepted. All
these corruptions of the earlier faith were the results of ambition in
the hierarchy, and of gross and sensual modes of thought in the people;
and the same causes led to the rapid development, in the fifteenth
century especially, of the worship of the Virgin Mary, who was honored
with ceremonies and prayers from which Christians of earlier ages would
have shrunk as blasphemous. Nor can the church of the beginning of the
sixteenth century be understood by studying the confession adopted by
the Council of Trent a generation or more afterward. The teachings
and practices which called forth Luther’s protest were far too gross,
when once explained, to bear the examination of sincere friends of
Romanism; who, without knowing it themselves, were greatly influenced,
even in their formal statements of belief, by the controversies of the
Reformation. The value of that great event to the world can not be
comprehended without a knowledge of what it has done for the Catholic
church within its own boundaries.[A]