CHAPTER V

BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY

The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall

of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During

a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes

to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer's name per century

which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is

the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is

in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that

Christianity was not the determining cause of the arrest. Civilization

progresses by the contact of cultures; and where that is lacking the

results are the same under all religious systems. Byzantium presents

the symptoms of China, because, like China, it was politically and

intellectually isolated for a whole era, under a centralized government

which imposed certain norms of life and doctrine, and prevented the

variation and mutual reaction that would otherwise have arisen between

its provinces. Only inasmuch as it promoted and consecrated such a

system was Christianity a primary factor in the resulting arrest of

growth. As a matter of fact, it lent itself alternately to division

and to petrifaction. In the period to the end of the seventh century,

dogma was a source of strife which dismembered the empire; in the

period of contracted empire, face to face with the Moslem enemy,

religious feeling tended to prevent further disruption, very much as

the Church had been unified in the pagan period by persecution.

Within the contracted empire, however, there was no durable

progress. Its condensed annals give a picture which even the barbarian

West could not outgo. In the period from 668 to 716 seven emperors

were dethroned, four of them were put to death, one (while drunk)

had his eyes put out, and two more, in addition to two brothers of

emperors, had their noses cut off--punishments which in Byzantium

became classical. Under Christianity there was certainly more cruelty

and demoralization than under early Islam. The Caliph Aboubekr had

given to his followers those injunctions: "Be just: the unjust never

prosper. Be valiant: die rather than yield. Be merciful: slay neither

old men, children, nor women. Destroy neither fruit-trees, grain, nor

cattle. Keep your word, even to your enemies." Only those who refused

either to become Moslems or to pay tribute were to be slain. In that

spirit the Caliph Moawyah rebuilt their Church for the Christians

of Edessa. Fifty years later, Justinian II invaded Armenia, and on

driving out the Saracens seized and sold as slaves the majority of the

Christian inhabitants, reducing the richest parts of the country to

desert. And when, after he had been dethroned, deprived of his nose,

and exiled for ten years, he returned to triumph over his enemies,

the Greek populace applauded him with Biblical quotations as he sat

in the circus with his feet on his rivals' necks.

The advent of Leo the Isaurian (716) marks an epoch in Byzantine

history. Acting as head of the Church, the established function of the

eastern emperors, he set himself to check idolatry, first by ordering

that the pictures in the churches should be placed high enough to

prevent the people from kissing them. On this issue the populace and

the lower clergy united against him, to the length of rebellion; and

he in turn made his edicts more stringent. Whatever may have been his

motives, he acted on principles afterwards founded on by Protestantism;

and during a century and a half--save for a relapse from 787 to 813,

in which the government was sometimes tyrannically orthodox and

sometimes tolerant--his views were more or less fully maintained by

succeeding rulers. It is interesting to note that, as repeatedly

happened centuries later in the West, a long period of religious

strife through the whole State created a party in favour of complete

tolerance and liberty of conscience. But though they so far gained

ground as to convert the emperor Nicephorus I (802-811), who employed

some of them in his ministry, and treated both Paulician heretics

and rebels with unusual tolerance, there was no such intellectual

life in Byzantium as could long sustain a tolerant policy. It is a

miscalculation to suppose, as some do, that the triumph of iconoclasm

would have meant the regeneration of the empire. To work regeneration

there were needed further forces of variation, since Islam stagnated

without image-worship as Byzantium did with it.

Leo the Armenian (813-820), who was averse to image-worship but

desirous of keeping the peace, was forced by the zeal of the

iconoclastic party and the obstinacy of the orthodox to resume an

iconoclastic policy. Under such circumstances numbers of the clergy

became temporizers, leaving to the monks the fanatical defence of

images; and as Leo himself was capable, with the approbation of

both parties, of an act of the grossest treachery toward his enemy

the king of the Bulgarians, it is clear that neither iconoclasm nor

image-worship was raising the plane of morals. Significantly enough,

it was at the beginning of the reign of Michael the Drunkard (842-867),

who was professedly orthodox, but openly burlesqued the ceremonies

of the Church, that image-worship was definitely restored under the

regency of his fanatical mother, Theodora. The great majority were

weary of the strife, and many of the iconoclasts had come to the

conclusion that relative sanity in religion was not worth fighting

for. For the rest, Michael was finally assassinated, as Leo the

Armenian had been before him.

It was at this period that Photius, the most learned man of the

Dark Ages, became Patriarch of Constantinople, in the teeth of the

opposition of the pope of Rome, who after the formal restoration of

image-worship had been appealed to, as a champion of orthodoxy, for

the decision of some official disputes in the Eastern Church. After

his position was assured, Photius effectually fought the Roman claims,

completing the schism between the Churches; and in his own sphere

he did much for the preservation of learning, and even something

for the cultivation of judgment. In theology, it is admitted by one

of another school, "he made use of his own reason and sagacity";

and he is notable, in his period and place, for having reached the

idea that earthquakes might not be divine portents. But Photius is

the high-water mark of Byzantine intelligence; and no man of equal

capacity and culture seems to have arisen during the six remaining

centuries of the eastern empire.

It is impossible, indeed, to say whether there was not in Byzantium,

behind the official scenes, a higher intellectual life. It was from

Michael II ("the Stammerer") that Louis the son of Charlemagne received

(824) the copy of the writings of Dionysius "the Areopagite," from

which was made the first Latin translation; and as this writer had

a great influence on John Scotus, who may even have acquired his

first knowledge of him from that very copy, which he translated

afresh, it may be that in Greece also, where Dionysius was much

admired and studied among the monks, there were deep thinkers whom

he stimulated. But whereas even Scotus could reach few in the West,

any higher thought there may have been in the East remained entirely

latent. Learning fared better. After Photius, the East produced for

posterity the important Lexicon of Suidas, which apparently belongs

to the tenth century; and in the twelfth Eustathius of Thessalonica

produced his valuable commentary on Homer. But the populace in the

East was as ignorant and superstitious as that of the West; and

the system of caste occupations or hereditary pursuits made eastern

learning even a less communicable influence than western.

In the political life there were fluctuations; and though in all ages

alike there were dethronements, assassinations, and mutilations of

emperors and of their suspected relatives, the time of the Basilian

dynasty (867-1057) was one of relative stability, with even some

military glory, and temporary recovery or expansion of territory, as

against Saracens and Bulgarians. Still the sum-total of each century's

life was practically stagnation. Under emperors, empresses, or eunuchs,

the administration was substantially the same. Alien elements, which

might under other conditions have generated new life, had entered the

empire with the Slavonians, whose race, after occupying Dalmatia and

Illyricum at the wish of Heraclius in the seventh century, flourished

and multiplied, and invaded the Peloponnesus early in the ninth. The

later iconoclastic emperors were vigorous enough to bring them to

submission; but Roman imperialism and Christian ecclesiasticism

between them undid all progressive influences, just as the policy of

militarism and fanaticism finally did among the Saracens.

The attempts at change, indeed, were many. Conspiracies were chronic;

and when one failed the conspirators were blinded according to

Byzantine rule: emperors on the other hand were often unmade; but the

political machinery remained the same. In the period to Heraclius,

the ruling class at Constantinople were mainly of Roman stock; under

the Iconoclastic emperors, who were Asiatics, it was mainly Asiatic;

later it became substantially Greek, as each party drove out the other;

but all alike maintained the old imperial ideals. "Men of every rank,"

says the historian Finlay, "were confined within a restricted circle,

and compelled to act in one unvarying manner. Within the imperial

palace the incessant ceremonial was regarded as the highest branch

of human knowledge.... Among the people at large, though the curial

system of castes had been broken down, still the trader was fettered

to his corporation, and often to his quarter or street ... amidst men

of the same profession.... No learning, no talent, and no virtue could

conduct either to distinction or wealth, unless exercised according

to the fixed formulas that governed the State and the Church. Hence

even the merchant, who travelled over all Asia, and who supported the

system by the immense duties that he furnished to the government,

supplied no new ideas to society, and perhaps passed through life

without acquiring any."

Yet such is the strength of the biological force of variation that

even in religion there was chronic heresy. We have seen, in tracing

the history of western belief in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,

how a strenuous anti-clerical heresy, the Paulician, had arisen and

thriven in the East, defying the bloodiest persecution, and developing

in the old fashion into a force of hostility to the empire. After that

heresy had been thus fatally expelled, others arose. In the twelfth

century, under the theological emperor Manuel Comnenus, there was a

return to the inexhaustible problem of the incarnation: men disputed

as to how God could at the same time be a sacrifice and the offerer

thereof; and the emperor himself, convicted of heresy, came round to

the orthodox view, whatever it was. Soon the dispute took a new form,

over the awkward text "My Father is greater than I"; and the emperor

gave an orthodox decision which he engraved on tables of stone for the

great Church, denouncing death on all who taught otherwise. As usual,

the dispute was not settled, and the later emperor Andronicus was fain

to take down the tablets and forbid all discussion on the subject. All

the while anti-clerical and anti-ceremonial heresy persisted; and the

burning alive of the monk Basil, founder of the Gnostic Bogomiles,

did not mend matters. The brutal sack and pillage of Constantinople

by the Latin crusaders, and the generation of western tyranny that

followed, did much to unify the Greek people of the thirteenth century

in a common hatred of their masters, whom they at length cast out;

but this, again, meant no new intellectual life. To the last there

was a sufficiency of static Greek scholarship to preserve much of the

ancient heritage for the time when the Turks should scatter it through

the West; but no Byzantine name belongs to the roll of light-givers

in the age of the Renaissance.

If we search for the bearing of religion on the popular life during the

thousand years of the eastern empire, the conclusion will remain very

much the same as that reached by a study of the conditions of the first

centuries of established Christianity. Boundless credulity, boundless

superstition, and zealous idolatry are the standing features from the

seventh century onwards. Conduct was substantially what it had been

in pagan times; and whatever might be the legal status of those born

in slavery, the myriads of captives enslaved in every successful war

can have had no better lot than those of the ancient world. Doubtless

the lot of the Byzantine people in the mass was better than that of

the westerns of the Dark Ages insofar as they were artisans living

under a regular government; but in the rural districts and outlying

regions they can have fared no better, either in peace or war. When the

Saracens wrested Crete and Sicily from Byzantium early in the ninth

century, the majority of the inhabitants seem to have been little

loth to turn Moslems. "In almost every case in which the Saracens

conquered Christian nations," says the Christian historian already

quoted, "history unfortunately reveals that they owed their success

chiefly to the favour with which their progress was regarded by the

mass of the people. To the disgrace of most Christian governments,

it will be found that their administration was more oppressive than

that of the Arabian conquerors." We have already seen that both the

Arabs and the Mongols, as apart from the Turks, were by far the more

tolerant. When the Byzantine empire recovered Crete in the tenth

century, its rulers planned to exterminate the Saracen population;

and though the purpose was not carried out, the Saracens who remained

were reduced to virtual serfdom.

Of the moral and intellectual unprogressiveness of Byzantium we may

say, finally, that the Christian State, like those of the Saracens

and the Turks, was in large measure kept stationary precisely by the

relation of constant strife set up by the existence of the enemy. Each

was the curse of its antagonist. And Christianity did no more to raise

men above that deadlock of enmity than did Islam; nay, the further

factor of Byzantine isolation represented by the rupture between the

Greek and Latin Churches was a special product of the Christian system.

PART IV

MODERN CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER I

THE REFORMATION

§ 1. Moral and Intellectual Forces

As early as the eleventh century we have seen at work in both

eastern and western Europe movements of popular resistance at once

to the religious claims and the financial methods of the Christian

priesthood, to the dogmas on which those claims and methods proceeded,

and to the ceremonialism which backed them. Early in the thirteenth

century the region in which such heresy had most largely spread was

systematically warred upon by armies called out by the Church, and

there the movement was destroyed by many years of bloodshed, the once

heretical territory becoming a centre of orthodox fanaticism. The

scattered seeds, however, bore fresh fruit, and in the fourteenth

century movements of thought, some of which were no less deeply

heretical, and many no less anti-hierarchical, went far in the west

and north of Europe. Still they failed to effect any revolution; and

in the middle of the fifteenth century the Church of Rome, corrupt

as its rulers were, might have seemed to calculating observers more

surely established than ever before. It had passed through a long and

scandalous series of papal schisms, and its power seemed strengthened

by reunion after a century and a half of divisions.

Heretical forces of course there were, several of the leading sects of

the fourteenth century being still active, especially in Germany and

the Low Countries. Thus the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit,

who leant to pantheism in doctrine and to some degree of antinomianism

in practice, persisted in spite of persecution, as did the kindred

movements of Beghards or Turlupins; members of these and similar sects

even found shelter in the lower orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans,

and Augustinians; and in Italy and France the heretical Franciscan

Fraticelli still obstinately fought the papacy, which followed them

up with fire and sword. But there are no signs that the papacy had

thus far been shaken; and more than one anti-clerical movement had

died out. Thus in England Lollardry had virtually disappeared in

the reign of Henry VI; and in Bohemia, where the Wiclifian John Huss

in the opening years of the century had preached vehemently against

clerical and papal abuses, not only had he been burned alive on the

sentence of the Council of Constance (1415), in iniquitous disregard

of the emperor's letter of safe-conduct, but his followers, after

long and savage wars in which great numbers were burned alive and

they themselves broke up into two sections, had finally been either

reconciled to the Church or reduced to peaceful nonconformity.

Nowhere could the anti-papal spirit be said to be dangerously strong;

nor was it much regarded by the popes. A little earlier than Huss,

Matthew of Cracow, Bishop of Worms, had written "On the Pollutions

(de squaloribus) of the Roman Curia," but he was never molested. It

does not seem, further, that the cause of the cruel sentence on

Huss was so much his attacks on the clergy or the papacy as the

enmities he had aroused (1) in what passed for philosophy (he being

a zealous "Realist," and as such hated by the "Nominalists," [24]

who were strong in the Council) and (2) on the side of nationality,

he being a Czech nationalist and a vehement enemy of the German race

and interest, which also were present in force. And though the cruelty

and the gross treachery of the sentence on Huss, and the infliction

of the same cruel death on Jerome of Prague in the following year,

roused a furious revolt among the Hussites, these outrages awoke no

general sympathy in Europe.

As the fifteenth century wore on, fresh movements of anti-papal

feeling rose, and some were put down. A professor of theology at the

university of Erfurt, John of Wesel (not to be confounded with John

Wessel, also a critical reformer in theology, but never persecuted),

began about the middle of the century to write against indulgences;

and when he became a popular preacher at Mayence and Worms he carried

his criticism further. The result was that in 1479 he was arraigned

before a "court of Inquisition" at Mayence and cast into prison, where

he soon died. Wesel was a Nominalist, and as such was no less hated by

the Realists than Huss had been by the Nominalists; but since he was

also denounced as a Hussite, and was further an extremely free-tongued

assailant of the hierarchy, there is reason in his case to suppose a

professional animus. Still there was no formidable movement. Before

John of Wesel, the Netherlander John of Goch, Confessor to the Nuns

of Tabor (d. 1475), had opposed both monasticism and episcopal power;

but he was associated with the orthodox Brethren of the Common Lot,

and had criticized the antinomian morals of the Brethren of the Free

Spirit, so that he hardly figured as a heretic. John Wessel, again

(d. 1489), anticipated, as Luther declared, most of the latter's

doctrines; but though he wandered in France and Italy, studied and

taught at Paris, and was a professor at Heidelberg, exercising a wide

influence, he never roused enmity enough to bring him into trouble. On

the other hand, Savonarola's strong dissentient movement at Florence,

as we have already noted, fell with him in 1498.

All the while, nevertheless, there was proceeding an intellectual

process which had not before been possible--a permeation of the

northern part of the continent, especially Germany, by a spirit of

comparatively orthodox anti-Romanism, based on a growing scholarship,

which found in the sacred books themselves a basis for its course. The

scholarly impulse had come from Italy, where it had been fostered

by the papacy itself; but in the north it had a different social

and political effect. In Germany and the Netherlands, to begin

with, elementary education was gaining ground. The Brethren of the

Common Lot had done much for it, and many of their pupils started

fresh schools, which weakened the first, but carried further their

work. At the same time sprang up new universities; those of Tübingen,

Mayence, Wittemberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder being founded between

1477 and 1506. In the higher Biblical scholarship, further, there

had begun a new era. Laurentius Valla's Notes on the New Testament

created a spirit of scholarlike criticism; and John Reuchlin, after

a training in France, began in Germany an equally vigorous movement

of Hebrew scholarship by producing the first Hebrew grammar. Numbers

of educated men were now in a position of intellectual superiority

to the great mass of the clergy; and all the while the process

of translating the New Testament or the gospels into the modern

languages for the use of the unlearned was going on in all the more

civilized countries. There were German translations before Luther;

Wiclif's versions had been current in England among the Lollards;

and French and Italian versions had been made by several hands in the

fifteenth century. The important result was that anti-clerical heresy

began to claim to be the stricter orthodoxy, and the Church could no

longer bracket the sin of anti-clericalism with that of rejecting the

leading Christian dogmas. Thus, when Erasmus of Rotterdam began with

a new and remarkable literary skill to write Latin satires on the old

text of the vices and ignorance of the monks and other clergy, he had

such an audience as no man had yet had on that theme. In Petrarch's

day, a century before, though he too had exclaimed like every other

educated layman at the corruption of the papal court and system,

humanist literature was still largely a matter of exquisite art for

art's sake; in that of Erasmus it had begun to handle the most vital

intellectual and moral interests.

Yet, though such an intellectual ferment was a condition precedent of

the Reformation, it was not the proximate cause of the explosion. The

doctrinal movement is seen at its strongest after Luther's disruptive

work had been done, in the allied movement set up in France by

Calvinism. More perhaps than in Geneva itself, the Huguenot cause in

France was one of moral and intellectual revolt, certainly fanatical

but in large measure disinterested. What precipitated the Reformation

in Germany was the coalition of the decisive economic interest of

the self-seeking nobles, and the anti-Roman national sentiment of

the people, with the moral and doctrinal appeal of Luther.

§ 2. Political and Economic Forces

Even the grievance of indulgence-selling, which gave the immediate

impulse to Luther's action, was an economic as well as a moral

question. Many of the best Catholics were entirely at one with him

and such of his predecessors as Wesel and Wessel in deploring and

denouncing the form the traffic had taken. The process of farming

out the sale of indulgences to districts, as governments farmed

out the taxes, was enough to stagger all men capable of independent

judgment; and the expedition of the Dominican monk Tetzel had reduced

it to something like burlesque. Yet it was typical of what papal

administration had become. Archbishop Albert of Mayence and Magdeburg,

who was also margrave of Brandenburg, owed the pope the usual large sum

for his investiture, and could not pay. The pope, Leo X, greatly needed

money for his building outlays; and the supreme prince of the Church

gave to the lesser permission to set up in his province a vigorous

trade in indulgences. For this trade Tetzel was selected, not by the

pope but by the archbishop, as a notoriously suitable tool. Albert

in turn made a financial arrangement with the great German banking

house of Fuggers, and their agent accompanied Tetzel to take care of

the cash. Thus, though the transaction was strictly a German one, the

procedure was externally one of bleeding a German province, through

its superstition, in the financial interest of Rome. Well-informed

people knew that the papal agent carried off at least the archbishop's

debt; and others might plausibly surmise that there had gone a million

thalers more, as the takings had been abnormally great.

Obviously the mass of the citizens were superstitious believers,

otherwise the traffic could not have gone on; and Luther in his pulpit

began merely by opposing the abuse of the practice, not the canonical

principle. In absolution, he correctly argued, there were according

to the established doctrine three elements--contrition, confession,

and remission of penalties; and indulgences could effect only the

third. He accordingly refused to absolve any on the mere ground of

an indulgence; whereupon Tetzel, finding his traffic thus ostensibly

hampered, preached against him, and the historic battle began. The

theses nailed to the Wittemberg church door by Luther (1517) did not

assail the Church or the pope; they simply challenged on orthodox

lines the abuse of indulgences; and when Luther began to publish his

views he expressed himself with perfect submission to the pope.

What won him the support of a vigorous popular party, albeit a

minority, and of a sufficient section of the nobility, was in

the first place his courage, and in the second place the growing

restiveness of the Germans as such under what was practically an

Italian domination. In past history, the "Germanic empire" had been

wont to lord it over Italy on feudal grounds, and it was always a

sore point with many that Italy none the less received an increasing

tribute from Germany as from other States. The blunder of the papacy

in Luther's case lay in not realizing how far such feelings, in

connection with a fresh scandal, might go in setting up a northern tide

of anti-Roman animus. So long wont to brow-beat all insubordination,

and to decide doctrinal disputes by fiat instead of by persuasion,

it either prescribed or permitted to its agents the usual tone in

their dealings with Luther; and finally the pope thought to clinch

matters by a bull (1520) against his doctrines, giving him his choice

between submission and excommunication. His defiance, and the act of

excommunication, duly followed, and the Protestant Church began.

Even now the papacy, witless of new developments, could very well

suppose the new heresy transient. Charles V, the new Emperor, was

thoroughly orthodox; and not many of the German nobles were ostensibly

otherwise. But Charles was under a deep obligation to Frederick the

Elector of Saxony for his election; and Frederick was one of those

who had begun, for racial and financial reasons, to contemplate

"home rule" in matters ecclesiastical. Frederick accordingly was

allowed to protect Luther, whose courage in going to the Diet of

Worms, with Huss's fate in common memory, further established his

popular influence. Manhood always loves manhood. After 1526, however,

the process of the Reformation in Germany was substantially one of

wholesale confiscation of Church lands and goods by the nobles, who

were thus irrevocably committed to the cause; and though Luther and

his more single-minded colleagues were naturally disgusted, there was

no other way in which they could have won, popular sympathy counting

for nothing in such a matter without military force.

A rupture took place, finally, between the Emperor and the new Medicean

pope, Clement VII, over the desperate politics of Italy, the papacy for

once taking a national course in resisting an imperialist invasion. But

the invaders triumphed; Italy was overrun anew; Rome was sacked (1527)

with all the atrocity which historically distinguishes the Christian

conquests of the city from those of the ancient Gauls and Goths;

and during the critical years of the establishment of Protestantism

the emperor was in no mood to quarrel with his German friends in

the interests of a pope whose friendship he could not trust. All the

political conditions were thus abnormally favourable to the Lutheran

movement. At the same time, every menace from Rome led naturally to

intensification of the Lutheran heresy; and though it always remained

nearer Catholicism that did Calvinism, it emphasized more and more

its differences.

In the meantime the success of the movement of Zwingli at Zurich

had proved independently that the strength of the Reformation lay

in its appeal to economic interest. Confiscation of the possessions

of the Church by the municipal authorities was a first step, and

one for which, once taken, the community would fight rather than

revoke it. With signal unwisdom, the Roman curia had contrived to

allot most of the Swiss town livings to Italians, so that the vested

interests were alien and not local. The municipality, on the other

hand, sagaciously pacified those interests by guaranteeing pensions or

posts as teachers or preachers to the whole twenty-four cantons of the

chapter; and there and in some other cantons the economic Reformation,

thus effected, was permanent.

In the case of England, on the other hand, the primary factor in

the repudiation of papal rule was the personal insistence of Henry

VIII on a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt

of the emperor, Charles V. Henry was so far from being inclined to

Protestantism that he caused to be compiled by his bishops (1521)

a treatise in reply to Luther, to which he put his name, thereupon

receiving from Leo X the title of "Defender of the Faith." To the very

last, he burned doctrinal Protestants as heretics, and despite revival

of the old Lollard propaganda the country remained substantially

Catholic in creed. But when it came to the king's demand for a divorce,

the new pope, Clement VII, was in a hopeless dilemma, since if he

granted the request, which he was personally and theologically not

unwilling to do, he would exasperate the emperor Charles, of whom

he dreaded to make an irreconcilable enemy, besides offending the

whole Catholicism of Spain and even much of that of England. When

once Henry decided to take ecclesiastical rule into his own hands

he found that, little as he liked the new doctrines, he must in

his own interest proceed to confiscate Church lands and bestow the

bulk of them on adherents, thereby establishing a firm anti-papal

interest. So little way did positive Protestant doctrine make that

when his daughter Mary came to the throne, though she dared not try

to resume the Church lands, the people were in substantial sympathy

with her faith, and only her marriage with Philip and her persecution

of heretics turned any large number against her. Even under Elizabeth

it was the new national enmity to Spain, and not religious propaganda,

that made the bulk of the people Protestant in creed and worship.

The process of the Reformation in Scotland clearly follows the economic

law. So late as 1535 Scotland was so Catholic in belief, despite

the usual grievances against priestly rapacity and luxury, that the

parliament passed a law forbidding all importation of the writings of

Luther, and all discussion of his "damnable opinions." But as soon

as the English king by his confiscation of the rich monastery lands

(1536-39) showed the Scots nobles how they might enrich themselves by

turning Protestant, they began to favour heresy; and from the death

(1542) of the last Catholic king, James V, throughout the minority of

his daughter Mary, they protected the reforming preachers. In 1543

began the wrecking of monasteries by mobs; in 1546 was assassinated

Cardinal Beaton, who had taken active steps to destroy heresy; and

though the ferocious war with England delayed developments, as did

the regency of the Queen's French mother, the preaching of Calvinism

by John Knox and others carried enough of the townspeople to make

easy the passing, in 1560, of an Act which made Protestantism the

established religion of the country. As usual, by far the greater

part of the plunder went to the landowning class, who brazenly broke

all their promises of endowment to the preachers. But the latter

had perforce to submit, indignant as they were; and when the young

Catholic queen Mary arrived in 1561 she found a Protestant kingdom, in

which the most powerful class was rich with church spoils. Again the

political and the economic forces had been the obviously determining

factors in the change.

Scandinavian Protestantism, in turn, moved on the same line of economic

opportunity and pressure. A popular movement seems to have begun in

Denmark, but it was favoured by the throne; and the nobles, seeing the

possibilities of the case, soon followed; whereupon King Christian III,

who ruled both Denmark and Norway, suppressed Catholicism with the

nobles' help, and confiscated the rich possessions of the bishops. In

Sweden, on the other hand, Gustavus Vasa took the initiative against

the clergy, who had supported the Danish rule which he succeeded in

throwing off; and he naturally had with him the mass of the laity,

especially when he gave the nobles leave to reclaim the lands that

had been granted by their ancestors to the monasteries. Doctrinal

Protestantism followed in the wake of confiscation.

The Protestantism of Holland, again, was plainly the result of the

mismanagement of Philip II. When Protestantism had in other countries

reached its fullest extension the Low Countries were still mainly

Catholic, only a few of the poorer classes having changed, apart

from the Anabaptist movement, which had a much larger following; and

the slaughter of such heretics by the Inquisition went on for many

years with the acquiescence of the middle and upper orders. In the

Netherlands the local Inquisition, conducted by natives, was positively

more cruel than that of Spain. It is thus clear that there was no

special bias to Protestantism in the "Teutonic" races as such. The

orthodox Protestant movement entered Holland not from the German but

from the French side; and it needed not only the ferocity but the

rapacity of Alva to create a permanent Protestant and rationalist

movement among the needy nobility. When the Protestant mobs began to

resort to image-breaking they put their cause in great peril. The

real reason of the slowness of the nobles to turn Protestant was,

doubtless, that they had little to gain from plunder of their Church

in any case, it having long been abnormally poor by reason of the

restrictive policy of the Flemish and Dutch feudal princes in the

past. When the rupture with Spain was complete the Church estates were

scrupulously disposed of in the public interest, Dutch Protestantism

being thus exceptionally clean-handed.

Philip's attempts to enrich the priesthood were certainly part of

the provocation he gave his subjects in the Netherlands; but their

resentment was at the outset strictly political, not religious;

and it is reasonable to say that had he chosen to reside among

them and conciliate them he could easily have kept them Catholic,

while in that case Spain might very well have become Protestant,

and Dutch and Flemish resources would have been turned against

Spanish disaffection. Even in what remained the Spanish Netherlands

Catholicism entirely recovered its ground. The Teutonic Charles V had

been as rigidly Catholic as his predecessors on the Spanish throne,

and for the same reasons, (1) that the Church in his dominions helped

him and did not thwart him; and (2) that his large revenues from the

Netherlands made it unnecessary for him to plunder the Church as did

the Scandinavian kings and Henry VIII.

In the case of France, where Protestantism reached its highest

development in point of intellectual and militant energy, but

became stationary after a generation of desperate strife, and later

decayed, the play of political and economic causation is little

less clear. There, as has been said, there was much less ostensible

pressure of wealth-seeking interest on the side of the Reformation

than in Germany and elsewhere; yet so far as the nobles were concerned

an economic motive was certainly at work. At the outset of his reign

Francis I had won from the pope, practically at the sword's point,

the concession (1516) of the right to appoint bishops and abbots, the

papacy in return receiving the annates, or first year's revenue. The

result was that the Gallican Church was at least as corrupt as any

other section of the fold, its dignities being usually bestowed on

court favourites, whose exactions exasperated the rural gentry as

much as those of papal nominees would have done. The throne being

strong, however, and the king having no special financial motive to go

further, the cause of reform had no help from his side. Had he turned

"reformer," as he once had some thought of doing, he could probably

have made France Protestant with less difficulty than Henry VIII met

with in England; but in view of the political divisions set up by

Lutheranism in Germany he decided against the new propaganda.

That, nevertheless, proceeded. There had always been keen criticism

of the Church in France; and as early as 1512 there began at Meaux a

reform movement on substantially Protestant lines, under the auspices

of the local bishop. He, however, was put down by the threats of

the college of the Sorbonne, the ecclesiastical faculty of the

university of Paris; and the first notable signs of anti-Romanism

came from the Vaudois of Provence, a small population who had been

settled there after the virtual extermination of their predecessors

of the same name and stock in the thirteenth century, and who were

latterly found to have the same anti-clerical tendencies. Under

Louis XII the Church had sought to punish them, but he refused to

permit it, declaring them better people than the orthodox. Finding

themselves in sympathy with the Reform movement, they sent some of

their own preachers to Switzerland and Germany (1530) to learn from

it, and began a similar propaganda. Decrees were issued against them

in 1535 and 1540, but Francis proposed to spare them on condition

that they should enter the Church of Rome. This policy failing, and

Francis having made a treaty with Charles V, under which, on papal

pressure, he agreed to put down heresy, the Vaudois were given up

to coercion. There ensued a massacre so vile (1545) that the king,

now near his end, was revolted by it, declaring that his orders had

been grossly exceeded. A slow process of inquiry, left to his son,

dragged on for years, but finally came to nothing.

The Vaudois had been nearly exterminated, in the old fashion;

but the massacre served to proclaim and spread their doctrine,

which rapidly gained ground among the skilled artisan class as

well as among the nobles, the Swiss printing-presses doing it

signal service. Persecution, as usual, kept pace with propaganda;

and in 1557 Pope Paul IV, with the king's approval, decreed that

the Inquisition should be set up in France, where it had never yet

been established. The legal "parliament" of Paris, jealous for its

privileges, successfully resisted; but the Sorbonne and the Church

carried on the work of heretic-burning, till at length the Huguenots

were driven to arms (1562). Their name had probably come from that of

the German-speaking Eidgenossen ("oath-fellows") of Switzerland; but

their doctrine was that of Calvin, who, driven from France (1533),

was now long established at Geneva; and their tenacity showed the

value of his close-knit dogmatism as a political inspiration. Catholic

fanaticism and treachery on the one hand, and Huguenot intemperance

on the other, brought about eight furious civil wars in the period

1562-94. The high-water mark of wickedness in that generation was

the abominable Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), which followed

on the third truce, and roused a new intensity of hatred. So evenly

balanced were the forces that only after more than twenty years of

further convulsions was the strife ended by the politic decision

of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to turn Catholic and so win the

crown (1594), on the score that "Paris was well worth a Mass." He

thus secured for his Protestant supporters a perfect toleration,

which he confirmed by the Edict of Nantes (1597).

In Poland and Bohemia, where also Protestantism went far, on bases

laid by the old movements of the Hussites, the process was at first

facilitated, as in Germany, by the political conditions; and the

economic motive was clearly potent. The subsequent collapse and

excision of Protestantism in those countries, as in France, in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, completes the proof that for the

modern as for the ancient world political and economic forces are the

determinants of a creed's success or failure, culture movements being,

as it were, the force of variation which they condition.

§ 3. Social and Political Results

On the side of daily life, it fared with Protestantism as with the

early Church: where it was warred upon it was socially circumspect;

where it had easier course it was lax. Thus we have the express

admissions of Luther and of Calvin that under Protestantism they found

less spirituality around them than there had been under Romanism; and

there is abundant evidence that the first effect of the new regimen

in Germany was to promote what Catholic and Protestant teachers

alike professed to think the most serious form of immorality--sexual

licence. In point of fact, Luther's own doctrines of predestination

and grace were a species of unbought indulgences, sure to injure

good morals, even apart from the effect of a free use of the Bible

as a working code. Some of Luther's fellow-preachers justified and

practised bigamy; and he and his colleagues not only counselled Henry

VIII to marry a second time without divorcing his first queen, but gave

their official consent, albeit reluctantly, to such a proceeding on

the part of the Landgrave of Hesse. Among the common people, the new

sense of freedom quickly gave a religious impulse to the lamentable

Peasants' War, and later to the so-called Anabaptist movement, which,

though it contained elements of sincerity and virtue that are not

always acknowledged, amounted in the main to a movement of moral and

social chaos.

Luther, during whose time of hiding in the Wartburg (1521-22) the new

ferment began at Wittemberg, came thither to denounce it as a work

of Satan; but it was a sequel of his own action. The new leaders,

Storch and Münzer and Carlstadt, had turned as he had advised to the

Bible, and there they found texts for whatever they were minded to

try, from image-smashing to the plunder and burning of monasteries

and castles, and a general effort at social revolution. In all they

did, they declared and believed they were moved by the Spirit of

God. Luther had done this service to Catholicism, that his course

led to the practical proof that the Bible, put in the hands of the

multitude as the sufficient guide to conduct, wrought far more harm

than good. Peasant revolts, indeed, had repeatedly occurred in Germany

before his time, the gross tyranny of the nobles provoking them;

but the religious frenzy of Münzer gave to the rising of 1524-25 in

Swabia and Franconia, though the formulated demands of the insurgents

were just and reasonable, a character of wildness and violence

seldom seen before. Luther, accordingly, to save his own position,

vehemently denounced the rising, and hounded on the nobles to its

bloody suppression, a work in which they needed no urging. His

protector, the wise Frederick of Saxony, then on his deathbed,

gave no such evil counsel, but advised moderation, and admitted the

guilt of his order towards the common people. The end was, however,

that at least 100,000 peasants were slain; and the lot of those left

was worse than before. The later Anabaptist movement, which set up a

short-lived republic (1535) in the city of Münster in Westphalia, and

spread to Holland, was too destitute of political sanity to gain any

but visionaries, and was everywhere put down with immense bloodshed.

Yet vaster social and political evils were to come from the

Reformation. In 1526, at the Diet of Spires, the emperor Charles

V called for strong measures against Lutheranism, but was firmly

resisted by the new Elector of Saxony and the other Lutheran princes,

whereupon the emperor waived his claim, not caring to raise a war

in the pope's interest; and it was agreed that each head of a State

in the empire should take his own way in regard to religion, his

subjects being at his disposal. It was at this stage that the German

Reformation began its most decisive progress. In the next few years the

papal party, backed by the Emperor, twice carried decrees rescinding

that of 1526. First came the decree of the second Diet of Spires

(1529). Against this a formal protest was made to the emperor by the

Lutheran princes and a number of the free imperial cities of Germany

and Switzerland, whence arose first the title of "Protestants." In 1530

the emperor convened a fresh Diet at Augsburg, to which the Lutherans

were required to bring a formal Confession of Faith. This was framed

on conciliatory lines; but the emperor issued a fresh coercive decree,

whereupon the Germans formed the defensive League of Smalkald, from

which the Swiss were excluded on their refusal to sign the Augsburg

Confession. At this stage the invasion of Austria by the Turks delayed

civil war, so that Luther was able to die in peace (1546). Then war

began, and the Protestant League was quickly and thoroughly overthrown

by the emperor. After a few years, however, the imperial tyranny,

exercised through Spanish troops, forced a revolt of the Protestant

princes, who with the help of France defeated Charles (1552). Now was

effected the Peace of Augsburg (signed 1555), which left the princes

as before to determine at their own will whether their States should

be Lutheran or Catholic, and entitled them to keep what Church lands

they had confiscated before 1552. No protection whatever was decreed

for Calvinists, with whom the Lutherans had long been at daggers drawn,

and who had not yet gained much ground in Germany.

Such a peace failed to settle the vital question as to whether in

future the Protestant princes could make further confiscations, on the

plea of the conversion of Catholic bishops and abbots or otherwise. As

the century wore on, accordingly, the princes "secularized" many more

Church estates; and as Protestantism was all the while losing moral

ground in Germany through the adoption of Calvinism by several princes,

and the bitter quarrels of the sects and sub-sects, the Catholics held

the more strongly to their view of the Augsburg treaty, which was that

all bishoprics and abbeys held directly from the emperor were to remain

Catholic. Friction grew from decade to decade, and, civic wisdom making

no progress on either side, a number of the Lutherans and Calvinists

at length formed (1608) a militant union, led by the Calvinist prince

Christian of Anhalt, to defend their gains; and the Catholics, led

by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, formed another. The Calvinists were

the chief firebrands; and Christian was bent on aggression, to the

end of upsetting the power of the Catholic House of Austria.

The train, however, was fired from Bohemia, where the Protestant nobles

were at odds with their two successive kings, Matthias and Ferdinand,

both of that house, and both bent on putting down Protestantism on the

crown lands. The nobles began a revolt in a brutally lawless fashion;

and when, in a winter pause of the war, Ferdinand was elected emperor

(1619), they deposed him from the throne of Bohemia, and elected in his

place the Calvinist prince Frederick, Elector Palatine (son-in-law of

James I of England), who foolishly accepted. The capable Maximilian,

with Tilly for general, took the field on behalf of Ferdinand;

the Lutheran princes stood aloof from Frederick, who for his own

part had offended his Lutheran subjects by slighting their rites;

his few allies could not sustain him, and he was easily defeated

and put to headlong flight. At once the leading Protestant nobles of

Bohemia were put to death; their lands were confiscated; the clergy

of the chief Protestant body, the Bohemian Brethren, dating back

to the time of Huss, were expelled in mass; and Protestantism in

Bohemia was soon practically at an end. Many of both the Lutheran

and Calvinist churches, in their resentment at the slackness of the

German Protestant League, voluntarily went over to Catholicism. At

the same period the Protestant Prince of Transylvania had been in

alliance with the Turks to attack Vienna; and the Protestant faith

was thus discredited on another side.

Meantime, however, the Thirty Years' War had begun. Frederick's

general, Mansfeld, held out for him in the Palatinate; the dissolution

of the army of the Protestant Union supplied him with fresh soldiers,

content to live by plunder; English volunteers and new German allies

joined; and the struggle went from bad to worse. The failure or

defeat of the first Protestant combatants brought others upon the

scene; James of England appealed to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and

Christian IV of Denmark to join him in recovering the Palatinate for

his son-in-law, and, unable to subsidize Gustavus as he required,

made terms with Christian, who at once entered the war. Thereupon

the emperor employed Wallenstein, and the Protestants were defeated

and hard pressed, till the great Gustavus came to their aid. Under

his masterly leadership they regained their ground, but could not

decisively triumph. After his death at the battle of Lützen (1632)

new developments took place, France entering the imbroglio by way of

weakening her enemies Austria and Spain, the two pillars of the empire;

and one period of war passed into another without stay or respite.

In the course of this inconceivable struggle children grew to middle

age, and men grew from youth to grey hairs; most of those who began

the strife passed away ere it had ended; the French Richelieu rose

to greatness and died; and the English Civil War passed through

nearly its whole course, a mere episode in comparison. When at length

there was signed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the German world was

reduced to mortal exhaustion. The armies on both sides had been to the

common people as the monstrous dragons of fable, bestial devourers,

dealing ruin to friend and foe alike. Every sack of a city was a new

triumph of cruelty and wickedness; tortures were inflicted by the

mercenaries which almost redeemed the name of the Inquisition; and,

as of old in the Ireland of Elizabeth's day, peasants were found dead

with grass in their mouths. According to some calculations, half of

the entire population of Germany was gone; and it is certain that in

many districts numbers and wealth, man and beast, had been reduced

in a much greater proportion, whole provinces being denuded of live

stock, and whole towns going to ruin. German civilization had been

thrown back a full hundred years, morally and materially. No such

procession of brutality and vice as followed the armies of Tilly and

Wallenstein had been seen since the first Crusade; and the generation

which had seen them and been able to survive them was itself grown

callous. Capacity, culture, and conduct had alike fallen below the

levels of a century before.

By the Peace of Westphalia were settled the boundaries of the two

creeds which had thus battled for a whole generation. In Germany

proselytism was at an end; but the States whose princes had been

Protestant remained so, they and their Catholic neighbours keeping

the right to impose their faith on their subjects. Protestantism

had gained nothing beyond rooting Catholicism more completely out of

Protestant States; and, on the other hand, the Catholics had rooted

heresy out of theirs. No racial dividing-line subsisted. Teutonic

Bavaria and Austria remained Catholic, as the five original Teutonic

cantons of Switzerland had done from the first; and between Lutherans

and Calvinists, of whatever stock, there remained a sullen doctrinal

division. Bohemia had been lost to Protestantism, and Poland was now

far on the way to the same fate.

The diverse cases of Poland and France here supply yet another lesson

in economic causation. In France at the accession of Henry IV the

Protestants were a very strong party, including many of the nobles,

though a minority of the nation; in Poland, at the accession of

Sigismund III, in 1586, they were considerably stronger. Within

half-a-century they were in full decadence in both countries,

from similar causes. Sigismund (the cousin of Gustavus Adolphus),

though grandson of the Protestant Gustavus Vasa of Sweden, had been

bred a Catholic with a view to his inheriting the Polish crown; and

from the day of his accession he set himself to the aggrandizement

of his creed. He thereby lost the crown of Sweden, but he went far

to make Poland Catholic; and the newly constituted order of Jesuits

did the rest. To the Polish crown belonged the right of conferring

life appointments to which were attached great tracts of crown land;

and the constant use of this economic force for Catholicism during a

long reign began the downfall of the Protestantism of the nobility,

who, though including many men of superior capacity, had been moved as

usual by the economic motive in their heresy. The complete ascendancy

of the Jesuits during the seventeenth century ultimately wrought

the ruin of Poland, their policy having expelled the Protestants,

alienated the Cossacks, who belonged to the Greek Church, and paralyzed

the intellectual life of the nation.

In France the decay of Protestantism was caused substantially by

economic means. When Richelieu obtained power the Huguenot party was

strong, turbulent, intolerant, and aggressive. Practising on the one

hand a firm political control, and on the other a strict tolerance,

he began the policy of detaching the ablest nobles from the Huguenot

interest by giving them positions of the highest honour and trust, the

holding of which soon reconciled them to the court. Thus deprived of

leaders who were men of the world, the Huguenot party fell into the

hands of its fanatical clergy, under whose guidance it became more

aggressive, and so provoked fresh civil war. The balance of military

power being now easily on the side of the crown, the revolts were

decisively put down; and the policy of anti-ecclesiasticism and

toleration, persisted in by Richelieu and carried on after him by

Mazarin, prevented any further strife. Thus French Protestantism

was irretrievably on the decline when Louis XIV, reverting to the

politics of Catholic bigotry, and not content with setting on foot

cruel persecutions which drove many from the country despite the

laws against emigration, committed the immense and criminal blunder

of revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685), and so expelling from France

the remnant of the Huguenots. He had been advised that the refusal of

liberty of worship would bring them to the Church, and that they could

be hindered from emigrating. On the contrary, his plan lost to France

fifty thousand families of industrious inhabitants, whose Protestantism

had ceased to be turbulent, though it remained austere; and by thus

grievously weakening a kingdom already heavily bled by his wars, the

French king prepared his own military humiliation, and the consequent

depression of his Church. It must always be remembered, however,

that his course was acclaimed by the élite of Catholic culture.

The alarm and resentment set up by his act counted for much in stirring

the English people three years later to resist their Romanizing king

James II, who, had he gone his way more prudently, might have done

much to rehabilitate Catholicism in virtue of the fanatical devotion

to the throne already developed by the reaction against the Puritan

rebellion. On the other hand, the tyrannous policy which had kept

Ireland Catholic, by identifying Protestantism with oppression, and

Catholicism with the national memories, was cruelly carried on by

England, with the result of maintaining a perpetual division between

the two countries, and preparing a great source of Catholic population

for the United States in a later age. The profound decivilization

inflicted on Ireland by Protestant England is probably the greatest of

the social and political evils resulting from the Reformation; but the

persecution of dissenters in England, and the more savage dragooning

of Presbyterians in Scotland under Charles II and James II (which had

an excuse in the aggressive intolerance of the Covenanters) must go to

the same account. Nowhere, not even in Protestant Switzerland--save in

the case of Zurich, well led by Zwingli, and in that of the Grisons,

where Catholics and Protestants agreed to abolish feudal abuses--did

the Reformation work social betterment for the common people. In

England the tyranny of the Protestant nobles under Edward VI was both

corrupt and cruel; and the Norfolk rising of 1549 was as savagely

suppressed as that of Wat Tyler had been in Catholic times.

In the processes by which Protestantism lost ground, as in those

by which Catholicism counteracted its own successes, there was a

considerable play of intellectual forces, which we shall consider

apart. But though the economic, the political, and the intellectual

forces always interact, the two former have had a potency which has

thus far been little acknowledged. It is essential to realize that

they have affected the movement of thought more than they have been

affected by it; and above all that they, and not the imaginary bias

of race, have determined the total fortunes of the Reformation.

§ 4. Intellectual Results

The intellectual reactions set up by the Reformation were complex,

and on some sides apparently contradictory. Some populations, and in

general the populace of the countries which remained Protestant, were

made collectively more fanatical than they had been under Catholicism,

even as Catholicism itself became for a time more strenuous under the

stress of the conflict; but, on the other hand, there grew up on the

intellectual border of Protestantism forms of heresy which outraged

its majority; and within the political sphere of Catholicism there

came a new growth of skepticism. All these varying results can be

traced to the initial shock of the revolt against Rome.

Luther and Calvin, it is clear, were alike bigots, as little disposed

to religious toleration as the papacy ever was. Of pope Paul III

(1534-49) it is recorded that he "bore with contradiction in the

consistory, and encouraged freedom of discussion." No such tribute

could be paid to the Protestant leaders of his day. Indeed, it is

noteworthy that while the Catholic hierarchy of the period were not

a little open to new scientific thought, Luther derided the teaching

of Copernicus, and would have suppressed it if he could. It resulted

from the spirit of such leaders that their polities could not be

reconciled. Luther, though he proceeded from a theoretical retention

of the Mass (set forth in the conciliatory Augsburg Confession of

1530, drawn up by Melanchthon) to a bitter denunciation of it, always

leant towards the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist in that he merely

substituted the dogma of "consubstantiation" for "transubstantiation,"

and refused to go further. The Swiss Protestants took up another

position. Their chief founder, Ulrich Zwingli, a more rational

spirit than Luther, and brave enough to teach that good heathens

might be saved, went boldly back to the position of John Scotus,

and taught that the bread and wine of the sacrament were merely

memorial symbols. On this head, despite the efforts of Melanchthon,

Luther refused all compromise, and denounced the Zwinglians with his

usual violence. Calvin, whose power in Geneva was established in 1541,

tempered their formula after Luther's death to the extent of affirming,

in Lutheran language, that in the eucharist a certain divine influence

was communicated to faithful participants. But even this could not

secure the dogmatic agreement that the theological ideal demanded; and

the followers of Luther soon gave the quarrel a quality of incurable

bitterness. Even on the question of predestination the sects could not

agree, though both Luther and Calvin, in their different terminologies,

affirmed the foreordination of all things.

These were only the most comprehensive of a multitude of Protestant

divisions. In the sixteenth century there are enumerated by

ecclesiastical historians at least eighty Protestant sects, all named

for certain special tenets, or after leaders who held themselves

apart. The general resort to the Bible had thus revived the phenomena

of the early ages of the faith; and each leading sect or church within

its own sphere sought in the papal fashion to suppress variation. The

result was a maximum of dogmatism and malice. Every sect split into

many. Thus there were some thirteen groups of Anabaptists; over thirty

separate confessions were drawn up among the main bodies; and Luther

enumerated nine varieties of doctrine on the eucharist alone. The

doctrine seldomest broached was that of mutual toleration. Between

Lutherans and Calvinists the quarrel went so far that when John

Laski, the learned Polish Calvinist, was sailing from England to the

continent on his expulsion with his adherents from England under Mary,

he was refused leave to remain at the Lutheran ports of Elsinore,

Hamburg, Lübeck, and Rostock. But as time went on the Lutherans

were divided endlessly and irreconcilably on doctrinal issues among

themselves. Melanchthon died declaring the gladness with which he

passed away from a world filled with the rabid hatreds of theologians;

and after his day matters grew worse instead of better.

From the very first, in short, the temper of Protestant propaganda, met

as it was by brutal resistance, had been one of brutal animosity. There

is indeed no more grotesque spectacle in human history than the

association of the phrase "a religion of love" with the masses of

furious controversy which constitute the bulk of Christian theological

literature in all ages of faith. Amenity has been much rarer in

religious strife than in actual warfare, where animal good humour

could at times mitigate or overlay animal hate. Fighters could meet

and banquet after a fight: theologians could not. They could feel

kindly towards those only who joined them in hating the foe. England,

with her Pecock and her Hooker, makes as good a show in this matter as

any other country; but in England the temper of the struggle between

Protestantism and Catholicism is from the first one of intense hate,

the cultured Catholic Sir Thomas More showing as little capacity for

gentleness of spirit as do the violent assailants who exasperated

him. Bale, a typical Protestant polemist, seems habitually to foam

at the mouth. War was the natural and inevitable expression of such

hatreds wherever it could come about; and when the establishment of

Protestantism left the sectarian spirit free play as between sects,

they turned to the new debate all the ferocity that had marked the old.

It was thus abundantly proved that the cult of the Bible gave no help

towards peace and goodwill; and Catholicism naturally profited by the

demonstration, many peaceable Protestants returning to its fold. In

Germany such reversions were set up alike by the attitude of Luther

towards the revolting peasants, many of whom in turn rejected his

doctrine, and by the wild licence of the Anabaptists, whose madness

could be traced to his impetus. Equally did Romanism gain from the

admission that freedom of profession was found to give outlets for

atheism; and from the open growth of Unitarianism which, taking rise

in Italy in the Lutheran period, was thence carried to Switzerland

and elsewhere, and made considerable headway in Poland. The younger

Socinus (Sozzini), who joined and developed the movement, was not its

founder even in Poland; but when modified and organized by him there

it received his name. The Socinian cult terrified many Protestants,

driving them back to the old ways; and it may have been partly the

resentful fear of such effects that led Calvin to commit his historic

crime of causing the Spaniard Servetus to be burned at the stake (1553)

for uttering Unitarian doctrine. But Calvin's language at every stage

of the episode, his heartless account of the victim's sufferings,

and his gross abuse of him afterwards, tell of the ordinary spirit

of the bigot--incensed at opposition and exulting in vengeance.

Where a scholar could so sink, the bulk of the Protestant communities

inevitably became fanatical and hard. In Holland, where Calvin's

church became that of the republic, it treated Arminianism in the

seventeenth century as itself had been treated by Lutheranism in

the sixteenth. Arminius (Jacobus Harmensen) had sought in a halting

fashion to modify the dogma of predestination, and to prove that

all men might repent and be saved. Dying after much controversy

(1609), he left a sect who went further than he; and the strife came

to the verge of civil war, the Arminian Barneveldt being beheaded as

a traitor (1619), and the illustrious Grotius sentenced to perpetual

imprisonment, from which however he contrived to escape. In England in

the next generation the Presbyterians, whose doctrine was Calvinistic,

showed the same tyrannous temper; the Arminian archbishop Laud was no

better; and in Calvinist Scotland and Lutheran Germany alike the common

people were similarly intolerant. Standing with their leaders on the

Bible as the beginning and end of truth, the Protestants everywhere

assumed infallibility, and proceeded to decree pains and penalties

with a quite papal inhumanity. Had Luther been able to give effect to

his hatred of the Jews, they would have been persecuted as they never

had been--apart from the chronic massacres--in the Catholic period. He

would have left them neither synagogues nor homes, neither books nor

property. Thus taught, Protestants became persecutors in mass.

In particular, they everywhere turned with a new zest to the burning

of witches, the old superstitions being frightfully reinforced by

the newly current doctrine of the Pentateuch. No argument--though

it was tried by some--could countervail the testimony of the Sacred

Book against witchcraft, and its decree of the death penalty. As the

frenzy of witch-burning was equally intense in the Catholic countries

in the Lutheran period, the mania may be traced in the first instance

to the Inquisition, which made a specialty of such action. But it

is clear that the new study of the Bible in Protestant countries

gave it as strong a stimulus. In England and Scotland, for instance,

there had been very little witch-burning in the Catholic period; and

the first English law for the purpose was passed under Henry VIII,

in 1541; but in both countries the madness thenceforth went step for

step with the growth of Puritanism; and the amount of insane cruelty

caused by it is past human power to realize.

If the merits of Christianity as a civilizing force are to be in any

way determined by its influence in working bloodshed, its record in the

matter of witch-slaying alone would serve to place it, in that regard,

lower than any other creed. Classic paganism knew no such infamy. All

the horrors which Christians are wont to cite as typically heathen,

the legends of Juggernaut and the pictures of Dahomey, dwindle in

moral bulk beside the dreadful sum of evil set forth in the past of

their own faith. For the Protestant lands burned at least as many

hapless women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft as the Inquisition

burned men for heresy. Most of the victims were women whose sole

offence had been to have few friends. To be left a childless widow

or an old maid was to run the risk of impeachment as a witch by any

superstitious or malevolent neighbour; and the danger seems to have

been actually doubled when such a woman gave herself to the work of

rustic medicine-making in a spirit of goodwill to her kind. Lonely

women who suffered in their minds from their very loneliness were

almost sure to be condemned; and in cases where partial insanity did

not lead them to admit the insane charges against them, torture easily

attained the same end. But the mere repute for scientific studies could

bring a man to his death; and in Scotland a physician was horribly

tortured and at last burned on the charge of having raised the storm

which endangered the life of King James on his return voyage from

Denmark with his bride.

The crowning touch of horror is the fact that in Protestant history

for generations there is hardly a trace of popular compassion for the

victims. In the north of Catholic Italy there was a rebellion against

witch-burning, perhaps because it was a part of the machinery of the

Inquisition; in the Protestant countries there was nothing of the

kind. Luther, a man normally fond of children, was capable of advising

that a "possessed" child should be thrown into the river to drown

or be cured. In Italy and France there had always been skepticism

on the matter among educated men; in the Protestant world the new

Bibliolatry made such skepticism go in fear of its life. Wherever

it arose, piety met it with the consciousness of perfect wisdom,

derived from revelation. Calvin was as confident on the subject as

Luther; and when Doctor John Wier of Clèves, apparently a believer in

demons, whose numbers he afterwards statistically estimated at over

seven thousand millions, ventured to argue in 1563 that many of the

so-called witches were simply lunatics, he met as little favour in

the Protestant as in the Catholic sphere. It is to be remembered, as

a landmark in intellectual history, that the great French publicist

Jean Bodin, the most original political thinker of his age, and far

from orthodox on the Christian creed, was the foremost champion of the

reigning superstition, which had become one of his rooted prejudices.

In England, in 1584, a notable book was written against it, the

Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot; but still the mania

deepened. King James I caused Scot's book to be burned by the hangman

in the next generation; and the superstition, thus accredited, reached

its height in the period of the Commonwealth, whereafter it declined in

the skeptical era of the Restoration. Nowhere did effective resistance

arise on the religious plane. The reaction was conspicuously the work

of the skeptics, noted as such. Montaigne began it in France, by the

sheer force of his hardy and luminous common sense, which made no

account of either the theology or the learning arrayed against it; and

inasmuch as the most brutal fanaticism was in this matter everywhere

bound up with the popular creed, the new enlightenment became in

England anti-democratic because democracy there was the power of

persecution, as in France it became anti-clerical. The Protestant

movement had in its own despite set up a measure of mental freedom,

by breaking up the ecclesiastical unity of Europe; but its spirit soon

revealed to clear eyes that freedom of thought was not to be reached

by mere reform of the Church as such. It thus evolved a skepticism

which struck at the roots of all Christian beliefs.

The intellectual fatality of the Reformation was that it set up against

the principle of papal authority not that of private judgment but that

of revelation, and thus still made ancient ignorance the arbiter in

the deepest problems. It is indeed vain to say, with Erasmus and with

Goethe, that Luther did ill to force a crisis, and that the reform of

the Church should have been left to time and the process of culture. No

culture could have reformed the papacy as an economic system: the

struggle there was finally not between knowledge and ignorance but

between vested interests and outsiders' rights. In the Rome of Leo

X, as Ranke has calculated, there were twenty-five hundred venal

offices, half of them created by Leo to raise funds for the building

of St. Peter's; and probably most were held by cultured men. What they

fought for was not dogma but revenue: Luther when among them had been

scandalized by their irreligion, not by their superstition. Looking

back, we may still say that a violent rupture was inevitable. Two

generations later, we find Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) raising money as

did Leo X by the sale of places, and putting the prices so high as

to promote official corruption in an extreme degree.

Rome, as a city, lived on its ecclesiastical revenue, and the total

vested interest was irreversible. During the long papal schism in

which the main wealth of the Church went to the Popes of Avignon,

Rome sank visibly to the level of "a town of cowherds," and the old

church of St. Peter's was in danger of falling to pieces. From the

middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the

popes laboured successively to make their city the most splendid in

Europe; and only a great revenue, extorted by corrupt or corrupting

methods, could maintain it. The great Council of Trent, begun in

1545 to reform and reorganize the Church, had accomplished at its

close in 1563 only a few doctrinal, disciplinary, and hierarchical

modifications; and its own history proved the impossibility of

a vital reform from within. Twice suspended for long periods, on

the pretext of the disturbed state of Europe, it revealed in its

closing session the inability of the nations as such to agree on any

curative policy. The emperor, Ferdinand I, called for many reforms in

a Protestant direction, such as marriage of priests, schools for the

poor, "the cup for the laity," and the reform of convents; and the

French prelates supported him; but those of Spain violently resisted,

though they agreed in wishing to restrict the pope's power; while the

Italians, the most numerous party, stood by the pope in all things,

denouncing all gainsayers. In the end, the diplomatic cardinal Morone

arranged matters with the different courts; the bishops had for the

most part to give way; and the powers of the pope, which in 1545 the

movers of the Council had been bent on curtailing, were established

in nearly every particular, without any important change being made

in the administrative system. The Council had indeed repudiated

the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of predestination to sin and

salvation; and on this head the Lutherans gradually came round to the

Catholic view; but on the side of Church government the Reformation

remained practically justified. Still, it is the historic fact that its

first general result was intellectual retrogression. Save in England,

where Elizabeth's irreligious regimen gave scope for a literary and

scientific renascence while it correlatively humiliated religion and

the Church, leaving the fanatical growth of Protestantism to come

later, the Protestant atmosphere was everywhere one of theological

passion and superstition, in which art and science and fine letters

were for a time blighted.

And even in England, the result of plunging an ignorant population

into the turmoil of theological strife was markedly evil, whatever

countervailing force there was in the freer play of mental life

on other lines. Were it only in respect of the new ecclesiastical

quarrels, the fierce and scurrilous wrangles between prelatists

and anti-prelatists, the intensities of malice set up by questions

of vestments, the insoluble disputes over the meaning of the

eucharist--all heading towards the great Civil War of the seventeenth

century--the Reformation was a letting out of the waters of enmity. But

all intellectual life was bound to suffer from the erection of a

historic delusion into a popular code of moral and social law. Men

assured that the ethical and ceremonial law of the ancient Hebrews

was the beginning and end of all civic wisdom and righteousness could

not lead a sane civic life. The sermons of the Reformers were vain

asseverations of a non-existent moral order. All social evil, all

individual misfortune, was declared, in the Hebraic manner, to be

God's vengeance for sin; when all the while the infliction of evil

by persecutors was denounced as in itself sin against God. The most

popular preachers made the wildest promises of material welfare to the

faithful as the due reward of faith; and every failure of fulfilment

was as confidently explained in terms alternately of divine benevolence

and divine chastening. The most repellent teachings of the Hebrew

books were erected into infallible canons and commands; and every

contemporary problem was put on the rack of Hebrew precedent. On all

sides, the human soul was bewildered by unreason.

No mode of mental activity could escape the play of

perversion. Hooker's appeal to reason in Church policy was forever

clouded by unreasoning resort to ancient texts. Bacon, complaining

of the theological mortmain on all mental life, tacitly endorsed it

by using the same tactic. With such standards in force at the upper

levels of thought, a superstitious populace invited to find its sole

light in the half-comprehended lore of ancient Palestine could make no

progress on its own part towards knowledge of nature, of man's past,

or of man's possibilities. Religious literature meant the semblance of

culture without the reality. The sole measurable gains were æsthetic,

and that mainly on the literary side; for the Biblical temper was

hostile to the plastic arts, though men of religion could not but

play their part in developing the instrument of language. Science

was at a discount till men wearied of theological debate.

By reaction, some similar results accrued within the scope of

Catholicism in France and Italy. It is significant that "the

importance of the anatomical description of the heart by Vesalius

was not thoroughly comprehended by investigators for seventy-three

years (1543 to 1616); and the uses of the valves of the veins remained

unknown for more than half a century." This was the period of the wars

of religion in France, and of the theologians in Germany. Servetus

had gone far on the way to the theory of the circulation of the

blood in his Christianismi Restitutio (not in his work on the

Trinity, as is often asserted), but the fact remained absolutely

unknown in Switzerland and Germany. Scotland, which just before the

Reformation had in the works of Dunbar and Lyndsay what might have

been the beginning of a great literature, fell into a theological

delirium which lasted two hundred years, and from which the nation

emerged with its literary and intellectual continuity destroyed, and

needing new tillage from foreign thought to yield any new life. It was

only after the period of devout Protestantism had been succeeded by

strife-weariness, toleration and doubt, that Protestant Holland and

Switzerland began to count for anything in science and scholarship;

and Germany and Scandinavia had to wait still longer for a new birth.

Catholic France, with all her troubles, fared on the whole better in

the mental life. Rabelais was for his country a fountain of riotous

wisdom all through the worst time of the civil wars; and before they

had ended Montaigne began effectually the new enlightenment. Only

in England, where Shakespeare and Bacon signalized Protestant

rule, was there any similar good fortune; and both in England and

France the period was one of extensive though necessarily cautious

skepticism. Alongside of the first stirrings of Protestantism there

had arisen in France a spirit of critical unbelief, represented by the

Cymbalum Mundi of Bonaventure des Periers (1537), who had set out as a

Protestant; and the ferocities of the war engendered in many a temper

like his. What Montaigne did was to give to practical skepticism the

warrant of literary genius, and to win for it free currency by the

skill of his insinuation. Without such fortunate fathering, rationalism

in England made much headway in the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is

deeply impregnated with its spirit; [25] Bacon gave it a broad basis

under cover of orthodoxy; and even before their day there were loud

protests that atheism was on foot wherever continental culture came.

By such complainants the evil was early traced to Italy; and it is

clear that there, after the Spanish conquest, men's energies turned

from the closed field of politics to that of religion and philosophy,

despite the Inquisition, very much as men in ancient Greece had

turned to philosophy after the rise of the Macedonian tyranny. From

Italy came alike Deism and Unitarianism, and such atheism as there

was. The Inquisition still burned all heretics alike when it could

catch them; but even among the clergy, nay, among the very inquisitors

themselves, there were many heretics; and the zealots had to call in

lay bigots to help them. Heretical books were burned by the thousand,

most being absolutely suppressed; and when there was established

(about 1550) the famous Index Expurgatorius, in imitation of the

example already set at Louvain and Paris, it was soon found that some

works by cardinals, and by the framer of the first Italian list,

had to be included. Protestantism was thus crushed out in Italy,

with due bloodshed to boot; and the heretical Franciscans were forced

in mass to recant; but in the end there was no gain to faith. Heresy

became more elusive and more pervasive; and when in the year 1600 the

papacy put to death Giordano Bruno, his work as the herald of a new

philosophy was already done. In the next generation appeared Galileo,

the pioneer of a new era of practical science. Thus even in her time

of downfall did Italy begin for Europe a second renascence.

Thenceforth, in the sphere of the Church of Rome, unbelief persisted

either audaciously or secretly alongside of the faith. Within

the Church the long battle with Protestantism had evolved fresh

energies of propaganda, and even a measure of ascetic reformation. In

particular, the new Order of Jesuits (founded in 1534), which we have

seen completing the recapture of Poland, strove everywhere by every

available means, fair and foul, for the Church's supremacy. Where

treachery and cruelty could not be used, as they were in Poland, the

Jesuits made play with a system of education which realized the ideals

of the time; and besides thus training the young as adherents, the

Church developed within itself a revival of ecclesiastical learning

that made a formidable resistance to the learning of French and

English Protestantism. In the latter half of the seventeenth century

the combatants thus wrought by their literary warfare what they had

previously done by their physical strife--a gain to the spirit of

unbelief. Neither side convinced the other; and while the Protestants

discredited many of the old Catholic beliefs, their opponents more

subtly discredited the faculty of theological reason, putting all

human judgments in doubt as such. The outcome was a strengthening

of the anti-theological bias. Jesuit education, where it became at

all scientific, armed the born skeptics; and where it was limited

to belles lettres it failed in the long run to make either earnest

believers or able disputants.

Thus the Reformation, in the act of giving Christianity a new

intensity of life among certain populations, where it fostered

and was fostered by a growth of intolerant democracy, unwittingly

promoted at once fanaticism and freethinking both in its own and

in its enemy's sphere. Deepened superstition forced a deepening of

skepticism; fanaticism drove moderate men to science; and theological

learning discredited theology. In papal and downtrodden Italy, in

monarchic and military France, in the England of the Restoration,

and in semi-democratic Holland, there worked in the seventeenth

century the same divergent forces.

In both Holland and England, by help of the spirit of fanatical

democracy, the multiplication of sects and heresies in the second

generation of the seventeenth century was so great--180 being specified

in England alone--that no repressive policy could deal with them;

and under cover of their political freedom there arose some Unitarian

doctrine among the common people, even as anti-Scriptural Deism

spread among the educated. Devoutly religious men, such as George

Fox, the founder of Quakerism, by the very thoroughness of their

loyalty to the doctrine of the inward light, helped to shake among

sincere people the old docility of belief in revelation, though in

some cases they reinforced it, and in many more evoked, by reaction,

the spirit of persecution.

The net gain from Protestantism thus lay in the fortuitous disruption

of centralized spiritual tyranny. The rents in the structure made

openings for air and light at a time when new currents were beginning

to blow and new light to shine. Twenty years before Luther's schism,

Columbus had found the New World. Copernicus, dying in 1543, left his

teaching to the world in which Protestantism had just established

itself. Early in the next century Kepler and Galileo began to roll

back for men the old dream-boundaries of the universe. The modern

era was at its dawn; and with it Christianity had begun its era of

reconsideration, revision, and slow decline.

CHAPTER II

PROGRESS OF ANTI-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

§ 1. The Physical Sciences

It was primarily the growth of physical science, from the middle

of the sixteenth century, that gave solidity and permanence to the

new movements of rationalistic revolt aroused by the spectacle of

the Reformation and the strifes it engendered. That spectacle, and

in general the wars of religion which followed, tended more to make

scoffers or skeptics than to develop constructive rationalism. One of

the conclusions forced on statesmanlike minds by the religious wars

in France was that "a peace with two religions was better than a war

with none"; and the seventeenth century there began with a strong

though secretive tendency among the idle classes to what in the next

century became universally known as the Voltairean temper. In the

seventeenth, however, it was still almost wholly denied the use of

printing; and under this disadvantage it must have fared ill were

it not for the new studies which at once developed and buttressed

the spirit of inquiry. They built up a new habit of mind, the surest

obstacle to dogma.

Were men wont to develop their beliefs logically, the teaching

of Copernicus alone, when once accepted, would have broken up the

orthodox faith, which at nearly every point implied the geocentric

theory. Giordano Bruno, recognizing this, wove on the one hand the

Copernican principle into his restatement of the ancient doctrine of

the infinity of the universe, and on the other hand derided alike

Catholicism and Protestantism. But a comprehensive philosophy is

not the kind of propaganda that first "comes home to men's business

and bosoms": the line of practical disturbance lay through exact

science; and it is in the practical and experimental work of Galileo

that Copernicanism begins (1616-38) strongly to stir the educated

intelligence of Europe. Bacon and Bodin, like Luther, had rejected

it as theoretically propounded. It was the telescopic discoveries of

Galileo that staggered the skeptics and alarmed the Church.

The need for a solid discipline as a grounding for rationalism

is made clear by the aberrations of many of the earlier religious

doubters. Bodin, as we have seen, held fanatically by witchcraft;

and he likewise accepted astrology, as did many half-developed Italian

freethinkers who rejected the ideas of demons and sorcery, and doubted

much concerning the Bible. Men reasoned on such matters by the light

of their training, of what seemed to be probability, and of scanty

evidence, in matters where the traditional hypotheses could be properly

checked only by minute and patient scrutiny. Thus the disbelievers in

astrology were as a rule bigoted Christians who, like Luther, merely

rejected it as unscriptural, while Melanchthon leant to the belief. Of

the early English Protestants many theologically rejected it as regards

the moral life, while assenting to the theory of astral influence

on men's affairs in other regards. Only with new science could come

the rational challenge; and even men like Bacon, who consciously

strove after scientific method, remained partly prepossessed by the

old belief in astral forces. The word "influence," in this sense,

constantly appears in all kinds of Tudor and early Stuart literature.

It has been said with broad truth that whereas Greece, with her

dialectic discipline, exhorted men to make their beliefs agree with one

another, and the Christian Church ordered them to make their beliefs

agree with her dogma, the modern spirit demands that beliefs should

agree with facts. Such a spirit first promoted and then was immensely

promoted by the study of natural science. Even in the Middle Ages,

as in antiquity, physicians were proverbially given to irreligion;

and the study of physics was still more conducive to religious doubt

than that of physic. In England the naturalistic spirit, as we may term

it, was notably popularized by Bacon in the course of the seventeenth

century, but the effectual growth of Protestant fanaticism began in his

day, and had to run its course before much energy was available for

scientific research; though both Gilbert the electrician and Harvey

the discoverer of the circulation of the blood belonged to Bacon's

generation. Only a small number of superior minds were capable of

the scientific attitude. But even before the Restoration educated

Englishmen were weary enough of strife to begin the gatherings which

afterwards became the Royal Society, devoted strictly to scientific

inquiry, with a positive veto on all theological discussion.

To their scientific studies they had a powerful lead from France,

where Descartes had virtually begun a new era in philosophy by his

Discourse on Method (1637), a work which professed allegiance to the

Church but reversed all the Church's methods; and where Gassendi, a

truer if a less influential physicist than Descartes, controverted the

spiritualistic positions of the latter in a singularly modern spirit of

rationalism. By this time, too, had begun to appear the impotence of

the Church against the ubiquitousness of modern heresy. She contrived

to strike where she should have spared, and to spare where she ought

in consistency to have struck. Galileo was probably, as he professed

to be, an orthodox Catholic in his main theological beliefs, yet

he was persecuted by the Inquisition; and though the story of his

"Still it moves" is a fable, he was forced to recant under threat

of torture. Descartes, who protested his loyalty to the Church,

was at least a new support to theism; but because his teachings were

adopted in France by the Jansenists, the quasi-Protestant enemies of

the Jesuits within the Catholic Church, they were ecclesiastically

prohibited, and his supporters in the Church and the university were

persecuted; while the prudent Gassendi, who at times reasons like an

atheist, contrived without protestation to keep on good terms with

the Church, of which he was actually a Canon. He had taken orders

solely for the sake of an income; and he was never disturbed, though

he wrote a vindication of Epicurus, one of the most nearly atheistical

of the leading Greek philosophers.

Nowhere is the new impulse to science more clearly seen than in papal

and Spanish-ruled Italy. There, as Bacon complained was the case nearly

everywhere throughout Europe, most scientific professors were poorly

paid, while the learned professions were well endowed; yet at the close

of the sixteenth century there did not exist a single distinguished

Greek scholar in the peninsula; and while this may have been due to

papal policy, the unfostered study of the natural sciences went forward

on all sides. Narrowly watched by the Church, the students nevertheless

propagated new science throughout north-western Europe. Unhappily,

as we have seen, the theological spirit still hampered its evolution,

but the study persisted.

From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards it is clear

that physical science by its very method and character undermined

theology. Here there were possible rational proof and intelligent

agreement, instead of the eternal sterility of theological debate

on irrational propositions. In France, Holland, and England, the

followers of Descartes, even when agreeing on a fundamentally wrong

theory of cosmic physics, made for rationalism by their discipline as

well as by what was accurate in their detailed science; the influence

of the English Royal Society was recognizably anti-clerical; and

from Gassendi onwards the whole scientific movement told decisively

against superstition, so that the belief in witchcraft was discredited

within a generation from the time of its worst intensity. Glanvil,

who in England professed a scientific skepticism, on Cartesian

lines, defended the superstition as Bodin had done in France,

and was supported not only by the theologians but by such a pious

man of science as the chemist Boyle, who was equally skeptical in

his own proper sphere; yet they could not restore credulity among

the thinking minds. More august beliefs were shaken in turn. Boyle

in his latter years set himself anxiously to defend Christianity;

and Newton was moved to exert himself even in the cause of theism,

which was newly undermined. But Newton himself was a Unitarian;

his distinguished contemporary the astronomer Halley was reputed a

thorough unbeliever; and Newton's own philosophy, which proceeded

on Gassendi as well as on the devout Kepler, was denounced by some,

including the German Leibnitz, as tending to atheism. Leibnitz in turn

stood wearily aloof from the Church in his own country. No personal

bias or prejudice could cancel the fundamental dissidence between

exact science and "revealed" dogma.

While the literary movement of English Deism in the eighteenth

century was not ostensibly grounded on physical philosophy, being

rather critical and logical, it always kept the new science in

view; and the movement in France, as set up by the young Voltaire,

connected itself from the first with the Newtonian philosophy, which

there had to drive out the Cartesian, now become orthodox. In the

hands of La Mettrie biological science pointed to even deeper heresy;

and for such propagandists as Diderot and D'Holbach all science was

an inspiration to a general rejection of religion. Even the pursuit

of mathematics developed pronounced unbelievers, such as D'Alembert

and Condorcet. When, finally, in the latter half of the century the

scientific spirit flagged or stagnated in England, first by reason of

the new growths of industry and the new imperial expansion, later by

reason of reaction against the French Revolution, it was the French

men of science, in particular the astronomers and mathematicians,

as Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, and Delambre, who carried on the

profession of rationalism. In particular, Laplace's great contribution,

the nebular hypothesis, clinched on non-theistic grounds the whole

development of modern astronomy; and the philosopher Kant, who on that

point had in a measure anticipated him, never conformed to Christian

orthodoxy even while glosing it in the effort to conserve theism.

All the later generalizations of science have told in the same way;

and all have had to struggle for life against the instinctive hostility

of the Christian Churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. Geology,

after generations of outcry, made an end in the nineteenth century of

the orthodox theory of cosmic creation; the evolution theory drove

home the negation with a new constructive doctrine; and Darwinism,

after a no less desperate contest, has upturned the very foundations of

Christian ethics as well as dogma. As represented by Huxley, its chief

polemist, it is definitely non-Christian and non-theistic. It does not

countervail this essential tendency that a number of men of science

in each generation profess to adhere to Christianity. The adherence is

seldom thorough, and when it is, it is commonly recognized to stand for

lack of culture on the historical and ethical sides of the issue. The

result is that Protestant Christianity nearly everywhere capitulates

outwardly to natural science, professing still to save its own more

essential dogmas; while Catholicism forces upon its adherents either

"scientific nescience" or a dissimulation fatal to zeal.

§ 2. Philosophy, Cosmic and Moral

It lies on the face of our sketch of the movement of physical

science that it is subversive of Christian orthodoxy, though not of

extra-Christian theism. But since Giordano Bruno all cosmic philosophy

that keeps the tincture of religion has pointed to pantheism; and

all moral philosophy since Descartes has been more or less fatally

subversive of Christian dogma. In the great work of Spinoza (1671),

who partly proceeded on Descartes and partly transcended him, we have a

philosophy and an ethic that are reluctantly pronounced by respectful

theists to be virtually atheistic; and no great philosophy since has

reversed that impetus. The God of Kant and the God of Hegel are as

non-Christian as the Absolute of Bradley.

Moral philosophy had begun to be non-theological in Montaigne's day

(1580); and his disciple, Charron, constructed in his Wisdom what is

pronounced to be the first modern treatise on that footing. Less than a

century later the English Cumberland, although a bishop of the Church,

took a similarly rationalistic course in morals in his reply to Hobbes

(1672), making no appeal to revelation, though of course making no

attack on it; and the almost undisguised naturalism of Hobbes was

thus tacitly countenanced in fundamentals from the clerical side,

in the very act of repudiation. Shaftesbury, who became the most

influential moralist of the first half of the eighteenth century,

did but develop the naturalistic principle on avowedly theistic and

non-Christian lines. Bishop Berkeley, who assailed both Spinoza and

Shaftesbury, could justify his Christian beliefs only by arguing

that skeptics themselves, in the study of mathematics, accepted

many arbitrary propositions, and might as well accept the mystery

of Jesus Christ. Even Locke, though he stood for a "reasonable" and

non-dogmatic Christianity, was in effect an influence for deism in

respect of his philosophy.

All later moral philosophy of any standing has been either plainly

non-evangelical or essentially irreconcilable with the Christian

faith. Even the argumentation of Bishop Butler (1736) has no more

validity for it than for any other, and is finally as favourable to

atheism as to theism. Hume, who developed from deism into a final

agnosticism, was at all stages anti-Christian in his ethic as well as

in his metaphysic and his historical criticism of religion; and Adam

Smith was strictly deistic. The later and deeper German philosophies

of Kant and Fichte are no more truly helpful to Christianity, though

elaborate attempts have been made to adapt Kantism to its service;

and though Hegel finally proposed to rehabilitate its dogmas, his

German disciples for the most part became anti-Christian; one of

them, Feuerbach, becoming one of the most formidable critics of the

faith. The professionally Christian moral philosophies, such as that

of Paley in England (1785), have been abandoned by the sincerely

religious no less than by the students of philosophy. Coleridge,

seeking to give a philosophic aspect to the faith of his latter years,

had to fall back on the "modal" Trinity, and could make no judicial

defence of the doctrines of salvation and damnation.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, finally, the balance

of philosophic thought has been overwhelmingly hostile to Christian

beliefs. Everywhere, whether it be professedly utilitarian or

"transcendental," it is essentially monistic and evolutionist;

and while the expressly naturalistic doctrine, typified in the

teaching of Spencer, positively rejects all pretence of revelation,

the spiritistic schools do nothing for historic religion beyond

claiming to have reinstated a theism which is not "providential,"

and so amounts in practice to pantheism. The so-called materialism

of Germany, represented by the writings of Moleschott and Büchner,

though constantly assailed on metaphysical grounds, is the common-sense

conviction of millions of educated men; and the metaphysical attack

makes scarcely a pretence of claiming belief for conventional

religion. Christianity thus subsists without anything that can

properly be described as philosophic support, save as regards some

Catholic systems which rationalists or men of science rarely take the

trouble to examine, and the sentimental mode of reasoning latterly

labelled Pragmatism. This is really an unwarrantable application of

a term which its framer, Mr. C. S. Pierce, applied to a practice of

testing beliefs by ascertaining how far they are acted on in life. The

so-called "Pragmatism" of Professor William James and Mr. Schiller

is the vitally different process of certificating beliefs as true by

the amount of comfort and stimulus derived from them. This procedure

Mr. Pierce repudiates; but the bulk of current "Pragmatism" flies

that flag, and not his.

That method logically concludes nothing for or against any belief,

but may be made to seem to support almost any. It posits, in effect,

that true beliefs are those by which men can successfully live, but

offers no test of the reality of any alleged grounding of life upon

a belief. Empirically, the negative of any opinion may thus be as

easily substantiated as the affirmative, since the naturalist and the

supernaturalist may alike claim individual success and satisfaction;

and the adherents of the different faiths may do as much. For the

"Pragmatist" of this order, accordingly, two contraries may be equally

"true." Any resort to objective tests, the method of science, puts

that of Pragmatism (of this order) out of action. It has thus no

philosophic significance save as a quasi-philosophical reaffirmation of

the pietist claim of "experience," and leaves religion as it found it.

Other quasi-philosophical defences of Christianity are even less

durable. A considerable amount of temporary favour has been won by

what may be termed the Irrationalist defence, typified by the works

of Mr. Benjamin Kidd and Mr. A. J. Balfour. As put by the former,

it is a suicidal process of reasoning against reliance on reason,

the necessary effect being to discredit the verdict claimed,

as being attainable only through the very act of reason that is

condemned. As more subtly handled by Mr. Balfour, the Irrationalist

case takes the form of a denial that scientific beliefs, so-called,

are any more capable of "ultimate proof" than the beliefs which

constitute religion. We have here a very modern reversion to the

orthodox forensic method anciently pursued by Cicero, and in later

times employed by Huet, Pascal, and Berkeley. Its complete practical

failure in all ages might serve to indicate its necessary nugatoriness

to those who most affect it. Were the central thesis true, there is

obviously no more warrant on that basis for any one creed than for

any other; and a "solipsism" which warrants any and every claim alike

is of no use to the Christian Church, which seeks to warrant a given

revelation. Whatever be their abstract right to certainty, most men

in search of it inevitably test the less certain proposition in the

light of the more certain: and this bias, bound up with all sincere

mental life, is as fatal to anti-critical defences as it is vital to

all scientific advance. An inquiring age is not to be made credulous

by the argument from nescience.

§ 3. Biblical and Historical Criticism

Most men, in short, accept or reject religious creeds on the strength

not of any systematically philosophic reasoning, but of either

emotional bias or common-sense examination of concrete evidence. The

former is as a rule, though not always, susceptible of influence from

the latter. Thus the main instruments in turning men from Christian

credences have been the documentary and historical forms of criticism.

Such criticism, secretly frequent among educated men in the

sixteenth century, never ventured into print till the seventeenth,

and even then did so very circumspectly. English Deism begins its

literary existence with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose first work,

produced under French influences, appeared in Latin in 1624. His

position was that the doctrine of forgiveness for faith is immoral;

that all pretences of revelation are repugnant to moral reason;

and that as all so-called revelations are sectarian and mutually

exclusive, human reason must proceed for itself on a basis of natural

theism. Such audacity was possible in virtue partly of the resort to

Latin, partly of the high personal standing of the writer. The next

outstanding anti-Christian work is the Leviathan (1651) of Hobbes,

who ventured to publish in English under the doctrinally tolerant

rule of Cromwell. In his treatise, not only is the attitude of faith

constantly disparaged, despite constant resort to scriptural citation,

but there is a beginning of open criticism of the inconsistencies

of the Pentateuch. Such criticism seems to have gone much further

in private discussion long before that time; and it is clear from

many apologetic treatises that doctrinal unbelief was abundant;

but the publication of a skeptical work that could be read by the

unlearned marks an era of germinating unbelief. Spinoza's Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus (1670) carries the principle of rational textual

criticism of the Bible further; and after the French Catholic professor

Richard Simon had published in French his critical treatises on the

texts of the Old and New Testaments (1678 and 1689), though these

were professedly orthodox, Biblical criticism began a new life.

The first drastic attacks of a direct and businesslike kind on

orthodoxy were those of the English Deists of the early years of the

eighteenth century, typified in the works of Anthony Collins, who

soberly and amiably called in question alike revelation, prophecy,

and miracles. Soon such criticism was reinforced by the inquiry of

Middleton into Roman Catholic miracles, on lines which implicitly

called in question those of the gospels; and the essay of Hume on

miracles in general put the case against them on grounds which could

be turned only by arguments that evaded them. The polemic of the

whole French school of freethinkers, headed by Voltaire, thereafter

attacked every aspect of Jewish and Christian supernaturalism and

of Jewish and Christian history considered as a moral dispensation;

the English Unitarians, represented by Priestley, made a number

of converts to their compromise; and when Gibbon came to deal with

the rise of Christianity in his great work (1776-88), he set forth

on naturalistic grounds a tentative sociological explanation which

could not be overthrown by orthodox methods, and is to be superseded

only by a more searching analysis on the same lines. So decisive was

the total effect of the critical attack that in the last quarter of

the eighteenth century many German theologians within the Church had

begun to deal with the supernatural elements in the Old Testament on

rationalistic though temporizing methods, and some had even begun to

apply the same treatment to the New. Finally came, in England, the

powerful common-sense attack of Thomas Paine (1793), which at once

set up a movement of popular rationalism that has never since ceased.

To all such rationalism, however, a strong check was set up for a

whole generation, especially in England, by the universal reaction

against the French Revolution. Hitherto the upper classes, there as

in France, had been noted mainly for unbelief in religious matters;

but when it was seen from the course of the Revolution that heterodoxy

could join hands with democracy, there was a rapid change of front,

on the simple ground of class interest. During the first generation

of the nineteenth century, accordingly, all English freethinking was

either driven under the social surface or classed as disreputable,

so that it was possible to assume a great revival of faith. In France,

similarly, the literary pietism of Chateaubriand seemed to have crowned

with success the official restoration of the Church's authority; and

even the intellectual revival was associated with Christian zeal on

the part of such energetic personalities as Guizot. Even in Germany,

though there the work of Biblical criticism on rationalist lines went

steadily on, there was a pietist revival. Before the middle of the

century was reached, however, it was clear that in France and Germany

rationalism was in full renascence; and in England, where such facts

are less readily avowed, scholarly writings even in the fourth decade

had begun to prove the solidarity of European culture.

As regards Biblical criticism, there appears to be a certain

periodicity of action. In the eighteenth century, when the work

done was mainly of the common-sense order, the French physician Jean

Astruc laid down a basis for exact documentary analysis by pointing

to the two elements of Yahwist (Jehovist) and Elohist narrative as

indicating two distinct sources. On such lines the earlier German

scholars of the nineteenth century long laboured, till the common-sense

criticism was lost sight of. In the meantime, however, a long line of

partially rationalist criticism of the New Testament culminated in the

Life of Jesus by Strauss; and educated Christendom was shaken to its

foundations, insofar as it ventured to read. Side by side with that of

Strauss, there proceeded in Germany a great movement of documentary

and historical analysis, till professional theology there became

almost identified with the surrender of Christian supernaturalism.

As the critical movement proceeded in England it came about that

an admired dignitary of its Church, Bishop Colenso, was convinced

on common-sense lines of the utterly unhistorical character of the

main Pentateuchal narrative, and courageously published his views

(1862). From that point the European criticism of the Old Testament,

which had been proceeding on the assumption of the genuineness

of the narrative, took a new course with such rapid success that

within a generation the whole mass of the Old Testament had been

either decisively or provisionally reduced, chiefly by Dutch and

German scholars, to a variety of sources never wholly in accordance

with the traditional ascription, and representing collectively a

vast historical process of fabrication. In the face of the facts,

the claim of "inspiration" still made for the books by some of the

scholars who expound the process of their composition is naturally

treated with indifference by educated men not professionally committed

to such a position.

With whatever bias the problem be approached, all really critical study

of the documents latterly tells against the Christian position. Writers

who, like Renan, have treated Christian origins in a spirit of

literary sympathy with that of belief, none the less undo faith,

and offer at best a sentimental historical construction in place of

the destroyed tradition. The orthodox defence, on the other hand,

grows rapidly less confident in the hands of scholarly men. The

later development of professional study, as set forth in the English

Encyclopædia Biblica shows a progressive collapse of the traditional

belief on almost every detail, some continental theologians now going

further in their rejection of it than many professed rationalists.

The general result of two generations of critical research and

controversy is that practically all Biblical students have accepted

the main results of the "higher criticism," whatever debate there

may still be over details. There is tacit or overt agreement that

the Hexateuch is a composite body of writings of many periods;

that the Mosaic authorship is a myth; that the quasi-historical

books are similarly works of redaction; that the Psalms are not

Davidic and the Solomonic books not Solomonic; and that the prophets

are endlessly manipulated. Even the view that all the prophets are

post-Maccabean finds some acceptance. And the dissolution of the Old

Testament tradition necessarily involves the New. Though the rigorous

documentary analysis of that lagged behind the criticism of the

Hebrew books, the general conceptions of miracles and of inspiration

have long lacked serious defence. Arnold's "Miracles do not happen"

startled only those who had been inattentive to the whole movement

of scientific and historical thought.

To-day it can hardly be said that there is any serious defence of

New Testament supernaturalism. Some years ago a large number of

Anglican clerics signed a memorial calling for a liberal attitude

towards all historical criticism of the texts, and this was followed

by an appeal to the Bishop of London asking that belief in the Virgin

Birth should no longer be required of candidates for holy orders. The

appeal was of course refused; but no competent inquirer doubts that

hundreds of clergymen of the orthodox Churches are Unitarian in their

beliefs. Living controversy now turns, not on the supernaturalism

of the gospels, but on the purely historical question as to whether

the Gospel Jesus ever lived; and over this issue Unitarians are

found to be as resentful as Trinitarians ever were on the Unitarian

issue. In Germany the debate has gone far, some of the more open-minded

theologians admitting that the old lines of defence must be abandoned

as inadequate. In England all critical processes take place more

slowly, but there is now accumulating a defensive literature which

tells of widespread unsettlement. The method of confident bluster is

found not to avail in an age which has seen the rapid abandonment of

so many vital positions, all in their time maintained with the same

contemptuous confidence.

The average layman has of course not yet been reached by such a

problem as that of the Historicity of Jesus; but he has long been well

accustomed to the defensive attitude in matters of faith. Down to the

time of Colenso the "sensations" of the controversy were over the books

which attacked. For a generation past the attack has been so general

that the new "sensations" were those set up by new attempts at defence

or counter-attack. Such books as the late Henry Drummond's Natural

Law in the Spiritual World, Mr. Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution,

and Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, in their turn elicited an

amount of excitement which told chiefly of eagerness for weapons of

defence against the rationalist invasion. None of the works named will

bear any critical scrutiny. Drummond's was repented of by its author,

as it well might; and the irrationalism of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour

soon ceased to comfort the clergy who hastily hailed it as a means

of stablishing the faith.

What subsists is the mass of mainly conventional, formal, and

uncritical orthodoxy, the custom of the majority, which stands for the

same mental inertia as preserved ancient paganism substantially intact

for five hundred years after Socrates, and enabled its traditional

polytheism to overgrow early Christianity. And the professional defence

to-day is at many points singularly like that put forward for pagan

polytheism by the Platonists and Neo-Platonists. At its best it is

certainly not more philosophical than the performance of Plotinus;

at its worst not more hollow than the performance of Cicero.

CHAPTER III

POPULAR ACCEPTANCE

§ 1. Catholic Christianity

All through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and till near

the end of the eighteenth, the masses of Europe remained attached to

their respective Churches in despite of the play of criticism among

the more instructed. Whether popular religion be regarded as a matter

of habit and superstition or as the expression of a higher happiness

in religious rites, it has unquestionably numbered the great majority

down till recent times. How the Catholic Church recovered large parts

of Germany, practically all Poland and Bohemia, and for a time the

complete control of France, we have seen. Within her sphere popular

conduct was certainly no worse than in the age of her undivided power;

and where she could number within her fold minds like Paolo Sarpi,

the historian of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century; like

Pascal and Fénelon and Bossuet in the seventeenth; and like Vico in

the eighteenth, though in hardly any case are such leading spirits

found to be in thorough harmony with the papal system, she could not

but hold the respect of a great body even of educated people.