CHAPTER XIV. THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED . . . . . . . 699

1. The Religious and Political Interpretations. Burnet, Bossuet,

Sleidan, Sarpi.

2. The Rationalist Critique. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Hume,

Gibbon, Goethe, Lessing.

3. The Liberal-Romantic Appreciation. Heine, Michelet, Froude, Hegel,

Ranke, Buckle.

4. The Economic and Evolutionary Interpretations. Marx, Lamprecht,

Berger, Weber, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Santayana, Harnack, Beard,

Janssen, Pastor, Acton.

5. Concluding Estimate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819

{3}

THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

CHAPTER I

THE OLD AND THE NEW

SECTION 1. THE WORLD.

Though in some sense every age is one of transition and every

generation sees the world remodelled, there sometimes comes a change so

startling and profound that it seems like the beginning of a new season

in the world's great year. The snows of winter melt for weeks, the

cold winds blow and the cool rains fall, and we see no change until,

almost within a few days, the leaves and blossoms put forth their

verdure, and the spring has come.

Such a change in man's environment and habits as the world has rarely

seen, took place in the generation that reached early manhood in the

year 1500. [Sidenote: 1483-1546] In the span of a single life--for

convenience let us take that of Luther for our measure--men discovered,

not in metaphor but in sober fact, a new heaven and a new earth. In

those days masses of men began to read many books, multiplied by the

new art of printing. In those days immortal artists shot the world

through with a matchless radiance of color and of meaning. In those

days Vasco da Gama and Columbus and Magellan opened the watery ways to

new lands beyond the seven seas. In those days Copernicus established

the momentous truth that the earth was but a tiny planet spinning

around a vastly greater sun. In those days was in large part

accomplished the economic shift from medieval gild to modern production

by capital and wages. In those days wealth was piled up in the coffers

of the merchants, and a new power was {4} given to the life of the

individual, of the nation, and of the third estate. In those days the

monarchy of the Roman church was broken, and large portions of her

dominions seceded to form new organizations, governed by other powers

and animated by a different spirit.

[Sidenote: Antecedents of the Reformation]

Other generations have seen one revolution take place at a time, the

sixteenth century saw three, the Rise of Capitalism, the end of the

Renaissance, and the beginning of the Reformation. All three,

interacting, modifying each other, conflicting as they sometimes did,

were equally the consequences, in different fields, of antecedent

changes in man's circumstances. All life is an adaptation to

environment; and thus from every alteration in the conditions in which

man lives, usually made by his discovery of new resources or of

hitherto unknown natural laws, a change in his habits of life must

flow. Every revolution is but an adjustment to a fresh situation,

intellectual or material, or both.

[Sidenote: Economic]

Certainly, economic and psychological factors were alike operative in

producing the three revolutions. The most general economic force was

the change from "natural economy" to "money economy," _i.e._ from a

society in which payments were made chiefly by exchange of goods, and

by services, to one in which money was both the agent of exchange and

standard of value. In the Middle Ages production had been largely

co-operative; the land belonged to the village and was apportioned out

to each husbandman to till, or to all in common for pasture.

Manufacture and commerce were organized by the gild--a society of

equals, with the same course of labor and the same reward for each, and

with no distinction save that founded on seniority--apprentice,

workman, master-workman. But {5} in the later Middle Ages, and more

rapidly at their close, this system broke down under the necessity for

larger capital in production and the possibility of supplying it by the

increase of wealth and of banking technique that made possible

investment, rapid turn-over of capital, and corporate partnership. The

increase of wealth and the changed mode of its production has been in

large part the cause of three developments which in their turn became

causes of revolution: the rise of the bourgeoisie, of nationalism, and

of individualism.

[Sidenote: The bourgeoisie]

Just as the nobles were wearing away in civil strife and were seeing

their castles shot to pieces by cannon, just as the clergy were wasting

in supine indolence and were riddled by the mockery of humanists, there

arose a new class, eager and able to take the helm of civilization, the

moneyed men of city and of trade. _Nouveaux riches_ as they were, they

had an appetite for pleasure and for ostentation unsurpassed by any, a

love for the world and an impatience of the meek and lowly church, with

her ideal of poverty and of chastity. In their luxurious and leisured

homes they sheltered the arts that made life richer and the philosophy,

or religion, that gave them a good conscience in the work they loved.

Both Renaissance and Reformation were dwellers in the cities and in the

marts of commerce.

[Sidenote: National states]

It was partly the rise of the third estate, but partly also cultural

factors, such as the perfecting of the modern tongues, that made the

national state one of the characteristic products of modern times.

Commerce needs order and strong government; the men who paid the piper

called the tune; police and professional soldiery made the state, once

so racked by feudal wars, peaceful at home and dreaded abroad. If the

consequence of this was an increase in royal power, the kings were

among those who had greatness thrust upon them, rather than achieving

it for themselves. {6} They were but the symbols of the new, proudly

conscious nation, and the police commissioners of the large bankers and

traders.

[Sidenote: Individualism]

The reaction of nascent capitalism on the individual was no less marked

than on state and society, though it was not the only cause of the new

sense of personal worth. Just as the problems of science and of art

became most alluring, the man with sufficient leisure and resource to

solve them was developed by economic forces. In the Middle Ages men

had been less enterprising and less self-conscious. Their thought was

not of themselves as individuals so much as of their membership in

groups. The peoples were divided into well-marked estates, or classes;

industry was co-operative; even the great art of the cathedrals was

rather gild-craft than the expression of a single genius; even learning

was the joint property of universities, not the private accumulation of

the lone scholar. But with every expansion of the ego either through

the acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits,

came a rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the

essence of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts

between modern and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a

large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and of

history, is conscious only of object; the trained and leisured

intellect discovers, literally by "reflection," the subjective. He is

then no longer content to be anything less than himself, or to be lost

in anything greater.

Just as men were beginning again to glory in their own powers came a

series of discoveries that totally transformed the world they lived in.

So vast a change is made in human thought and habit by some apparently

trivial technical inventions that it sometimes {7} seems as if the race

were like a child that had boarded a locomotive and half accidentally

started it, but could neither guide nor stop it. Civilization was born

with the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of

[Sidenote: Inventions] animals, writing, and navigation, all of them,

together with important astronomical discoveries, made prior to the

beginnings of recorded history. On this capital mankind traded for

some millenniums, for neither classic times nor the Dark Ages added

much to the practical sciences. But, beginning with the thirteenth

century, discovery followed discovery, each more important in its

consequences than its last. One of the first steps was perhaps the

recovery of lost ground by the restoration of the classics. Gothic art

and the vernacular literatures testify to the intellectual activity of

the time, but they did not create the new elements of life that were

brought into being by the inventors.

What a difference in private life was made by the introduction of

chimneys and glass windows, for glass, though known to antiquity, was

not commonly applied to the openings that, as the etymology of the

English word implies, let in the wind! By the fifteenth century the

power of lenses to magnify and refract had been utilized, as mirrors,

then as spectacles, to be followed two centuries later by telescopes

and microscopes. Useful chemicals were now first applied to various

manufacturing processes, such as the tinning of iron. The compass,

with its weird power of pointing north, guided the mariner on uncharted

seas. The obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war

more than all the famous conquerors had done, and the polity of states

more than any of the renowned legislators of antiquity. The equally

obscure inventor of mechanical clocks--a great improvement on the {8}

older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles--made possible a new

precision and regularity of daily life, an untold economy of time and

effort.

[Sidenote: Printing]

But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the glory of John

Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor and in their own times obscure

geniuses who carry out to fulfilment a great idea at much sacrifice to

themselves. The demand for books had been on the increase for a long

time, and every effort was made to reproduce them as rapidly and

cheaply as possible by the hand of expert copyists, but the

applications of this method produced slight result. The introduction

of paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, furnished one of

the indispensable pre-requisites to the multiplication of cheap

volumes. In the early fifteenth century, the art of the wood-cutter

and engraver had advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be

printed in this manner, _i.e._ from carved blocks. This was usually,

or at first, done only with books in which a small amount of text went

with a large amount of illustration. There are extant, for example,

six editions of the _Biblia Pauperum_, stamped by this method. It was

afterwards applied, chiefly in Holland, to a few other books for which

there was a large demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example,

and a guide-book to Rome known as the _Mirabilia Urbis Romae_. But at

best this method was extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore

out, the text was blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense

was large.

The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was therefore not, as

the name implies, printing, or impression, but typography, or the use

of type. The printer first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was

called the punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the {9} matrix in

which he was able to found a large number of exactly identical types of

metal, usually of lead.

These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made it possible

satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a large number of copies of

the same text, and, when that was done, the types could be taken apart

and used for another work.

The earliest surviving specimen of printing--not counting a few undated

letters of indulgence--is a fragment on the last judgment completed at

Mayence before 1447. In 1450 Gutenberg made a partnership with the

rich goldsmith John Fust, and from their press issued, within the next

five years, the famous Bible with 42 lines to a page, and a Donatus

(Latin grammar) of 32 lines. The printer of the Bible with 36 lines to

a page, that is the next oldest surviving monument, was apparently a

helper of Gutenberg, who set up an independent press in 1454. Legible,

clean-cut, comparatively cheap, these books demonstrated once for all

the success of the new art, even though, for illuminated initials, they

were still dependent on the hand of the scribe.

[Sidenote: Books and Reading]

In those days before patents the new invention spread with wonderful

rapidity, reaching Italy in 1465, Paris in 1470, London in 1480,

Stockholm in 1482, Constantinople in 1487, Lisbon in 1490, and Madrid

in 1499. Only a few backward countries of Europe remained without a

press. By the year 1500 the names of more than one thousand printers

are known, and the titles of about 30,000 printed works. Assuming that

the editions were small, averaging 300 copies, there would have been in

Europe by 1500 about 9,000,000 books, as against the few score thousand

manuscripts that lately had held all the precious lore of time. In a

few years the price of books sank to one-eighth of what it had been

before. "The gentle reader" had started on his career.

{10} The importance of printing cannot be over-estimated. There are

few events like it in the history of the world. The whole gigantic

swing of modern democracy and of the scientific spirit was released by

it. The veil of the temple of religion and of knowledge was rent in

twain, and the arcana of the priest and clerk exposed to the gaze of

the people. The reading public became the supreme court before whom,

from this time, all cases must be argued. The conflict of opinions and

parties, of privilege and freedom, of science and obscurantism, was

transferred from the secret chamber of a small, privileged,

professional, and sacerdotal coterie to the arena of the reading public.

[Sidenote: Exploration]

It is amazing, but true, that within fifty years after this exploit,

mankind should have achieved another like unto it in a widely different

sphere. The horror of the sea was on the ancient world; a heart of oak

and triple bronze was needed to venture on the ocean, and its

annihilation was one of the blessings of the new earth promised by the

Apocalypse. All through the centuries Europe remained sea-locked,

until the bold Portuguese mariners venturing ever further and further

south along the coast of Africa, finally doubled the Cape of Good

Hope--a feat first performed by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, though it was

not until 1498 that Vasco da Gama reached India by this method.

Still unconquered lay the stormy and terrible Atlantic,

"Where, beyond the extreme sea-wall,

and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder,

and deep death waits."

But the ark of Europe found her dove--as the name Columbus

signifies--to fly over the wild, western {11} waves, and bring her news

of strange countries. The effect of these discoveries, enormously and

increasingly important from the material standpoint, was first felt in

the widening of the imagination. Camoens wrote the epic of Da Gama,

More placed his Utopia in America, and Montaigne speculated on the

curious customs of the redskins. Ariosto wrote of the wonders of the

new world in his poem, and Luther occasionally alluded to them in his

sermons.

[Sidenote: Universities]

If printing opened the broad road to popular education, other and more

formal means to the same end were not neglected. One of the great

innovations of the Middle Ages was the university. These permanent

corporations, dedicated to the advancement of learning and the

instruction of youth, first arose, early in the twelfth century, at

Salerno, at Bologna and at Paris. As off-shoots of these, or in

imitation of them, many similar institutions sprang up in every land of

western Europe. The last half of the fifteenth century was especially

rich in such foundations. In Germany, from 1450 to 1517, no less than

nine new academies were started: Greifswald 1456, Freiburg in the

Breisgau 1460, Basle 1460, Ingolstadt 1472, Trèves 1473, Mayence 1477,

Tübingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502, and Frankfort on the Oder 1506. Though

generally founded by papal charter, and maintaining a strong

ecclesiastical flavor, these institutions were under the direction of

the civil government.

In France three new universities opened their doors during the same

period: Valence 1459, Nantes 1460, Bourges 1464. These were all placed

under the general supervision of the local bishops. The great

university of Paris was gradually changing its character. From the

most cosmopolitan and international of bodies it was fast becoming

strongly nationalist, and was the chief center of an Erastian

Gallicanism. Its {12} tremendous weight cast against the Reformation

was doubtless a chief reason for the failure of that movement in France.

Spain instituted seven new universities at this time: Barcelona 1450,

Saragossa 1474, Palma 1483, Sigüenza 1489, Alcalá 1499, Valencia 1500,

and Seville 1504. Italy and England remained content with the

academies they already had, but many of the smaller countries now

started native universities. Thus Pressburg was founded in Hungary in

1465, Upsala in Sweden in 1477, Copenhagen in 1478, Glasgow in 1450,

and Aberdeen in 1494. The number of students in each foundation

fluctuated, but the total was steadily on the increase.

Naturally, the expansion of the higher education brought with it an

increase in the number and excellence of the schools. Particularly

notable is the work of the Brethren of the Common Life, who devoted

themselves almost exclusively to teaching boys. Some of their schools,

as Deventer, attained a reputation like that of Eton or Rugby today.

The spread of education was not only notable in itself, but had a more

direct result in furnishing a shelter to new movements until they were

strong enough to do without such support. It is significant that the

Reformations of Wyclif, Huss, and Luther, all started in universities.

[Sidenote: Growth of intelligence]

As the tide rolls in, the waves impress one more than the flood beneath

them. Behind, and far transcending, the particular causes of this and

that development lies the operation of great biological laws, selecting

a type for survival, transforming the mind and body of men slowly but

surely. Whether due to the natural selection of circumstance, or to

the inward urge of vital force, there seems to be no doubt that the

average intellect, not of leading thinkers or of select groups, {13}

but of the European races as a whole, has been steadily growing greater

at every period during which it can be measured. Moreover, the

monastic vow of chastity tended to sterilize and thus to eliminate the

religiously-minded sort. Operating over a long period, and on both

sexes, this cause of the growing secularization of the world, though it

must not be exaggerated, cannot be overlooked.

SECTION 2. THE CHURCH

Over against "the world," "the church." . . . As the Reformation was

primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later

Middle Ages must be given. How Christianity was immaculately conceived

in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty

and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him

its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was

enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current

mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by

sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek

philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from

the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the

place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then

the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock

of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of

space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;--all this

lies outside the scope of the present work to describe. But of its

later fortunes some brief account must be given.

[Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216]

By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long

strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to

the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe. Innocent III took realms in

fief and dictated to kings. The pope, asserting that the spiritual

power was as much superior to the civil as the sun was brighter than

the moon, acted as the vicegerent of God on earth. But this supremacy

did not last long unquestioned. Just a century after Innocent III,

Boniface VIII [Sidenote: Boniface VIII 1294-1303] was worsted in a

quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, Clement V, a

Frenchman, by transferring the papal capital to Avignon, virtually made

the supreme pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus

weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This "Babylonian

Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by

a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote:

The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back

to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors,

respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two

rival cities. The difficulty of deciding which was the true successor

of Peter was so great that not only were the kingdoms of Europe divided

in their allegiance, but doctors of the church and canonized saints

could be found among the supporters of either line. There can be no

doubt that respect for the pontificate greatly suffered by the schism,

which was in some respects a direct preparation for the greater

division brought about by the Protestant secession.

[Sidenote: Councils--Pisa, 1409, Constance, 1414-18]

The attempt to end the schism at the Council of Pisa resulted only in

the election of a third pope. The situation was finally dealt with by

the Council of Constance which deposed two of the popes and secured the

voluntary abdication of the third. The synod further strengthened the

church by executing the heretics Huss and Jerome of Prague, and by

passing decrees intended to put the government of the church in the

hands of representative assemblies. It asserted that it {15} had power

directly from Christ, that it was supreme in matters of faith, and in

matters of discipline so far as they affected the schism, and that the

pope could not dissolve it without its own consent. By the decree

_Frequens_ it provided for the regular summoning of councils at short

intervals. Beyond this, other efforts to reform the morals of the

clergy proved abortive, for after long discussion nothing of importance

was done.

For the next century the policy of the popes was determined by the wish

to assert their superiority over the councils. The Synod of Basle

[Sidenote: Basle 1431-43] reiterated all the claims of Constance, and

passed a number of laws intended to diminish the papal authority and to

deprive the pontiff of much of his ill-gotten revenues--annates, fees

for investiture, and some other taxes. It was successful for a time

because protected by the governments of France and Germany, for, though

dissolved by Pope Eugene IV in 1433, it refused to listen to his

command and finally extorted from him a bull ratifying the conciliar

claims to supremacy.

In the end, however, the popes triumphed. The bull _Execrabilis_

[Sidenote: 1458] denounced as a damnable abuse the appeal to a future

council, and the _Pastor Aeternus_ [Sidenote: 1516] reasserted in

sweeping terms the supremacy of the pope, repealing all decrees of

Constance and Basle to the contrary, as well as other papal bulls.

[Sidenote: The secularization of the papacy]

At Rome the popes came to occupy the position of princes of one of the

Italian states, and were elected, like the doges of Venice, by a small

oligarchy. Within seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini,

Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more than one pontiff, and

a majority of the others were nearly related by blood or marriage to

one of these great stocks. The cardinals were appointed from the

pontiff's sons or nephews, and the numerous other {16} offices in their

patronage, save as they were sold, were distributed to personal or

political friends.

Like other Italian princes the popes became, in the fifteenth century,

distinguished patrons of arts and letters. The golden age of the

humanists at Rome began under Nicholas V [Sidenote: Nicholas V 1447-55]

who employed a number of them to make translations from Greek. It is

characteristic of the complete secularization of the States of the

Church that a number of the literati pensioned by him were skeptics and

scoffers. Valla, who mocked the papacy, ridiculed the monastic orders,

and attacked the Bible and Christian ethics, was given a prebend;

Savonarola, the most earnest Christian of his age, was put to death.

[Sidenote: 1453]

The fall of Constantinople gave a certain European character to the

policy of the pontiffs after that date, for the menace of the Turk

seemed so imminent that the heads of Christendom did all that was

possible to unite the nations in a crusade. This was the keynote of

the statesmanship of Calixtus III [Sidenote: Calixtus III 1455-8] and

of his successor, Pius II. [Sidenote: Pius II 1458-64] Before his

elevation to the see of Peter this talented writer, known to literature

as Aeneas Sylvius, had, at the Council of Basle, published a strong

argument against the extreme papal claims, which he afterwards, as

pope, retracted. His zeal against the Turk and against his old friends

the humanists lent a moral tone to his pontificate, but his feeble

attempts to reform abuses were futile.

[Sidenote: Paul II 1464-71]

The colorless reign of Paul II was followed by that of Sixtus IV,

[Sidenote: Sixtus IV 1471-84] a man whose chief passion was the

aggrandizement of his family. He carried nepotism to an extreme and by

a policy of judicial murder very nearly exterminated his rivals, the

Colonnas.

[Sidenote: Innocent VIII 1484-92]

The enormous bribes paid by Innocent VIII for his election were

recouped by his sale of offices and spiritual graces, and by taking a

tribute from the Sultan, {17} in return for which he refused to

proclaim a crusade. The most important act of his pontificate was the

publication of the bull against witchcraft.

[Sidenote: Alexander VI 1492-1503]

The name of Alexander VI has attained an evil eminence of infamy on

account of his own crimes and vices and those of his children, Caesar

Borgia and Lucretia. One proof that the public conscience of Italy,

instead of being stupified by the orgy of wickedness at Rome was rather

becoming aroused by it, is found in the appearance, just at this time,

of a number of preachers of repentance. These men, usually friars,

started "revivals" marked by the customary phenomena of sudden

conversion, hysteria, and extreme austerity. The greatest of them all

was the Dominican Jerome Savonarola [Sidenote: Savonarola] who, though

of mediocre intellectual gifts, by the passionate fervor of his

convictions, attained the position of a prophet at Florence. He began

preaching here in 1482, and so stirred his audiences that many wept and

some were petrified with horror. His credit was greatly raised by his

prediction of the invasion of Charles VIII of France in 1494. He

succeeded in driving out the Medici and in introducing a new

constitution of a democratic nature, which he believed was directly

sanctioned by God. He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the

people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only

public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The people burned their

cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left

their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and

blasphemers had their tongues pierced. A police was instituted with

power of searching houses.

It was only the pope's fear of Charles VIII that prevented his dealing

with this dangerous reformer, who now began to attack the vices of the

curia. In 1495, however, the friar was summoned to Rome, and {18}

refused to go; he was then forbidden to preach, and disobeyed. In Lent

1496 he proclaimed the duty of resisting the pope when in error. In

November a new brief proposed changes in the constitution of his order

which would bring him more directly under the power of Rome.

Savonarola replied that he did not fear the excommunication of the

sinful church, which, when launched against him May 12, 1497, only made

him more defiant. Claiming to be commissioned directly from God, he

appealed to the powers to summon a general council against the pope.

At this juncture one of his opponents, a Franciscan, Francis da Puglia,

proposed to him the ordeal by fire, stating that though he expected to

be burnt he was willing to take the risk for the sake of the faith.

The challenge refused by Savonarola was taken up by his friend Fra

Domenico da Peseta, and although forbidden by Alexander, the ordeal was

sanctioned by the Signory and a day set. A dispute as to whether

Domenico should be allowed to take the host or the crucifix into the

flames prevented the experiment from taking place, and the mob, furious

at the loss of its promised spectacle, refused further support to the

discredited leader. For some years, members of his own order, who

resented the severity of his reform, had cherished a grievance against

him, and now they had their chance. Seized by the Signory, he was

tortured and forced to confess that he was not a prophet, and on May

22, 1498, was condemned, with two companions, to be hung. After the

speedy execution of the sentence, which the sufferers met calmly, their

bodies were burnt. All effects of Savonarola's career, political,

moral, and religious, shortly disappeared.

Alexander was followed by a Rovere who took the name of Julius II.

[Sidenote: Julius II 1503-13] Notwithstanding his advanced age this

pontiff proved one of the most vigorous and able {19} statesman of the

time and devoted himself to the aggrandizement, by war and diplomacy,

of the Papal States. He did not scruple to use his spiritual thunders

against his political enemies, as when he excommunicated the Venetians.

[Sidenote: 1509] He found himself at odds with both the Emperor

Maximilian and Louis XII of France, who summoned a schismatic council

at Pisa. [Sidenote: 1511] Supported by some of the cardinals this

body revived the legislation of Constance and Basle, but fell into

disrepute when, by a master stroke of policy, Julius convoked a council

at Rome. [Sidenote: 1512-16] This synod, the Fifth Lateran, lasted

for four years, and endeavored to deal with a crusade and with reform.

All its efforts at reform proved abortive because they were either

choked, while in course of discussion, by the Curia, or, when passed,

were rendered ineffective by the dispensing power.

[Sidenote: Leo X 1513-21]

While the synod was still sitting Julius died and a new pope was

chosen. This was the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici Leo X.

Having taken the tonsure at the age of seven, and received the red hat

six years later, he donned the tiara at the early age of thirty-eight.

His words, as reported by the Venetian ambassador at Rome, "Let us

enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us," exactly express his

program. To make life one long carnival, to hunt game and to witness

comedies and the antics of buffoons, to hear marvellous tales of the

new world and voluptuous verses of the humanists and of the great

Ariosto, to enjoy music and to consume the most delicate viands and the

most delicious wines--this was what he lived for. Free and generous

with money, he prodigally wasted the revenues of three pontificates.

Spending no less than 6000 ducats a month on cards and gratuities, he

was soon forced to borrow to the limit of his credit. Little recked he

that Germany was being {20} reft from the church by a poor friar. His

irresolute policy was incapable of pursuing any public end

consistently, save that he employed the best Latinists of the time to

give elegance to his state papers. His method of governing was the

purely personal one, to pay his friends and flatterers at the expense

of the common good. One of his most characteristic letters expresses

his intention of rewarding with high office a certain gentleman who had

given him a dinner of lampreys.

SECTION 3. CAUSES OF THE REFORMATION

[Sidenote: Corruption of the church not a main cause of the Reformation]

In the eyes of the early Protestants the Reformation was a return to

primitive Christianity and its principal cause was the corruption of the

church. That there was great depravity in the church as elsewhere cannot

be doubted, but there are several reasons for thinking that it could not

have been an important cause for the loss of so many of her sons. In the

first place there is no good ground for believing that the moral

condition of the priesthood was worse in 1500 than it had been for a long

time; indeed, there is good evidence to the contrary, that things were

tending to improve, if not at Rome yet in many parts of Christendom. If

objectionable practices of the priests had been a sufficient cause for

the secession of whole nations, the Reformation would have come long

before it actually did. Again, there is good reason to doubt that the

mere abuse of an institution has ever led to its complete overthrow; as

long as the institution is regarded as necessary, it is rather mended

than ended. Thirdly, many of the acts that seem corrupt to us, gave

little offence to contemporaries, for they were universal. If the church

sold offices and justice, so did the civil governments. If the clergy

lived impure lives, so did the laity. Probably the standard of the {21}

church (save in special circumstances) was no worse than that of civil

life, and in some respects it was rather more decent. Finally, there is

some reason to suspect of exaggeration the charges preferred by the

innovators. Like all reformers they made the most of their enemy's

faults. Invective like theirs is common to every generation and to all

spheres of life. It is true that the denunciation of the priesthood

comes not only from Protestants and satirists, but from popes and

councils and canonized saints, and that it bulks large in medieval

literature. Nevertheless, it is both _a priori_ probable and to some

extent historically verifiable that the evil was more noisy, not more

potent, than the good. But though the corruptions of the church were not

a main cause of the Protestant secession, they furnished good excuses for

attack; the Reformers were scandalized by the divergence of the practice

and the pretensions of the official representatives of Christianity, and

their attack was envenomed and the break made easier thereby. It is

therefore necessary to say a few words about those abuses at which public

opinion then took most offence.

[Sidenote: Abuses: Financial]

Many of these were connected with money. The common man's conscience was

wounded by the smart in his purse. The wealth of the church was

enormous, though exaggerated by those contemporaries who estimated it at

one-third of the total real estate of Western Europe. In addition to

revenues from her own land the church collected tithes and taxes,

including "Peter's pence" in England, Scandinavia and Poland. The clergy

paid dues to the curia, among them the _servitia_ charged on the bishops

and the annates levied on the income of the first year for each appointee

to high ecclesiastical office, and the price for the archbishop's pall.

The priests recouped themselves by charging high fees for their

ministrations. At a time {22} when the Christian ideal was one of

"apostolic poverty" the riches of the clergy were often felt as a scandal

to the pious.

[Sidenote: Simony]

Though the normal method of appointment to civil office was sale, it was

felt as a special abuse in the church and was branded by the name of

simony. Leo X made no less than 500,000 ducats[1] annually from the sale

of more than 2000 offices, most of which, being sinecures, eventually

came to be regarded as annuities, with a salary amounting to about 10 per

cent. of the purchase price.

Justice was also venal, in the church no less than in the state. Pardon

was obtainable for all crimes for, as a papal vice-chamberlain phrased

it, "The Lord wishes not the death of a sinner but that he should pay and

live." Dispensations from the laws against marriage within the

prohibited degrees were sold. Thus an ordinary man had to pay 16

grossi[2] for dispensation to marry a woman who stood in "spiritual

relationship" [3] to him; a noble had to pay 20 grossi for the same

privilege, and a prince or duke 30 grossi. First cousins might marry for

the payment of 27 grossi; an uncle and niece for from three to four

ducats, though this was later raised to as much as sixty ducats, at least

for nobles. Marriage within the first degree of affinity (a deceased

wife's mother or daughter by another husband) was at one time sold for

about ten ducats; marriage within the second degree[4] was {23} permitted

for from 300 to 600 grossi. Hardly necessary to add, as was done: "Note

well, that dispensations or graces of this sort are not given to poor

people." [5] Dispensations from vows and from the requirements of

ecclesiastical law, as for example those relating to fasting, were also

to be obtained at a price.

[Sidenote: Indulgences]

One of the richest sources of ecclesiastical revenue was the sale of

indulgences, or the remission by the pope of the temporal penalties of

sin, both penance in this life and the pains of purgatory. The practice

of giving these pardons first arose as a means of assuring heaven to

those warriors who fell fighting the infidel. In 1300 Boniface VIII

granted a plenary indulgence to all who made the pilgrimage to the

jubilee at Rome, and the golden harvest reaped on this occasion induced

his successors to take the same means of imparting spiritual graces to

the faithful at frequent intervals. In the fourteenth century the

pardons were extended to all who contributed a sum of money to a pious

purpose, whether they came to Rome or not, and, as the agents who were

sent out to distribute these pardons were also given power to confess and

absolve, the papal letters were naturally regarded as no less than

tickets of admission to heaven. In the thirteenth century the

theologians had discovered that there was at the disposal of the church

and her head an abundant "treasury of the merits of Christ and the

saints," which might be applied vicariously to anyone by the pope. In

the fifteenth century the claimed power to free living men from purgatory

was extended to the {24} dead, and this soon became one of the most

profitable branches of the "holy trade."

The means of obtaining indulgences varied. Sometimes they were granted

to those who made a pilgrimage or who would read a pious book. Sometimes

they were used to raise money for some public work, a hospital or a

bridge. But more and more they became an ordinary means for raising

revenue for the curia. How thoroughly commercialized the business of

selling grace and remission of the penalties of sin had become is shown

by the fact that the agents of the pope were often bankers who organized

the sales on purely business lines in return for a percentage of the net

receipts plus the indirect profits accruing to those who handle large

sums. Of the net receipts the financiers usually got about ten per

cent.; an equal amount was given to the emperor or other civil ruler for

permitting the pardoners to enter his territory, commissions were also

paid to the local bishop and clergy, and of course the pedlars of the

pardons received a proportion of the profits in order to stimulate their

zeal. On the average from thirty to forty-five per cent. of the gross

receipts were turned into the Roman treasury.

It is natural that public opinion should have come to regard indulgences

with aversion. Their bad moral effect was too obvious to be disregarded,

the compounding with sin for a payment destined to satisfy the greed of

unscrupulous prelates. Their economic effects were also noticed, the

draining of the country of money with which further to enrich a corrupt

Italian city. Many rulers forbade their sale in their territories,

because, as Duke George of Saxony, a good Catholic, expressed it, before

Luther was heard of, "they cheated the simple layman of his soul."

Hutten mocked at Pope Julius II for selling to others the heaven he could

not win himself. Pius II [Sidenote 1458-64] was obliged {25} to confess:

"If we send ambassadors to ask aid of the princes, they are mocked; if we

impose a tithe on the clergy, appeal is made to a future council; if we

publish an indulgence and invite contributions in return for spiritual

favors, we are charged with greed. People think all is done merely for

the sake of extorting money. No one trusts us. We have no more credit

than a bankrupt merchant."

[Sidenote: Immorality of clergy]

Much is said in the literature of the latter Middle Ages about the

immorality of the clergy. This class has always been severely judged

because of its high pretensions. Moreover the vow of celibacy was too

hard to keep for most men and for some women; that many priests, monks

and nuns broke it cannot be doubted. And yet there was a sprinkling of

saintly parsons like him of whom Chancer [Transcriber's note: Chaucer?]

said

"Who Christes lore and his apostles twelve

He taught, but first he folwed it himselve,"

and there were many others who kept up at least the appearance of

decency. But here, as always, the bad attracted more attention than the

good.

The most reliable data on the subject are found in the records of church

visitations, both those undertaken by the Reformers and those

occasionally attempted by the Catholic prelates of the earlier period.

Everywhere it was proved that a large proportion of the clergy were both

wofully ignorant and morally unworthy. Besides the priests who had

concubines, there were many given to drink and some who kept taverns,

gaming rooms and worse places. Plunged in gross ignorance and

superstition, those blind leaders of the blind, who won great reputations

as exorcists or as wizards, were unable to understand the Latin service,

and sometimes to repeat even the Lord's prayer or creed in any language.

{26}

[Sidenote: Piety]

The Reformation, like most other revolutions, came not at the lowest ebb

of abuse, but at a time when the tide had already begun to run, and to

run strongly, in the direction of improvement. One can hardly find a

sweeter, more spiritual religion anywhere than that set forth in

Erasmus's _Enchiridion_, or in More's _Utopia_, or than that lived by

Vitrier and Colet. Many men, who had not attained to this conception of

the true beauty of the gospel, were yet thoroughly disgusted with things

as they were and quite ready to substitute a new and purer conception and

practice for the old, mechanical one.

Evidence for this is the popularity of the Bible and other devotional

books. Before 1500 there were nearly a hundred editions of the Latin

Vulgate, and a number of translations into German and French. There were

also nearly a hundred editions, in Latin and various vernaculars, of _The

Imitation of Christ_. There was so flourishing a crop of devotional

handbooks that no others could compete with them in popularity. For

those who could not read there were the _Biblia Pauperum_, picture-books

with a minimum of text, and there were sermons by popular preachers. If

some of these tracts and homilies were crude and superstitious, others

were filled with a spirit of love and honesty. Whereas the passion for

pilgrimages and relics seemed to increase, there were men of clear vision

to denounce the attendant evils. A new feature was the foundation of lay

brotherhoods, like that of the Common Life, with the purpose of

cultivating a good character in the world, and of rendering social

service. The number of these brotherhoods was great and their popularity

general.

[Sidenote: Clash of new spirit with old institutions]

Had the forces already at work within the church been allowed to operate,

probably much of the moral reform desired by the best Catholics would

have been {27} accomplished quietly without the violent rending of

Christian unity that actually took place. But the fact is, that such

reforms never would or could have satisfied the spirit of the age. Men

were not only shocked by the abuses in the church, but they had outgrown

some of her ideals. Not all of her teaching, nor most of it, had become

repugnant to them, for it has often been pointed out that the Reformers

kept more of the doctrines of Catholicism than they threw away, but in

certain respects they repudiated, not the abuse but the very principle on

which the church acted. In four respects, particularly the ideals of the

new age were incompatible with those of the Roman communion.

[Sidenote: Sacramental theory of the church]

The first of these was the sacramental theory of salvation and its

corollary, the sacerdotal power. According to Catholic doctrine grace is

imparted to the believer by means of certain rites: baptism,

confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and

matrimony. Baptism is the necessary prerequisite to the enjoyment of the

others, for without it the unwashed soul, whether heathen or child of

Christian parents, would go to eternal fire; but the "most excellent of

the sacraments" is the eucharist, in which Christ is mysteriously

sacrificed by the priest to the Father and his body and blood eaten and

drunk by the worshippers. Without these rites there was no salvation,

and they acted automatically (_ex opere operato_) on the soul of the

faithful who put no active hindrance in their way. Save baptism, they

could be administered only by priests, a special caste with "an indelible

character" marking them off from the laity. Needless to remark the

immense power that this doctrine gave the clergy in a believing age.

They were made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and their

moral character had no more to do with their binding and loosing sentence

than does the moral {28} character of a secular officer affect his

official acts. Add to this that the priests were unbound by ties of

family, that by confession they entered into everyone's private life,

that they were not amenable to civil justice--and their position as a

privileged order was secure. The growing self-assurance and

enlightenment of a nascent individualism found this distinction

intolerable.

[Sidenote: Other-worldliness]

Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash with the developing

powers of the new age was its pessimistic and ascetic other-worldliness.

The ideal of the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this world,

all its pomps and learning and art were but snares to seduce men from

salvation. Reason was called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom

like the rose. Wealth was shunned as dangerous, marriage deprecated as a

necessary evil. Fasting, scourging, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated

as the surest roads to heaven. If a good layman might barely shoulder

his way through the strait and narrow gate, the highest graces and

heavenly rewards were vouchsafed to the faithful monk. All this grated

harshly on the minds of the generations that began to find life glorious

and happy, not evil but good.

[Sidenote: Worship of saints]

Third, the worship of the saints, which had once been a stepping-stone to

higher things, was now widely regarded as a stumbling-block. Though far

from a scientific conception of natural law, many men had become

sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see in the current

hagiolatry a sort of polytheism. Erasmus freely drew the parallel

between the saints and the heathen deities, and he and others scourged

the grossly materialistic form which this worship often took. If we may

believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for help in hiding their sin; merchants

for a rich haul; gamblers for luck; and prostitutes for generous {29}

patrons. Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact of a man who prayed

for help in seducing his neighbor's wife, and similar instances of

perverted piety are not wanting. The passion for the relics of the

saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles. There appeared

to be enough of the wood of the true cross, said Erasmus, to make a ship;

there were exhibited five shin-bones of the ass on which Christ rode,

whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several complete bits of skin

saved from the circumcision of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Temporal power of the church]

Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate the claims of the

popes to temporal power. The church had become, in fact, an

international state, with its monarch, its representative legislative

assemblies, its laws and its code. It was not a voluntary society, for

if citizens were not born into it they were baptized into it before they

could exercise any choice. It kept prisons and passed sentence

(virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments

as one power with another; it took principalities and kingdoms in fief.

It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6]

The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church. It needed a

new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the

Reformation. Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct

efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the

Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by

the patriots and by the humanists.

[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time

when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.

[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied

considerably in value. It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about

8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing

power that it now has.

[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were

sponsors to the same child at baptism.

[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing

to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one

time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of

Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.

[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non

conceduntur pauperibus." _Taxa cancellariae apostolicae_, in E.

Friedberg: _Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts_,

1903, pp. 389 ff.

[6] Maitland: _Canon Law in the Church of England_, p. 100.

SECTION 4. THE MYSTICS

One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation

offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth

and fifteenth {30} century. In this, however, there was protest

neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for

in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more

religious than the church herself. They were like soldiers who

disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these

orders interfered with their supreme duty of harassing the enemy. With

the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought

to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to

her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory;

they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her

sacraments as aids to the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see

what they considered merely the means of grace substituted for the end

sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead

of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and

credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted

service. Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart

of religion is a union of the soul with God, they were shocked to see

the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find

that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best

bargain they could for their own eternal happiness. While rejecting

nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything. Accepting

priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard

them as necessary intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Eckhart, 1260-1327]

The first of the great German mystics was Master Eckhart, a Dominican

who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, at Paris, and at Cologne. The

inquisitors of this last place summoned him before their court on the

charge of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died. He was a

Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the only true being, and

that man was capable of reaching {31} the absolute. Of all the mystics

he was the most speculative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and

John Tauler were his disciples. [Sidenote: Suso, 1300-66] Suso's

ecstatic piety was of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and

bent on winning personal salvation by the old means of severe

self-torture and the constant practice of good works. Tauler, a

Dominican of Strassburg, belonged to a society known as The Friends of

God. [Sidenote: Tauler c. 1300-61] Of all his contemporaries he in

religion was the most social and practical. His life was that of an

evangelist, preaching to laymen in their own vernacular the gospel of a

pure life and direct communion with God through the Bible and prayer.

Like many other popular preachers he placed great emphasis on

conversion, the turning (_Kehr_) from a bad to a good life. Simple

faith is held to be better than knowledge or than the usual works of

ecclesiastical piety. Tauler esteemed the holiest man he had ever seen

one who had never heard five sermons in his life. All honest labor is

called God's service, spinning and shoe-making the gifts of the Holy

Spirit. Pure religion is to be "drowned in God," "intoxicated with

God," "melted in the fire of his love." Transcending the common view

of the average Christian that religion's one end was his own salvation,

Tauler taught him that the love of God was greater than this. He tells

of a woman ready to be damned for the glory of God--"and if such a

person were dragged into the bottom of hell, there would be the kingdom

of God and eternal bliss in hell."

One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written

anonymously--"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise,

understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic

Order at Frankfort." _The German Theology_, [Sidenote: _The German

Theology_] as it was named by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire

abandonment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter {32}

self-denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposition of any

external power, and equally without effort of her own, the soul shall

find herself at one with the bridegroom. The immanence of God is

taught; man's helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the

reconciliation of the two is found only in the unconditional surrender

of man's will to God. "Put off thine own will and there will be no

hell."

Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an immense influence on

Luther. They were later taken up by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by

them to purify his church. [Sidenote: 1543] _The German Theology_ was

first published by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the

Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met with a book from

which he had learned so much of the nature of "God, Christ, man, and

all things." But other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did

not agree with him. Calvin detected secret and deadly poison in the

author's pantheism, and in 1621 the Catholic Church placed his work on

the Index.

The Netherlands also produced a school of mystics, later in blooming

than that of the Germans and greater in its direct influence. The

earliest of them was John of Ruysbroeck, a man of visions and

ecstasies. [Sidenote: Ruysbroeck, 1293-1381] He strove to make his

life one long contemplation of the light and love of God. Two younger

men, Gerard Groote and Florence Radewyn, socialized his gospel by

founding the fellowship of the Brethren of the Common Life. [Sidenote:

Groote, 1340-84] [Sidenote: Radewyn, 1350-1400] Though never an order

sanctioned by the church, they taught celibacy and poverty, and devoted

themselves to service of their fellows, chiefly in the capacity of

teachers of boys.

The fifteenth century's rising tide of devotion brought forth the most

influential of the products of all the mystics, the _Imitation of

Christ_ by Thomas à Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas à Kempis, c. 1380-1471]

Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it

sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's

personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint,

asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent

use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist are the means recommended

to form the character of the perfect Christian. It was doubtless

because all this was so perfect an expression of the medieval ideal

that it found such wide and instant favor. There is no questioning of

dogma, nor any speculation on the positions of the church; all this is

postulated with child-like simplicity. Moreover, the ideal of the

church for the salvation of the individual, and the means supposed to

secure that end, are adopted by à Kempis. He tacitly assumes that the

imitator of Christ will be a monk, poor and celibate. His whole

endeavor was to stimulate an enthusiasm for privation and a taste for

things spiritual, and it was because in his earnestness and

single-mindedness he so largely succeeded that his book was eagerly

seized by the hands of thousands who desired and needed such

stimulation and help. The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to the

heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who saw in the love of God

a good in itself transcending the happiness of one's own soul. He just

wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his

might. But this careful self-cultivation made his religion

self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the

Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial.

Notwithstanding the profound differences between the Mystics and the

Reformers, it is possible to see that at least in one respect the two

movements were similar. It was exactly the same desire to get away

from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme of salvation,

that animated both. Tauler and Luther {34} both deprecated good works

and sought justification in faith only. Important as this is, it is

possible to see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt from

the church, and it is certain that they were far more than the

Reformers fundamentally, even typically Catholic. [Sidenote:

Mysticism] It is true that mysticism is at heart always one, neither

national nor confessional. But Catholicism offered so favorable a

field for this development that mysticism may be considered as the

efflorescence of Catholic piety _par excellence_. Hardly any other

expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in

medieval Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and

fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in

Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be

anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely

individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could

never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or

intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to

solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason. Moreover it was

slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and

emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God. How much more

truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul,

turned inward, could see the divine light, just as the eyeball,

sufficiently pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind!

SECTION 5. PRE-REFORMERS

The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism

older than the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the

mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church

as heretics. Though from the earliest age Christendom never lacked

minds independent enough {35} to differ from authority and characters

strong enough to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in

ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics that can

really be considered as harbingers of the Reformation were two sects

dwelling in Southern France, the Albigenses and the Waldenses.

[Sidenote: Albigenses] The former, first met with in the eleventh

century, derived part of their doctrines from oriental Manichaeism,

part from primitive gnosticism. The latter were the followers of Peter

Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 1170, sold his goods and

went among the poor preaching the gospel. [Sidenote: Waldenses]

Though quite distinct in origin both sects owed their success with the

people to their attacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their

use of the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of part of

the sacramental system, and to their own earnest and ascetic morality.

The story of their savage suppression, at the instigation of Pope

Innocent III, [Sidenote: 1209-29] in the Albigensian crusade, is one of

the darkest blots on the pages of history. A few remnants of them

survived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, harried from time to

time by blood-thirsty pontiffs. In obedience to a summons of Innocent

VIII King Charles VIII of France massacred many of them. [Sidenote:

1437]

The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not so much the French

heretics as two Englishmen, Occam and Wyclif. [Sidenote: Occam, d. c.

1349] William of Occam, a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was the

most powerful scholastic critic of the existing church. Untouched by

the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be

said against the church from her own medieval standpoint. He taught

determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the

Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of

God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from

the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of

transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in

his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther. Defining the church as

the congregation of the faithful, he undermined her governmental

powers. This, in fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead

of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the judicial powers

of the clergy be transferred to the civil government. Not only, in his

opinion, should the civil ruler be totally independent of the pope, but

even such matters as the regulation of marriage should be left to the

common law.

[Sidenote: Wyclif, 1324-84]

A far stronger impression on his age was made by John Wyclif, the most

significant of the Reformers before Luther. He, too, was an Oxford

professor, a schoolman, and a patriot, but he was animated by a deeper

religious feeling than was Occam. In 1361 he was master of Balliol

College, where he lectured for many years on divinity. At the same

time he held various benefices in turn, the last, the pastorate of

Lutterworth in Leicestershire, from 1374 till his death. He became a

reformer somewhat late in life owing to study of the Bible and of the

bad condition of the English church. [Sidenote: 1374] At the peace

congress at Bruges as a commissioner to negotiate with papal

ambassadors for the relief of crying abuses, he became disillusioned in

his hope for help from that quarter. He then turned to the civil

government, urging it to regain the usurped authority of the church.

This plan, set forth in voluminous writings, in lectures at Oxford and

in popular sermons in London, soon brought him before the tribunal

[Sidenote: 1377] of William Courtenay, Bishop of London, and, had he

not been protected by the powerful prince, John of Lancaster, it might

have gone hard with him. Five bulls launched against him by Gregory XI

from Rome only confirmed him in his course, for he {37} appealed from

them to Parliament. Tried at Lambeth he was forbidden to preach or

teach, and he therefore retired for the rest of his life to

Lutterworth. [Sidenote: 1378] He continued his literary labors,

resulting in a vast host of pamphlets.

Examining his writings we are struck by the fact that his program was

far more religious and practical than rational and speculative. Save

transubstantiation, he scrupled at none of the mysteries of

Catholicism. It is also noticeable that social reform left him cold.

When the laborers rose under Wat Tyler, [Sidenote: 1381] Wyclif sided

against them, as he also proposed that confiscated church property be

given rather to the upper classes than to the poor. The real

principles of Wyclif's reforms were but two: to abolish the temporal

power of the church, and to purge her of immoral ministers. It was for

this reason that he set up the authority of Scripture against that of

tradition; it was for this that he doubted the efficacy of sacraments

administered by priests living in mortal sin; it was for this that he

denied the necessity of auricular confession; it was for this that he

would have placed the temporal power over the spiritual. The bulk of

his writings, in both Latin and English, is fierce, measureless abuse

of the clergy, particularly of prelates and of the pope. The head of

Christendom is called Antichrist over and over again; the bishops,

priests and friars are said to have their lips full of lies and their

hands of blood; to lead women astray; to live in idleness, luxury,

simony and deceit; and to devour the English church. Marriage of the

clergy is recommended. Indulgences are called a cursed robbery.

To combat the enemies of true piety Wyclif relied on two agencies. The

first was the Bible, which, with the assistance of friends, he

Englished from the {38} Vulgate. None of the later Reformers was more

bent upon giving the Scriptures to the laity, and none attributed to it

a higher degree of inspiration. As a second measure Wyclif trained

"poor priests" to be wandering evangelists spreading abroad the message

of salvation among the populace. For a time they attained considerable

success, notwithstanding the fact that the severe persecution to which

they were subjected caused all of Wyclif's personal followers to

recant. [Sidenote: 1401] The passage of the act _De Haeretico

Comburendo_ was not, however, in vain, for in the fifteenth century a

number of common men were found with sufficient resolution to die for

their faith. It is probable that, as Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of

London wrote in 1523, the Lollards, as they were called, were the first

to welcome Lutheranism into Britain.

But if the seed produced but a moderate harvest in England it brought

forth a hundred-fold in Bohemia. Wyclif's writings, carried by Czech

students from Oxford to Prague, were eagerly studied by some of the

attendants at that university, the greatest of whom was John Huss.

[Sidenote: Huss, 1369-1415] Having taken his bachelor's degree there

in 1393, he had given instruction since 1398 and became the head of the

university (Rector) for the year 1402. Almost the whole content of his

lectures, as of his writings, was borrowed from Wyclif, from whom he

copied not only his main ideas but long passages verbatim and without

specific acknowledgment. Professors and students of his own race

supported him, but the Germans at the university took offence and a

long struggle ensued, culminating in the secession of the Germans in a

body in 1409 to found a new university at Leipsic. The quarrel, having

started over a philosophic question,--Wyclif and Huss being realists

and the Germans nominalists,--took a more serious turn when it came to

a definition of the church {39} and of the respective spheres of the

civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Defining the church as the body

of the predestinate, and starting a campaign against indulgences, Huss

soon fell under the ban of his superiors. After burning the bulls of

John XXIII Huss withdrew from Prague. Summoned to the Council of

Constance, he went thither, under safe-conduct from the Emperor

Sigismund, and was immediately cast into a noisome dungeon. [Sidenote:

1411, 1412]

[Sidenote: 1414]

The council proceeded to consider the opinions of Wyclif, condemning

260 of his errors and ordering his bones to be dug up and burnt, as was

done twelve years later. Every effort was then made to get Huss to

recant a list of propositions drawn up by the council and attributed to

him. Some of these charges were absurd, as that he was accused of

calling himself the fourth person of the Trinity. Other opinions, like

the denial of transubstantiation, he declared, and doubtless with

truth, that he had never held. Much was made of his saying that he

hoped his soul would be with the soul of Wyclif after death, and the

emperor was alarmed by his argument that neither priest nor king living

in mortal sin had a right to exercise his office. He was therefore

condemned to the stake.

His death was perfect. His last letters are full of calm resolution,

love to his friends, and forgiveness to his enemies. Haled to the

cathedral where the council sat on July 6, 1415, he was given one last

chance to recant and save his life. Refusing, he was stripped of his

vestments, and a paper crown with three demons painted on it put on his

head with the words, "We commit thy soul to the devil"; he was then led

to the public square and burnt alive. Sigismund, threatened by the

council, made no effort to redeem his safe-conduct, and in September

the reverend fathers passed a decree that no safe-conduct to a heretic,

and {40} no pledge prejudicial to the Catholic faith, could be

considered binding. Among the large concourse of divines not one voice

was raised against this treacherous murder.

Huss's most prominent follower, Jerome of Prague, after recantation,

returned to his former position and was burnt at Constance on May 30,

1416. A bull of 1418 ordered the similar punishment of all heretics

who maintained the positions of Wyclif, Huss, or Jerome of Prague.

As early as September a loud remonstrance against the treatment of

their master was voiced by the Bohemian Diet. The more radical party,

known as Taborites, rejected transubstantiation, worship of the saints,

prayers for the dead, indulgences, auricular confession, and oaths.

They allowed women to preach, demanded the use of the vernacular in

divine service and the giving of the cup to the laity. A crusade was

started against them, but they knew how to defend themselves. The

Council of Basle [Sidenote: 1431-6] was driven to negotiate with them

and ended by a compromise allowing the cup to the laity and some other

reforms. Subsequent efforts to reduce them proved futile. Under King

Podiebrad the Ultraquists maintained their rights.

Some Hussites, however, continued as a separate body, calling

themselves Bohemian Brethren. First met with in 1457 they continue to

the present day as Moravians. They were subject to constant

persecution. In 1505 the Catholic official James Lilienstayn drew up

an interesting list of their errors. It seems that their cardinal

tenet was the supremacy of Scripture, without gloss, tradition, or

interpretation by the Fathers of the church. They rejected the primacy

of the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could not be found

in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy of masses for the dead and

the validity of indulgences.

{41} With much reason Wyclif and Huss have been called "Reformers

before the Reformation." Luther himself, not knowing the Englishman,

recognized his deep indebtedness to the Bohemian. All of their

program, and more, he carried through. His doctrine of justification

by faith only, with its radical transformation of the sacramental

system, cannot be found in these his predecessors, and this was a

difference of vast importance.

SECTION 6. NATIONALIZING THE CHURCHES

Inevitably, the growth of national sentiment spoken of above reacted on

the religious institutions of Europe. Indeed, it was here that the

conflict of the international, ecclesiastical state, and of the secular

governments became keenest. Both kings and people wished to control

their own spiritual affairs as well as their temporalities.

[Sidenote: The ecclesia Anglicana]

England traveled farthest on the road towards a national church. For

three centuries she had been asserting the rights of her government to

direct spiritual as well as temporal matters. The Statute of Mortmain

[Sidenote: 1279] forbade the alienation of land from the jurisdiction

of the civil power by appropriating it to religious persons. The

withdrawing of land from the obligation to pay taxes and feudal dues

was thus checked. The encroachment of the civil power, both in England

and France, was bitterly felt by the popes. Boniface VIII endeavored

to stem the flood by the bull _Clericis laicos_ [Sidenote: 1296]

forbidding the taxation of clergy by any secular government, and the

bull _Unam Sanctam_ [Sidenote: 1302] asserting the universal monarchy

of the Roman pontiff in the strongest possible terms. But these

exorbitant claims were without effect. The Statute of Provisors

[Sidenote: 1351 and 1390] forbade the appointment to English benefices

by the pope, and the Statute of Praemunire [Sidenote: 1353 and 1393]

took away the right of {42} English subjects to appeal from the courts

of their own country to Rome. The success of Wyclif's movement was

largely due to his patriotism. Though the signs of strife with the

pope were fewer in the fifteenth century, there is no doubt that the

national feeling persisted.

[Sidenote: The Gallican Church]

France manifested a spirit of liberty hardly less fierce than that of

England. It was the French King Philip the Fair who humiliated

Boniface VIII so severely that he died of chagrin. During almost the

whole of the fourteenth century the residence of a pope subservient to

France at Avignon prevented any difficulties, but no sooner had the

Council of Constance restored the head of the unified church to Rome

than the old conflict again burst forth. [Sidenote: 1438] The extreme

claims of the Gallican church were asserted in the law known as the

Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the pope was left hardly any

right of appointment, of jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France.

The supremacy of a council over the pope was explicitly asserted, as

was the right of the civil magistrate to order ecclesiastical affairs

in his dominions. When the pontiffs refused to recognize this almost

schismatical position taken by France, the Pragmatic Sanction was

further fortified by a law sentencing to death any person who should

bring into the country a bull repugnant to it. Strenuous efforts of

the papacy were directed to secure the repeal of this document, and in

1461 Pius II induced Louis XI to revoke it in return for political

concessions in Naples. This action, opposed by the University and

Parlement of Paris, proved so unpopular that two years later the

Gallican liberties were reasserted in their full extent.

Harmony was established between the interests of the curia and of the

French government by the compromise known as the Concordat of Bologna.

[Sidenote: 1516] The {43} concessions to the king were so heavy that

it was difficult for Leo X to get his cardinals to consent to them.

Almost the whole power of appointment, of jurisdiction, and of taxation

was put into the royal hands, some stipulations being made against the

conferring of benefices on immoral priests and against the frivolous

imposition of ecclesiastical punishments. What the pope gained was the

abandonment of the assertion made at Bourges of the supremacy of a

general council. The Concordat was greeted by a storm of protest in

France. The Sorbonne refused to recognize it and appealed at once to a

general council. The king, however, had the refractory members

arrested and decreed the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1518.

In Italy and Germany the growth of a national state [Sidenote: Italy]

was retarded by the fact that one was the seat of the pope, the other

of the emperor, each of them claiming a universal authority. Moreover,

these two powers were continually at odds. The long investiture

strife, culminating in the triumph of Gregory VII at Canossa [Sidenote:

1077] and ending in the Concordat of Worms, [Sidenote: 1122] could not

permanently settle the relations of the two. Whereas Aquinas and the

Canon Law maintained the superiority of the pope, there were not

lacking asserters of the imperial preëminence. William of Occam's

argument to prove that the emperor might depose an heretical pope was

taken up by Marsiglio of Padua, whose _Defender of the Peace_

[Sidenote: c. 1324] ranks among the ablest of political pamphlets. In

order to reduce the power of the pope, whom he called "the great dragon

and old serpent," he advanced the civil government to a complete

supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. He stated that the only authority

in matters of faith was the Bible, with the necessary interpretation

given it by a general council composed of both clergy and laymen; that

the emperor had the right to convoke and {44} direct this council and

to punish all priests, prelates and the supreme pontiff; that the Canon

Law had no validity; that no temporal punishment should be visited on

heresy save by the state, and no spiritual punishment be valid without

the consent of the state.

[Sidenote: Germany]

With such a weapon in their hands the emperors might have taken an even

stronger stand than did the kings of England and France but for the

lack of unity in their dominions. Germany was divided into a large

number of practically independent states. It was in these and not in

the empire as a whole that an approach was made to a form of national

church, such as was realized after Luther had broken the bondage of

Rome. When Duke Rudolph IV of Austria in the fourteenth century stated

that he intended to be pope, archbishop, archdeacon and dean in his own

land, when the dukes of Bavaria, Saxony and Cleves made similar boasts,

they but put in a strong form the program that they in part realized.

The princes gradually acquired the right of patronage to church

benefices, and they permitted no bulls to be published, no indulgences

sold, without their permission. The Free Cities acted in much the same

way. The authority of the German states over their own spiritualities

was no innovation of the heresy of Wittenberg.

For all Germany's internal division there was a certain national

consciousness, due to the common language. In no point were the people

more agreed than in their opposition to the rule of the Italian Curia.

[Sidenote: 1382] At one time the monasteries of Cologne signed a

compact to resist Gregory XI in a proposed levy of tithes, stating

that, "in consequence of the exactions by which the Papal Court burdens

the clergy the Apostolic See has fallen into contempt and the Catholic

faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled." Again, {45} a

Knight of the Teutonic Order in Prussia [Sidenote: 1430] wrote: "Greed

reigns supreme in the Roman Court, and day by day finds new devices and

artifices for extorting money from Germany under pretext of

ecclesiastical fees. Hence arise much outcry, complaint and

heart-burning. . . . Many questions about the papacy will be answered,

or else obedience will ultimately be entirely renounced to escape from

these outrageous exactions of the Italians."

The relief expected from the Council of Basle failed, and abuses were

only made worse by a compact between Frederick III and Nicholas V,

known as the Concordat of Vienna. [Sidenote: 1448] This treaty was by

no means comparable with the English and French legislation, but was

merely a division of the spoils between the two supreme rulers at the

expense of the people. The power of appointment to high ecclesiastical

positions was divided, annates were confirmed, and in general a

considerable increase of the authority of the Curia was established.

Protests began at once in the form of "Gravamina" or lists of

grievances drawn up at each Diet as a petition, and in part enacted

into laws. In 1452 the Spiritual Electors demanded that the emperor

proceed with reform on the basis of the decrees of Constance. In 1457

the clergy refused to be taxed for a crusade. In 1461 the princes

appealed against the sale of indulgences. The Gravamina of this year

were very bitter, complaining of the practice of usury by priests, of

the pomp of the cardinals and of the pope's habit of giving promises of

preferment to certain sees and then declaring the places vacant on the

plea of having made a "mental reservation" in favor of some one else.

The Roman clergy were called in this bill of grievances "public

fornicators, keepers of concubines, ruffians, pimps and sinners in

various other {46} respects." Drastic proposals of reform were

defeated by the pope.

[Sidenote: Gravamina]

The Gravamina continued. Those of 1479 appealed against the Mendicant

Orders and against the appointment of foreigners. They clamored for a

new council and for reform on the basis of the decrees of Basle; they

protested against judicial appeals to Rome, against the annates and

against the crusade tax. It was stated that the papal appointees were

rather fitted to be drivers of mules than pastors of souls. Such words

found a reverberating echo among the people. The powerful pen of

Gregory of Heimburg, sometimes called "the lay Luther," roused his

countrymen to a patriotic stand against the Italian usurpation.

The Diet of 1502 resolved not to let money raised by indulgences leave

Germany, but to use it against the Turks. Another long list of

grievances relating to the tyranny and extortion of Rome was presented

in 1510. The acts of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are

eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just

begun his career. To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal

Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. It was

proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the

clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity. This was refused

on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and

refused in language of the utmost violence. It was stated that the

real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in

Rome. Indulgences were branded as blood-letting.

When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a

match to a heap of inflammable material. The whole nationalist

movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches

of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous

separatist tendencies.

SECTION 7. THE HUMANISTS

But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the

intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides. The

revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the

Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval

standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The Renaissance

stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called

"Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of the

fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth.

The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as far as Dante

[Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements,

such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of

the universe. His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on

the _Summa theologiae_ of Aquinas; it is all about the other world.

The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch,

1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit

dawned on them. Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed

incompatible with faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world

as Dante was a prophet of the next. [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375]

Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was

instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting himself

to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial

delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, representing them as the

quintessence of all impurity and hypocrisy. The first story in his

famous Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed as a saint,

invoked as such and performing miracles {48} after death. The second

story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness

of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could

survive such desperate depravity as he saw there. The third tale, of

the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what

religion is the true one. The fourth narrative, like many others,

turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes

the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by

pretending that he was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was

naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is too spontaneous

to be called philosophic doubt; it is merely impiety.

[Sidenote: Valla, 1406-56]

But such a sentiment could not long remain content with scoffing. The

banner of pure rationalism, or rather of conscious classical

skepticism, was raised by a circle of enthusiasts. The most brilliant

of them, and one of the keenest critics that Europe has ever produced,

was Lorenzo Valla, a native of Naples, and for some years holder of a

benefice at Rome. Such was the trenchancy and temper of his weapons

that much of what he advanced has stood the test of time.

[Sidenote: The Donation of Constantine]

The papal claim to temporal supremacy in the Western world rested

largely on a spurious document known as the Donation of Constantine.

In this the emperor is represented as withdrawing from Rome in order to

leave it to the pope, to whom, in return for being cured of leprosy, he

gives the whole Occident. An uncritical age had received this forgery

for five or six centuries without question. Doubt had been cast on it

by Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Peacock, but Valla demolished it. He

showed that no historian had spoken of it; that there was no time at

which it could have occurred; that it is contradicted by other

contemporary acts; that the barbarous style contains {49} expressions

of Greek, Hebrew, and German origin; that the testimony of numismatics

is against it; and that the author knew nothing of the antiquities of

Rome, into whose council he introduced satraps. Valla's work was so

thoroughly done that the document, embodied as were its conclusions in

the Canon Law, has never found a reputable defender since. In time the

critique had an immense effect. Ulrich von Hutten published it in

1517, and in the same year an English translation was made. In 1537

Luther turned it into German.

[Sidenote: Valla attacks the Pope]

And if the legality of the pope's rule was so slight, what was its

practical effect? According to Valla, it was a "barbarous,

overbearing, tyrannical, priestly domination." "What is it to you," he

apostrophizes the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed? You have

crushed it. If our temples have been pillaged? You have pillaged

them. If our virgins and matrons have been violated? You have done

it. If the city is innundated with the blood of citizens? You are

guilty of it all."

[Sidenote: Annotations on the New Testament]

Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle

and the humanist's demigod Cicero. More important were his

_Annotations on the New Testament_, first published by Erasmus in 1505.

The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to

be, the authentic or official form of the Scriptures. Taking in hand

three Latin and three Greek manuscripts, Valla had no difficulty in

showing that they differed from one another and that in some cases the

Latin had no authority whatever in the Greek. He pointed out a number

of mistranslations, some of them in passages vitally affecting the

faith. In short he left no support standing for any theory of verbal

inspiration. He further questioned, and successfully, the authorship

of the Creed attributed {50} to the Apostles, the authenticity of the

writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ to

King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius.

[Sidenote: Attack on Christian ethics]

His attack on Christian ethics was still more fundamental. In his

_Dialogue on Free Will_ he tried with ingenuity to reconcile the

freedom of the will, denied by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of

God, which he did not feel strong enough to dispute. In his work on

_The Monastic Life_ he denied all value to asceticism. Others had

mocked the monks for not living up to their professions; he asserted

that the ideal itself was mistaken. But it is the treatise _On

Pleasure_ that goes the farthest. In form it is a dialogue on ethics;

one interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and

the third the Christian standard. The sympathies of the author are

plainly with the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is

the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute

is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is

dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against

adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should

go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any

other ideal. . . . It is noteworthy that the representative of the

Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is

the supreme good, only he places that happiness in the next life.

Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in the half-century

following his death. Masuccio indulged in the most obscene mockery of

Catholic rites. Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the

monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the faithful.

Machiavelli assailed the papacy with great ferocity, attributing to it

the corruption of Italian morals and the political disunion and

weakness of {51} Italy, and advocating its annihilation. [Sidenote:

Machiavelli, 1469-1530] In place of Christianity, habitually spoken of

as an exploded superstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the

patriotic cults of antiquity.

It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, that pagan

expressions should color the writings of their courtiers. Poggio was a

papal secretary, and so was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read

Paul's epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity. In his exquisite

search for classical equivalents for the rude phrases of the gospel, he

referred, in a papal breve, to Christ as "Minerva sprung from the head

of Jove," and to the Holy Ghost as "the breath of the celestial

Zephyr." Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon of Inghirami heard

by Erasmus at Rome on Good Friday 1509. Couched in the purest

Ciceronian terms, while comparing the Saviour to Gurtius, Cecrops,

Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly devoted to an

extravagant eulogy of the reigning pontiff, Julius II.

But all the Italian humanists were not pagans. There arose at

Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly

under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to

invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato.

The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola

[Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficino, sought

to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the

same. Approaching the Bible in the simple literary way indicated by

classical study, Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the

New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was forced to adopt an

ingenious but unsound allegorical interpretation. "Philosophy seeks

the truth," he wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it." His

extraordinary personal influence extended through {52} lands beyond the

Alps, even though it failed in accomplishing the rehabilitation of

Italian faith.

[Sidenote: Faber Stapulensis, c. 1455-1536]

The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, James Lefèvre

d'Étaples, was one of his disciples. Traveling in Italy in 1492, after

visiting Padua, Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know

Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics

made by Cardinal Bessarion. Returning to Paris he taught, at the

College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did

not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists,

for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was

due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to

himself. He therefore labored to restore the true text, on which he

wrote a number of treatises. It was with the same purpose that he

turned next to the early Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the

Areopagite. But he did not find himself until he found the Bible. In

1509 he published the _Quintuplex Psalterium_, the first treatise on

the Psalms in which the philological and personal interest was

uppermost. Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been studied so

much as the commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile

subtlety. Lefèvre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it

became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a

real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret

everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the

emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine

effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he

published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary.

Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple instrument of God, he yet

did more to uncover his personality than any of the previous {53}

commentators. Half mystic as he was, Lefèvre discovered in Paul the

doctrine of justification by faith only. To I Corinthians viii, he

wrote: "It is almost profane to speak of the merit of works, especially

towards God. . . . The opinion that we can be justified by works is an

error for which the Jews are especially condemned. . . . Our only hope

is in God's grace." Lefèvre's works opened up a new world to the

theologians of the time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that

the richness of the _Quintuplex Psalter_ made him poor. Thomas More

said that English students owed him much. Luther used the two works of

the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures. From them he drew

very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefèvre who first suggested to

him the formula of his famous "sola fide."

The religious renaissance in England was led by a disciple of Pico

della Mirandola, John Colet, [Sidenote: Colet, d. 1519] a man of

remarkably pure life, and Dean of St. Paul's. He wrote, though he did

not publish, some commentaries on the Pauline epistles and on the

Mosaic account of creation. Though he knew no Greek, and was not an

easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the humanists by his

desire to return to the real sources of Christianity, and by his search

for the historical sense of his texts. Though in some respects he was

under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others his

interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic. He exercised a

considerable influence on Erasmus and on a few choice spirits of the

time.

The humanism of Germany centered in the universities. At the close of

the fifteenth century new courses in the Latin classics, in Greek and

in Hebrew, began to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and

philosophy. At every academy there sprang up a circle of "poets," as

they called themselves, often of {54} lax morals and indifferent to

religion, but earnest in their championship of culture. Nor were these

circles confined entirely to the seats of learning. Many a city had

its own literary society, one of the most famous being that of

Nuremberg. Conrad Mutianus Rufus drew to Gotha, [Sidenote: Mutian,

1471-1526] where he held a canonry, a group of disciples, to whom he

imparted the Neo-Platonism he had imbibed in Italy. Disregarding

revelation, he taught that all religions were essentially the same. "I

esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those of priests," he

wrote.

[Sidenote: Reuchlin, 1455-1522]

What Lefèvre and Colet had done for the New Testament, John Reuchlin

did for the Old. After studying in France and Italy, where he learned

to know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and devoted his

life to the study of Hebrew. His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_, [Sidenote:

1506] a grammar and dictionary of this language, performed a great

service for scholarship. In the late Jewish work, the _Cabbala_, he

believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The extravagance

of his interpretations of Scriptual passages, based on this, not only

rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of

trouble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of

pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be

compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to

be burnt, except the Old Testament. When Reuchlin's aid in this pious

project was requested it was refused in a memorial dated October 6,

1510, pointing out the great value of much Hebrew literature. The

Dominicans of Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstraten,

made this the ground for a charge of heresy. The case was appealed to

Rome, and the trial, lasting six years, excited the interest of all

Europe. In Germany it was argued with much heat in a host of {55}

pamphlets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side of the

inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, Ortuin Gratius of Cologne,

taking the part of the scholar. The latter received many warm

expressions of admiration and support from the leading writers of the

time, and published them in two volumes, the first in 1514, under the

title _Letters of Eminent Men_. It was this that suggested to the

humanist, Crotus Bubeanus, the title of his satire published

anonymously, _The Letters of Obscure Men_. In form it is a series of

epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gratius. [Sidenote:

_Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_]

Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they express their admiration for

his attack on Reuchlin and the cause of learning, gossip about their

drinking-bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance and

gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether it is a mortal sin

to salute a Jew, and whether the worms eaten with beans and cheese

should be considered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what

stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat and therefore

prohibited on Fridays. The satire, coarse as it was biting, failed to

win the applause of the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter

from the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding to

contempt for the church. The first book of these _Letters_, published

in 1515, was followed two years later by a second, even more caustic

than the first. This supplement, also published without the writer's

name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten.

[Sidenote: Hutten, 1488-1523]

This brilliant and passionate writer devoted the greater part of his

life to war with Rome. His motive was not religious, but patriotic.

He longed to see his country strong and united, and free from the

galling oppression of the ultramontane yoke. He published Valla's

_Donation of Constantine_, and wrote epigrams on the popes. His

dialogue _Fever the First_ is a {56} vitriolic attack on the priests.

His _Vadiscus or the Roman Trinity_ [Sidenote: 1520] scourges the vices

of the curia where three things are sold: Christ, places and women.

When he first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of monks,

and only hoped they would all destroy one another. But by 1519 he saw

in the Reformer the most powerful of allies against the common foe, and

he accordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal. His letters at

this time breathe out fire and slaughter against the Romanists if

anything should happen to Luther. In 1523, he supported his friend

Francis von Sickingen, in the attempt to assert by force of arms the

rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights. When this was

defeated, Hutten, suffering from a terrible disease, wandered to

Switzerland, where he died, a lonely and broken exile. His epitaph

shall be his own lofty poem:

I have fought my fight with courage,

Nor have I aught to rue,

For, though I lost the battle,

The world knows, I was true!

[Sidenote: Erasmus, 1466-1536]

The most cosmopolitan, as well as the greatest, of all the Christian

humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Though an illegitimate

child, he was well educated and thoroughly grounded in the classics at

the famous school of Deventer. At the age of twenty he was persuaded,

somewhat against his will, to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at

Steyn. Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was enabled to

continue his studies at Paris. [Sidenote: 1499-1509] For the next ten

years he wandered to England, to various places in Northern France and

Flanders, and Italy, learning to know many of the intellectual leaders

of the time. From 1509-14 he was in England, part of the time

lecturing at Cambridge. He then spent some {57} years at Louvain,

seven years at Basle and six years at Freiburg in the Breisgau,

returning to Basle for the last year of his life.

Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant interest was classical

literature. Under the influence of Colet and of a French Franciscan,

John Vitrier, he turned his attention to liberalizing religion. His

first devotional work, _The Handbook of the Christian Knight_,

perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, as opposed to formal,

Christianity. [Sidenote: _Enchiridion Militis Christiani_, 1503] It

all turns upon the distinction between the inner and the outer man, the

moral and the sensual. True service of Christ is purity of heart and

love, not the invocation of saints, fasting and indulgences.

In _The Praise of Folly_ Erasmus mildly rebukes the foibles of men.

[Sidenote: 1511] There never was kindlier satire, free from the savage

scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from the didactic scolding of Sebastian

Brant, whose _Ship of Fools_ [Sidenote: 1494] was one of the author's

models. Folly is made quite amiable, the source not only of some

things that are amiss but also of much harmless enjoyment. The

besetting silliness of every class is exposed: of the man of pleasure,

of the man of business, of women and of husbands, of the writer and of

the pedant. Though not unduly emphasized, the folly of current

superstitions is held up to ridicule. Some there are who have turned

the saints into pagan gods; some who have measured purgatory into years

and days and cheat themselves with indulgences against it; some

theologians who spend all their time discussing such absurdities as

whether God could have redeemed men in the form of a woman, a devil, an

ass, a squash or a stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity.

In following up his plan for the restoration of a simpler Christianity,

Erasmus rightly thought that a return from the barren subtleties of the

schoolmen to {58} the primitive sources was essential. He wished to

reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, undogmatic philosophy of

life. His attitude towards dogma was to admit it and to ignore it.

Scientific enlightenment he welcomed more than did either the Catholics

or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on the Mount survived,

Christianity had nothing to fear. In like manner, while he did not

attack the cult and ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on

it. "If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites

superstitious," he seemed to say, "what does it matter? Let us

emphasize the ethical and spiritual content of Christ's message, for if

we seek his kingdom, all else needful shall be added unto us." His

favorite name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ,"

[Sidenote: Philosophy of Christ] and it is thus that he persuasively

expounds it in a note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30:

Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden

light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what

he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save

love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that

charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything

according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords

better with the nature of man than the philosophy of

Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to

fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . . How pure,

how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us! How

close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles,

or apostolic men. The church, divided and tormented by

discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of

which some can be omitted without prejudice to the

faith. . . . There are many opinions from which impiety

may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic

doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction

of the persons of the Godhead. . . . The sacraments

themselves were instituted for the salvation of men, but

we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppression

of the humble. . . . What rules, what superstitions

we have about vestments! How many are judged as to

{59}

their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent

in themselves, which change with the fashion and of which

Christ never spoke! . . . How many fasts are instituted!

And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on

pain of damnation. . . . What shall we say about

vows . . . about the authority of the pope, the abuse of

absolutions, dispensations, remissions of penalty, law-suits,

in which there is much that a truly good man cannot see

without a groan? The priests themselves prefer to

study Aristotle than to ply their ministry. The gospel

is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are

monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often

the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for

their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let

Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they

would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant

tyranny by human decrees!

[Sidenote: Colloquies]

In the _Familiar Colloquies_, first published in 1518 and often

enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious

ideas most sharply. Enormous as were the sales and influence of his

other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work,

intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. The first

conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but

the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art. Erasmus

is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in

writing a really exquisite Latin. But his supreme gift was his dry

wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple

matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in the

_Colloquies_, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at

Canterbury, the bloody bones and the handkerchief covered with the

saint's rheum offered to be kissed--all without a disapproving word and

yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how

anything so silly could ever have existed. Thus again he strips the

worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is

asked to abet. In the conversation called _The Shipwreck_, the people

pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it

is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They offer mountains of wax candles

to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his

neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one

penny taper on his vow. Again, in the _Colloquy on the New Testament_,

a young man is asked what he has done for Christ. He replies:

A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament

of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called

on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left

hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so

sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a

mere jelly. What do you say to that? Isn't that

maintaining the gospel? And then, by way of absolution for

his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a

folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding

whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the

Son and of the Holy Ghost.

"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel

by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute

beast into a man."

So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the

leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions

without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he

undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued

against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"--for that is

the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary,

of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his

Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt"

(_subdubito_). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he

confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average"

(_paulo latinius_). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only

admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not

altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light

touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made

his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been

quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be

quoted as often again.

[Sidenote: His wit]

But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he

was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of

its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing

him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one

should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his

coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with

but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a

religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to

its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected

something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so

delicately conveyed.

Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a

letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his

letters on publishing them--he foresaw. "In this part of the world,"

he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was

already knocking at the door!

{62}

CHAPTER II

GERMANY

SECTION 1. THE LEADER

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical

movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single

individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but

express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The

need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at

hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men

with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for

which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent

guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man

was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike

represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most

passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most

capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to

stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a

figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution

supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a

pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful

reagent possible.

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a

boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at

Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin

primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was

flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for

faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother

bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she

and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight

faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself

recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice

and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened

mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of

the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy

by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued

his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to

death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready

to thrust sinners into hell. "They painted Christ," says Luther--and

such pictures can still be seen in old churches--"sitting on a rainbow

with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors

against his frightful wrath."

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and

the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He

contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and

was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he

matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote:

Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar,

and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There

was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but

wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and

there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics

and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars

Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in

1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his

diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he

mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even

prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made

"an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and

good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am

settled at college as pleasantly as possible."

For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one

no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was,

his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a

boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well

substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was

overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination

saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to

St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash

promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian

friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable

vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained

priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the

order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of

the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach

Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year

later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to

lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound

experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he

was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a

gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man

must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own

efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the

recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism

and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove

frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for

redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not

free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could

do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but

a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to

man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true

salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be

damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in

Lefèvre d'Étaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith,

like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and

pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith."

[Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that

he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon

him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely

to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to

his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in

the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new

in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the

religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the

medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the

good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote;

the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth

century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the

church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and

over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims,

and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of

justification by faith only.

The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his

order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle.

Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of

the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of

indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political

influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg

and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy

of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical

occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of

several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt

and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help

him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In

order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief

agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel]

This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money

clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from

purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured

plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came

very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy

heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to

be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these

wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly

called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads

for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle

Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517]

He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain,

especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that

contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity

were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the

indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment

heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the

whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other

cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo

by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of

greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed

the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel

was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any

sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general

of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant.

[Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at

the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was

present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he

published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses

stating his points more strongly than before.

The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at

Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to

his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who

had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in

the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On

August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and

in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to

a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the

legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture

Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the

Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was

procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before

Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on

indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days

later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the

pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again

from the pope to a future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X,

in the bull _Cum postquam_, authoritatively defined the doctrine of

indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.

The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special

agent, the Saxon Charles von Miltitz, with instructions either to

cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering

him. In neither of these attempts was he successful. [Sidenote:

January 1519] At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was

to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the

decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his

opponents did the same.

Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the

church could not let the heretic rest for a moment. The whole affair

was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the

same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet

reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When

he assailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the

authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:

{69} The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all

other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal

decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to

the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred

years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all

councils, the Nicene.

[Sidenote: The Leipzig Debate, 1519]

A debate on this and other propositions between Eck on the one side and

Luther and his colleague Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig

in the days from June 27 to July 16, 1519. The climax of the argument

on the power of popes and councils came when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring

to show that Luther's opinions were identical with those of Huss,

forced from his opponent the bold declaration that "among the opinions

of John Huss and the Bohemians many are certainly most Christian and

evangelic, and cannot be condemned by the universal church." The words

sent a thrill through the audience and throughout Christendom. Eck

could only reply: "If you believe that a general council, legitimately

convoked, can err, you are to me a heathen and a publican."

Reconciliation was indeed no longer possible. When Luther had

protested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a loyal son of

the church. Now at last he was forced to raise the standard of revolt,

at least against Rome, the recognized head of the church. He had begun

by appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from the pope to a

universal council; now he declared that a great council had erred, and

that he would not abide by its decision. The issue was a clear one,

though hardly recognized as such by himself, between the religion of

authority and the right of private judgment.

His opposition to the papacy developed with extraordinary rapidity.

His study of the Canon Law made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the

pope as either Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle. He {70} applauded

Melancthon, a brilliant young man called to teach at Wittenberg in

1518, for denying transubstantiation. He declared that the cup should

never have been withheld from the laity, and that the mass considered

as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomination. His eyes were

opened to the iniquities of Rome by Valla's exposure of the Donation of

Constantine, published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519. After reading it

he wrote:

Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at

Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God that such

unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but

prevailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated

into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might

be wanting) that they became as articles of faith.