Together with the monarchy, the new masters of men developed other

instruments, parliamentary government in some countries, a bureaucracy

in others, and a mercenary army in nearly all. At that time was either

invented or much quoted the saying that {550} gold was one of the

nerves of war. The expensive firearms that blew up the feudal castle

were equally deadly when turned against the rioting peasants.

[Sidenote: To break the nobility]

Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way into the front rank,

he was greatly aided by the frantic civil strife that broke out in both

the older privileged orders. Never was better use made of the maxim,

"divide and conquer," than when the Reformation divided the church, and

the civil wars, dynastic in England, feudal in Germany and nominally

religious in France, broke the sword of the noble. When the earls and

knights had finished cutting each others' throats there were hardly

enough of them left to make a strong stand. Occasionally they tried to

do so, as in the revolt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls

in England, and in the early stages of the rising of the Communeros in

Spain. In every case they were defeated, and the work of the sword was

completed by the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the

blood-soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succumbed to the hired

assassins of Catharine, the old nobles were disposed of and the power

of their caste was broken. But their places were soon taken by new

men. Some bought baronies and titles outright, others ripened more

gradually to these honors in the warmth of the royal smile and on the

sunny slopes of manors wrested from the monks. But the end finally

attained was that the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the

rich, the final badge of social deference to success in money-making.

[Sidenote: Plunder the church]

Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations

carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the

newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into

their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or

endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most

and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders

and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated

soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years,

into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county

families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate

Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important

session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers.

In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the

spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons

became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy

representing either landed or commercial wealth.

Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place

throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was

slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant

territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But

something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic

lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the

examples of the Reformers. [Sidenote: 1536] Venice forbade gifts or

legacies to church or cloisters. [Sidenote: 1557] France, where

confiscation was proposed, [Sidenote: 1516] partially attained the same

ends by subjecting the clergy to the power of the crown.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie]

Among the groups into which society naturally falls is that of the

intellectual class, the body of professional men, scientists, writers

and teachers. [Sidenote: Bribes the intelligentsia] This group, just

as it came into a new prominence in the sixteenth century, at the same

time became in part an annex and a servant to the money power. The

high expense of education as compared with the Middle Ages, the

enormous fees then charged for graduating in professional schools, the

custom of buying {552} livings in the church and practices in law and

medicine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made it nearly

impossible for the sons of the poor to enter into the palace of

learning. Moreover the patronage of the wealthy, their assertion of a

monopoly of good form and social prestige, seduced the professional

class that now ate from the merchant's hand, aped his manners, and

served his interests. For four hundred years law, divinity,

journalism, art, and education, have cut their coats, at least to some

extent, in the fashion of the court of wealth.

[Sidenote: And subjugates the proletariat]

Last of all, there remained the only power that proved itself nearly a

match for money, that of labor. Far outnumbering the capitalists, in

every other way the workers were their inferiors,--in education, in

organization, in leadership and in material resources. One thing that

made their struggle so hard was that those men of exceptional ability

who might have been their leaders almost always made fortunes of their

own and then turned their strength against their former comrades.

Labor also suffered terribly from quacks and ranters with counsels of

folly or of madness.

The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of the characteristics

of both medieval and modern times. The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was

both communistic and religious; the risings of Communeros and the

Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; the several rebellions in

England were partly religious. But a new element marked them all, the

demand on the part of the workers for better wages and living

conditions. The proletariat of town and mining district joined the

German peasants in 1524; the revolt was in many respects like a

gigantic general strike.

[Sidenote: Emancipation of the serfs]

Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, the emancipation of

the serfs cannot be reckoned as {553} an immediate economic gain to

them. They were freed not because of the growth of any moral

sentiment, much less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but

because free labor was found more profitable than unfree. It is

notable that serfs were emancipated first in those countries like

Scotland where there had been no peasants' revolt; the inference is

that they were held in bondage in other countries longer than it was

profitable to do so for political reasons. The last serf was reclaimed

in Scotland in 1365, but the serfs had not been entirely freed in

England even in the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on

rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of the serfs

themselves. One hundred thousand peasants emigrated from Northern

France to Burgundy at that time to exchange their free for a servile

state. However, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs in

the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, lost their last

chains in the sixteenth century, most rapidly between the years 1515

and 1531. In Germany serfdom remained far beyond the end of the

sixteenth century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited by

the civil war of 1525.

[Sidenote: Regulation of labor]

In place of the old serfdom under one master came a new and detailed

regulation of labor by the government. This regulation was entirely

from the point of view, and consequently all but entirely in the

interests, of the propertied classes. The form was the old form of

medieval paternalism, but the spirit was the new spirit of capitalistic

gain. The endeavor of the government to be fair to the laborer as well

as to the employer is very faint, but it is just perceptible in some

laws.

Most of the taxes and burdens of the state were loaded on the backs of

the poor. Hours of labor were fixed at from 12 to 15 according to the

season. {554} Regulation of wages was not sporadic, but was a regular

part of the work of certain magistrates, in England of the justices of

the peace. Parliament enforced with incredible severity the duty of

the poor and able-bodied man to work. Sturdy idlers were arrested and

drafted into the new proletariat needed by capital. When whipping,

branding, and short terms of imprisonment, did not suffice to compel

men to work, a law was passed to brand able-bodied vagrants on the

chest with a "V," [Sidenote: 1547] and to assign them to some honest

neighbor "to have and to hold as a slave for the space of two years

then next following." The master should "only give him bread and water

and small drink and such refuse of meat as he should think meet to

cause the said slave to work." If the slave still idled, or if he ran

away and was caught again he was to be marked on the face with an "S"

and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally refractory he was to

be sentenced as a felon. This terrible measure, intended partly to

reduce lawless vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers,

failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. Its re-enactment

was vainly urged by Cecil upon Parliament in 1559. As a substitute for

it in this year the law was passed forbidding masters to receive any

workman without a testimonial from his last employer; laborers were not

allowed to stop work or change employers without good cause, and

conversely employers were forbidden to dismiss servants "unduly."

[Sidenote: The proletariat]

In Germany the features of the modern struggle between owners and

workers are plainest. In mining, especially, there developed a real

proletariat, a class of laborers seeking employment wherever it was

best paid and combining and striking for higher wages. To combat them

were formed pools of employers to keep down wages and to blacklist

agitators. Typical of these was the agreement made by Duke George of

{555} Saxony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, [Sidenote:

1520] not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking work, and

not to hire any troublesome agitator once dismissed by any operator.

It is extraordinary how rapidly many features of the modern proletariat

developed. Take, for example, the housing problem. As this became

acute some employers built model tenements for their workers. Others

started stores at which they could buy food and clothing, and even paid

them in part in goods instead of in money. Labor tended to become

fluid, moving from one town to another and from one industry to another

according to demand. Such a thing had been not unknown in the previous

centuries; it was strongly opposed by law in the sixteenth. The new

risks run by workers were brought out when, for the first time in

history, a great mining accident took place in 1515, a flood by which

eighty-eight miners were drowned. Women began to be employed in

factories and were cruelly exploited. Most sickening of all, children

were forced, as they still are in some places, to wear out their little

lives in grinding toil. The lace-making industry in Belgium, for

example, fell entirely into the hands of children. Far from protesting

against this outrage, the law actually sanctioned it by the provision

that no girl over twelve be allowed to make lace, lest the supply of

maidservants be diminished.

[Sidenote: Strikes]

Strikes there were and rebellions of all sorts, every one of them

beaten back by the forces of the government and of the capitalists

combined. The kings of commerce were then, more than now, a timorous

and violent race, for then they were conscious of being usurpers. When

they saw a Münzer or a Kett--the mad Hamlets of the people--mop and mow

and stage their deeds before the world, they became frantic with terror

and could do nought but take subtle counsel to {556} kill these heirs,

or pretenders, to their realms. The great rebellions are all that

history now pays much attention to, but in reality the warfare on the

poor was ceaseless, a chronic disease of the body politic. Louis XI

spared nothing, disfranchisement, expulsion, wholesale execution, to

beat down the lean and hungry conspirators against the public order,

whose raucous cries of misery he detested. With somewhat gentler,

because stronger, hand, his successors followed in his footsteps. But

when needed the troops were there to support the rich. The great

strike of printers at Lyons is one example of several in France. In

the German mines there were occasional strikes, sternly suppressed by

the princes acting in agreement.

[Sidenote: Degradation of the poor]

There can be no doubt that the economic developments of the sixteenth

century worked tremendous hardship to the poor. It was noted

everywhere that whereas wine and meat were common articles in 1500,

they had become luxuries by 1600. Some scholars have even argued from

this a diminution of the wealth of Europe during the century. This,

however, was not the case. The aggregate of capital, if we may judge

from many other indications, notably increased throughout the century.

But it became more and more concentrated in a few hands.

The chief natural cause of the depression of the working class was the

rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in

movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained

nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a

French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on

food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds

of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At

that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to

twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The

new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by substituting

foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products.

The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to the

peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of

sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money

for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive

terms of service and dues.

Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of

gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of

adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new

wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an

attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched,

destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into

ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there

then much pity for the poor. The charity and worship for "apostolic

poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness,

so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who

do not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or

art, regarded the peasant as a different race--"the ox without horns"

they called him--to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a

wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very

existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the

vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a

moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that

any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew

Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved.

"Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while

Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and

"the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the ass will have blows and

the people _will_ be ruled by force."

There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent

callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble peasant," wrote an obscure

German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be

thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German

humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking

of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt,

not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their

wrongs. _The Utopia_ will always remain one of the world's noblest

books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social

problem.

[Sidenote: Pauperism]

This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy

throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects

of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted

tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the déclassé journeyman of

the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of

sturdy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered

through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that

race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was

coined in England about 1550 to name the new class. _The Book of

Vagabonds_, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Hütlin of Pfortzheim,

describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and

gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to

be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay

them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and

disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains

to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible

tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the

alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it

is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the

population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg

were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of

the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were

just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of

their population in vagabondage.

In the face of this appalling situation the medieval method of charity

completely broke down. In fact, with its many begging friars, with its

injunction of alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to God, and with

its respect for voluntary poverty, the church rather aggravated than

palliated the evil of mendicancy. The state had to step in to relieve

the church.

[Sidenote: State poor-relief, 1506]

This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe edict was issued and

repeatedly re-enacted against tramps ordering them to be whipped, have

their heads shaved, and to be further punished with stocks. An

enterprising group of humanists and lawyers demanded that the

government should take over the duty of poor-relief from the church.

Accordingly at Lille a "common chest" was started, the first civil

charitable bureau in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1512] At Bruges a

cloister was secularized and turned into a school for eight hundred

poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of charity was started at

Antwerp. [Sidenote: 1521]

Under these circumstances the humanist Lewis Vives wrote his famous

tract on the relief of the poor, [Sidenote: January, 1526] in the form

of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In this well thought out

treatise he advocated the law that no one should eat who did not work,

and urged that all able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to

artisans--a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to {560}

draft men into their workshops! Cases of people unable to work should

also be taken up, and they should be cared for by application of

religious endowments by the government. Vives' claim to recognition

lies even more in his spirit than in his definite program. For almost

the first time in history he plainly said that poverty was a disgrace

as well as a danger to the state and should be, not palliated, but

extirpated.

While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city of Ypres

[Sidenote: 1525] (tragic name!) had already sought his advice and acted

upon it, as well as upon the example of earlier reforms in German

cities, in promulgating an ordinance. The city government combined all

religious and philanthropic endowments into one fund and appointed a

committee to administer it, and to collect further gifts. These

citizens were to visit the poor in their dwellings, to apply what

relief was necessary, to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures

and to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging and idleness.

All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.

Though there were sporadic examples of municipal poor-relief in Germany

prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there

first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his _Address to the

German Nobility_ Luther had recommended that each city should take care

of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During

his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps

to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was

started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which

orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be

helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per

cent. A severe law against begging was passed. Augsburg and Nuremberg

followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote:

1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one

joined the procession.

For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it

did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and

thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the

state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development,

whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the

medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract.

Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published _A Plea for

the Right of the Poor to Beg_. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk,

Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his _Sacred Economy of caring for the

Poor_, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation

and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on

the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the

direction of charity.

[Sidenote: 1531]

But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the

University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in

Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but

informed by the modern spirit, grew up.

In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere.

The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all

needs. After municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and

after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence

to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing

need, the first compulsory Poor Rates were laid. Three or four years

later came an act for setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These

measures failed of the success that met the continental method. Even

compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of

pauperism. Some {562} authorities have asserted that by giving the

poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote:

1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of

the commercialism that made money but did not make men.

{563}

CHAPTER XII

MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT

Were we reading the biography of a wayward genius, we should find the

significance of the book neither in the account of his quarrels and of

his sins nor in the calculation of his financial difficulties and

successes, but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty and

wisdom of the world. Something the same is true about the history of a

race or of a period; the political and economic events are but the

outward framework; the intellectual achievement is both the most

attractive and the most repaying object of our study. In this respect

the sixteenth century was one of the most brilliant; it produced works

of science that outstripped all its predecessors; it poured forth

masterpieces of art and literature that are all but matchless.

SECTION 1. BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP

[Sidenote: Position of Bible in 16th century]

It is naturally impossible to give a full account of all the products

of sixteenth century genius. In so vast a panorama only the mountain

peaks can be pointed out. One of these peaks is assuredly the Bible.

Never before nor since has that book been so popular; never has its

study absorbed so large a part of the energies of men. It is true that

the elucidation of the text was not proportional to the amount of labor

spent on it. For the most part it was approached not in a scientific

but in a dogmatic spirit. Men did not read it historically and

critically but to find their own dogmas in it. Nevertheless, the

foundations were laid for both the textual and the higher criticism.

{564} [Sidenote: The Greek Text]

The Greek text of the New Testament was first published by Erasmus in

March, 1516. Revised, but not always improved, editions were brought

out by him in 1519, 1522 and 1527. For the first edition he had before

him ten manuscripts, all of them minuscules, the oldest of which,

though he believed it might have come from the apostolic age, is

assigned by modern criticism to the twelfth century. In the course of

printing, some bad errors were introduced, and the last six verses of

the Apocalypse, wanting in all the manuscripts, were supplied by an

extremely faulty translation from the Latin. The results were such as

might have been anticipated. Though the text has been vastly purified

by modern critics, the edition of Erasmus was of great service and was

thoroughly honest. He noted that the last verses of Mark were doubtful

and that the passage on the adulteress (John vii, 53 to viii, 11) was

lacking in the best authorities, and he omitted the text on the three

heavenly witnesses (I John v, 7) as wanting in all his manuscripts.

For this omission he was violently attacked. To support his position

he asked his friend Bombasius to consult the Codex Vaticanus, and dared

to assert that were a single manuscript found with the verse in Greek,

he would include it in subsequent editions. Though there were at the

time no codices with the verse in question--which was a Latin forgery

of the fourth century, possibly due to Priscillian--one was promptly

manufactured. Though Erasmus suspected the truth, that the verse had

been interpolated from the Latin text, he added it in his third edition

"that no occasion for calumny be given." This one sample must serve to

show how Erasmus's work was received. For every deviation from the

Vulgate, whether in the Greek text or in the new Latin translation with

which he accompanied it, he was ferociously assailed. His {565} own

anecdote of the old priest who, having the misprint "mumpsimus" for

"sumpsimus" in his missal, refused to correct the error when it was

pointed out, is perfectly typical of the position of his critics. New

truth must ever struggle hard against old prejudice.

While Erasmus was working, a much more ambitious scheme for publishing

the Scriptures was maturing under the direction of Cardinal Ximénez at

Alcalá or, as the town was called in Latin, Complutum. The

Complutensian Polyglot, as it was thence named, was published in six

volumes, four devoted to the Old Testament, one to the New Testament,

and one to a Hebrew lexicon and grammar. The New Testament volume has

the earliest date, 1514, but was withheld from the public for several

years after this. The manuscripts from which the Greek texts were

taken are unknown, but they were better than those used by Erasmus.

The later editors of the Greek text in the sixteenth century, Robert

Estienne (Stephanus) and Theodore Beza, did little to castigate it,

although one of the codices used by Beza, and now known by his name, is

of great value.

[Sidenote: Hebrew text]

The Hebrew Massoretic text of the Old Testament was printed by Gerson

Ben Mosheh at Brescia in 1494, and far more elaborately in the first

four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglot. With the Hebrew text the

Spanish editors offered the Septuagint Greek, the Syriac, and the

Vulgate, the Hebrew, Syriac and Greek having Latin translations. The

manuscripts for the Hebrew were procured from Rome. A critical

revision was undertaken by Sebastian Münster and published with a new

Latin version at Basle 1534-5. Later recensions do not call for

special notice here. An incomplete text of the Syriac New Testament

was published at Antwerp in 1569.

[Sidenote: Latin versions]

The numerous new Latin translations made during {566} this period

testify to the general discontent with the Vulgate. Not only humanists

like Valla, Lefèvre and Erasmus, but perfectly orthodox theologians

like Pope Nicholas V, Cajetan and Sadoletus, saw that the common

version could be much improved. In the new Latin translation by

Erasmus many of the errors of the Vulgate were corrected. Thus, in

Matthew iii, 2, he offers "resipiscite" or "ad mentem redite" instead

of "poenitentiam agite." This, as well as his substitution of "sermo"

for "verbum" in John i, 1, was fiercely assailed. Indeed, when it was

seen what use was made by the Protestants of the new Greek texts and of

the new Latin versions, of which there were many, a strong reaction

followed in favor of the traditional text. Even by the editors of the

Complutensian Polyglot the Vulgate was regarded with such favor that,

being printed between the Hebrew and Greek, it was compared by them to

Christ crucified between the two thieves. [Sidenote: 1530] The

Sorbonne condemned as "Lutheran" the assertion that the Bible could not

be properly understood or expounded without knowledge of the original

languages. [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] In the decree of Trent the

Vulgate was declared to be the authentic form of the Scriptures. The

preface to the English Catholic version printed at Rheims [Sidenote:

1582] defends the thesis, now generally held by Catholics, that the

Latin text is superior in accuracy to the Greek, having been corrected

by Jerome, preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council of

Trent. [Sidenote: 1592] In order to have this text in its utmost

purity an official edition was issued.

[Sidenote: Biblical scholarship]

Modern critics, having far surpassed the results achieved by their

predecessors, are inclined to underestimate their debts to these

pioneers in the field. The manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries,

concordances, special lexicons, all that make an introduction to

biblical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or {567} were

supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The professors at

Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, were unable to find a map of

Palestine. The first Hebrew concordance was printed, with many errors,

at Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 1546, at

Basle. To find a parallel passage or illustrative material or ancient

comment on a given text, the critic then had to search through dusty

tomes and manuscripts, instead of finding them accumulated for him in

ready reference books. That all this has been done is the work of ten

generations of scholars, among whom the pioneers of the Renaissance

should not lack their due meed of honor. The early critics were

hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely

dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by

which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the

historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical

(or didactic).

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to a more fruitful

method. It is true that his main object was a moral one, the overthrow

of superstition and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of

Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or chiefly, to explain

away as fables stories that would seem silly or obscene as history. In

the New Testament he sought the man Jesus and not the deified Christ.

He preferred the New Testament, with its "simple, plain and gentle

truth, without savor of superstition or cruelty" to the Old Testament.

He discriminated nicely even among the books of the New Testament,

considering the chief ones the gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles

(except Hebrews), I Peter and I John. He hinted that many did not

consider the Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in

thought but not in style; he believed Hebrews to have {568} been

written by Clement of Rome; and he called James lacking in apostolic

dignity.

[Sidenote: Luther]

By far the best biblical criticism of the century was the mature work

of Martin Luther. It is a remarkable fact that a man whose doctrine of

the binding authority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his

disciples permission to interpret the text with the least shade of

independence, should himself have shown a freedom in the treatment of

the inspired writers unequaled in any Christian for the next three

centuries. It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were mere

matters of taste; that he took what he liked and rejected what he

disliked, and this is true to a certain extent. "What treats well of

Christ, that is Scripture, even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he

averred, and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against Christ,

we must urge Christ against the Bible." His wish to exclude the

epistle of James from the canon, on the ground that its doctrine of

justification contradicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and

excited wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir Thomas

More, but also from many Protestants, beginning with Bullinger.

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of the Bible were usually

far more than would be implied by a merely dogmatic interest. Together

with the best scholarship of the age he had a strong intuitive feeling

for style that guided him aright in many cases. In denying the Mosaic

authorship of a part of the Pentateuch, in asserting that Job and Jonah

were fables, in finding that the books of Kings were more credible than

Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Proverbs and

Ecclesiastes had received their final form from later editors, he but

advanced theses now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther,

Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply {569} confirmed. Some

modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of

James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not

joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators

are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry.

Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the

time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty

volumes in deserved neglect.

[Sidenote: German version]

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of the Bible that of

Luther stands first in every sense of the word. Long he had meditated

on it before his enforced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the

leisure to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had much

help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg professors, was a life-long

labor. Only recently have the minutes of the meetings of these

scholars come to light, and they testify to the endless trouble taken

by the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. He wrote no

dialect, but a common, standard German which he believed to have been

introduced by the Saxon chancery. But he also modelled his style not

only on the few good German authors then extant, but on the speech of

the market-place. From the mouths of the people he took the sweet,

common words that he gave back to them again, "so that they may note

that we are speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put into the

German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, lofty eloquence, poetry.

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the Bible. To make Moses

"so German that no one would know that he was a Jew" insured a noble

style, but involved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. Thus

the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite plainly, and of German

May-festivals; and the passover is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there

not even {570} an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the

translation of Micah iv, 8?--"Und du Thurm Eder, eine Feste der Tochter

Zion, es wird deine goldene Rose kommen." Luther declared his

intention of "simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the rest of

Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of fact the greatest change

that he actually made was the introduction of the word "alone" after

"faith" in the passage (Romans iii, 28) "A man is justified by faith

without works of the law." Luther never used the word "church"

(Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it by "congregation" (Gemeinde).

Following Erasmus he turned [Greek] _metanoieite_ (Matthew iii, 2, 8)

into "bessert euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" ("do

penance") as in the older German versions. Also, following the

Erasmian text, he omitted the "comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7); this was

first insinuated into the German Bible in 1575.

[Sidenote: English Bible]

None of the other vernacular versions, not even the French translation

of Lefèvre and Olivetan can compare with the German save one, the

English. How William Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed the

work in 1535, has been told on another page. Many revisions followed:

the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops'

Bible of 1568. Then came the Catholic, or Douai version of 1582, the

only one completely differing from the others, with its foundation on

the Vulgate and its numerous barbarisms: "parasceue" for "preparation,"

"feast of Azymes" for "feast of unleavened bread," "imposing of hands,"

"what to me and thee, woman" (John ii, 4), "penance," "chalice,"

"host," "against the spirituals of wickedness in the celestials"

(Ephesians vi, 12), "supersubstantial bread" in the Lord's prayer, "he

exinanited himself" (Philippians ii, 7).

We are accustomed to speak of the Authorized Version {571} of 1610 as

if it were a new product of the literary genius of Shakespeare's age.

In fact, it was a mere revision, and a rather light one, of previous

work. Its rare perfection of form is due to the labors of many men

manipulating and polishing the same material. Like the Homeric poems,

like the Greek gospels themselves probably, the greatest English

classic is the product of the genius of a race and not of one man.

Even from the very beginning it was such to some extent. Tyndale could

hardly have known Wyclif's version, which was never printed and was

rare in manuscript, but his use of certain words, such as "mote,"

"beam," and "strait gate," also found in the earlier version, prove

that he was already working in a literary tradition, one generation

handing down to another certain Scriptural phrases first heard in the

mouths of the Lollards.

Both Tyndale and Coverdale borrowed largely from the German

interpreters, as was acknowledged on the title-page and in the prologue

to the Bible of 1535. Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the

marginal notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, "this is

once bone of my bone," "they offered unto field-devils" (Luther,

"Felt-teuffem"), "Blessed is the room-maker, Gad" (Luther,

"Raum-macher"). The English translators also followed the German in

using "elder" frequently for "priest," "congregation" for "church," and

"love" for "charity." By counting every instance of this and similar

renderings, Sir Thomas More claimed to have found one thousand errors

in the New Testament alone.

[Sidenote: Popularity of Bible]

The astounding popularity of the Bible, chiefly but not only in

Protestant countries, is witnessed by a myriad voices. Probably in all

Christian countries in every age it has been the most read book, but in

the sixteenth century it added to an unequaled reputation {572} for

infallibility the zest of a new discovery. Edward VI demanding the

Bible at his coronation, Elizabeth passionately kissing it at hers,

were but types of the time. That joyous princess of the Renaissance,

Isabella d'Este, ordered a new translation of the Psalms for her own

perusal. Margaret of Navarre, in the Introduction to her frivolous

_Heptameron_, expresses the pious hope that all present have read the

Scripture. Hundreds of editions of the German and English translations

were called for. The people, wrote an Englishman in 1539, "have now in

every church and place, almost every man, the Bible and New Testament

in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical

books of the Table Round . . . and such other whose impure filth and

vain fabulosity the light of God hath abolished there utterly." In

Protestant lands it became almost a matter of good form to own the

Bible, and reading it has been called, not ineptly, "the _opus

operatum_ of the Evangelicals." Even the Catholics bore witness to the

demand, which they tried to check. While they admonished the laity

that it was unnecessary and dangerous to taste of this tree of

knowledge, while they even curtailed the reading of the Scripture by

the clergy, they were forced to supply vernacular versions of their own.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

Along with unbounded popularity the Bible then enjoyed a much higher

reputation for infallibility than it bears today. The one point on

which all Protestant churches were agreed was the supremacy and

sufficiency of Scripture. The Word, said Calvin, flowed from the very

mouth of God himself; it was the sole foundation of faith and the one

fountain of all wisdom. "What Christ says must be true whether I or

any other man can understand it," preached Luther. "Scripture is fully

to be believed," wrote an English theologian, "as a thing necessary to

salvation, though {573} the thing contained in Scripture pertain not

merely to the faith, as that Aaron had a beard." The Swiss and the

Anabaptists added their voices to this chorus of bibliolatry.

[Sidenote: _Abeunt studia in mores_]

Since studies pass into character, it is natural to find a marked

effect from this turning loose of a new source of spiritual authority.

That thousands were made privately better, wiser and happier from the

reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that standards of

morality were raised and ethical tastes purified thereby, is certain.

But the same cause had several effects that were either morally

indifferent or positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by

contemporaries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, as Luther

complained, interpreted the Holy Book according to his own brain and

crazy reason. The old saying that the Bible was the book of heretics,

came true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that none but

the ministers (_i.e._ themselves) had the right to interpret Scripture.

It was in vain for the governments to forbid, as the Scotch statute

expressed it, "any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible";

[Sidenote: 1550] discordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some

learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig-headed and

intolerant.

There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion to the amount of

inerrancy attributed to it, became a stumbling-block in the path of

progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against

Copernicus as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism was

regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, as a cause of

vehement suspicion of atheism. Some texts buttressed the horrible and

cruel superstition of witchcraft. The examples of the wars of Israel

and the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to support the duty of

intolerance. Social reformers, like {574} Vives, in their struggle to

abolish poverty, were confronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal

verity, that the poor are always with us. Finally the great moral

lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission of polygamy, was

supported by biblical texts.

[Sidenote: The classics]

Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the classics. Most of

the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most

important exception being the _Annals_ of Tacitus, of which the _editio

princeps_ was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following

Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer,

Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides,

Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates

of the _editiones principes_ of the other principal Greek writers:

1502: Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus.

1503: Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's _Hellenica_.

1504: Demosthenes.

1509: Plutarch's _Moralia_.

1513: Pindar, Plato.

1516: Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pausanias, Strabo.

1517: Plutarch's _Lives_.

1518: Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays.

1525: Galen, Xenophon's complete works.

1528: Epictetus.

1530: Polybius.

1532: Aristophanes, eleven plays.

1533: Euclid, Ptolemy.

1544: Josephus.

1552: Aeschylus, seven plays.

1558: Marcus Aurelius.

1559: Diodorus.

1565: Bion and Moschus.

1572: Plutarch's complete works.

Naturally the first editions were not usually the best. {575}

[Sidenote: Scholarship] The labor of successive generations has made

the text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not exclusively,

in editing the fathers of the church, was done by Erasmus. But a

really new school of historical criticism was created by Joseph Justus

Scaliger, [Sidenote: J. J. Scaliger, 1540-1609] the greatest of

scholars. His editions of the Latin poets first laid down and applied

sound rules of textual emendation, besides elucidating the authors with

a wealth of learned comment.

The editing of the texts was but a small portion of the labor that went

to the cultivation of the classics. The foundations of our modern

lexicons were laid in the great _Thesaurus linguae Latinae_ of Robert

Estienne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in three volumes

1543) and the _Thesauris linguae Graecae_ by Henry Estienne the

younger, published in five volumes in 1572. This latter is still used,

the best edition being that in nine volumes 1829-63.

So much of ancient learning has become a matter of course to the modern

student that he does not always realize the amount of ground covered in

the last four centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani:

[Sidenote: November 13, 1517] "The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient

poets vainly promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that its

very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the greatest scholars

then was ignorant of a site now visited by every tourist in the Eternal

City, how much must there not have been to learn in other respects?

Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and successors of Erasmus

labored to supply the knowledge then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew

grammars were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epigraphy, on

ancient religion, on chronology, on comparative philology, on Roman

law, laid deep and strong the foundations of the consummate scholarship

of modern times.

{576} [Sidenote: Idolatry of ancients]

The classics were not only studied in the sixteenth century, they were

loved, they were even worshipped. "Every elegant study, every science

worthy of the attention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there

is of polite learning," wrote the French savant Muret, [Sidenote: 1573]

"is contained nowhere save in the literature of the Greeks." Joachim

du Bellay wrote a cycle of sonnets on the antiquities of Rome, in the

spirit:

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

"The Latin allureth me by its gracious dignity," wrote Montaigne, "and

the writings of the Greeks not only fill and satisfy me, but transfix

me with admiration. . . . What glory can compare with that of Homer?"

Machiavelli tells how he dressed each evening in his best attire to be

worthy to converse with the spirits of the ancients, and how, while

reading them, he forgot all the woes of life and the terror of death.

Almost all learned works, and a great many not learned, were written in

Latin. For those who could not read the classics for themselves

translations were supplied. Perhaps the best of these were the _Lives

of Famous Men_ by Plutarch, first rendered into French by Amyot and

thence into English by Sir Thomas North.

[Sidenote: Value of classics in 16th century]

Strong, buoyant, self-confident as was the spirit of the age, it bore

plainly upon it the impress of its zealous schooling in the lore of the

ancients. In supplying the imperious need of cultured men for good

literature the Romans and Greeks had, in the year 1500, but few

rivals--save in Italy, hardly any. To an age that had much to learn

they had much to teach; to men as greedy for the things of the mind as

they were for luxury and wealth the classics offered a new world as

rich in spoils of wisdom and beauty as were the East Indies and {577}

Peru in spices and gold. The supreme value of the Greek and Latin

books is that which they have in common with all literature; they

furnished, for the mass of reading men, the best and most copious

supply of food for the intellectual and spiritual life. "Books," says

Erasmus, "are both cheering and wholesome. In prosperity they steady

one, in affliction console, do not vary with fortune and follow one

through all dangers even to the grave. . . . What wealth or what

scepters would I exchange for my tranquil reading?" "From my earliest

childhood," Montaigne confides, "poetry has had the power to pierce me

through and transport me."

In the best sense of the word, books are popular philosophy. All

cannot study the deepest problems of life or of science for themselves,

but all can absorb the quintessence of thought in the pleasant and

stimulating form in which it is served up in the best literature.

Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to cultivate a high

and noble inward life. This, their supreme value for the moulding of

character, was appreciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink

the spirit of the classics," observes Montaigne, "rather than learn

their precepts," and again, "the use to which I put my studies is a

practical one--the formation of character for the exigencies of life."

[Sidenote: Ancient masters of literary style]

This is the service by which the ancients have put the moderns in their

debt. Another gift of distinct, though lesser value, was that of

literary style. So close is the correspondence between expression and

thought that it is no small advantage to any man or to any age to sit

at the feet of those supreme masters of the art of saying things well,

the Greeks. The danger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with

habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years in constructing

sentences that might have been written {578} by his master, who speaks

of Jehovah as Jupiter and of Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who

transmutes the world around him into a Roman empire with tribunes and

augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant that the English word

"pedant" was coined in the sixteenth century.

What the classics had to teach directly was not only of less value than

their indirect influence, but was often positively harmful. Those who,

intoxicated with the pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by

the moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, though into

the opposite vices, as those who deified the letter of the Bible. Like

the Bible the classics were, and are, to some extent obstacles to the

march of science, and this not only because they take men's interest

from the study of nature, but because most ancient philosophers from

the time of Socrates spoke contemptuously of natural experiment and

discovery as things of little or no value to the soul.

If for the finer spirits of the age a classical education furnished a

noble instrument of culture, for all too many it was prized simply as a

badge of superiority. Among a people that stands in awe of

learning--and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more

true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century--a classical

education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing

inferiors with their crudity.

[Sidenote: Vernaculars]

The period that marked high water in the estimation of the classics,

also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded

the classics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation

of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries

and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature,

written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was

{579} Joachim du Bellay's _Défence et Illustration de la langue

française_ published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise

French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics.

This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the

characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus

formally introduced.

SECTION 2. HISTORY

For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly

any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the

period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents,

of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and

church history, the child of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]

The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what has just been said

about the influence of the classics. Their supreme interest was style,

generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods,

to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a few

antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the

height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their

manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and

aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political

intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the

virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the

people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did

most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even

in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish

Reformation, who drafted the _Book of Articles_, came to write the

history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate

the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious

controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the _New_

Testament was written by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament

back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few other passing

references are all of the Reformation that comes into a bulky volume

dealing with the reigns of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in

political liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between

tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not so plainly rooted

in antique soil.

The prevailing vice of the humanists--to see in the story of a people

nothing but a political lesson--is carried to its extreme by

Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that

conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the

point of composing historical romances. His _Life of Castruccio_ is as

fictitious and as didactic as Xenophon's _Cyropaedia_; his _Commentary

on Livy_ is as much a treatise on politics as is _The Prince_; the

_History of Florence_ is but slightly hampered by the events.

[Sidenote: Guicciardini]

If Guicciardini's interest in politics is not less exclusive than that

of his compatriot, he is vastly superior as a historian to the older

man in that, whereas Machiavelli deduced history _a priori_ from

theory, Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive method

of deriving his theory from an accurate mastery of the facts. With

superb analytical reasoning he presents his data, marshals them and

draws from them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation that

vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into account only low and

selfish motives. Before idealists he stands helpless; he leaves the

reader uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely

astute politician.

[Sidenote: Jovius]

The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the Florentines lies in the

appeal that he made to the {581} interests of the general public.

History had hitherto been written for the greater glory of a patron or

at most of a city; Jovius saw that the most generous patron of genius

must henceforth be the average reader. It is true that he despised the

public for whom he wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as

the first great interviewer and reporter for the history of his own

times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy by assuming an air of virtue

not natural to him, he anticipated the modern journalist.

[Sidenote: Polydore Vergil]

So much more modern in point of view than his contemporaries was

Polydore Vergil--whose _English History_ appeared in 1534--that the

generalizations about humanist historiography are only partially true

of him. Though his description of land and people is perhaps modelled

on Herodotus, it shows a genuine interest in the life of the common

man, even of the poor. He noted the geography, climate and fauna of

the island; his eyes saw London Bridge with its rows of shops on either

side, and they admired the parks full of game, the apple orchards, the

fat hens and pheasants, the ploughs drawn by mixed teams of horses and

oxen; he even observed the silver salt-cellars, spoons and cups used by

the poor, and their meals of meat. His description of the people as

brave, hospitable and very religious is as true now as it was then.

With an antiquary's interest in old manuscripts Vergil combined a

philosopher's skepticism of old legends. This Italian, though his

patron was Henry VIII, balanced English and French authorities and told

the truth even in such delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of

Arc. Political history was for him still the most important, although

to one branch of it, constitutional history, he was totally blind. So

were almost all Englishmen then, even Shakespeare, whose _King John_

contains no allusion to Magna Charta. In his work _On the Inventors

{582} of Things_ Vergil showed the depth of his insight into the

importance in history of culture and ideas. While his treatment of

such subjects as the origin of myths, man, marriage, religion,

language, poetry, drama, music, sciences and laws is unequal to his

purpose, the intention itself bears witness to a new and fruitful

spirit.

[Sidenote: French Memoirs]

Neither France nor England nor Germany produced historians equal to

those of Italian or of Scottish birth. France was the home of the

memoir, personal, chatty, spicy and unphilosophic. Those of Blaise de

Montluc are purely military, those of Brantôme are mostly scandalous.

Martin du Bellay tried to impart a higher tone to his reminiscences,

while with Hotman a school of pamphleteers arose to yoke history with

political theory. John Bodin attempted without much success the

difficult task of writing a philosophy of history. His chief

contribution was the theory of geography and climate as determinant

influences.

[Sidenote: English chronicles]

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as sources, in the

popular English chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John

Stow. Full of court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist,

conservative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the

middle-class cockney as faithfully as does a certain type of newspaper

and magazine today.

[Sidenote: Biographies]

The biography and autobiography were cultivated with considerable

success. Jovius and Brantôme both wrote series of lives of eminent men

and women. Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are both few

and brief, they are notable as among the most exquisite pen-portraits

in literature. More ambitious and more notable were the _Lives of the

Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects_ by George Vasari, in which the

whole interest was personal and practical, with no attempt to write a

history or a philosophy of art. Even criticism was confined almost

entirely to {583} variations of praise. In the realm of autobiography

Benvenuto Cellini attained to the _non plus ultra_ of self-revelation.

If he discloses the springs of a rare artistic genius, with equal

naïvete he lays bare a ruffianly character and a colossal egotism.

[Sidenote: Church history]

One immense field of human thought and action had been all but totally

ignored by the humanist historians--that of religion. To cultivate

this field a new genre, church history, sprang into being, though the

felt want was not then for a rational explanation of important and

neglected phenomena, but for material which each side in the religious

controversy might forge into weapons to use against the other. The

natural result of so practical a purpose was that history was studied

through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with strong tendency.

In the most honest hands, such as those of Sleidan, the scale was

unconsciously weighted on one side; by more passionate or less

honorable advocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression of

the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of the false on the

other.

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history,

their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as

well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still

more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient

Judaism, was set apart as divinely revealed over against all other

faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the

heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were

the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato

and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a

title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of

Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred

hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued

under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been

pitiful.

In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to

the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of God

over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians

regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which God and the devil

pulled the strings. Institutions of which they disapproved, such as

the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by

the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses

passed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source

in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history

did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and

ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely

forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing

under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or

distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened

only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign

growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and

deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference

between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge

deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.

[Sidenote: _Magdeburg Centuries_, 1559-74]

Among the most industrious and the most biassed must certainly be

numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing

the _Magdeburg Centuries_, a vast history of the church to the year

1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic

sources. Save for the accumulation of much material it deserves no

praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only

criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The

latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as

such, but are divided into two classes, those tending to prove an

accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal

institution which are branded as "first-class lies." The

correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having

been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is

never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their

criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German

Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.

[Sidenote: _Annales_ of Baronius, 1583-1607]

However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries,

they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than

can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose _Annales Ecclesiastici_ was the

official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his

criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy,

unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or

suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences

drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a

side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the

Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the

most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him,

found the work difficult.

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the

Reformation itself. A certain class of Protestant works, of which

Crespin's _Book of Martyrs_, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's _Ecclesiastical

History_ [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's _Acts and Monuments_ (first

English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the passions of the

multitude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and

sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the

persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated

facts has a certain "thickness" of reality--if I may borrow William

James's phrase--that is found by more complex minds only in the

deduction of general causes. Passionate, partisan and sometimes

ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues.

When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into

a general history, he plagiarized the _Magdeburg Centuries_. The

reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some

success, though it has not been fully or impartially investigated.

Much of it being drawn from personal recollection or from unpublished

records, its solo value consists for us in its accuracy. I have

compared a small section of the work with the manuscript source used by

Foxe and have made the rather surprising discovery that though there

are wide variations, none of them can be referred to partisan bias or

to any other conceivable motive. In this instance, which is too small

to generalize, it is possible that Foxe either had supplementary

information, or that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his

work must be used with caution.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox's _History of the

Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland_ (written

1559-71). In style it is rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the

essential and a no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its

intention to be "a faithful rehearsal of such personages as God has

made instruments of his glory," though thus equivocally stated, is

carried out in an honorable sense. It is true that the writer never

harbored a doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instrument of

God's glory, nor that "the Roman Kirk is the synagogue of Satan and the

head thereof, called the pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle

speaketh." If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get

impartiality, {587} neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's

honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphleteer, he did not

falsify or suppress essential facts as he understood them himself.

[Sidenote: Bullinger]

In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the fair appearance of

impartiality presented in Henry Bullinger's _History of the

Reformation_ 1519-32. Here, too, we meet with excellent composition,

but with a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that the

author's professions of fairness are sincere, though at times the

temptation to omit recording unedifying facts, such as the

sacramentarian schism, is too strong for him.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

Before passing judgment on anything it is necessary to know it at its

best. Probably John Sleidan's _Religious and political History of the

reign of Charles V_ [Sidenote: 1555] was the best work on the German

Reformation written before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more

eloquent and acute, Seckendorf more learned, Gilbert Burnet had better

perspective, but, none of these writers was better informed than

Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really

combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the

ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements

of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most

is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults

are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the

subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as

the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was

he above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses and in

monsters. He cited documents broadly and on the whole fairly, but not

with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up

to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588}

Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and

thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his

public, and temperately.

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of

notable histories than had the Protestants. A _succès de scandale_ was

won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] _Origin and Progress

of the English Schism_. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr.

Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are

absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the

books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is

impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he

gave rein to his imagination.

[Sidenote: Loyola]

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in

the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated

by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in

Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is

its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of

careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the

inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness,

such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in

Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts

at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives

of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius,

lag far in the dusty rear.

SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY

[Sidenote: Premises]

The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought.

Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic

laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced.

From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a

universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new

entities, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all

unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was

power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting

equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even

religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national

egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the

shift of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie

necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with

the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road

of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and

others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few

egalitarians who claimed for all classes a democratic régime. And,

thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the

relationship of church and state. It was on premises gathered from

these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling

structure of political thought.

[Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1527]

It was chiefly the first of these problems that absorbed the attention

of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most brilliant, the most studied and the

most abused of political theorists. As between monarchy and a republic

he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely to be the stronger,

but he clearly saw that where economic equality prevailed political

equality was natural and inevitable. The masses, he thought, desired

only security of person and property, and would adhere to either form

of government that offered them the best chance of these. For republic

and monarchy alike Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft,

those for the former embodied in his _Discourses on Livy_, those for

the latter in his _Prince_. In erecting a new science of statecraft,

by which a people might {590} arrive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli's

great merit is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the

old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect is that he set

before his mind as a premise an abstract "political man" as far

divorced from living, breathing, complex reality as the "economic man"

of Ricardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, governed by

calculable motives of self-interest. In general, he thought, men are

ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by

an appeal to their greed, but chiefly by fear.

[Sidenote: Politics divorced from morality]

Realist as he professed to be, Machiavelli divorced politics from

morality. Whereas for Aristotle[1] and Aquinas alike the science of

politics is a branch of ethics, for Machiavelli it is an abstract

science as totally dissociated from morality as is mathematics or

surgery. The prince, according to Machiavelli, should appear to be

merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, but should be able

to act otherwise without the least scruple when it is to his advantage

to do so. His heroes are Ferdinand of Aragon, "a prince who always

preaches good faith but never practises it," and Caesar Borgia, "who

did everything that can be done by a prudent and virtuous man; so that

no better precepts can be offered to a new prince than those suggested

by the example of his actions." What the Florentine publicist

especially admired in Caesar's statecraft were some examples of

consummate perfidy and violence which he had the opportunity of

observing at first hand. Machiavelli made a sharp distinction between

private and public virtue. The former he professed to regard as

binding on the individual, as it was necessary to the public good. It

is noteworthy that this advocate of all hypocrisy and guile {591} and

violence on the part of the government was in his own life gentle,

affectionate and true to trust. [Sidenote: Public vs. private life]

Religion Machiavelli regarded as a valuable instrument of tyranny, but

he did not hold the view, attributed by Gibbon to Roman publicists,

that all religions, though to the philosopher equally false, were to

the statesman equally useful. Christianity he detested, not so much as

an exploded superstition, as because he saw in it theoretically the

negation of those patriotic, military virtues of ancient Rome, and

because practically the papacy had prevented the union of Italy.

Naturally Machiavelli cherished the army as the prime interest of the

state. In advocating a national militia with universal training of

citizens he anticipated the conscript armies of the nineteenth century.

This writer, speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil

generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and

secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of

moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis

Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only

to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the

Florentine--and there were very many such allusions to him on the

Elizabethan stage--to be sure of a round of applause from the audience.

While Machiavelli found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were

numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works were written by the

evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang amen and the church put his writings

on the Index. The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition.

Among them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his morals but his

talent, saying that his maxims were drawn from an observation of small

states only, and that his judgment of the policy suitable to large

nations was of the poorest.

{592} It is fair to try _The Prince_ by the author's own standards. He

did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be

but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but

as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose,

"for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces

by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin

succeeded where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points out,

because he put the moral ideal first.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not forthcoming from the

camp of the Reformers, but from that of the northern humanists, Erasmus

and More. The _Institution of a Christian Prince_, by the Dutch

scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Virtue is

inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, who can be considered

good only in proportion as he fosters the wealth and the education of

his people. He should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live

parsimoniously off his own estate. He should never make war, save when

absolutely necessary, even against the Infidel, and should negotiate

only such treaties as have for their principal object the prevention of

armed conflict.

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is Erasmus's

preference for the republican form of government. In the _Christian

Prince_, dedicated as it was to the emperor, he spoke as if kings might

and perhaps ought to be elected, but in his _Adages_ he interpreted the

spirit of the ancients in a way most disparaging to monarchy.

Considering how carefully this work was studied by promising youths at

the impressionable age, it is not too much to regard it as one of the

main sources of the marked republican current of thought throughout the

century. Under the heading, "Fools {593} and kings are born such," he

wrote: "In all history, ancient and recent, you will scarcely find in

the course of several centuries one or two princes, who, by their

signal folly, did not bring ruin on humanity." In another place, after

a similar remark, he continues:

I know not whether much of this is not to be imputed

to ourselves. We trust the rudder of a vessel, where a

few sailors and some goods alone are in jeopardy, to

none but skilful pilots; but the state, wherein is

comprised the safety of so many thousands, we leave to the

guidance of any chance hands. A charioteer must learn,

reflect upon and practice his art; a prince needs only to

be born. Yet government is the most difficult, as it is the

most honorable, of sciences. Shall we choose the master

of a ship and not choose him who is to have the care of

so many cities and so many souls? . . . Do we not see

that noble cities are erected by the people and destroyed

by princes? that a state grows rich by the industry of

its citizens and is plundered by the rapacity of its

princes? that good laws are enacted by elected magistrates

and violated by kings? that the people love peace and

the princes foment war?

There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, which in all makes

a polemic against monarchy not exceeded by the fiercest republicans of

the next two generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this in

1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. "Princes must be

endured," he then thought, "lest tyranny give place to anarchy, a still

greater evil."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

As one of the principal causes of the Reformation was the strengthening

of national self-consciousness, so conversely one of the most marked

results of the movement was the exaltation of the state. The

Reformation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the separation

of church and state, and it endowed the latter with much wealth, with

many privileges and with high prerogatives and duties up to that time

{594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators

would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the

theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the

free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the

Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of

enforcing orthodoxy and punishing sinners, Hobbes drew the logical

inference that the state was the final authority for determining

religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the _reductio ad

absurdum_ of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers

themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable

religious truth.

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two

divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was.

Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had

in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a

form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the

people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the

whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical

conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English

Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it

began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the

Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Luther]

While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant

service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates

harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants'

War and the extravagance of Münzer, he came to believe that "Herr

Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this

world are gods," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through

whom God sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly

through Satan, _i.e._, makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's

sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a

people doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely ordained

"powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in

no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up

against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in

1530.

That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine

majesty in the state is due not only to Scriptural authority but to the

fact that there was no material for any other form of government to be

found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he any illusions as to

the character of hereditary monarchs. In his _Treatise on Civil

Authority_, [Sidenote: 1523] dedicated to his own sovereign, Duke John

of Saxony, he wrote: "Since the foundation of the world a wise prince

has been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They are generally the

biggest fools and worst knaves on earth, wherefore one must always

expect the worst of them and not much good, especially in divine

matters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to decide

spiritual things, but only to enforce the decisions of the Christian

community.

Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth of the emperor and

finding no warrant for the people to curb him, Luther groped for the

notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word

"constitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea

was present is certain. The German Empire had a constitution, largely

unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power

were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507]

When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of

the German states to resist by force {597} imperial acts of injustice

contrary to positive laws. Moreover, he always maintained that no

subject should obey an order directly contravening the law of God. In

these limitations on the government's power, slight as they were, were

contained the germs of the later Calvinistic constitutionalism.

[Sidenote: Reformed Church]

While many of the Reformers--Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndale--were

completely in accord with Luther's earlier doctrine of passive

obedience, the Swiss, French and Scotch developed a consistent body of

constitutional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered

liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance in the Reformed as

distinct from the Lutheran church, was the form of ecclesiastical

government. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism are practical

object-lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly pointed out in

the case of America the influence of the vestry in the evolution of the

town meeting. In other countries the same cause operated in the same

way, giving the British and French Protestants ample practice in

representative government. [Sidenote: Zwingli] Zwingli asserted that

the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the

Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the identity of spiritual and civil

authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was

natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were

republican through and through.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large

part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with

established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as

well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought

was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the

Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of

{597} France seemed on the point of anticipating the great Revolution

by two centuries.

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the

servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a

theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further

than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical

authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and

honorable of all merely human institutions. The form he preferred was

an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared

to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at

Luther's idea of constitutional, or contractual, limitations on the

royal power, he asserted that the king should be resisted, when he

violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to

whom the guardianship of the people's rights should be particularly

entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the

clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the

most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the

Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular

sovereignty.

[Sidenote: French republicans]

The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long

hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with

blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of

popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after

the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before

it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded

that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that the

members of the house of Lorraine and the Chancellor L'Hôpital be

removed from all offices as not having been appointed by the Estates.

In August {598} of the same year, thirty-nine representatives of the

three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contemporaneously with the

religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pontoise, and there voiced with great

boldness the claims of constitutional government. They demanded the

right of the Estates to govern during the minority of the king; they

claimed that the Estates should be summoned at least biennially; they

forbade taxation, alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war

without their consent. The further resolution that the persecution of

the Huguenots should cease, betrayed the quarter from which the popular

party drew its strength.

But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried beyond the

senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, following hard upon the great

massacre, trumpeted the sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore

Beza [Sidenote: Beza] published anonymously his _Rights of

Magistrates_, developing Calvin's theory that the representatives of

the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the king. The pact

between the people and king is said to be abrogated if the king

violates it.

[Sidenote: Hotman, 1573]

At the same time another French Protestant, Francis Hotman, published

his _Franco-Gallia_, to show that France had an ancient and inviolable

constitution. This unwritten law regulates the succession to the

throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the Estates

General; by it the laws, binding even on the king, are made. The right

of the people can be shown, in Hotman's opinion, to extend even to

deposing the monarch and electing his successor.

[Sidenote: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 1577]

A higher and more general view was taken in the _Rights against

Tyrants_ published under the pseudonym of Stephen Junius Brutus the

Celt, and written by Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but

comprehensive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Protestants,

{599} and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief supporter of tyranny,

advanced four theses: 1. Subjects are bound to obey God rather than the

king. This is regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates the

church and violates God's law, he may be resisted at least passively as

far as private men are concerned, but actively by magistrates and

cities. The author, who quotes from the Bible and ancient history,

evidently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The people may resist a

tyrant who is oppressing or ruining the state. Originally, in the

author's view, the people either elected the king, or confirmed him,

and if they have not exercised this right for a long time it is a legal

maxim that no prescription can run against the public claims. Laws

derive their sanction from the people, and should be made by them;

taxes may only be levied by their representatives, and the king who

exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different from an enemy.

The kings are not even the owners of public property, but only its

administrators, are bound by the contract with the governed, and may be

rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth thesis advanced by

Mornay is that foreign aid may justly be called in against a tyrant.

[Sidenote: La Boétie, 1530-63]

Not relying exclusively on their own talents the Huguenots were able to

press into the ranks of their army of pamphleteers some notable

Catholics. In 1574 they published as a fragment, and in 1577 entire,

_The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude_, commonly called the _Contr'un_,

by Stephen de la Boétie. This gentleman, dying at the age of

thirty-three, had left all his manuscripts to his bosom friend

Montaigne. The latter says that La Boétie composed the work as a prize

declamation at the age of sixteen or eighteen. [Sidenote: 1546-8] But

along with many passages in the pamphlet, which might have been

suggested by Erasmus, are several {600} allusions that seem to point to

the character of Henry III--in 1574 king of Poland and in 1577 king of

France--and to events just prior to the time of publication. According

to an attractive hypothesis, not fully proved, these passages were

added by Montaigne himself before he gave the work to one of his

several Huguenot friends or kinsmen. La Boétie, at any rate, appealed

to the passions aroused by St. Bartholomew in bidding the people no

longer to submit to one man, "the most wretched and effeminate of the

nation," who has only two hands, two eyes, and who will fall if

unsupported. And yet, he goes on rhetorically, "you sow the fruits of

the earth that he may waste them; you furnish your houses for him to

pillage them; you rear your daughters to glut his lust and your sons to

perish in his wars; . . . you exhaust your bodies in labor that he may

wallow in vile pleasures."

As Montaigne and La Boétie were Catholics, it is pertinent here to

remark that tyranny produced much the same effect on its victims,

whatever their religion. The Sorbonne, [Sidenote: The Sorbonne]

consulted by the League, unanimously decided that the people of France

were freed from their oath of allegiance to Henry III and could with a

good conscience take arms against him. One of the doctors, Boucher,

wrote to prove that the church and the people had the right to depose

an assassin, a perjurer, an impious or heretical prince, or one guilty

of sacrilege or witchcraft. A tyrant, he concluded, was a wild beast,

whom it was lawful for the state as a whole or even for private

individuals, to kill.

So firmly established did the doctrine of the contract between prince

and people become that towards the end of the century one finds it

taken for granted. The _Mémoires_ of the Huguenot soldier, poet and

historian Agrippa d'Aubigné are full of republican sentiments, as, for

example, "There is a binding obligation {601} between the king and his

subjects," and "The power of the prince proceeds from the people."

But it must not be imagined that such doctrines passed without

challenge. The most important writer on political science after

Machiavelli, John Bodin, [Sidenote: Bodin, 1530-96] was on the whole a

conservative. In his writings acute and sometimes profound remarks

jostle quaint and abject superstitions. He hounded the government and

the mob on witches with the vile zeal of the authors of the _Witches'

Hammer_; and he examined all existing religions with the coolness of a

philosopher. He urged on the attention of the world that history was

determined in general by natural causes, such as climate, but that

revolutions were caused partly by the inscrutable will of God and

partly by the more ascertainable influence of planets.

His most famous work, _The Republic_, [Sidenote: 1576] is a criticism

of Machiavelli and an attempt to bring politics back into the domain of

morality. He defines a state as a company of men united for the

purpose of living well and happily; he thinks it arose from natural

right and social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates the

state from the government, defining sovereignty (_majestas_) as the

attribute of the former. He classifies governments in the usual three

categories, and refuses to believe in mixed governments. Though

England puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute monarchy. This is

the form that he decidedly prefers, for he calls the people a

many-headed monster and says that the majority of men are incompetent

and bad. Preaching passive obedience to the king, he finds no check on

him, either by tyrannicide or by constitutional magistrates, save only

in the judgment of God.

It is singular that after Bodin had removed all effective checks on the

tyrant in this world, he should lay it down as a principle that no king

should levy {602} taxes without his subjects' consent. Another

contradiction is that whereas he frees the subject from the duty of

obedience in case the monarch commands aught against God's law, he

treats religion almost as a matter of policy, advising that, whatever

it be, the statesman should not disturb it. Apart from the streak of

superstition in his mind, his inconsistencies are due to the attempt to

reconcile opposites--Machiavelli and Calvin. For with all his

denunciation of the former's atheism and immorality, he, with his

chauvinism, his defence of absolutism, his practical opportunism, is

not so far removed from the Florentine as he would have us believe.

[Sidenote: Dutch republicans]

The revolution that failed in France succeeded in the Netherlands, and

some contribution to political theory can be found in the constitution

drawn up by the States General in 1580, when they recognized Anjou as

their prince, and in the document deposing Philip in 1581. Both assume

fully the sovereignty of the people and the omnicompetence of their

elected representatives. As Oldenbarnevelt commented, "The cities and

nobles together represent the whole state and the whole people." The

deposition of Philip is justified by an appeal to the law of nature,

and to the example of other tortured states, and by a recital of

Philip's breaches of the laws and customs of the land.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Scotland, in the course of her revolution, produced almost as brilliant

an array of pamphleteers as had France. John Knox maintained that, "If

men, in the fear of God, oppose themselves to the fury and blind rage

of princes, in doing so they do not resist God, but the devil, who

abuses the sword and authority of God," and again, he asked, "What harm

should the commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of ignorant

rulers were moderated and bridled by the {603} wisdom and discretion of

godly subjects?" But the duty, he thought, to curb princes in free

kingdoms and realms, does not belong to every private man, but

"appertains to the nobility, sworn and born counsellors of the same."

Carrying such doctrines to the logical result, Knox hinted to Mary that

Daniel might have resisted Nebuchadnezzar and Paul might have resisted

Nero with the sword, had God given them the power.

Another Scotch Protestant, John Craig, in support of the prosecution of

Mary, said that it had been determined and concluded at the University

of Bologna [Sidenote: 1554] that "all rulers, be they supreme or

inferior, may be and ought to be reformed or deposed by them by whom

they were chosen, confirmed and admitted to their office, as often as

they break that promise made by oath to their subjects." Knox and

Craig both argued for the execution of Mary on the ground that "it was

a public speech among all peoples and among all estates, that the queen

had no more liberty to commit murder nor adultery than any other

private person." Knollys also told Mary that a monarch ought to be

deposed for madness or murder.

To the zeal for religion animating Knox, George Buchanan [Sidenote:

Buchanan] joined a more rational spirit of liberty and a stronger

consciousness of positive right. His great work _On the Constitution

of Scotland_ derived all power from the people, asserted the

responsibility of kings to their subjects and pleaded for the popular

election of the chief magistrate. In extreme cases execution of the

monarch was defended, though by what precise machinery he was to be

arraigned was left uncertain; probably constitutional resistance was

thought of, as far as practicable, and tyrannicide was considered as a

last resort. "If you ask anyone," says our author, "what he thinks of

the punishment of {604} Caligula, Nero or Domitian, I think no one will

be so devoted to the royal name as not to confess that they rightly

paid the penalty of their crimes."

[Sidenote: English monarchists]

In England the two tendencies, the one to favor the divine right of

kings, the other for constitutional restraint, existed side by side.

The latter opinion was attributed by courtly divines to the influence

of Calvin. Matthew Hutton blamed the Reformer because "he thought not

so well of a kingdom as of a popular state." "God save us," wrote

Archbishop Parker, "from such a visitation as Knox has attempted in

Scotland, the people to be orderers of things." This distinguished

prelate preached that disobedience to the queen was a greater crime

than sacrilege or adultery, for obedience is the root of all virtues

and the cause of all felicity, and "rebellion is not a single fault,

like theft or murder, but the cesspool and swamp of all possible sins

against God and man." Bonner was charged by the government of Mary to

preach that all rebels incurred damnation. Much later Richard Hooker

warned his countrymen that Puritanism endangered the prerogatives of

crown and nobility.

[Sidenote: and republicans]

But there were not wanting champions of the people. Reginald Pole

asserted the responsibility of the sovereign, though in moderate

language. Bishop John Ponet wrote _A Treatise on Politic Power_ to

show that men had the right to depose a bad king and to assassinate a

tyrant. The haughty Elizabeth herself often had to listen to drastic

advice. When she visited Cambridge she was entertained by a debate on

tyrannicide, in which one bold clerk asserted that God might incite a

regicide; and by a discussion of the respective advantages of elective

and hereditary monarchy, one speaker offering to maintain the former

with his life and, if need be, with his death. When Elizabeth, after

hearing a refractory Parliament, complained to the {605} Spanish

ambassador that "she could not tell what those devils were after" his

excellency replied, "They want liberty, madam, and if princes do not

look to themselves" they will soon find that they are drifting to

revolution and anarchy. Significant, indeed, was the silent work of

Parliament in building up the constitutional doctrine of its own

omnicompetence and of its own supremacy.

[Sidenote: Tyrannicide]

One striking aberration in the political theory of that time was the

prominence in it of the appeal to tyrannicide. Schooled by the

ancients who sang the praises of Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the

biblical example of Ehud and Eglon, and by various medieval publicists,

and taught the value of murder by the princes and popes who set prices

on each other's heads, an extraordinary number of sixteenth century

divines approved of the dagger as the best remedy for tyranny.

Melanchthon wished that God would raise up an able man to slay Henry

VIII; John Ponet and Cajetan and the French theologian Boucher admitted

the possible virtue of assassination. But the most elaborate statement

of the same doctrine was put by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana, in a book

_On the King and his Education_ published in 1599, with an official

_imprimatur_, a dedication to the reigning monarch and an assertion

that it was approved by learned and grave men of the Society of Jesus.

It taught that the prince holds sway solely by the consent of the

people and by ancient law, and that, though his vices are to be borne

up to a certain point, yet when he ruins the state he is a public

enemy, to slay whom is not only permissible but glorious for any man

brave enough to despise his own safety for the public good.

If one may gather the official theory of the Catholic church from the

contradictory statements of her doctors, she advocated despotism

tempered by {606} assassination. No Lutheran ever preached the duty of

passive obedience more strongly than did the Catechism of the Council

of Trent.

[Sidenote: Radicals]

A word must be said about the more radical thought of the time. All

the writers just analysed saw things from the standpoint of the

governing and propertied classes. But the voice of the poor came to be

heard now and then, not only from their own mouths but from that of the

few authors who had enough imagination to sympathize with them. The

idea that men might sometime live without any government at all is

found in such widely different writers as Richard Hooker and Francis

Rabelais. But socialism was then, as ever, more commonly advocated

than anarchy. The Anabaptists, particularly, believed in a community

of goods, and even tried to practice it when they got the chance.

Though they failed in this, the contributions to democracy latent in

their egalitarian spirit must not be forgotten. They brought down on

themselves the severest animadversions from defenders of the existing

order, by whatever confession they were bound. [Sidenote: 1535] Vives

wrote a special tract to refute the arguments of the Anabaptists on

communism. Luther said that the example of the early Christians did

not authorize communism for, though the first disciples pooled their

own goods, they did not try to seize the property of Pilate and Herod.

Even the French Calvinists, in their books dedicated to liberty,

referred to the Anabaptists as seditious rebels worthy of the severest

repression.

[Sidenote: _Utopia_, 1516]

A nobler work than any produced by the Anabaptists, and one that may

have influenced them not a little, was the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More.

He drew partly on Plato, on Tacitus's _Germania_, on Augustine and on

Pico della Mirandola, and for the outward framework of his book on the

_Four Voyages of Americus Vespuccius_. {607} But he relied mostly on

his own observation of what was rotten in the English state where he

was a judge and a ruler of men. He imagined an ideal country, Utopia,

a place of perfect equality economically as well as politically. It

was by government an elective monarchy with inferior magistrates and

representative assembly also elected. The people changed houses every

ten years by lot; they considered luxury and wealth a reproach. "In

other places they speak still of the common wealth but every man

procureth his private wealth. Here where nothing is private the common

affairs be earnestly looked upon." "What justice is this, that a rich

goldsmith or usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living either by

idleness or by unnecessary occupation, when in the meantime poor

laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters and plowmen by so great and

continual toil . . . do yet get so hard and so poor a living and live

so wretched a life that the condition of the laboring beasts may seem

much better and wealthier?" "When I consider and weigh in my mind all

these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, [Sidenote: The

commonwealth] so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain

conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name

and title of the commonwealth." More was convinced that a short day's

labor shared by everyone would produce quite sufficient wealth to keep

all in comfort. He protests explicitly against those who pretend that

there are two sorts of justice, one for governments and one for private

men. He repudiates the doctrine that bad faith is necessary to the

prosperity of a state; the Utopians form no alliances and carry out

faithfully the few and necessary treaties that they ratify. Moreover

they dishonor war above all things.

In the realm of pure economic and social theory {608} something, though

not much, was done. Machiavelli believed that the growth of population

in the north and its migration southwards was a constant law, an idea

derived from Paulus Diaconus and handed on to Milton. He even derived

"Germany" from "germinare." A more acute remark, anticipating Malthus,

was made by the Spanish Jesuit John Botero [Sidenote: Botero, 1589]

who, in his _Reason of State_, pointed out that population was

absolutely dependent on means of subsistence. He concluded _a priori_

that the population of the world had remained stationary for three

thousand years.

[Sidenote: Mercantile economics]

Statesmen then labored under the vicious error, drawn from the analogy

of a private man and a state, that national wealth consisted in the

precious metals. The stringent and universal laws against the export

of specie and intended to encourage its import, proved a considerable

burden on trade, though as a matter of fact they only retarded and did

not stop the flow of coin. The striking rise in prices during the

century attracted some attention. Various causes were assigned for it,

among others the growth of population and the increase of luxury.

Hardly anyone saw that the increase in the precious metals was the

fundamental cause, but several writers, among them Bodin, John Hales

and Copernicus, saw that a debased currency was responsible for the

acute dearness of certain local markets.

[Sidenote: Usury]

The lawfulness of the taking of usury greatly exercised the minds of

men of that day. The church on traditional grounds had forbidden it,

and her doctors stood fast by her precept, though an occasional

individual, like John Eck, could be found to argue for it. Luther was

in principle against allowing a man "to sit behind his stove and let

his money work for him," but he weakened enough to allow moderate

interest in given circumstances. Zwingli would allow interest to {609}

be taken only as a form of profit-sharing. Calvin said: "If we forbid

usury wholly we bind consciences by a bond straiter than that of God

himself. But if we allow it the least in the world, under cover of our

permission someone will immediately make a general and unbridled

licence." The laws against the taking of interest were gradually

relaxed throughout the century, but even at its close Bacon could only

regard usury as a concession made on account of the hardness of men's

hearts.

[1] In Greek the words "politics" and "ethics" both have a wider

meaning than they have in English.

[2] Lord Morley.

SECTION 4. SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Inductive method]

The glory of sixteenth-century science is that for the first time, on a

large scale, since the ancient Greeks, did men try to look at nature

through their own eyes instead of through those of Aristotle and the

_Physiologus_. Bacon and Vives have each been credited with the

discovery of the inductive method, but, like so many philosophers, they

merely generalized a practice already common at their time. Save for

one discovery of the first magnitude, and two or three others of some

little importance, the work of the sixteenth century was that of

observing, describing and classifying facts. This was no small service

in itself, though it does not strike the imagination as do the great

new theories.

[Sidenote: Mathematics]

In mathematics the preparatory work for the statement and solution of

new problems consisted in the perfection of symbolism. As reasoning in

general is dependent on words, as music is dependent on the mechanical

invention of instruments, so mathematics cannot progress far save with

a simple and adequate symbolism. The introduction of the Arabic as

against the Roman numerals, and particularly the introduction of the

zero in reckoning, for the first time, in the later Middle Ages,

allowed men to perform conveniently the four fundamental processes.

The use of the signs + {610} and - for plus and minus (formerly written

p. and m.), and of the sign = for equality and of V [square root

symbol] for root, were additional conveniences. To this might be added

the popularization of decimals by Simon Stevin in 1586, which he called

"the art of calculating by whole numbers without fractions." How

clumsy are all things at their birth is illustrated by his method of

writing decimals by putting them as powers of one-tenth, with circles

around the exponents; _e.g._, the number that we should write 237.578,

he wrote 237(to the power 0) 5(to the power 1) 7(to the power 2) 8 (to

the power 3). He first declared for decimal systems of coinage,

weights and measures.

[Sidenote: Algebra 1494]

Algebraic notation also improved vastly in the period. In a treatise

of Lucas Paciolus we find cumbrous signs instead of letters, thus no.

(numero) for the known quantity, co. (cosa) for the unknown quantity,

ce. (censo) for the square, and cu. (cubo) for the cube of the unknown

quantity. As he still used p. and m. for plus and minus, he wrote

3co.p.4ce.m.5cu.p.2ce.ce.m.6no. for the number we should write 3x +

4x(power 2) - 5x(power 3) + 2x(power 4) - 6a. The use of letters in

the modern style is due to the mathematicians of the sixteenth century.

The solution of cubic and of biquadratic equations, at first only in

certain particular forms, but later in all forms, was mastered by

Tartaglia and Cardan. The latter even discussed negative roots,

whether rational or irrational.

[Sidenote: Geometry]

Geometry at that time, as for long afterwards, was dependent wholly on

Euclid, of whose work a Latin translation was first published at

Venice. [Sidenote: 1505] Copernicus with his pupil George Joachim,

called Rheticus, and Francis Vieta, made some progress in trigonometry.

Copernicus gave the first simple demonstration of the fundamental

formula of spherical trigonometry; Rheticus made tables of sines,

tangents and secants {611} of arcs. Vieta discovered the formula for

deriving the sine of a multiple angle.

[Sidenote: Cardan, 1501-76]

As one turns the pages of the numerous works of Jerome Cardan one is

astonished to find the number of subjects on which he wrote, including,

in mathematics, choice and chance, arithmetic, algebra, the calendar,

negative quantities, and the theory of numbers. In the last named

branch it was another Italian, Maurolycus, who recognized the general

character of mathematics as "symbolic logic." He is indeed credited

with understanding the most general principle on which depends all

mathematical deduction.[1] Some of the most remarkable anticipations

of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic

matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution.

Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the

indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior

metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce gold, might seem

to foreshadow the idea of the transmutation of metals under the

influence of radioactivity. It must be remembered that such guesses

had no claim to be scientific demonstrations.

The encyclopaedic character of knowledge was then, perhaps, one of its

most striking characteristics. Bacon was not the first man of his

century to take all knowledge for his province. In learning and

breadth of view few men have ever exceeded Conrad Gesner, [Sidenote:

Gesner] called by Cuvier "the German Pliny." His _History of Animals_

(published in many volumes 1551-87) was the basis of zoölogy until the

time of Darwin. [Sidenote: Zoölogy] He {612} drew largely on previous

writers, Aristotle and Albertus Magnus, but he also took pains to see

for himself as much as possible. The excellent illustrations for his

book, partly drawn from previous works but mostly new, added greatly to

its value. His classification, though superior to any that had

preceded it, was in some respects astonishing, as when he put the

hippopotamus among aquatic animals with fish, and the bat among birds.

Occasionally he describes a purely mythical animal like "the

monkey-fox." It is difficult to see what criterion of truth would have

been adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox is no more

improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner found it necessary to assure

his readers that the rhinoceros really existed in nature and was not a

creation of fancy.

[Sidenote: Leonardo]

As the master of modern anatomy and of several other branches of

science, stands Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to appraise his

work accurately because it is not yet fully known, and still more

because of its extraordinary form. Ho left thousands of pages of notes

on everything and hardly one complete treatise on anything. He began a

hundred studies and finished none of them. He had a queer twist to his

mind that made him, with all his power, seek byways. The monstrous,

the uncouth, fascinated him; he saw a Medusa in a spider and the

universe in a drop of water. He wrote his notes in mirror-writing,

from right to left; he illustrated them with a thousand fragments of

exquisite drawing, all unfinished and tantalizing alike to the artist

and to the scientist. His mind roamed to flying machines and

submarines, but he never made one; the reason given by him in the

latter case being his fear that it would be put to piratical use. He

had something in him of Faust; in some respects he reminds us of

William James, who also started as a {613} painter and ended as an

omniverous student of outré things and as a psychologist.

[Sidenote: Anatomy]

If, therefore, the anatomical drawings made by Leonardo from about

twenty bodies that he dissected, are marvellous specimens of art, he

left it to others to make a really systematic study of the human body.

His contemporary, Berengar of Carpi, professor at Bologna, first did

this with marked success, classifying the various tissues as fat,

membrane, flesh, nerve, fibre and so forth. So far from true is it

that it was difficult to get corpses to work upon that he had at least

a hundred. Indeed, according to Fallopius, another famous scientist,

the Duke of Tuscany would occasionally send live criminals to be

vivisected, thus making their punishment redound to the benefit of

science. The Inquisitors made the path of science hard by burning

books on anatomy as materialistic and indecent.

[Sidenote: Servetus]

Two or three investigators anticipated Harvey's discovery of the

circulation of the blood. Unfortunately, as the matter is of interest,

Servetus's treatment of the subject, found in his work on _The

Trinity_, is too long to quote, but it is plain that, along with

various fallacious ideas, he had really discovered the truth that the

blood all passes through heart and lungs whence it is returned to the

other organs.

[Sidenote: Physics]

While hardly anything was done in chemistry, a large number of

phenomena in the field of physics were observed now for the first time.

Leonardo da Vinci measured the rapidity of falling bodies, by dropping

them from towers and having the time of their passage at various stages

noted. He thus found, correctly, that their velocity increased. It is

also said that he observed that bodies always fell a little to the

eastward of the plumb line, and thence concluded that the earth

revolved on its axis. He made careful experiments with billiard balls,

discovering that the {614} momentum of the impact always was preserved

entire in the motion of the balls struck. He measured forces by the

weight and speed of the bodies and arrived at an approximation of the

ideas of mechanical "work" and energy of position. He thought of

energy as a spiritual force transferred from one body to another by

touch. This remarkable man further invented a hygrometer, explained

sound as a wave-motion in the air, and said that the appearance known

to us as "the old moon in the new moon's lap" was due to the reflection

of earth-light.

Nicholas Tartaglia first showed that the course of a projectile was a

parabola, and that the maximum range of a gun would be at an angle of

45 degrees.

Some good work was done in optics. John Baptist della Porta described,

though he did not invent, the camera obscura. Burning glasses were

explained. Leonard Digges even anticipated the telescope by the use of

double lenses.

Further progress in mechanics was made by Cardan who explained the

lever and pulley, and by Simon Stevin who first demonstrated the

resolution of forces. He also noticed the difference between stable

and unstable equilibrium, and showed that the downward pressure of a

liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel it is in and is

dependent only on the height. He and other scholars asserted the

causation of the tides by the moon.

[Sidenote: Magnetism]

Magnetism was much studied. When compasses were first invented it was

thought that they always pointed to the North Star under the influence

of some stellar compulsion. But even in the fifteenth century it was

noticed independently by Columbus and by German experimenters that the

needle did not point true north. As the amount of its declination

varies at {615} different places on the earth and at different times,

this was one of the most puzzling facts to explain. One man believed

that the change depended on climate, another that it was an individual

property of each needle. About 1581 Robert Norman discovered the

inclination, or dip of the compass. These and other observations were

summed up by William Gilbert [Sidenote: Gilbert] in his work on _The

Magnet, Magnetic Bodies and the Earth as a great Magnet_. [Sidenote:

1600] A great deal of his space was taken in that valuable destructive

criticism that refutes prevalent errors. His greatest discovery was

that the earth itself is a large magnet. He thought of magnetism as "a

soul, or like a soul, which is in many things superior to the human

soul as long as this is bound by our bodily organs." It was therefore

an appetite that compelled the magnet to point north and south.

Similar explanations of physical and chemical properties are found in

the earliest and in some of the most recent philosophers.

[Sidenote: Geography]

As might be expected, the science of geography, nourished by the

discoveries of new lands, grew mightily. Even the size of the earth

could only be guessed at until it had been encircled. Columbus

believed that its circumference at the equator was 8000 miles. The

stories of its size that circulated after Magellan were exaggerated by

the people. Thus Sir David Lyndsay in his poem _The Dreme_ [Sidenote:

1528] quotes "the author of the sphere" as saying that the earth was

101,750 miles in circumference, each mile being 5000 feet. The author

referred to was the thirteenth century Johannes de Sacro Bosco (John

Holywood). Two editions of his work, _De Sphaera_, that I have seen,

one of Venice, 1499, and one of Paris, 1527, give the circumference of

the earth as 20,428 miles, but an edition published at Wittenberg in

1550 gives it as 5,400, probably an {616} attempt to reduce the

author's English miles to German ones. [Sidenote: 1551] Robert

Recorde calculated the earth's circumference at 21,300 miles.[2]

Rough maps of the new lands were drawn by the companions of the

discoverers. Martin Waldseemuller [Sidenote: 1507] published a large

map of the world in twelve sheets and a small globe about 4 1/2 inches

in diameter, in which the new world is for the first time called

America. The next great advance was made by the Flemish cartographer

Gerard Mercator [Sidenote: Mercator, 1512-94] whose globes and

maps--some of them on the projection since called by his name--are

extraordinarily accurate for Europe and the coast of Africa, and fairly

correct for Asia, though he represented that continent as too narrow.

He included, however, in their approximately correct positions, India,

the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java and Japan. America is very poorly

drawn, for though the east coast of North America is fairly correct,

the continent is too broad and the rest of the coasts vague. He made

two startling anticipations of later discoveries, the first that he

separated Asia and America by only a narrow strait at the north, and

the second that he assumed the existence of a continent around the

south pole. This, however, he made far too large, thinking that the

Tierra del Fuego was part of it and drawing it so as to come near the

south coast of Africa and of Java. His maps of Europe were based on

recent and excellent surveys.

[Sidenote: Astronomy]

Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, had made much progress in the

tabulation of material. The apparent orbits of the sun, moon, planets,

and stars had been correctly observed, so that eclipses might be

predicted, conjunction of planets calculated, and that {617} gradual

movement of the sun through the signs of the zodiac known as the

precession of the equinoxes, taken account of. To explain these

movements the ancients started on the theory that each heavenly body

moved in a perfect circle around the earth; the fixed stars were

assigned to one of a group of revolving spheres, the sun, moon and five

planets each to one, making eight in all. But it was soon observed

that the movements of the planets were too complicated to fall into

this system; the number of moving spheres was raised to 27 before

Aristotle and to 56 by him. To these concentric spheres later

astronomers added eccentric spheres, moving within others, called

epicycles, and to them epicycles of the second order; in fact

astronomers were compelled:

To build, unbuild, contrive,

To save appearances, to gird the sphere

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

The complexity of this system, which moved the mirth of Voltaire and,

according to Milton, of the Almighty, was such as to make it doubted by

some thinkers even in antiquity. Several men thought the earth

revolved on its axis, but the hypothesis was rejected by Aristotle and

Ptolemy. Heracleides, in the fourth century B. C., said that Mercury

and Venus circled around the sun, and in the third century Aristarchus

of Samos actually anticipated, though it was a mere guess, the

heliocentric theory.

Just before Copernicus various authors seemed to hint at the truth, but

in so mystical or brief a way that little can be made of their

statements. Thus, Nicholas of Cusa [Sidenote: Nicholas of Cusa,

1400-64] argued that "as the earth cannot be the center of the universe

it cannot lack all motion." Leonardo believed that the earth revolved

on its axis, and stated that it was a star and would look, to a man on

{618} the moon, as the moon does to us. In one place he wrote, "the

sun does not move,"--only that enigmatical sentence and nothing more.