[Sidenote: Copernicus, 1473-1543]

Nicholas Copernicus was a native of Thorn in Poland, himself of mixed

Polish and Teutonic blood. At the age of eighteen he went to the

university of Cracow, where he spent three years. In 1496 he was

enabled by an ecclesiastical appointment to go to Italy, where he spent

most of the next ten years in study. He worked at the universities of

Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and lectured--though not as a member of the

university--at Rome. His studies were comprehensive, including civil

law, canon law, medicine, mathematics, and the classics. At Padua, on

May 31, 1503, he was made doctor of canon law. He also studied

astronomy in Italy, talked with the most famous professors of that

science and made observations of the heavens.

Copernicus's uncle was bishop of Ermeland, a spiritual domain and fief

of the Teutonic Order, under the supreme suzerainty, at least after

1525, of the king of Poland. Here Copernicus spent the rest of his

life; the years 1506-1512 in the bishop's palace at Heilsberg, after

1512, except for two not long stays at Allenstein, as a canon at

Frauenburg.

This little town, near but not quite on the Baltic coast, is ornamented

by a beautiful cathedral. On the wall surrounding the close is a small

tower which the astronomer made his observatory. Here, in the long

frosty nights of winter and in the few short hours of summer darkness,

he often lay on his back examining the stars. He had no telescope, and

his other instruments were such crude things as he put together

himself. The most important was what he calls the _Instrumentum

parallacticum_, a wooden isosceles triangle with legs eight feet long

divided into 1000 {619} divisions by ink marks, and a hypotenuse

divided into 1414 divisions. With this he determined the height of the

sun, moon and stars, and their deviation from the vernal point. To

this he added a square (quadrum) which told the height of the sun by

the shadow thrown by a peg in the middle of the square. A third

instrument, also to measure the height of a celestial body, was called

the Jacob's staff. His difficulties were increased by the lack of any

astronomical tables save those poor ones made by Greeks and Arabs. The

faults of these were so great that the fundamental star, _i.e._, the

one he took by which to measure the rest, Spica, was given a longitude

nearly 40 degrees out of the true one.

[Sidenote: Copernican hypothesis]

Nevertheless with these poor helps Copernicus arrived, and that very

early, at his momentous conclusion. His observations, depending as

they did on the weather, were not numerous. His time was spent largely

in reading the classic astronomers and in working out the mathematical

proofs of his hypothesis. He found hints in quotations from ancient

astronomers in Cicero and Plutarch that the earth moved, but he, for

the first time, placed the planets in their true position around the

sun, and the moon as a satellite of the earth. He retained the old

conception of the primum mobile or sphere of fixed stars though he

placed it at an infinitely greater distance than did the ancients, to

account for the absence of any observed alteration (parallax) in the

position of the stars during the year. He also retained the old

conception of circular orbits for the planets, though at one time he

considered the possibility of their being elliptical, as they are.

Unfortunately for his immediate followers the section on this subject

found in his own manuscript was cut out of his printed book.

The precise moment at which Copernicus {620} formulated his theory in

his own mind cannot be told with certainty, but it was certainly before

1516. He kept back his books for a long time, but his light was not

placed under a bushel nevertheless. [Sidenote: 1520] The first rays

of it shown forth in a tract by Celio Calcagnini of which only the

title, "That the earth moves and the heaven is still," has survived.

Some years later Copernicus wrote a short summary of his book, for

private circulation only, entitled "A Short commentary on his

hypotheses concerning the celestial movements." A fuller account of

them was given by his friend and disciple, [Sidenote: _Narratio prima_,

1540] George Joachim, called Rheticus, who left Wittenberg, where he

was teaching, to sit at the master's feet, and who published what was

called _The First Account_.

Finally, Copernicus was persuaded to give his own work to the public.

Foreseeing the opposition it was likely to call forth, he tried to

forestall criticism by a dedication to the Pope Paul III. Friends at

Nuremberg undertook to find a printer, and one of them, the Lutheran

pastor Andrew Osiander, with the best intentions, did the great wrong

of inserting an anonymous preface stating that the author did not

advance his hypotheses as necessarily true, but merely as a means of

facilitating astronomical calculations. At last the greatest work of

the century, _On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres_, [Sidenote:

De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, 1543] came from the press; a copy

was brought to the author on his death bed.

The first of the six books examines the previous authorities, the

second proposes the new theory, the third discusses the precession of

the equinoxes, the fourth proves that the moon circles the earth, the

fifth and most important proves that the planets, including the earth,

move around the sun, and gives correctly the time of the orbits of all

the planets then known, from Mercury with eighty-eight days to Saturn

with thirty {621} years. The sixth book is on the determination of

latitude and longitude from the fixed stars. Copernicus's proofs and

reasons are absolutely convincing and valid as far as they go. It

remained for Galileo and Newton to give further explanations and some

modifications in detail of the new theory.

[Sidenote: Reception of the Copernican theory]

When one remembers the enormous hubbub raised by Darwin's _Origin of

Species_, the reception of Copernicus's no less revolutionary work

seems singularly mild. The idea was too far in advance of the age, too

great, too paradoxical, to be appreciated at once. Save for a few

astronomers like Rheticus and Reinhold, hardly anyone accepted it at

first. It would have been miraculous had they done so.

Among the first to take alarm were the Wittenberg theologians, to whose

attention the new theory was forcibly brought by their colleague

Rheticus. Luther alludes to the subject twice or thrice in his table

talk, most clearly on June 4, 1539, when

mention was made of a certain new astronomer, who tried

to prove that the earth moved and not the sky, sun and

moon, just as, when one was carried along in a boat or

wagon, it seemed to himself that he was still and that

the trees and landscape moved. "So it goes now," said

Luther, "whoever wishes to be clever must not let

anything please him that others do, but must do something

of his own. Thus he does who wishes to subvert the

whole of astronomy: but I believe the Holy Scriptures,

which say that Joshua commanded the sun, and not the

earth, to stand still."

In his _Elements of Physics_, written probably in 1545, but not

published until 1549, Melanchthon said:

The eyes bear witness that the sky revolves every

twenty-four hours. But some men now, either for love

of novelty, or to display their ingenuity, assert that the

earth moves. . . . But it is hurtful and dishonorable to

{622}

assert such absurdities. . . . The Psalmist says that the

sun moves and the earth stands fast. . . . And the earth,

as the center of the universe, must needs be the

immovable point on which the circle turns.

Apparently, however, Melanchthon either came to adopt the new theory,

or to regard it as possible, for he left this passage entirely out of

the second edition of the same work. [Sidenote: 1550] Moreover his

relations with Rheticus continued warm, and Rheinhold continued to

teach the Copernican system at Wittenberg.

The reception of the new work was also surprisingly mild, at first, in

Catholic circles. As early as 1533 Albert Widmanstetter had told

Clement VII of the Copernican hypothesis and the pope did not, at

least, condemn it. Moreover it was a cardinal, Schönberg, who

consulted Paul III on the matter [Sidenote: 1536] and then urged

Copernicus to publish his book, though in his letter the language is so

cautiously guarded against possible heresy that not a word is said

about the earth moving around the sun but only about the moon and the

bodies near it so doing. [Sidenote: 1579] A Spanish theologian,

Didacus a Stunica (Zuñiga) wrote a commentary on Job, which was

licensed by the censors, accepting the Copernican astronomy.

But gradually, as the implications of the doctrine became apparent, the

church in self-defence took a strong stand against it. [Sidenote:

March 5, 1616] The Congregation of the Index issued a decree saying,

"Lest opinions of this sort creep in to the destruction of Catholic

truth, the book of Nicholas Copernicus and others [defending his

hypothesis] are suspended until they be corrected." A little later

Galileo was forced, under the threat of torture, to recant this heresy.

Only when the system had become universally accepted, did the church,

in 1822, first expressly permit the faithful to hold it.

The philosophers were as shy of the new light as {623} the theologians.

Bodin in France and Bacon in England both rejected it; the former was

conservative at heart and the latter was never able to see good in

other men's work, whether that of Aristotle or of Gilbert or of the

great Pole. Possibly he was also misled by Osiander's preface and by

Tycho Brahe. Giordano Bruno, however, welcomed the new idea with

enthusiasm, saying that Copernicus taught more in two chapters than did

Aristotle and the Peripatetics in all their works.

Astronomers alone were capable of weighing the evidence scientifically

and they, at first, were also divided. Erasmus Reinhold, of

Wittenberg, accepted it and made his calculations on the assumption of

its truth, as did an Englishman, John Field. [Sidenote: 1556] Tycho

Brahe, [Sidenote: Tycho Brahe, 1546-1601] on the other hand, tried to

find a compromise between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. He

argued that the earth could not revolve on its axis as the centrifugal

force would hurl it to pieces, and that it could not revolve around the

sun as in that case a change in the position of the fixed stars would

be observed. Both objections were well taken, of course, considered in

themselves alone, but both could be answered by a deeper knowledge.

Brahe therefore considered the earth as the center of the orbits of the

moon, sun, and stars, and the sun as the center of the orbits of the

planets.

The attention to astronomy had two practical corollaries, the

improvement of navigation and the reform of the calendar. Several

better forms of astrolabe, of "sun-compass" (or dial turnable by a

magnet) and an "astronomical ring" for getting the latitude and

longitude by observation of sun and star, were introduced.

[Sidenote: Reform of calendar]

The reform of the Julian calendar was needed on account of the

imperfect reckoning of the length of the {624} year as exactly 365 1/4

days; thus every four centuries there would be three days too much. It

was proposed to remedy this for the present by leaving out ten days,

and for the future by omitting leap-year every century not divisible by

400. The bull of Gregory XIII, [Sidenote: February 24, 1582] who

resumed the duties of the ancient Pontifex Maximus in regulating time,

enjoined Catholic lands to rectify their calendar by allowing the

fifteenth of October, 1582, to follow immediately after the fourth.

This was done by most of Italy, by Spain, Portugal, Poland, most of

Germany, and the Netherlands. Other lands adopted the new calendar

later, England not until 1752 and Russia not until 1917.

[1] _I.e._ the principle thus formulated in the _Encyclopaedia

Britannica_, s.v. "Mathematics": "If s is any class and zero a member

of it, also if when x is a cardinal number and a member of s, also x +

1 is a member of s, then the whole class of cardinal numbers is

contained in s."

[2] Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) had correctly calculated the earth's

circumference at 25,000, which Poseidonius (c. 135-50 B.C.) reduced to

18,000, in which he was followed by Ptolemy (2d century A.D.).

SECTION 5. PHILOSOPHY

[Sidenote: Science, religion and philosophy]

The interrelations of science, religion, and philosophy, though complex

in their operation, are easily understood in their broad outlines.

Science is the examination of the data of experience and their

explanation in logical, physical, or mathematical terms. Religion, on

the other hand, is an attitude towards unseen powers, involving the

belief in the existence of spirits. Philosophy, or the search for the

ultimate reality, is necessarily an afterthought. It comes only after

man is sophisticated enough to see some difference between the

phenomenon and the idea. It draws its premises from both science and

religion: some systems, like that of Plato, being primarily religious

fancy, some, like that of Aristotle, scientific realism.

The philosophical position taken by the Catholic church was that of

Aquinas, Aristotelian realism. [Sidenote: The Reformers] The official

commentary on the _Summa_ was written at this time by Cardinal Cajetan.

Compared to the steady orientation of the Catholic, the Protestant

philosophers wavered, catching often at the latest style in thought, be

it monism or pragmatism. Luther was the {625} spiritual child of

Occam, and the ancestor of Kant. His individualism stood half-way

between the former's nominalism and the latter's transcendentalism and

subjectivism. But the Reformers were far less interested in purely

metaphysical than they were in dogmatic questions. The main use they

made of their philosophy was to bring in a more individual and less

mechanical scheme of salvation. Their great change in point of view

from Catholicism was the rejection of the sacramental, hierarchical

system in favor of justification by faith. This was, in truth, a

stupendous change, putting the responsibility for salvation directly on

God, and dispensing with the mediation of priest and rite.

[Sidenote: Attitude towards reason]

But it was the only important change, of a speculative nature, made by

the Reformers. The violent polemics of that and later times have

concealed the fact that in most of his ideas the Protestant is but a

variety of the Catholic. Both religions accepted as axiomatic the

existence of a personal, ethical God, the immortality of the soul,

future rewards and punishments, the mystery of the Trinity, the

revelation, incarnation and miracles of Christ, the authority of the

Bible and the real presence in the sacrament. Both equally detested

reason.

He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith

[says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from

an inquisitive curiosity; for when God commands us to

believe, he does not propose to have us search into his

divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes,

but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore,

excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of

subjecting its truth to demonstration.

We know that reason is the devil's harlot [says

Luther] and can do nothing but slander and harm all that

God says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ,

you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to

{626}

God, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him

who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what God

is, and by doing so he will draw you into the abyss.

Therefore keep to revelation and don't try to understand.

There are many mysteries in the Bible, Luther acknowledged, that seem

absurd to reason, but it is our duty to swallow them whole. Calvin

abhorred the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy of free

thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation

the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will

should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli,

anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that

our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said

that he wanted no more light than he then had--an instructive contrast

to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence

or conviction, said that theological mysteries seeming absurd to reason

must be believed.

[Sidenote: Radical sects]

Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. Those who represented

the protest against Protestantism and the dissidence of dissent

appealed to the Bible as an authority and abhorred reason as much as

did the orthodox churches. The Antitrinitarians were no more deists or

free thinkers than were the Lutherans. Campanus and Adam Pastor and

Servetus and the Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made

no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian deism, as some modern

Unitarians would do. Their doubts were simply based on a different

exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a

subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Supreme God gave over the

government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an

illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of God {627}

in the Word and a communication of the substance of God in the Spirit."

This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete

heresy, that of Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find

Servetus lecturing on astrology.

[Sidenote: Spiritual Reformers]

Somewhat to the left of the Antitrinitarian sects were a few men, who

had hardly any followers, who may be called, for want of a better term,

Spiritual Reformers. They sought, quite in the nineteenth century

spirit, to make Christianity nothing but an ethical culture. James

Acontius, born in Trent [Sidenote: 1565] but naturalized in England,

published his _Stratagems of Satan_ in 1565 to reduce the fundamental

doctrines of Christianity to the very fewest possible. Sebastian

Franck of Ingolstadt [Sidenote: Franck, 1499-1542] found the only

authority for each man in his inward, spiritual message. He sought to

found no community or church, but to get only readers. These men

passed almost unnoticed in their day.

[Sidenote: Italian skeptics]

There was much skepticism throughout the century. Complete Pyrrhonism

under a thin veil of lip-conformity, was preached by Peter Pomponazzi,

[Sidenote: Pomponazzi,1462-1325] professor of philosophy at Padua,

Ferrara and Bologna. His _De immortalitate animi_ [Sidenote: 1516]

caused a storm by its plain conclusion that the soul perished with the

body. He tried to make the distinction in his favor that a thing might

be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus he denied his belief

in demons and spirits as a philosopher, while affirming that he

believed in them as a Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He

placed Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism on the same level,

broadly hinting that all were impostures.

Public opinion became so interested in the subject of immortality at

this time that when another philosopher, Simon Porzio, tried to lecture

on meteorology at Pisa, his audience interrupted him with cries, "Quid

de anima?" He, also, maintained that the soul of man {628} was like

that of the beasts. But he had few followers who dared to express such

an opinion. After the Inquisition had shown its teeth, the life of the

Italian nation was like that of its great poet, Tasso, whose youth was

spent at the feet of the Jesuits and whose manhood was haunted by fears

of having unwittingly done something that might be punished by the

stake. It was to counteract the pagan opinion, stated to be rapidly

growing, that the Vatican Council forbade all clerics to lecture on the

classics for five years. But in vain! A report of Paul III's

cardinals charged professors of philosophy with teaching impiety.

Indeed, the whole literature of contemporary Italy, from Machiavelli,

who treated Christianity as a false and noxious superstition, to Pulci

who professed belief in nothing but pleasure, is saturated with free

thought. "Vanity makes most humanists skeptics," wrote Ariosto, "why

is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?"

[Sidenote: German skeptics]

In Germany, too, there was some free thought, the most celebrated case

being that of the "godless painters of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham,

Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some

doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further,

asserting that baptism was a human device, that the Scriptures could

not be believed and that the preaching he had heard was but idle talk,

producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized

no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still,

for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature

was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the

Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men were banished from the city.

[Sidenote: French skeptics]

In France, as in Italy, the opening of the century saw signs of

increasing skepticism in the frequent {629} trials of heretics who

denied all Christian doctrines and "all principles save natural ones."

But a spirit far more dangerous to religion than any mere denial

incarnated itself in Rabelais. He did not philosophize, but he poured

forth a torrent of the raw material from which philosophies are made.

He did not argue or attack; he rose like a flood or a tide until men

found themselves either swimming in the sea of mirth and mockery, or

else swept off their feet by it. He studied law, theology and

medicine; he travelled in Germany and Italy and he read the classics,

the schoolmen, the humanists and the heretics. And he found everywhere

that nature and life were good and nothing evil in the world save its

deniers. To live according to nature he built, in his story, the abbey

of Thélème, a sort of hedonist's or anarchist's Utopia where men and

women dwell together under the rule, "Do what thou wilt," and which has

over its gates the punning invitation: "Cy entrez, vous, qui le saint

evangile en sens agile annoncez, quoy qu'on gronde." For Rabelais

there was nothing sacred, or even serious in "revealed religion," and

God was "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and

the circumference nowhere."

Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels

of the day. Bonaventure des Périers, [Sidenote: Des Périers, d. 1544]

in a work called _Cymbalum Mundi_, introduced Luther under the anagram

of Rethulus, a Catholic as Tryocan (_i.e._, Croyant) and a skeptic as

Du Glenier (_i.e._, Incrédule), debating their opinions in a way that

redounded much to the advantage of the last named.

Then there was Stephen Dolet [Sidenote: Dolet, 1509-46] the humanist

publisher of Lyons, burned to death as an atheist, because, in

translating the Axiochos, a dialogue then attributed to Plato, he had

written "After death you will be nothing at all" instead of "After

death you will be no {630} more," as the original is literally to be

construed. The charge was frivolous, but the impression was doubtless

correct that he was a rather indifferent skeptic, disdainful of

religion. He, too, considered the Reformers only to reject them as too

much like their enemies. No Christian church could hold the worshipper

of Cicero and of letters, of glory and of humanity. And yet this sad

and restless man, who found the taste of life as bitter as Rabelais had

found it sweet, died for his faith. He was the martyr of the

Renaissance.

[Sidenote: Bodin]

A more systematic examination of religion was made by Jean Bodin in his

_Colloquy on Secret and Sublime Matters_, commonly called the

_Heptaplomeres_. Though not published until long after the author's

death, it had a brisk circulation in manuscript and won a reputation

for impiety far beyond its deserts. It is simply a conversation

between a Jew, a Mohammedan, a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, a Catholic, an

Epicurean and a Theist. The striking thing about it is the fairness

with which all sides are presented; there is no summing up in favor of

one faith rather than another. Nevertheless, the conclusion would

force itself upon the reader that among so many religions there was

little choice; that there was something true and something false in

all; and that the only necessary articles were those on which all

agreed. Bodin was half way between a theist and a deist; he believed

that the Decalogue was a natural law imprinted in all men's hearts and

that Judaism was the nearest to being a natural religion. He admitted,

however, that the chain of casuality was broken by miracle and he

believed in witchcraft. It cannot be thought that he was wholly

without personal faith, like Machiavelli, and yet his strong argument

against changing religion even if the new be better than the old, is

entirely worldly. With France before his {631} eyes, it is not strange

that he drew the general conclusion that any change of religion is

dangerous and sure to be followed by war, pestilence, famine and

demoniacal possession.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

After the fiery stimulants, compounded of brimstone and Stygian hatred,

offered by Calvin and the Catholics, and after the plethoric gorge of

good cheer at Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's

conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the fruit of the lotus.

In him we find no blast and blaze of propaganda, no fulmination of bull

and ban; nor any tide of earth-encircling Rabelaisian mirth. His words

fall as softly and as thick as snowflakes, and they leave his world a

white page, with all vestiges of previous writings erased. He neither

asseverates nor denies; he merely, as he puts it himself, "juggles,"

treating of idle subjects which he believes nothing at all, for he has

noticed that as soon one denies the possibility of anything, someone

else will say that he has seen it. In short, truth is a near neighbor

to falsehood, and the wise man can only repeat, "Que sais-je?" Let us

live delicately and quietly, finding the world worth enjoying, but not

worth troubling about.

Wide as are the differences between the Greek thinker and the French,

there is something Socratic in the way in which Montaigne takes up

every subject only to suggest doubts of previously held opinion about

it. If he remained outwardly a Catholic, it was because he saw exactly

as much to doubt in other religions. Almost all opinions, he urges,

are taken on authority, for when men begin to reason they draw

diametrically opposite conclusions from the same observed facts. He

was in the civil wars esteemed an enemy by all parties, though it was

only because he had both Huguenot and Catholic friends. "I have seen

in Germany," he wrote, "that Luther hath left as many {632} divisions

and altercations concerning the doubt of his opinions, yea, and more,

than he himself moveth about the Holy Scriptures." The Reformers, in

fact, had done nothing but reform superficial faults and had either

left the essential ones untouched, or increased them. How foolish they

were to imagine that the people could understand the Bible if they

could only read it in their own language!

Montaigne was the first to feel the full significance of the

multiplicity of sects. [Sidenote: Multiplicity of sects] "Is there

any opinion so fantastical, or conceit so extravagant . . . or opinion

so strange," he asked, "that custom hath not established and planted by

laws in some region?" Usage sanctions every monstrosity, including

incest and parricide in some places, and in others "that unsociable

opinion of the mortality of the soul." Indeed, Montaigne comes back to

the point, a man's belief does not depend on his reason, but on where

he was born and how brought up. "To an atheist all writings make for

atheism." "We receive our religion but according to our fashion. . . .

Another country, other testimonies, equal promises, like menaces, might

sembably imprint a clean contrary religion in us."

Piously hoping that he has set down nothing repugnant to the

prescriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman church, where he was

born and out of which he purposes not to die, Montaigne proceeds to

demonstrate that God is unknowable. A man cannot grasp more than his

hand will hold nor straddle more than his legs' length. Not only all

religions, but all scientists give the lie to each other. Copernicus,

having recently overthrown the old astronomy, may be later overthrown

himself. In like manner the new medical science of Paracelsus

contradicts the old and may in turn pass away. The same facts appear

differently to different men, and "nothing comes to us but falsified

{633} and altered by our senses." Probability is as hard to get as

truth, for a man's mind is changed by illness, or even by time, and by

his wishes. Even skepticism is uncertain, for "when the Pyrrhonians

say, 'I doubt,' you have them fast by the throat to make them avow that

at least you are assured and know that they doubt." In short, "nothing

is certain but uncertainty," and "nothing seemeth true that may not

seem false." Montaigne wrote of pleasure as the chief end of man, and

of death as annihilation. The glory of philosophy is to teach men to

despise death. One should do so by remembering that it is as great

folly to weep because one would not be alive a hundred years hence as

it would be to weep because one had not been living a hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: Charron, 1541-1603]

A disciple who dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Montaigne was

Peter Charron. He, too, played off the contradictions of the sects

against each other. All claim inspiration and who can tell which

inspiration is right? Can the same Spirit tell the Catholic that the

books of Maccabees are canonical and tell Luther that they are not?

The senses are fallible and the soul, located by Charron in a ventricle

of the brain, is subject to strange disturbances. Many things almost

universally believed, like immortality, cannot be proved. Man is like

the lower animals. "We believe, judge, act, live and die on faith,"

but this faith is poorly supported, for all religions and all

authorities are but of human origin.

[Sidenote: English skeptics]

English thought followed rather than led that of Europe throughout the

century. At first tolerant and liberal, it became violently religious

towards the middle of the period and then underwent a strong reaction

in the direction of indifference and atheism. For the first years,

before the Reformation, the _Utopia_ may serve as an example. More,

under the influence {634} of the Italian Platonists, pictured his ideal

people as adherents of a deistic, humanitarian religion, with few

priests and holy, tolerant of everything save intolerance. They

worshipped one God, believed in immortality and yet thought that "the

chief felicity of man" lay in the pursuit of rational pleasure.

Whether More depicted this cult simply to fulfil the dramatic

probabilities and to show what was natural religion among men before

revelation came to them, or whether his own opinions altered in later

life, it is certain that he became robustly Catholic. He spent much

time in religious controversy and resorted to austerities. In one

place he tells of a lewd gallant who asked a friar why he gave himself

the pain of walking barefoot. Answered that this pain was less than

hell, the gallant replied, "If there be no hell, what a fool are you,"

and received the retort, "If there be hell, what a fool are you." Sir

Thomas evidently believed there was a hell, or preferred to take no

chances. In one place he argues at length that many and great miracles

daily take place at shrines.

The feverish crisis of the Reformation was followed in the reign of

Elizabeth by an epidemic of skepticism. Widely as it was spread there

can be found little philosophical thought in it. It was simply the

pendulum pulled far to the right swinging back again to the extreme

left. The suspicions expressed that the queen herself was an atheist

were unfounded, but it is impossible to dismiss as easily the numerous

testimonies of infidelity among her subjects. Roger Ascham wrote in

his _Schoolmaster_ [Sidenote: 1563] that the "incarnate devils" of

Englishmen returned from Italy said "there is no God" and then, "they

first lustily condemn God, then scornfully mock his Word . . . counting

as fables the holy mysteries of religion. They make Christ and his

Gospel only serve civil policies. . . . They boldly laugh {635} to

scorn both Protestant and Papist. They confess no Scripture. . . .

They mock the pope; they rail on Luther. . . . They are Epicures in

living and [Greek] _atheoi_ in doctrine."

[Sidenote: 1569]

In like manner Cecil wrote: "The service of God and the sincere

profession of Christianity are much decayed, and in place of it, partly

papistry, partly paganism and irreligion have crept in. . . .

Baptists, deriders of religion, Epicureans and atheists are

everywhere." Ten years later John Lyly wrote that "there never were

such sects among the heathens, such schisms among the Turks, such

misbelief among infidels as is now among scholars." The same author

wrote a dialogue, _Euphues and Atheos_, to convince skeptics, while

from the pulpit the Puritan Henry Smith shot "God's Arrow against

atheists." According to Thomas Nash [Sidenote: 1592] (_Pierce

Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_) atheists are now triumphing and

rejoicing, scorning the Bible, proving that there were men before Adam

and even maintaining "that there are no divells." Marlowe and some of

his associates were suspected of atheism. In 1595 John Baldwin,

examined before Star Chamber, "questioned whether there were a God; if

there were, how he should be known; if by his Word, who wrote the same,

if the prophets and the apostles, they were but men and _humanum est

errare_." The next year Robert Fisher maintained before the same court

that "Christ was no saviour and that the gospel was a fable."

[Sidenote: Bacon]

That one of the prime causes of all this skepticism was to be found in

the religious revolution was the opinion of Francis Bacon. Although

Bacon's philosophic thought is excluded from consideration by the

chronological limits of this book, it may be permissible to quote his

words on this subject. In one place he says that where there are two

religions contending for {636} mastery their mutual animosity will add

warmth to conviction and rather strengthen the adherents of each in

their own opinions, but where there are more than two they will breed

doubt. In another place he says:

Heresies and schisms are of all others the greatest

scandals, yea more than corruption of manners. . . . So

that nothing doth so keep men out of the church and drive

men out of the church as breach of unity. . . . The doctor

of the gentiles saith, "If an heathen come in and hear

you speak with several tongues, will he not say that you

are mad?" And certainly it is little better when atheists

and profane persons hear of so many discordant and

contrary opinions in religion.

But while Bacon saw that when doctors disagree the common man will lose

all faith in them, it was not to religion but to science that he looked

for the reformation of philosophy. Theology, in Bacon's judgment, was

a chief enemy to philosophy, for it seduced men from scientific pursuit

of truth to the service of dogma. "You may find all access to any

species of philosophy," said Bacon, "however pure, intercepted by the

ignorance of divines."

The thought here expressed but sums up the actual trend of the

sixteenth century in the direction of separating philosophy and

religion. In modern times the philosopher has found his inspiration

far more in science than in religion, and the turning-point came about

the time of, and largely as a consequence of, the new observation of

nature, and particularly the new astronomy.

[Sidenote: Revolt against Aristotle]

The prologue to the drama of the new thought was revolt against

Aristotle. "The master of them who know" had become, after the

definite acceptance of his works as standard texts in the universities

of the thirteenth century, an inspired and infallible authority {637}

for all science. With him were associated the schoolmen who debated

the question of realism versus nominalism. But as the mind of man grew

and advanced, what had been once the brace became a galling bond. All

parties united to make common cause against the Stagyrite. The Italian

Platonists attacked him in the name of their, and his, master. Luther

opined that no one had ever understood Aristotle's meaning, that the

ethics of that "damned heathen" directly contradicted Christian virtue,

that any potter would know more of natural science than he, and that it

would be well if he who had started the debate on realism and

nominalism had never been born. Catholics like Usingen protested at

the excessive reverence given to Aristotle at the expense of Christ.

Finally, the French scientist Peter Ramus [Sidenote: Ramus, c. 1515-72]

advanced the thesis at the University of Paris that everything taught

by Aristotle was false. No authority, he argued, is superior to

reason, for it is reason which creates and determines authority.

[Sidenote: Effect of science on philosophy]

In place of Aristotle men turned to nature. "Whosoever in discussion

adduces authority uses not intellect but memory," said Leonardo. Vives

urged that experiment was the only road to truth. The discoveries of

natural laws led to a new conception of external reality, independent

of man's wishes and egocentric theories. It also gave rise to the

conception of uniformity of law. Copernicus sought and found a

mathematical unity in the heavens. It was, above all else, his

astronomy that fought the battle of, and won the victory for, the new

principles of research. Its glory was not so much its positive

addition to knowledge, great as that was, but its mode of thought. By

pure reason a new system was established and triumphed over the

testimony of the senses and of all {638} previous authority, even that

which purported to be revelation. Man was reduced to a creature of

law; God was defined as an expression of law.

How much was man's imagination touched, how was his whole thought and

purpose changed by the Copernican discovery! No longer lord of a

little, bounded world, man crept as a parasite on a grain of dust

spinning eternally through endless space. And with the humiliation

came a great exaltation. For this tiny creature could now seal the

stars and bind the Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun.

What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of soul was not his! To

Copernicus belongs properly the praise lavished by Lucretius on

Epicurus, of having burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having

made man equal to heaven. The history of the past, the religion of the

present, the science of the future--all ideas were transmuted, all

values reversed by this new and wonderful hypothesis.

But all this, of course, was but dimly sensed by the contemporaries of

Copernicus. What they really felt was the new compulsion of natural

law and the necessity of causation. Leonardo was led thus far by his

study of mathematics, which he regarded as the key to natural science.

He even went so far as to define time as a sort of non-geometrical

space.

[Sidenote: Theory of knowledge]

Two things were necessary to a philosophy in harmony with the

scientific view; the first was a new theory of knowledge, the second

was a new conception of the ultimate reality in the universe.

Paracelsus contributed to the first in the direction of modern

empiricism, by defending understanding as that which comprehended

exactly the thing that the hand touched and the eyes saw. Several

immature attempts were made at scientific skepticism. That of

Cornelius Agrippa--_De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et {639}

artium atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio_--can hardly be taken

seriously, as it was regarded by the author himself rather as a clever

paradox. Francis Sanchez, on the other hand, formulated a tenable

theory of the impossibility of knowing anything. A riper theory of

perception, following Paracelsus and anticipating Leibnitz, was that of

Edward Digby, based on the notion of the active correspondence between

mind and matter.

[Sidenote: The ultimate reality]

To the thinker of the sixteenth century the solution of the question of

the ultimate reality seemed to demand some form of identification of

the world-soul with matter. Paracelsus and Gilbert both felt in the

direction of hylozoism, or the theory of the animation of all things.

If logically carried out, as it was not by them, this would have meant

that everything was God. The other alternative, that God was

everything, was developed by a remarkable man, who felt for the new

science the enthusiasm of a religious convert, Giordano Bruno.

[Sidenote: Bruno, 1548-1600]

Born at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth year the

Dominican friary. This step he soon regretted, and, after being

disciplined for disobedience, fled, first to Rome and then to Geneva.

Thence he wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg [Sidenote:

1569] and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including Oxford.

In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was imprisoned by the Inquisition,

and after long years was finally burnt at the stake in Rome.

[Sidenote: February 17, 1600]

In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. At Wittenberg he

spoke of Luther as "a second Hercules who bound the three-headed and

triply-crowned hound of hell and forced him to vomit forth his poison."

But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Reformers as more ignorant

than himself. His _Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast_, in the disguise

of an {640} attack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an assault

on revealed religion. His treatise _On the Heroic Passions_ aims to

show that moral virtues are not founded on religion but on reason.

[Sidenote: The new astronomy]

The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he felt in almost

boundless measure for the new astronomy, "by which," as he himself

wrote, "we are moved to discover the infinite cause of an infinite

effect, and are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside,

apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as deity is

situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us as we can be to

ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa Bruno had learned that God may be

found in the smallest as in the greatest things in the world; the

smallest being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in

energy, and all being united in the "Monad," or "the One." Now,

Bruno's philosophy is nothing but the cosmological implication and the

metaphysical justification of the Copernician theory in the conceptual

terms of Nicholas of Cusa.

Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the senses, dazzled by the

whirling maze of worlds without end scattered like blazing sparks

throughout space, drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a

paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to celebrate his new

faith, the religion of science. The universe for him was composed of

atoms, tiny "minima" that admit no further division. Each one of these

is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some higher unity until finally

"the monad of monads" was found in God. But this was no tribal

Jehovah, no personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle;

nearly identical with Natural Law.

{641}

CHAPTER XIII

THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES

SECTION 1. TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE

Because religion has in the past protested its own intolerance the most

loudly, it is commonly regarded as the field of persecution _par

excellence_. This is so far from being the case that it is just in the

field of religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard

struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work in the vineyard

had been forcibly hauled thither, whereas the other son, admitting his

willingness to go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized

countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by going bare-foot and

long-haired than by proclaiming novel religious views; he would be in

vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic

doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he

would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this

state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle

between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result,

and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two

parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the other, respect

for each other's rights.

[Sidenote: Intolerance, Catholics]

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Almost all religions and almost all statesmen were then equally

intolerant when they had the power to be so. The Catholic church, with

that superb consistency that no new light can alter, has {642} always

asserted that the opinion that everyone should have freedom of

conscience [Sidenote: Freedom of conscience] was "madness flowing from

the most foul fountain of indifference." [1] Augustine believed that

the church should "compel men to enter in" to the kingdom, by force.

Aquinas argued that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have

heard the truth a sin, and that "heretics deserve not only to be

excommunicated but to be put to death." One of Luther's propositions

condemned by the bull _Exsurge Domine_ was that it is against the will

of the Holy Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote: "Who

ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to slaughter heretics who were

nothing else than heretics?" the proposition was condemned, by the

Sorbonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of God and of man. The

power of the pope to depose and punish heretical princes was asserted

in the bull of February 15, 1559.

The theory of the Catholic church was put into instant practice; the

duty of persecution was carried out by the Holy Office, of which Lord

Acton, though himself a Catholic, has said:[2]

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly

the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things

in which they co-operated, followed or assented, as the

distinctive feature of papal Rome. . . . It is the

principal thing with which the papacy is identified and by

which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition

is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is

regulated and determined by his opinion about religious

assassination.

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not the judgment of the

church. A prelate of the papal {643} household published in 1895, the

following words in the _Annales ecclesiastici_:[3]

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils

and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle

Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberalism that

bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little

reasons to defend the Inquisition! Let no one speak of

the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the

church needed excuses. O blessed flames of those pyres

by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons

were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes

of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and

eternal damnation! O noble and venerable memory of

Torquemada!

[Sidenote: Protestants]

So much for the Catholics. If any one still harbors the traditional

prejudice that the early Protestants were more liberal, he must be

undeceived. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, [Sidenote:

Luther] confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is

hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of

freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they

did.

In his first period Luther expressed the theory of toleration as well

as anyone can. He wrote: "The pope is no judge of matters pertaining

to God's Word and the faith, but a Christian must examine and judge

them himself, as he must live and die by thorn." Again he said:

"Heresy can never be prevented by force. . . . Heresy is a spiritual

thing; it cannot be cut with iron nor burnt with fire nor drowned in

water." And yet again, "Faith is free. What could a heresy trial do?

No more than make people agree by mouth or in writing; it could not

compel the heart. For true is the proverb: 'Thoughts are free of

taxes.'" Even {644} when the Anabaptists began to preach doctrines

that he thoroughly disliked, Luther at first advised the government to

leave them unmolested to teach and believe what they liked, "be it

gospel or lies."

But alas for the inconsistency of human nature! When Luther's party

ripened into success, he saw things quite differently. The first

impulse came from the civil magistrate, whom the theologians at first

endured, then justified and finally urged on. All persons save priests

were forbidden [Sidenote: February 26, 1527] by the Elector John of

Saxony to preach or baptize, a measure aimed at the Anabaptists. In

the same year, under this law, twelve men and one woman were put to

death, and such executions were repeated several times in the following

years, _e.g._ in 1530, 1532 and 1538. In the year 1529 came the

terrible imperial law, passed by an alliance of Catholics and Lutherans

at the Diet of Spires, condemning all Anabaptists to death, and

interpreted to cover cases of simple heresy in which no breath of

sedition mingled. A regular inquisition was set up in Saxony, with

Melanchthon on the bench, and under it many persons were punished, some

with death, some with life imprisonment, and some with exile.

While Luther took no active part in these proceedings, and on several

occasions gave the opinion that exile was the only proper punishment,

he also, at other times, justified persecution on the ground that he

was suppressing not heresy but blasphemy. As he interpreted blasphemy,

in a work published about 1530, it included the papal mass, the denial

of the divinity of Christ or of any other "manifest article of the

faith, clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout

Christendom." The government should also, in his opinion, put to death

those who preached sedition, anarchy or the abolition of private

property.

[Sidenote: Melanchthon]

Melanchthon was far more active in the pursuit of {645} heretics than

was his older friend. He reckoned the denial of infant baptism, or of

original sin, and the opinion that the eucharistic bread did not

contain the real body and blood of Christ, as blasphemy properly

punishable by death. He blamed Brenz for his tolerance, asking why we

should pity heretics more than does God, who sends them to eternal

torment? Brenz was convinced by this argument and became a persecutor

himself.

[Sidenote: Bucer and Capito]

The Strassburgers, who tried to take a position intermediate between

Lutherans and Zwinglians, were as intolerant as any one else. They put

to death a man for saying that Christ was a mere man and a false

prophet, and then defended this act in a long manifesto asking whether

all religious customs of antiquity, such as the violation of women, be

tolerated, and, if not, why they should draw the line at those who

aimed not at the physical dishonor, but at the eternal damnation, of

their wives and daughters?

[Sidenote: Zwingli]

The Swiss also punished for heresy. Felix Manz was put to death by

drowning, [Sidenote: January 5, 1527] the method of punishment chosen

as a practical satire on his doctrine of baptism of adults by

immersion. At the same time George Blaurock was cruelly beaten and

banished under threat of death. [Sidenote: September 9, 1527] Zurich,

Berne and St. Gall published a joint edict condemning Anabaptists to

death, and under this law two Anabaptists were sentenced in 1528 and

two more in 1532.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

In judicially murdering Servetus the Genevans were absolutely

consistent with Calvin's theory. In the preface to the _Institutes_ he

admitted the right of the government to put heretics to death and only

argued that Protestants were not heretics. Grounding himself on the

law of Moses, he said that the death decreed by God to idolatry in the

Old Testament was a universal law binding on Christians. He thought

that {646} Christians should hate the enemies of God as much as did

David, and when Renée of Ferrara suggested that that law might have

been abrogated by the new dispensation, Calvin retorted that any such

gloss on a plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin went

further, and when Castellio argued that heretics should not be punished

with death, Calvin said that those who defended heretics in this manner

were equally culpable and should be equally punished.

Given the premises of the theologians, their arguments were

unanswerable. Of late the opinion has prevailed that his faith cannot

be wrong whose life is in the right. But then it was believed that the

creed was the all-important thing; that God would send to hell those

who entertained wrong notions of his scheme of salvation. "We utterly

abhor," says the Scots' Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those

that affirm that men who live according to equity and justice shall be

saved, what religion so ever they have professed."

[Sidenote: Tolerance]

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ventured to protest in

the name of their master. In general, the persecuted sects,

Anabaptists and Unitarians, were firmly for tolerance, by which their

own position would have been improved. [Sidenote: Erasmus] Erasmus

was thoroughly tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise

specially devoted to the subject, uttered many _obiter dicta_ in favor

of mercy and wrote many letters to the great ones of the earth

interceding for the oppressed. His broad sympathies, his classical

tastes, his horror of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not

have permitted him to resort to the coarse arms of rack and stake even

against infidels and Turks.

The noblest plea for tolerance from the Christian standpoint was that

written by Sebastian Castellio [Sidenote: Castellio] as a protest

against the execution of Servetus. He {647} collects all the

authorities ancient and modern, the latter including Luther and Erasmus

and even some words, inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by

Calvin himself. "The more one knows of the truth the less one is

inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely observes, and yet,

"there is no sect which does not condemn all others and wish to reign

alone. Thence come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments,

burnings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture and torment that

is plied every day because of some opinions not pleasing to the

government, or even because of things unknown." But Christians burn

not only infidels but even each other, for the heretic calls on the

name of Christ as he perishes in agony.

Who would not think that Christ were Moloch, or some

such god, if he wished that men be immolated to him and

burnt alive? . . . Imagine that Christ, the judge of all,

were present and himself pronounced sentence and lit

the fire,--who would not take Christ for Satan? For

what else would Satan do than burn those who call on

the name of Christ? O Christ, creator of the world, dost

thou see such things? And hast thou become so totally

different from what thou wast, so cruel and contrary to

thyself? When thou wast on earth, there was no one

gentler or more compassionate or more patient of injuries.

Calvin called upon his henchmen Beza to answer this "blasphemy" of one

that must surely be "the chosen vessel of Satan." Beza replied to

Castellio that God had given the sword to the magistrate not to be

borne in vain and that it was better to have even a cruel tyrant than

to allow everyone to do as he pleased. Those who forbid the punishment

of heresy are, in Beza's opinion, despisers of God's Word and might as

well say that even parricides should not be chastized.

Two authors quoted in favor of tolerance more than {648} they deserve

to be are Sir Thomas More [Sidenote: More] and Montaigne. In Utopia,

indeed, there was no persecution, save of the fanatic who wished to

persecute others. But even in Utopia censure of the government by a

private individual was punishable by death. And, twelve years after

the publication of the _Utopia_, More came to argue "that the burning

of heretics is lawful and well done," and he did it himself

accordingly. The reason he gave, in his _Dialogue_, was that heretics

also persecute, and that it would put the Catholics at an unfair

disadvantage to allow heresy to wax unhindered until it grew great

enough to crush them. There is something in this argument. It is like

that today used against disarmament, that any nation which started it

would put itself at the mercy of its rivals.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

The spirit of Montaigne was thoroughly tolerant, because he was always

able to see both sides of everything; one might even say that he was

negatively suggestible, and always saw the "other" side of an opinion

better than he saw his own side of it. He never came out strongly for

toleration, but he made two extremely sage remarks about it. The first

was that it was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put men

to death for their sake. The second was thus phrased, in the old

English translation: "It might be urged that to give factions the

bridle to uphold their opinion, is by that facility and ease, the ready

way to mollify and release them; and to blunt the edge, which is

sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty."

Had the course of history been decided by weight of argument,

persecution would have been fastened on the world forever, for the

consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience.

But just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital question by

argument, so the course of races and of civilizations is decided by

factors lying deeper than {649} the logic of publicists can reach.

Modern toleration developed from two very different sources; by one of

which the whole point of view of the race has changed, and by the other

of which a truce between warring factions, at first imposed as bitter

necessity, has developed, because of its proved value, into a permanent

peace.

[Sidenote: Renaissance]

The first cause of modern tolerance is the growing rationalism of which

the seeds were sown by the Renaissance. The generation before Luther

saw an almost unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned

opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian ethics;

Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the soul; More could frame a

Utopia of deists, and Machiavelli could treat religion as an instrument

in the hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this liberty

was admirable; but it was really narrow and "academic" in the worst

sense of the word. The scholars who vindicated for themselves the

right to say and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and in

university halls, never dreamed that the people had the same rights.

Even Erasmus was always urging Luther not to communicate imprudent

truths to the vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so vexed

that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted or boiled" for it.

Erasmus's good friend Ammonius jocosely complained that heretics were

so plentiful in England in 1511 before the Reformation had been heard

of, that the demand for faggots to burn them was enhancing the price of

fire-wood. Indeed, in this enlightened era of the Renaissance, what

porridge was handed to the common people? What was free, except

dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal and persecuted

everywhere else? What tolerance was extended to the Hussites? What

mercy was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola?

{650} [Sidenote: Reformation]

Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has been said of the

intolerance of the Reformers, the second cause that extended modern

freedom of conscience from the privileged few to the masses, was the

Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few years, all the glorious

culture of the Renaissance with a dark mist of fanaticism, it

nevertheless proved, contrary to its own purpose, one of the two

parents of liberty. What neither the common ground of the Christians

in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of God, nor their enlightenment by

the Spirit, could produce, was finally wrung from their mutual and

bitter hatreds. Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark

and noisome soil, that of religious liberty sprouting from religious

war has been the fairest.

The steps were gradual. First, after the long deadlock of Lutheran and

Catholic, came to be worked out the principle of the toleration of the

two churches, [Sidenote: 1555] embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The

Compact of Warsaw [Sidenote: 1573] granted absolute religious liberty

to the nobles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with slaughter

in the name of the faith, took a longer step in the direction of

toleration in the Union of Utrecht. [Sidenote: 1579] The government

of Elizabeth, acting from prudential motives only, created and

maintained an extra-legal tolerance of Catholics, again and again

refusing to molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The papists

even hoped to obtain legal recognition when Francis Bacon proposed to

tolerate all Christians except those who refused to fight a foreign

enemy. France found herself in a like position, [Sidenote: 1592] and

solved it by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the

Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians for each other

blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, [Sidenote: 1598] but after that

lesson persecution on a large scale was at an end. Indeed, before its

end, wide religious {651} liberty had been granted in some of the

American colonies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland.

[1] Gregory XVI, Encyclical, _Mirari vos_, 1832.

[2] _Letters to Mary Gladstone_, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p. 298 f.

[3] C. Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums_, 3, 1911, p. 390.

SECTION 2. WITCHCRAFT

Some analogy to the wave of persecution and confessional war that swept

over Europe at this time can be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were

examples of those manias to which mankind is periodically subject. They

run over the face of the earth like epidemics or as a great fire consumes

a city. Beginning in a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to

trace, the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maximum

fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it were, dies away,

often quite suddenly. Such manias were the Children's Crusade and the

zeal of the flagellants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad

speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the panics that

repeatedly visit our markets. To the same category belong the religious

and superstitious delusions of the sixteenth century.

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to trace than their

causes. Certainly, reason does nothing to control them. In almost every

case there are a few sane men to point out, with perfect rationality, the

nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all cases their words

fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, imprisoned, sometimes put to death

for their pains, whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame

of current passion is listened to, rewarded and followed.

[Sidenote: Ancient magic]

The original stuff from which the mania was wrought is a savage survival.

Hebrew and Roman law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the

survival of magic, still called in Italy, "the old religion," and new

superstitions added to it. Something of the ancient enchantment still

lies upon the {652} fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one sometimes

comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the

tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through

the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny

harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock

and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over

their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking

under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the

pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the

chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins

and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of

the Willows[1] and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling in the

rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the calm of pools is so

complete that it seems as if, according to Luther's words, the throwing

of a stone into the water would raise a tempest. But on moonlit, windy,

Walpurgis Night, witches audibly ride by, hooted at by the owls, and vast

spectres dance in the cloud-banks beyond the Brocken.

[Sidenote: The witch]

The witch has become a typical figure: she was usually a simple, old

woman living in a lonely cottage with a black cat, gathering herbs by the

light of the moon. But she was not always an ancient beldam; some

witches were known as the purest and fairest maidens of the village; some

were ladies in high station; some were men. A ground for suspicion was

sometimes furnished by the fact that certain charletans playing upon the

credulity of the ignorant, professed to be able by sorcery to find money,

"to provoke persons to love," or to consume the body and goods of a

client's enemy. Black magic was occasionally resorted to to get rid

{653} of personal or political enemies. More often a wise woman would be

sought for her skill in herbs and her very success in making cures would

sometimes be her undoing.

[Sidenote: The devil]

If the witch was a domestic article in Europe, the devil was an imported

luxury from Asia. Like Aeneas and many another foreign conqueror, when

he came to rule the land he married its princess--in this case Hulda the

pristine goddess of love and beauty--and adopted many of the native

customs. It is difficult for us to imagine what a personage the devil

was in the age of the Reformation. Like all geniuses he had a large

capacity for work and paid great attention to detail. Frequently he took

the form of a cat or a black dog with horns to frighten children by

"skipping to and fro and sitting upon the top of a nettle"; again he

would obligingly hold a review of evil spirits for the satisfaction of

Benvenuto Cellini's curiosity. He was at the bottom of all the

earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars of the century, and also, if

we may trust their mutual recriminations, he was the special patron of

the pope on the one hand and of Calvin on the other. Luther often talked

with him, though in doing so the sweat poured from his brow and his heart

almost stopped beating. Luther admitted that the devil always got the

best of an argument and could only be banished by some unprintably nasty

epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satellites often took the

form of men or women and under the name of incubi and succubi had sexual

intercourse with mortals. One of the most abominable features of the

witch craze was that during its height hundreds of children of four or

five years old confessed to being the devil's paramours.

So great was the power of Satan that, in the common belief, many persons

bartered their souls to him {654} in return for supernatural gifts in

this life. To compensate them for the loss of their salvation, these

persons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite to their

neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, causing sickness to man

and animals, making children cry themselves to death before baptism,

rendering marriages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms to

blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to compel love.

[Sidenote: Witches' Sabbath]

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the celebration of

blasphemous and obscene rites in an assembly known as the Witches'

Sabbath. To enable themselves to ride to the meeting-place on

broomsticks, the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a toad to

it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of an infant, the

powdered bones of a hanged man and certain herbs. The meeting then

indulged in a parody of the mass, for, so the grave doctors taught, as

Christ had his sacraments the devil had his "unsacraments" or

"execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the form of a goat, dog, cat or

ape and received the homage of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony.

After a banquet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches followed.

All this superstition smouldered along in the embers of folk tales for

centuries until it was blown into a devastating blaze by the breath of

theologians who started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given

by Innocence VIII in his bull _Summis desiderantes_. [Sidenote: December

5, 1484] The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that many persons in

Germany had had intercourse with demons and had by incantations hindered

the birth of children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave authority

to Henry Institoris and James Sprenger to correct, incarcerate, punish

and fine such persons, calling in, if need be, the aid of the secular

arm. These {655} gentlemen acquitted themselves with unsurpassed zeal.

Not content with trying and punishing people brought before them, they

put forth _The Witches' Hammer_, [Sidenote: _Malleus Maleficarum_, 1487]

called by Lea the most portentous monument of superstition ever produced.

In the next two centuries it was printed twenty-nine times. The

University of Cologne at once decided that to doubt the reality of

witchcraft was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand,

having all it could do with Jews and heretics, treated witchcraft as a

diabolical delusion.

[Sidenote: Inquisition]

Though most men, including those whom we consider the choice and

master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and More, firmly believed in the

objective reality of witchcraft, they were not obsessed by the subject,

as were their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found for the

intensification of the fanaticism. The first was the use of torture by

the Inquisition. [Sidenote: Torture] The crime was of such a nature

that it could hardly be proved save by confession, and this, in general,

could be extracted only by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to

note that in England where the spirit of the law was averse to torture,

no progress in witch-hunting took place until a substitute for the rack

had been found, first in pricking the body of the witch with pins to find

the anaesthetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in depriving her

of sleep.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and the bibliolatry of

Protestantism. The religious debate heated the spiritual atmosphere and

turned men's thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continually

harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the injunction, "Thou shalt

not suffer a witch to live," and the demoniacs of the New Testament,

weighed heavily upon the shepherds of the people and upon their flocks.

Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored not a doubt. The first use

he made of the ban was to {656} excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an

idiotic child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recommended the

authorities to drown it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in

private talk and in public sermons, he recommended that witches should be

put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties. As a

matter of fact, four witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540.

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of their master.

In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-four women were burned or quartered for

the crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps

the occasion of a new English law against witchcraft. Richard Baxter

wrote on the _Certainty of a World of Spirits_. At a much later time the

bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John Wesley's remark

that giving up witchcraft meant giving up the Bible.

[Sidenote: The madness]

After the mania reached its height in the closing years of the century,

anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry,

or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a

murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician,

baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding

and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that

witchcraft was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any contrariety

met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he or she immediately thought

of the black art, and considered the most likely person for denunciation.

This would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if she had a

tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad luck to you!" on some previous

occasion. She would then be hauled before the court, promised liberty if

she confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of Satan or to be sure

that she was not hiding a charm {657} about her person. Torture in some

form was then applied, and a ghastly list it was, pricking with needles

under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow spurted out, wrenching of

the head with knotted cords, toasting the feet before a fire, suspending

the victim by the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop until

the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work would be kept up until

the poor woman either died under the torture, or confessed, when she was

sentenced without mercy, usually to be burned, sometimes to lesser

punishments.

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, once accused, escaped.

John Bodin, a man otherwise enlightened and learned, earned himself the

not unjust name of "Satan's attorney-general" by urging that strict proof

could not be demanded by the very nature of these cases and that no

suspected person should ever be released unless the malice of her

accusers was plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, for

each witch denounced accomplices until almost the whole population of

certain districts was suspected. So frequently did they accuse their

judges or their sovereign of having assisted at the witches' sabbath,

that this came to be discounted as a regular trick of the devil.

Persecution raged in some places, chiefly in Germany, like a visitation

of pestilence or war. Those who tried to stop it fell victims to their

own courage, and, unless they recanted, languished for years in prison,

or were executed as possessed by devils themselves. At Trèves the

persecution was encouraged by the cupidity of the magistrates who

profited by confiscation of the property of those sentenced. At Bonn

schoolboys of nine or ten, fair young maidens, many priests and scores of

good women were done to death.

[Sidenote: Numbers executed]

No figures have been compiled for the total number {658} of victims of

this insanity. In England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more

than well started on its career, 125 persons are known to have been tried

for witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for the crime. In

Venice the Inquisition punished 199 persons for sorcery during the

sixteenth century. In the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia,

in 1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500

witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Würzburg 900. About

800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In

the year 1586 the archbishop of Trèves burned 118 women and two men for

this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of

the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be

reckoned by the tens of thousands.

Throughout the century there were not wanting some signs of a healthy

skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg,

[Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the

episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies

should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson

wrote in his _School of Abuse_: [Sidenote: 1578] "Do not imitate those

foolish patients, who, having sought all means of recovery and are never

the nearer, run into witchcraft." Leonardo da Vinci called belief in

necromancy the most foolish of all human delusions.

As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at its height, the more

honor must go to the few who wrote _ex professo_ against it. The first

of these, of any note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer.

[Sidenote: Weyer] In his book _De praestigiis daemonum_ [Sidenote: 1563]

he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded,

{659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the

victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce

with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations.

Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really

used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not

admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and

cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and

elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant

of Satan.

[Sidenote: Scott]

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superstition was Reginald

Scott's _Discovery of Witchcraft_, wherein the lewd dealings of _Witches

and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise

upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils_. [Sidenote: 1584]

Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he

was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he

endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and

traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter

flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done

to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as

ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and

religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily

be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental

disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the

cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame

for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not

be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on _a priori_

grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable

to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the

work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by

order of James I.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art

of rebutting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless

Bodin's abominable _Demonology_ that called forth his celebrated essay on

witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit.

The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from

him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his

knowledge of the world, is easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion

of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to

kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly

boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite

treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an

icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the

mental passions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no

danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what

vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he

had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the

lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets

another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to

the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to

be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a

marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty

then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the

wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they

should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill

human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light."

And what do the stories amount to?

How much more natural and more likely do I find it

that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours

should pass from east to west? How much more natural

that our understanding may by the volubility of our

loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than

that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and

bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a

chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to

believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain

away or break down the truth of the report in some way

not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through

the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me

and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own

presence and in a particular place to make me see ten

or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an

old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by

her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long

before was most famous in that profession. I saw both

proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some

insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired

and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed

and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away

by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my

conscience I should rather have appointed them hellebore

than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime.

Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we cannot get an

explanation--and any explanation is more probable than magic--it is safe

to disbelieve: "Fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the

vulgar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows and

such other bugbears and chimaeras." For Montaigne the evil spell upon

the mind of the race had been broken; alas! that it took so long for

other men to throw it off!

[1] Erikönig.

SECTION 3. EDUCATION

[Sidenote: Education]

From the most terrible superstition let us turn to the noblest, most

inspiring and most important work of {662} humanity. With each

generation the process of handing on to posterity the full heritage of

the race has become longer and more complex.

[Sidenote: Schools]

It was, therefore, upon a very definite and highly developed course of

instruction that the contemporary of Erasmus entered. There were a few

great endowed schools, like Eton and Winchester and Deventer, in which

the small boy might begin to learn his "grammar"--Latin, of course.

Some of the buildings at Winchester and Eton are the same now as they

were then, the quite beautiful chapel and dormitories of red brick at

Eton, for example. Each of these two English schools had, at this

time, less than 150 pupils, and but two masters, but the great Dutch

school, Deventer, under the renowned tuition of Hegius, boasted 2200

scholars, divided into eight forms. Many an old woodcut shows us the

pupils gathered around the master as thick as flies, sitting

cross-legged on the floor, some intent on their books and others

playing pranks, while there seldom fails to be one undergoing the

chastisement so highly recommended by Solomon. These great schools did

not suffice for all would-be scholars. In many villages there was some

poor priest or master who would teach the boys what he knew and prepare

them thus for higher things. In some places there were tiny

school-houses, much like those now seen in rural America. Such an one,

renovated, may be still visited at Mansfeld, and its quaint inscription

read over the door, to the effect that a good school is like the wooden

horse of Troy. When the boys left home they lived more as they do now

at college, being given a good deal of freedom out of hours. The

poorer scholars used their free times to beg, for as many were

supported in this way then as now are given scholarships and other

charitable aids in our universities.

[Sidenote: Flogging]

Though there were a good many exceptions, most of {663} the teachers

were brutes. The profession was despised as a menial one and indeed,

even so, many a gentleman took more care in the selection of grooms and

gamekeepers than he did in choosing the men with whom to entrust his

children. Of many of the tutors the manners and morals were alike

outrageous. They used filthy language to the boys, whipped them

cruelly and habitually drank too much. They made the examinations,

says one unfortunate pupil of such a master, like a trial for murder.

The monitor employed to spy on the boys was known by the significant

name of "the wolf." Public opinion then approved of harsh methods.

Nicholas Udall, the talented head-master of Eton, was warmly commended

for being "the best flogging teacher in England"--until he was removed

for his immorality.

[Sidenote: Latin]

The principal study--after the rudiments of reading and writing the

mother tongue were learned--was Latin. As, at the opening of the

century, there were usually not enough books to go around, the

pedagogue would dictate declensions and conjugations, with appropriate

exercises, to his pupils. The books used were such as _Donatus on the

Parts of Speech_, a poem called the _Facetus_ by John of Garland,

intended to give moral, theological and grammatical information all in

one, and selecting as the proper vehicle rhymed couplets. Other

manuals were the _Floretus_, a sort of abstruse catechism, the

_Cornutus_, a treatise on synonyms, and a dictionary in which the words

were arranged not alphabetically but according to their supposed

etymology--thus _hirundo_ (swallow) from _aer_ (air). One had to know

the meaning of the word before one searched for it! The grammars were

written in a barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can any

man now readily understand the following definition of "pronoun," taken

from a book intended {664} for beginners, published in 1499? "Pronomen

. . . significat substantiam seu entitatem sub modo conceptus

intrinseco permanentis seu habitus et quietis sub determinatae

apprehensionis formalitate."

That with all these handicaps boys learned Latin at all, and some boys

learned it extremely well, must be attributed to the amount of time

spent on the subject. For years it was practically all that was

studied--for the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic

reduced itself to this--and they not only read a great deal but wrote

and spoke Latin. Finally, it became as easy and fluent to them as

their own tongue. Many instances that sound like infant prodigies are

known to us; boys who spoke Latin at seven and wrote eloquent orations

in it at fourteen, were not uncommon. It is true that the average boy

spoke then rather a translation of his own language into Latin than the

best idiom of Rome. The following ludicrous specimens of conversation,

throwing light on the manners as well as on the linguistic attainments

of the students, were overheard in the University of Paris: "Capis me

pro uno alio"; "Quando ego veni de ludendo, ego bibi unum magnum vitrum

totum plenum de vino, sine deponendo nasum de vitro"; "In prandendo non

facit nisi lichare suos digitos."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

Though there was no radical reform in education during the century

between Erasmus and Shakespeare, two strong tendencies may be discerned

at work, one looking towards a milder method, the other towards the

extension of elementary instruction to large classes hitherto left

illiterate. The Reformation, which was rather poor in original

thought, was at any rate a tremendous vulgarizer of the current

culture. It was a popular movement in that it passed around to the

people the ideas that had hitherto been the possession of the few. Its

first effect, indeed, together with that of {665} the tumults that

accompanied it, was for the moment unfavorable to all sorts of

learning. Not only wars and rebellions frightened the youth from

school, but men arose, both in England and Germany, who taught that if

God had vouchsafed his secrets to babes and sucklings, ignorance must

be better than wisdom and that it was therefore folly to be learned.

[Sidenote: Luther]

Luther not only turned the tide, but started it flowing in that great

wave that has finally given civilized lands free and compulsory

education for all. In a _Letter to the Aldermen and Cities of Germany

on the Erection and Maintenance of Christian Schools_ [Sidenote: 1524]

he urged strongly the advantages of learning. "Good schools [he

maintained] are the tree from which grow all good conduct in life, and

if they decay great blindness must follow in religion and in all useful

arts. . . . Therefore, all wise rulers have thought schools a great

light in civil life." Even the heathen had seen that their children

should be instructed in all liberal arts and sciences both to fit them

for war and government and to give them personal culture. Luther

several times suggested that "the civil authorities ought to compel

people to send their children to school. If the government can compel

men to bear spear and arquebus, to man ramparts and perform other

martial duties, how much more has it the right to compel them to send

their children to school?" Repeatedly he urged upon the many princes

and burgomasters with whom he corresponded the duty of providing

schools in every town and village. A portion of the ecclesiastical

revenues confiscated by the German states was in fact applied to this

end. Many other new schools were founded by princes and were known as

"Fürstenschulen" or gymnasia.

[Sidenote: England]

The same course was run in England. Colet's foundation of St. Paul's

School in London, [Sidenote: 1510] for 153 boys, has perhaps won an

undue fame, for it was {666} backward in method and not important in

any special way, but it is a sign that people at that time were turning

their thoughts to the education of the young. When Edward VI mounted

the throne the dissolution of the chantries had a very bad effect, for

their funds had commonly supported scholars. A few years previously

Henry VIII had ordered "every of you that be parsons, vicars, curates

and also chantry priests and stipendiaries to . . . teach and bring up

in learning the best you can all such children of your parishioners as

shall come to you, or at least teach them to read English." Edward VI

revived this law in ordering chantry priests to "exercise themselves in

teaching youth to read and write," and he also urged people to

contribute to the maintenance of primary schools in each parish. He

also endowed certain grammar schools with the revenues of the chantries.

In Scotland the _Book of Discipline_ advocated compulsory education,

children of the well-to-do at their parents' expense, poor children at

that of the church.

[Sidenote: Jesuit colleges]

In Catholic countries, too, there was a passion for founding new

schools. Especially to be mentioned are the Jesuit "colleges," "of

which," Bacon confesses, "I must say, _Talis cum sis utinam noster

esses_." How well frequented they were is shown by the following

figures. The Jesuit school at Vienna had, in 1558, 500 pupils, in

Cologne, about the same time, 517, in Trèves 500, in Mayence 400, in

Spires 453, in Munich 300. The method of the Jesuits became famous for

its combined gentleness and art. They developed consummate skill in

allowing their pupils as much of history, science and philosophy as

they could imbibe without jeoparding their faith. From this point of

view their instruction was an inoculation against free thought. But it

must be allowed that their teaching of the {667} classics was

excellent. They followed the humanists' methods, but they adapted them

to the purpose of the church.

[Sidenote: The classics]

All this flood of new scholars had little that was new to study.

Neither Reformers nor humanists had any searching or thorough revision

to propose; all that they asked was that the old be taught better: the

humanities more humanely. Erasmus wrote much on education, and,

following him Vives and Budé and Melanchthon and Sir Thomas Elyot and

Roger Ascham; their programs, covering the whole period from the cradle

to the highest degree, seem thorough, but what does it all amount to,

in the end, but Latin and Greek? Possibly a little arithmetic and

geometry and even astronomy were admitted, but all was supposed to be

imbibed as a by-product of literature, history from Livy, for example,

and natural science from Pliny. Indeed, it often seems as if the

knowledge of things was valued chiefly for the sake of literary

comprehension and allusion.

The educational reformers differed little from one another save in such

details as the best authors to read. Colet preferred Christian

authors, such as Lactantius, Prudentius and Baptista Mantuan. Erasmus

thought it well to begin with the verses of Dionysius Cato, and to

proceed through the standard authors of Greece and Rome. For the sake

of making instruction easy and pleasant he wrote his _Colloquies_--in

many respects his _chef d' oeuvre_ if not the best Latin produced by

anyone during the century. In this justly famous work, which was

adopted and used by all parties immediately, he conveyed a considerable

amount of liberal religious and moral instruction with enough wit to

make it palatable. Luther, on Melanchthon's advice, notwithstanding

his hatred for the author, urged the use of the {668} _Colloquies_ in

Protestant schools, [Sidenote: 1548] and they were likewise among the

books permitted by the Imperial mandate issued at Louvain.

The method of learning language was for the instructor to interpret a

passage to the class which they were expected to be able to translate

the next day. Ascham recommended that, when the child had written a

translation he should, after a suitable interval, be required to

retranslate his own English into Latin. Writing, particularly of

letters, was taught. The real advance over the medieval curriculum was

in the teaching of Greek--to which the exceptionally ambitious school

at Geneva added, after 1538, Hebrew. Save for this and the banishment

of scholastic barbarism, there was no attempt to bring in the new

sciences and arts. For nearly four hundred years the curriculum of

Erasmus has remained the foundation of our education. Only in our own

times are Latin and Greek giving way, as the staples of mental

training, to modern languages and science. In those days modern

languages were picked up, as Milton was later to recommend that they

should be, not as part of the regular course, but "in some leisure

hour," like music or dancing. Notwithstanding such exceptions as

Edward VI and Elizabeth, who spoke French and Italian, there were

comparatively few scholars who knew any living tongue save their own.

[Sidenote: University life]

When the youth went to the university he found little change in either

his manner of life or in his studies. A number of boys matriculated at

the age of thirteen or fourteen; on the other hand there was a

sprinkling of mature students. The extreme youth of many scholars made

it natural that they should be under somewhat stricter discipline than

is now the case. Even in the early history of Harvard it is recorded

that the president once "flogged four bachelors" for {669} being out

too late at night. At colleges like Montaigu, if one may believe

Erasmus, the path of learning was indeed thorny. What between the

wretched diet, the filth, the cold, the crowding, "the short-winged

hawks" that the students combed from their hair or shook from their

shirts, it is no wonder that many of them fell ill. Gaming, fighting,

drinking and wenching were common.

[Sidenote: Mode of government]

Nominally, the university was then under the entire control of the

faculty, who elected one of themselves "rector" (president) for a

single year, who appointed their own members and who had complete

charge of studies and discipline, save that the students occasionally

asserted their ancient rights. In fact, the corporation was pretty

well under the thumb of the government, which compelled elections and

dismissals when it saw fit, and occasionally appointed commissions to

visit and reform the faculties.

[Sidenote: of instruction]

Instruction was still carried on by the old method of lectures and

debates. These latter were sometimes on important questions of the

day, theological or political, but were often, also, nothing but

displays of ingenuity. There was a great lack of laboratories, a need

that just began to be felt at the end of the century when Bacon wrote:

"Unto the deep, fruitful and operative study of many sciences,

specially natural philosophy and physics, books be not only the

instrumentals." Bacon's further complaint that, "among so many great

foundations of colleges in Europe, I find it strange that they are all

dedicated to professions, and none left free to arts and sciences at

large," is an early hint of the need of the endowment of research. The

degrees in liberal arts, B.A. and M.A., were then more strictly than

now licences either to teach or to pursue higher professional studies

in divinity, law, or medicine. Fees for graduation {670} were heavy;

in France a B.A. cost $24, an M.D. $690 and a D.D. $780.

[Sidenote: New universities]

Germany then held the primacy that she has ever since had in Europe

both in the number of her universities and in the aggregate of her

students. The new universities founded by the Protestants were:

Marburg 1527, Königsberg 1544, Jena 1548 and again 1558, Helmstadt

1575, Altdorf 1578, Paderborn 1584. In addition to these the Catholics

founded four or five new universities, though not important ones. They

concentrated their efforts on the endeavor to found new "colleges" at

the old institutions.

[Sidenote: Numbers]

In general the universities lost during the first years of the

Reformation, but more than made up their numbers by the middle of the

century. Wittenberg had 245 matriculations in 1521; in 1526 the

matriculations had fallen to 175, but by 1550, notwithstanding the

recent Schmalkaldic War, the total numbers had risen to 2000, and this

number was well maintained throughout the century.

Erfurt, remaining Catholic in a Protestant region, declined more

rapidly and permanently. In the year 1520-21 there were 311

matriculations, in the following year 120, in the next year 72, and

five years later only 14. Between 1521 to 1530 the number of students

fell at Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder from 73 to 32.

Rostock, however, recovered after a reorganization in 1532. The number

of students at Greifswald declined so that no lectures were given

during the period 1527-39, after which it again began to pick up.

Königsberg, starting with 314 students later fell off. Cologne

declined in numbers, and so did Mayence until the Jesuits founded their

college in 1561, which, by 1568, had 500 pupils recognized as members

of the university. Vienna, also, having sunk to the number of 12

students in 1532, kept at a {671} very low ebb until 1554, when the

effects of the Jesuit revival were felt. Whereas, during the fifteen

years 1508-22 there were 6485 matriculations at Leipzig, during the

next fifteen years there were only 1935. By the end of the century,

however, Leipzig had again become, under Protestant leadership, a large

institution.

[Sidenote: British universities]

Two new universities were founded in the British Isles during the

century, Edinburgh in 1582 and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1591. In

England a number of colleges were added to those already existing at

Oxford and Cambridge, namely Christ Church (first known, after its

founder, Wolsey, as Cardinal's College, then as King's College),

Brasenose, and Corpus Christi at Oxford and St. John's, Magdalen, and

Trinity at Cambridge. Notwithstanding these new foundations the number

of students sank. During the years 1542-8, only 191 degrees of B.A.

were given at Cambridge and only 172 at Oxford. Ascham is authority

for the statement that things were still worse under Mary, when "the

wild boar of the wood" either "cut up by the root or trod down to the

ground" the institutions of learning. The revenues of the universities

reached their low-water mark about 1547, when the total income of

Oxford from land was reckoned at L5 and that of Cambridge at L50, per

annum. Under Elizabeth, the universities rose in numbers, while better

Latin and Greek were taught. It was at this time that a college

education became fashionable for young gentlemen instead of being

exclusively patronized by "learned clerks." The foundation of the

College of Physicians in London deserves to be mentioned. [Sidenote:

1528]

A university was founded at Zurich under the influence of Zwingli.

Geneva's University opened in 1559 with Beza as rector. Connected with

it was a preparatory school of seven forms, with a rigidly prescribed

{672} course in the classics. When the boy was admitted to the

university proper by examination, he took what he chose; there was not

even a division into classes. The courses offered to him included

Greek, Hebrew, theology, dialectic, rhetoric, physics and mathematics.

[Sidenote: French universities]

The foundation of the Collège de France by Francis I represented an

attempt to bring new life and vigor into learning by a free association

of learned men. It was planned to emancipate science from the tutelage

of theology. Erasmus was invited but, on his refusal to accept, Budé

was given the leading position. Chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics

and Latin were founded by the king in 1530. Other institutions of

learning founded in France were Rheims 1547, Douai 1562, Besançon[1]

1564, none of them now in existence. Paris continued to be the largest

university in the world, with an average number of students of about

6000.

Louvain, in the Netherlands, had 3000 students in 1500 and 1521; in

1550 the number rose to 5000. It was divided into colleges on the plan

still found in England. Each college had a president, three professors

and twelve fellows, entertained gratis, in addition to a larger number

of paying scholars. The most popular classes often reached the number

of 300. The foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's friend

Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its name indicates, to give

instruction in Greek and Hebrew as well as in the Latin classics. A

blight fell upon the noble institution during the wars of religion.

Under the supervision of Alva it founded professorships of catechetics

and substituted the decrees of the Council of Trent for the _Decretum_

of Gratian in the law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused by

the Religious War and starved by the Lenten diet of Spanish

Catholicism, it gradually decayed, while its {673} place was taken in

the eyes of Europe by the Protestant University of Leyden. [Sidenote:

1575] A second Protestant foundation, Franeker, [Sidenote: 1585] for a

time flourished, but finally withered away.

Spanish universities were crowded with new numbers. The maximum

student body was reached by Salamanca in 1584 with 6778 men, while

Alcalá passed in zenith in 1547 with the respectable enrollment of

1949. The foundation of no less than nine new universities in Spain

bears witness to the interest of the Iberian Peninsula in education.

Four new universities opened their doors in Italy during the year

1540-1565. The Sapienza at Rome, in addition to these, was revived

temporarily by Leo X in 1513, and, after a relapse to the dormant

state, again awoke to its full power under Paul III, when chairs of

Greek and Hebrew were established.

[Sidenote: Contribution to progress]

The services of all these universities cannot be computed on any

statistical method. Notwithstanding all their faults, their dogmatic

narrowness and their academic arrogance, they contributed more to

progress than any other institutions. Each academy became the center

of scientific research and of intellectual life. Their influence was

enormous. How much did it mean to that age to see its contending hosts

marshalled under two professors, Luther and Adrian VI! And how many

other leaders taught in universities:--Erasmus, Melanchthon, Reuchlin,

Lefèvre, to mention only a few. Pontiffs and kings sought for support

in academic pronouncements, nor could they always force the doctors to

give the decision they wished. In fact, each university stood like an

Acropolis in the republic of letters, at once a temple and a fortress

for those who loved truth and ensued it.

[1] Besançon was then an Imperial Free City.

{674}

SECTION 4. ART

[Sidenote: Art the expression of an ideal]

The significant thing about art, for the historian as for the average

man, is the ideal it expresses. The artist and critic may find more to

interest him in the development of technique, how this painter dealt with

perspective and that one with "tactile values," how the Florentines

excelled in drawing and the Venetians in color. But for us, not being

professionals, the content of the art is more important than its form.

For, after all, the glorious cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the

marvellous paintings of the Renaissance were not mere iridescent bubbles

blown by or for children with nothing better to do. They were the

embodiments of ideas; as the people thought in their hearts so they

projected themselves into the objects they created.

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many others who would be

greatest in any other time, were contemporaries of Luther. They had a

gospel to preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it was the

glad tidings of the kingdom of this world: the splendor, the loveliness,

the wonder and the nobility of human life. When, with young eyes, they

looked out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not the vale

of tears that they had been told; they found it a rapture. They saw the

naked body not vile but beautiful.

[Sidenote: Leonardo, 1452-1519]

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of wonder, but not of naïve admiration of

things seen. To him the miracle of the world was in the mystery of

knowledge,--and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and

his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered

everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground,

nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape

him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner

reality of things; he spent years drawing the internal organs of the

body, and other years making plans for engineers.

When he painted, there was but one thing that fascinated him: the soul.

To lay bare the mind as he had dissected the brain; to take man or woman

at some self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of

personality, all this was his passion, and in all this he excelled as no

one had ever done, before or since. His battle picture is not some

gorgeous and romantic cavalry charge, but a confused melée of horses

snorting with terror, of men wild with the lust of battle or with hatred

or with fear. His portraits are either caricatures or prophecies: they

lay bare some trait unsuspected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is

not his portrait of himself a wizard? Does not his Medusa chill us with

the horror of death? Is not Beatrice d'Este already doomed to waste

away, when he paints her?

[Sidenote: The Last Supper]

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times before him, now as a

eucharistic sacrament, now as a monastic meal, now as a gathering of

friends. What did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. Jesus has

just said, "One of you will betray me," and his divine head has sunk upon

his breast with calm, immortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick

with sorrow; Peter would be fiercely at the traitor's throat; Thomas

darts forward, doubting, to ask, "Lord, is it I?" Every face expresses

deep and different reaction. There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords

of his neck standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort not to

betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, lowers on his visage as

plainly as a thunder cloud on a sultry afternoon.

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an enigmatic smile that he

had seen somewhere, perhaps in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of

some {676} woman he had known as a boy. His first paintings were of

laughing women, and the same smile is on the lips of John the Baptist and

Dionysus and Leda and the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he

trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a

thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Müntz

"sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic.

Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx;

Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie

of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the

return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great

critics, like Reinach, have asserted that Mona Lisa [Sidenote: Mona Lisa]

is only subtle as any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to

regard it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And what means

the smile? In a word, sex,--not on the physical side so studied and

glorified by other painters, but in its psychological aspect. For once

Leonardo has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire,--the

passion, the lust, the trembling and the shame. There is something

frightening about Leda caught with the swan, about the effeminate

Dionysus and John the Baptist's mouth "folded for a kiss of irresistible

pleasure." If the stories then told about the children of Alexander VI

and about Margaret of Navarre and Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was

their sister.

Everything he touched acquires the same psychological penetration. His

Adoration of the Magi is not an effort to delight the eye, but is a

study, almost a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are brought

before the miraculous Babe, and their reactions, of wonder, of amazement,

of devotion, of love, of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference,

are perfectly recorded.

{677} [Sidenote: The Venetians]

After the cool and stormy spring of art came the warm and gentle summer.

Life became so full, so beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men

sought for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. Venice, seated

like a lovely, wanton queen, on her throne of sparkling waters, drew to

her bosom all the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her

argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of vestment with which

to array her body sumptuously; her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels

and palaces and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in her

great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto!

Life is no longer a wonder to them but a banquet; the malady of thought,

the trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the

senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in

what they offer. They dye their canvasses in such blaze of color and

light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the

Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in

every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining

armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow

dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit of landscape an

enchanted garden, every action an ecstasy, every man a hero and every

woman a paragon of voluptuous beauty.

The portrait is one of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance

painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the

grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After

Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study.

Titian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought

rather to please and flatter than to analyse. [Sidenote: Titian, c.

1490-1576] But withal there is often a truth to nature that make many

{678} of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their

revelation of character. Titian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and

crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine

many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly

realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France;

than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his

son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish

bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in

Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand,

what a profusion of strong and noble men and women gaze at us from the

canvases of that time. They are a study of infinite variety and of

surpassing charm.

The secularization of art proceeded even to the length of affecting

religious painting. Susanna and Magdalen and St. Barbara and St.

Sebastian are no longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless

clothes; they become maidens and youths of marvellous beauty. Even the

Virgin and Christ were drawn from the handsomest models obtainable and

were richly clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its consummation

in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

[Sidenote: Raphael, 1483-1520]

It is one of those useful coincidences that seem almost symbolic that

Raphael and Luther were born in the same year, for they were both the

products of the same process--the decay of Catholicism. When, for long

ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may form a bed of coal, ready

to be dug up and turned into power, or it may make a field luxuriant in

grain and fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval religion the

miner's son of Mansfeld extracted enough energy to turn half Europe

upside down; from the same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most

exquisite {679} blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change the

metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Raphael the rainbow of the same

storm.

[Sidenote: Religious art]

The chief work of both of them was to make religion understanded of the

people; to adapt it to the needs of the time. When faith fails a man may

either abandon the old religion for another, or he may stop thinking

about dogma altogether and find solace in the mystical-aesthetic

aspect of his cult. This second alternative was worked to its limit

by Raphael. He was not concerned with the true but with the beautiful.

By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures have religious

subjects. The whole Bible--which Luther translated into the

vernacular--was by him translated into the yet clearer language of sense.

Even now most people conceive biblical characters in the forms of this

greatest of illustrators. Delicacy, pathos, spirituality, idyllic

loveliness--everything but realism or tragedy--are stamped on all his

canvases. "Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so

skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are

neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at

its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine Madonna, "whose

eyes are deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even." The simple

mind, unsophisticated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship

a Raphael when he will but revel in a Titian. Strangely touched by the

magic of this passionate lover both of the church and of mortal women,

the average man of that day, or of this, found, and will find, glad

tidings for his heart in the very color of Mary's robe. "Whoever would

know how Christ transfigured and made divine should be painted, must

look," says Vasari, on Raphael's canvases.

The church and the papacy found an ally in Raphael, {680} whose pencil

illustrated so many triumphs of the popes and so many mysteries of

religion. In his Disputa (so-called) he made the secret of

transubstantiation visible. In his great cartoon of Leo I turning back

Attila he gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parnassus and School

of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy for the people. Indeed, it is

from them that he has reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of

art pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallowness and of

insincerity, the people love him more than any other artist has been

loved. It is for them that he worked, and on every labor one might read

as it were his motto, "I will not offend even one of these little ones."

If Raphael's art was safe in his own hands there can be little doubt that

it hastened the decadence of painting [Sidenote: Decadence of religious

art] in the hands of his followers. His favorite pupil, Giulio Romano,

caught every trick of the master and, like the devil citing Scripture,

painted pictures to delight the eye so licentious that they cannot now be

exhibited. Andrea del Sarto sentimentalized the Virgin, turning

tenderness to bathos. Correggio, the most gifted of them all, could do

nothing so well as depict sensual love. His pictures are hymns to Venus,

and his women, saints and sinners alike, are houris of an erotic

paradise. Has the ecstasy of amorous passion amounting almost to

mystical transport ever been better suggested than in the marvellous

light and shade of his Jupiter and Io? These and many other contemporary

artists had on their lips but one song, a paean in praise of life, the

pomps and glories of this goodly world and the delights and beauties of

the body.

But to all men, save those loved by the gods, there comes some moment,

perhaps in the very heyday of success and joy and love, when a sudden

ruin falls upon the world. The death of one loved more than self, {681}

disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure of the so

cherished cause--all these and many more are the gates by which tragedy

is born. And the beauty of tragedy is above all other beauty because

only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of the human spirit assert

its full majesty. In Shakespeare and Michelangelo it is not the torture

that pleases us, but the triumph over circumstance.

[Sidenote: Michelangelo, 1475-1564]

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine

sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful

sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can

emerge victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is perfected. He

was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He

would paint no portraits--or but one or two--because no living person

came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only

is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than

women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength

of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he

attain calm,--in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them,

including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended

to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.

But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand

to is fairly convulsed with passion. Leda embraces the swan at the

supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is

weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is

life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of

hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict.

Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches,

when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl

and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with

a riot of strength and "terribilità."

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest

scope in illustrating the idea of predestination that obsessed the

Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last

Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the whole emphasis

upon the damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the

sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek

and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the _rex tremendae majestatis_, a

Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders.

A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of

Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he

and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called

Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow.

So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some

anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.

But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor

Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His

sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is

like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour.

Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour,

Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles,

Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the

comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern

painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for

Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the

demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a

regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Dürer and

Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein

[Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who

could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only

in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his

wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty.

His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest

qualities of two rare natures.

[Sidenote: Albert Dürer, 1471-1528]

Dürer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type,

but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's

studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his

two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the

philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won;

in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522

the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Dürer was also the northern

Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What

beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has

been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art

democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion

to the home of the people at large. Dürer and his compeers were enabled

to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and

wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and

sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they

reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely

phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in

the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular

preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life,

wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very

literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Dürer's

illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and

seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented

exactly as they are described? Dürer neither strove for nor attained

anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a

man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another

opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I

consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life

he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.

But Dürer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote:

1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three

of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best

explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these,

The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding

through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben

nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German

translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his

_Handbook of the Christian Knight_ had imagined just such a scene, and so

deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people's mind

that later generations interpreted Dürer's knight as a picture of

Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.