In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating

the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little

bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study,

{685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has

also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever

before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the

vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds but,

withal, the soul still yearned for more. The vanity of knowledge is

expressed as nowhere else in Dürer's Melancholia, one of the world's

greatest pictures. Surrounded by scientific instruments,--the compass,

the book, the balance, the hammer, the arithmetical square, the

hour-glass, the bell--sits a woman with wings too small to raise her

heavy body. Far in the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of

the Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits the little

bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disordered fancy of an overwrought

mind.

[Sidenote: The Grotesque]

Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance is the love of the

grewsome. In Dürer it took the harmless form of a fondness for

monstrosities,--rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the

like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the emotions of their

contemporaries by painting long series known as the Dance of Death, in

which some man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the emperor,

the soldier, the peasant, the bride, is represented as being haled from

life by a grinning skeleton.

Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now drawn into the service of

the intense party struggles of the Reformation. To depict the pope or

Luther or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew them with

claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's tails, drinking and

blaspheming. Even kings were caricatured,--doubly significant fact!

[Sidenote: Architecture]

As painting and sculpture attained so high a level of maturity in the

sixteenth century, one might suppose that architecture would do the same.

In truth, {686} however, architecture rather declined. Very often, if

not always, each special art-form goes through a cycle of youth,

perfection, and decay, that remind one strongly of the life of a man.

The birth of an art is due often to some technical invention, the full

possibilities of which are only gradually developed. But after the newly

opened fields have been exhausted the epigoni can do little but

recombine, often in fantastic ways, the old elements; public taste turns

from them and demands something new.

[Sidenote: Churches]

So the supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral as seen at Pisa or

Florence or Perugia or Rheims or Cologne, was never equalled in the

sixteenth century. As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take

St. Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously unequal in

execution. With characteristic pride and self-confidence Pope Julius II

to make room for it tore down the old church, and other ancient

monuments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve centuries.

Even by his contemporaries the architect, Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante!

He made a plan, which was started; then he died. In his place were

appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, together or in turn,

and towers were added after the close of the sixteenth century. The

result is the hugest building in the world, and almost the worst

proportioned. After all, there is something appropriate in the fact

that, just as the pretensions of the popes expanded and their powers

decreased, so their churches should become vaster and yet less

impressive. St. Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but

like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was but a _brutum

fulmen_ in the end!

The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible

in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at

Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line

that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne

du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of

the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great

cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England

portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge date from these years,

but these portions are grafted on to an older style that really

determined them. The greatest glory of English university architecture,

the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, was finished in the first

years of the century. The noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass

windows will be remembered by all who have seen them.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastic architecture]

After the Reformation ecclesiastical architecture followed two diverse

styles; the Protestants cultivated excessive plainness, the Catholics

excessive ornament. The iconoclasts had no sense for beauty, and

thought, as Luther put it, that faith was likely to be neglected by those

who set a high value on external form. Moreover the Protestant services

necessitated a modification of the medieval cathedral style. What they

wanted was a lecture hall with pews; the old columns and transepts and

the roomy floor made way for a more practical form.

The Catholics, on the other hand, by a natural reaction, lavished

decoration on their churches as never before. Every column was made

ornate, every excuse was taken for adding some extraneous embellishment;

the walls were crowded with pictures and statues and carving to delight,

or at least to arrest, the eye. But it happened that the noble taste of

the earlier and simpler age failed; amid all possible devices to give

effect, quiet grandeur was wanting.

[Sidenote: Castles]

What the people of that secular generation really built with enthusiasm

and success were their own {688} dwellings. What are the castles of

Chambord and Blois and the Louvre and Hampton Court and Heidelberg but

houses of play and pleasure such as only a child could dream of? King

and cardinal and noble vied in making tower and gable, gallery and court

as of a fairy palace; banqueting hall and secret chamber where they and

their playmates could revel to their heart's content and leave their

initials carved as thickly as boys carve them on an old school desk. And

how richly they filled them! A host of new arts sprang up to minister to

the needs of these palace-dwellers: our museums are still filled with the

glass and enamel, the vases and porcelain, the tapestry and furniture and

jewelry that belonged to Francis and Catharine de' Medici and Leo X and

Elizabeth. How perfect was the art of many of these articles of daily

use can only be appreciated by studying at first hand the salt-cellars of

Cellini, or the gold and silver and crystal goblets made by his compeers.

Examine the clocks, of which the one at Strassburg is an example; the

detail of workmanship is infinite; even the striking apparatus and the

dials showing planetary motions are far beyond our own means, or perhaps

our taste. When Peter Henlein invented the watch, using as the

mainspring a coiled feather, he may not have made chronometers as exact

as those turned out nowadays, but the "Nuremberg eggs"--so called from

their place of origin and their shape, not a disk, but a sphere--were

marvels of chasing and incrustation and jewelry.

[Sidenote: Love of beauty]

The love of the beautiful was universal. The city of that time, less

commodious, sanitary, and populous than it is today, was certainly fairer

to the eye. Enough of old Nuremberg and Chester and Siena and Perugia

and many other towns remains to assure us that the red-tiled houses, the

overhanging storeys, the high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented

a {689} far more pleasing appearance than do our lines of smoky factories

and drab dwellings.

[Sidenote: Music]

The men so greedy of all delicate sights and pleasant, would fain also

stuff their ears with sweet sounds. And so they did, within the

limitations of a still undeveloped technique. They had organs, lutes,

viols, lyres, harps, citherns, horns, and a kind of primitive piano known

as the clavichord or the clavicembalo. Many of these instruments were

exquisitely rich and delicate in tone, but they lacked the range and

volume and variety of our music. Almost all melodies were slow, solemn,

plaintive; the tune of Luther's hymn gives a good idea of the style then

prevalent. When we read that the churches adopted the airs of popular

songs, so that hymns were sung to ale-house jigs and catches from the

street, we must remember that the said jigs and love-songs were at least

as sober and staid as are many of the tunes now expressly written for our

hymns. The composers of the time, especially Palestrina [Sidenote:

Palestrina, 1526-94] and Orlando Lasso, [Sidenote: Lasso, c. 1530-1594]

did wonders within the limits then possible to introduce richness and

variety into song.

[Sidenote: Art and religion]

Art was already on the decline when it came into conflict with the

religious revivals of the time. The causes of the decadence are not hard

to understand. The generation of giants, born in the latter half of the

fifteenth century, seemed to exhaust the possibilities of artistic

expression in painting and sculpture, or at least to exhaust the current

ideas so expressible. Guido Reni and the Caracci could do nothing but

imitate and recombine.

And then came the battle of Protestant and Catholic to turn men's minds

into other channels than that of beauty. Even when the Reformation was

not consciously opposed to art, it shoved it aside as a distraction from

the real business of life. Thus it has come {690} about in Protestant

lands that the public regards art as either a "business" or an

"education." Luther himself loved music above all things and did much to

popularize it,--while Erasmus shuddered at the psalm-singing he heard

from Protestant congregations! Of painting the Reformer spoke with

admiration, but so rarely! What could art be in the life of a man who

was fighting for his soul's salvation? Calvin saw more clearly the

dangers to the soul from the seductions of this world's transitory charm.

Images he thought idolatrous in churches and he said outright: "It would

be a ridiculous and inept imitation of the papists to fancy that we

render God more worthy service in ornamenting our temples and in

employing organs and toys of that sort. While the people are thus

distracted by external things the worship of God is profaned." So it was

that the Puritans chased all blandishments not only from church but from

life, and art came to be looked upon as a bit immoral.

[Sidenote: Counter-Reformation]

But the little finger of the reforming pope was thicker than the

Puritan's loins; where Calvin had chastised with whips Sixtus V chastised

with scorpions. Adrian VI, the first Catholic Reformer after Luther,

could not away with "those idols of the heathen," the ancient statues.

Clement VII for a moment restored the old régime of art and

licentiousness together, having Perino del Vaga paint his bathroom with

scenes from the life of Venus in the manner of Giulio Romano. But the

Council of Trent made severe regulations against nude pictures, in

pursuance of which Daniel da Volterra was appointed to paint breeches on

all the naked figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and on similar

paintings. Sixtus V, who could hardly endure the Laocoon and Apollo

Belvidere, was bent on destroying the monuments of heathendom. The ruin

was complete when to her cruel hate the church added {691} her yet more

cruel love. Along came the Jesuits offering, like pedlars, instead of

the good old article a substitute guaranteed by them to be "just as

good," and a great deal cheaper. Painting was sentimentalized and

"moralized" under their tuition; architecture adopted the baroque style,

gaudy and insincere. The church was stuffed with gewgaws and tinsel;

marble was replaced by painted plaster and saintliness by sickliness.

SECTION 5. BOOKS

[Sidenote: Numbers of books published]

The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. There were then in

Germany alone about 100,000 works printed, or reprinted. If each

edition amounted to 1000--a fair average, for if many editions were

smaller, some were much larger--that would mean that about a million

volumes were offered to the German public each year throughout the

century. There is no doubt that the religious controversy had a great

deal to do with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the

same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a political campaign

now has on the circulation of the newspaper. The following figures

show how rapidly the number of books published in Germany increased

during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, in 1519 260, in

1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, and 1524 990.

Many of these books were short, controversial tracts; some others were

intended as purveyors of news pure and simple. Some of these

broadsides were devoted to a single event, as the _Neue Zeitung: Die

Schlacht des türkischen Kaisers_, [Sidenote: 1526] others had several

items of interest, including letters from distant parts. Occasionally

a mere lampoon would appear under the title of _Neue Zeitung_,

corresponding to our funny papers. But these substitutes for modern

journals were both rare and irregular; the world then got along with

much {692} less information about current events than it now enjoys.

Nor was there anything like our weekly and monthly magazines.

The new age was impatient of medieval literature. The schoolmen, never

widely read, were widely mocked. The humanists, too, fell into deep

disgrace, charged with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They

still wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, bemoaning

their hard lot and deploring the coarseness of an unappreciative time.

Their real fault was that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy,

and the people, who could read for themselves, no longer were imposed

on by pretensions to esoteric learning and a Ciceronian style.

Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer suited the taste of the

new generation. A certain class continued to read _Amadis of Gaul_ or

_La Morte d'Arthur_ furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that

they would no longer do. The Puritan found them immoral; the man of

the world thought them ridiculous. Ascham asserts that "the whole

pleasure" of _La Morte d'Arthur_, "standeth in two special points, in

open manslaughter and bold bawdry." The century was hardly out when

Cervantes published his famous and deadly satire on the knight errant.

[Sidenote: Poetry]

But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was transmuted into

the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim

to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a

fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and

hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of

miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola

came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and

the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another

generation, and {693} Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a

religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman,

allegorized the whole in such fashion that while the conscience was

soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral

virtues or vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences

and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss.

And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the

principal virtues!

Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The

early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it

did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and

Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater

poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few

compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers,

some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of

singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were

mostly of "love, whose month is always May." Each songster poured

forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in

chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was

something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply

psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's

"sugared sonnets" gave his "private friends" something to think about

as well as something to enjoy.

[Sidenote: Wit]

If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and

humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of

her terrible power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio,

were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and

lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at

everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule;

a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of

blackmailing to his wit.

[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]

But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too contemptuously called

him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as multitudinous as the ocean

billows, and as wholesome as the sunshine. He laughed not because he

scorned life but because he loved it; he did not "warm both hands"

before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot

be said that he took a "slice of life" as his subject, for this would

imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he

reached out, in the fashion of his time, and pulled with both hands

from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life

that he could grasp. "You never saw a man," he said of himself, "who

would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could

live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my

friends and all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in love

with everything that the mere repetition of common names delighted him.

It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell

what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness

and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais

enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two

hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite was like

Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was

gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and

fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without

stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel,

whose lust for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of

consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle

Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the

world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled

themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too

backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.

[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]

And the people were no longer content to leave the glory of life to

their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be

preserved like game for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons,

for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature

they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of

poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they

themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel

in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the

north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his

wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to

make love.

[Sidenote: Plays]

For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama.

From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious

instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a

completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite

literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and

there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the

Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was

sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his

Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and

such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of the audience.

Somewhat akin to these pieces in spirit were the {696} Shrovetide

Farces written in Germany by the simple Nuremberger who describes

himself in the verses, literally translatable:

Hans Sachs is a shoe-

Maker and poet, too.

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rough fun of these

artless scenes than in the apothegms and sound advice in which they

abounded.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the Sixteenth Century]

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the

spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the

Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the

other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo

culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was

the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German

dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the

Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To

all, the exile in the far country, the riotous living with harlots and

the feeding on husks with swine, meant the life of this world with its

pomps and vanities, its lusts and sinful desires that become as mast to

the soul. The return to the father is the return to God's love here

below and to everlasting felicity above. To those who can believe it,

it is the most beautiful story in the world.

[Sidenote: Faust]

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the

time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a

charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited

Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was

but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who

had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know

everything, to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world.

{697} The first printed _Faust-book_ (1587) passed for three centuries

as a Protestant production, but the discovery of an older and quite

different form of the legend in 1897 changed the whole literary

problem. It has been asserted now that the Faust of this unknown

author is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor at

Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with Helena recalls the

Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is

such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust

is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in

early Christian literature Simon Magus is the antithesis of Peter.

Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of God; their

adventures are somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose.

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as the Prodigal or

Pantagruel. To live to the full; to know all science and all

mysteries, to drain to the dregs the cup crowned with the wine of the

pleasure and the pride of life: this was worth more than heaven! The

full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for human experience

was not brought out until Goethe took it up; but it is implied both in

the German Faust-books and in Marlowe's play.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the Sixteenth Century]

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do justice to the age

of the Reformation. We are now at the end of the period inaugurated by

Columbus and Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their

contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place that it then did,

nor does the difference between Catholic and Protestant any longer seem

the most important thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the

state, both of which started on their paths of conquest then, are now

attacked.

Again, the application of any statistical method makes the former ages

seem to shrink in comparison {698} with the present. In population and

wealth, in war and in science we are immeasurably larger than our

ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than had Henry VIII,

and many a college boy knows more astronomy than did Kepler. But if we

judge the greatness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from

us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets dreamed and by what

its strong men accomplished, the importance of the sixteenth century

can be appreciated.

[Sidenote: An age of aspiration]

It was an "experiencing" age. It loved sensation with the greediness

of childhood; it intoxicated itself with Rabelais and Titian, with the

gold of Peru and with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was a

daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for spiritual liberty, or

they gave their lives with Magellan to compass the earth or with Bruno

to span the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed with

Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ-like, or with More of the

place where they should be just; or with Michelangelo it pondered the

meaning of sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. And of

this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, was born the

world's supreme poet with an eye to see the deepest and a tongue to

tell the most of the human heart. Truly such a generation was not a

poor, nor a backward one. Rather it was great in what it achieved,

sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in ripe wisdom and in heroic

deeds; full of light and of beauty and of life!

{699}

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be classified in

a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or

by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our

present purpose it will be convenient to classify them, according to

their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for

want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the

Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like

all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most,

historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When

different philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an

eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at

their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they

survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth

century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the

liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided

into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and

Darwinians began to assert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS.

(SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based

on the analogy of Scripture. God, it was thought, had chosen a

peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance,

particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a

{700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs.

God's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to

the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the

true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to

belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation"]

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies

_par éminence_, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should

be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in

the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like

Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and

Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to

Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the

spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he

incorporated it in the title of his greatest German pamphlet. The

other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party

was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing

nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus

and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive

away the foggy mists of superstition and to restore the purity of the

primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply _ad libitum_ quotations

showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general

purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to

the impertinent but more assiduous activity of the devil. It is

interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes.

Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his

movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the

Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also

saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was

no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was

inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and

suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing

before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that

there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such

as Münzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an

overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary,

natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the

papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized

that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the

"first push and assault" given by the ungodly humanists. Burnet

followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many

documents he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing

facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by

the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the

flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in

the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of

the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf,

was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made

many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its

principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless

labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the

special student for the documents it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to

the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one

was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the

other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine

governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That

Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar

with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly

compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were

found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he

failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his

protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the

Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their

sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter

Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and

secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole

cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced,

prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of

Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His _History of the

Variations of the Protestant Churches_, written without that odious

defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of

confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn

the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions.

Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth,

but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors.

Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on

Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration

the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion

without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and

atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in

civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the

admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of

the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged,

as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original

sin and his latitudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed was written on the

Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men

of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their

environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the

most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians

neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward

Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion.

Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not

confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper

subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou

passes over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either

papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his

works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a

malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a

revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore

Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in

the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed

by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was

largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is

evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its

too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to

the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the

nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions

often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best

minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was

simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of

the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was

some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his _History of Italy_ mentions Luther merely to show how

the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini

[Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the

indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this

beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther,

carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party.

The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected

it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great

flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantôme says that he

leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about

it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a

people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther

won over a good many of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin

Du Bellay found the cause of the English schism in Henry's divorce and

the small respect the pope had for his majesty. Davila, de Mézeray and

Daniel, writing the history of the French civil wars, treated the

Huguenots merely as a political party. So they were, but they were

something more. Even Hugo Grotius could not sound the deeper causes of

the Dutch revolt and of the religious revolution.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

The first of all the histories of the German Reformation {705} was

also, for at least two centuries, the best. Though surpassed in some

particulars by others, Sleidan united more of the qualities of a great

historian than anyone else who wrote extensively on church history in

the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: fairness, accuracy, learning,

skill in presentation. In words that recall Ranke's motto he declared

that, though a Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth simply

"rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing religious affairs," he

continues, "I was not able to omit politics, for, as I said before,

they almost always interact, and in our age least of all can they be

separated." Withal, he regards the Reformation as a great victory for

God's word, and Luther as a notable champion of the true religion. In

plain, straightforward narrative, without much philosophic reflection,

he sets forth,--none better,--the diplomatic and theological side of

the movement without probing its causes or inquiring into the popular

support on which all the rest was based.

[Sidenote: Sarpi]

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration than Sleidan compassed

is found in the writings of Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the

Tridentine Council," as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose book

could only be published on Protestant soil, this historian admired by

Macaulay as the best of modern times and denounced by Acton as fit for

Newgate prison, has furnished students with one of the most curious of

psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion of his learning and

accuracy, which have recently been severely attacked and perhaps

discredited, let us ask what was his attitude in regard to his subject?

It is difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic

apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explanation of his

attacks on the creed in which he believed and of his favorable

presentation of the acts of the {706} heretics he must have

anathematized, is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently

desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political

entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and

Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of

their own church; one may also find in Döllinger a parallel to him.

Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his

explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history

as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been

advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was

caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian

and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant anticipation of the modern economic school of historical

thought is found in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, who suggested that the

causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social.

When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and noble into the

hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed

the ancient balance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling

feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more

dangerous enemy.

SECTION 2. THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE. (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge

the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in

historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had

been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or

a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw

deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was

false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met

the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and

to point out instructive analogies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and

were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After

comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe

adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas

the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed.

The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their

secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican

because of the circumstances in which each arose. The suppression of

church festivals in Protestant countries he thought due to the greater

need and zest for labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact

that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by saying that their

unadorned cult naturally aroused a less warm attachment than the sensuous

ritual of Romanism.

[Sidenote: Voltaire]

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. None other has made

history so nearly universal as did he, peering into every side of life

and into every corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, no fact

was admitted to be inexplicable by natural laws. It is true that he was

not very learned and that he had strong prejudices against what he called

"the most infamous superstition that ever brutalized man." But with it

all he brought more freedom and life into the story of mankind than had

any of his predecessors.

For his history of the Reformation he was dependent on Bossuet, Sarpi,

and a few other general works; there is no evidence that he perused any

of the sources. But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. {708}

Beginning with an enthusiastic account of the greatness of the

Renaissance, its discoveries, its opulence, its roll of mighty names, he

proceeds to compare the Reformation with the two contemporaneous

religious revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the other in

Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one else had even thought of

looking to comparative religion [Sidenote: Comparative religion] for

light. In tracing the course of events he is more conventional, finding

rather small causes for large effects. The whole thing started, he

assures us, in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the spoils

of indulgence-sales, "and this little squabble of monks in a corner of

Saxony, produced more than a hundred years of discord, fury, and

misfortune for thirty nations." "England separated from the pope because

King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted because of the painful

impression produced by the Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in

Voltaire's opinion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal to

the passions of the mob. The dogmas of the Reformers are considered no

whit more rational than those of their opponents, save that Zwingli is

praised for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for Christianity.

Of course he erred," wittily comments our author, "but how humane it is

to err thus!" The influence of Montesquieu is found in the following

early economic interpretation in the _Philosophic Dictionary_:

There are some nations whose religion is the result of

neither climate nor government. What cause detached

North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland, Holland,

England, Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from the Roman

communion? Poverty. Indulgences . . . were sold too

dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole

revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion.

[Sidenote: Scotch historians]

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of

Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and

scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote:

Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the

latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a

revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most

beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity."

Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone to

superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this

Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he

enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates

of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy

together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of

printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact

that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were

repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real

judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther

for his violence, but praised him--and here speaks the middle-class

advocate of law and order--for his firm stand against the peasants in

their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of

his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the

spell of the supernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical

establishments, with which he begins his account of the English

Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view,

priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and

passions of the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delusion

even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore incumbent on the civil

power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy,

inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to

{710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought

and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the

largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention

of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular

character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to

the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses

by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves,

and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to

sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was

in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to

exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as

he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to

the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless

spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted

"those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to

a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the

eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to

that subject in his great history of _The Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire_. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their

merit [_i.e._ of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what

articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the

Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised

at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers."

They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great

mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six

first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did

{711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their

reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in

scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence

in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and

popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith,

grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian

would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and

capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther

and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his

obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty

fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession

of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes

of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors

of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of

images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least

unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism."

Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to

acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This

led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to

indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating

Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress

of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected

a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the

people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back,

and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of

boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with

selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he

wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing

in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression

on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet,

to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he

changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his

conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people

hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the

courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked

change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the

earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had

been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save

abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in

view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing]

apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great,

misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is

to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally

bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as

Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in

Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution

in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil

still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as

fair as any German Protestant could then be.

{713}

SECTION 3. THE LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION. (CIRCA 1794-c. 1860)

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a

profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French

Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a

century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the

scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed

accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century

was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the

Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character

of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the

liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with

this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant

praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic

Döllinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and

Froude.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution]

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into

construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against

oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite

examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the

earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the

Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

[Sidenote: Condorcet]

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was

Condorcet in his noble essay on _The Advance of the Human Spirit_,

written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he,

punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke

of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of

the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring

political enfranchisement, banded together against the {714} revolt.

He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to

political science and that it purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal

celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the

lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced as the subject for

a prize competition, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of

Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and

on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de

Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the

thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been

effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and

that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either

religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect

to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established

religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed

Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he

liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries

more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that

grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general

philosophical enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning

and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human

race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to

think and judge freely and independently of all ideas

and opinions, which until then Europe had received or

been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It

was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason

and to call things by their right names. It was an

insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power

of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the

nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical,

artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be

made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One

need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life

(1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's

opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the

Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic

movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to

transcend the limits of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite,

to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Staël]

All this is reflected in Mme. de Staël's enthusiastic appreciation of

Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by

reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She

contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's

revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had

brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of

life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that

of heart and brain.

[Sidenote: Heine]

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of

style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and

philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature,

Heine points out that the place taken in France by _belles lettres_ is

taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is

one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions

in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the

tempest that shattered the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the

Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716}

rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave

his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope;

Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one

insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the

scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great

historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the

greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet,

[Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His _History

of France_ is like the biography of some loved and worshipped genius;

he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all

great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question,

"What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they

stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what

entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means

that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that

educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For

the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as

he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that

he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois

virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing

a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us,

were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family

and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns

ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans

of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If

now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human

intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I

owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this

liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless

rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of

greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the

obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude.

Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to

the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, _The History of

England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada_

won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the

enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he

thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a

revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a

superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and

which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the

Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different

choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness

of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard,

once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known

world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect

shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged

limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of

middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that

the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the

moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the

Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic

revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote

similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and

Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and

Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an

enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into

the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that

his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life

in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the

conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated

itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons

and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious

sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The

creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism,

individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very

moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and

sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and

America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first

emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the

Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated

Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same

time, in his fervent _Speeches to the German Nation_, called the

Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its

"perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period,

tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once

national and liberal. In his _Pictures from the German Past_, largely

painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on

"Deutschtum" and "Bürgertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners

and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F.

Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than

superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which

was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that,

early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was

the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a

world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually

become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an

unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that

man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore,

consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was

incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men

studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of

nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the

progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had

its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in

the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man

had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to

sink into the background, and that of other influences to be

preponderant.

[Sidenote: Hegel]

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history

took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel,

pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable

"time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development

of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing

forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit,

or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the

necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720}

Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the

Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of

evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The

characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its

own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The

dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle

Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to

prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show that the cause of the Protestant

revolt in the corruption of the church was not accidental but

necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of progress, that which

is adored must necessarily be sensuous, but at the lofty German level

the worshipper must look for God in the spirit and heart, that is, in

faith. The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity

manifesting the self-consciousness of the world-spirit; his doctrine of

the eucharist, conservative as it seems to the rationalist, is in

reality a manifestation of the same spirituality, in the assertion of

an immediate relation of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of

the Reformation is said to be that man in his very nature is destined

to be free, and all history since Luther's time is but a working out of

the implications of his position. If only the Germanic nations have

adopted Protestantism, it is because only they have reached the highest

state of spiritual development.

[Sidenote: Baur]

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of whom

it has been said that he rather deduced history than narrated it. With

much detail he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far

as the subject of church history was concerned. He showed that the

Reformation (a term to which he objected, apparently preferring

Division, or Schism) was bound to come from antecedents already in full

operation before Luther. At most, he admitted, the {721} personal

factor was decisive of the time and place of the inevitable revolution,

but said that the most powerful personality would have been helpless

but for the popularity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he

deduced the causes of the movement from the corruption of the medieval

church, and like him he regarded all later history as but the tide of

which the first wave broke in 1517. The true principle of the

movement, religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he believed, had

been achieved only for states in the sixteenth century, but thereafter

logically and necessarily came to be applied to individuals.

[Sidenote: Ranke]

From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the

world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion

that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked

nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him

the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history

for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without

regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the

most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own

opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an

historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little

biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no

polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the

times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the

Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to

generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"--coined in 1770

and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution."

The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and

moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and

service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722}

rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized

the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the

ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely

autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and

existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the

development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective.

Would he have thought so after 1919?

[Sidenote: Buckle]

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry

Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the

universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as

interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of

unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a

constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and

of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle

argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable,

and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with

his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any

period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that

age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate

enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the

earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though

diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the

cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging

admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts

it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries

should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has

not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the

Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment,

and a democratic rebellion.

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to

modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless

Lecky is best classified as a member of the new school. His _History

of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism_ is partly

Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how

little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology,

and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined

by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its

conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought

it had done more than any other movement to emancipate the mind from

superstition and to secularize society.

[Sidenote: Protestants]

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short space at

my command, the principal Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in

this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old

"truths," Merle d'Aubigné won an enormous and unmerited success by

reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with

such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively

prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was

in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won

its enormous circulation.[1]

[Sidenote: Döllinger]

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by

the Catholic Döllinger, the most theological of historians, the most

historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really

{724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical

doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very

fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his

practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is

noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.

[1] The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas,

since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and

200,000 were sold in England and America.

SECTION 4. THE ECONOMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY INTERPRETATIONS.

(1859 TO THE PRESENT)

The year 1859 saw the launching of two new theories of the utmost

importance. These, together with the political developments of the next

twelve years, completely altered the view-point of the intellectual

class, as well as of the peoples. In relation to the subject under

discussion this meant a reversal of historical judgment as radical as

that which occurred at the time of the French Revolution. The three new

influences, in the order of their immediate importance for

historiography, were the following: 1. The publication of Marx's _Zur

Kritik der politischen Ökonomie_ in 1859, containing the germ of the

economic interpretation of history later developed in _Das Kapital_

(1867) and in other works. 2. The publication of Darwin's _Origin of

Species_, giving rise to an evolutionary treatment of history. 3. The

Bismarckian wars (1864-71), followed by German intellectual and material

hegemony, and the defeat of the old liberalism. This lasted only until

the Great War (1914-18), when Germany was cast down and liberalism rose

in more radical guise than ever.

[Sidenote: Marx]

Karl Marx not only viewed history for the first time from the point of

view of the proletariat, or working class, but he directly asserted that

in the march of mankind the economic factors had always been, in the last

analysis, decisive; that the material basis of life, {725} particularly

the system of production, determined, in general, the social, political

and religious ideas of every epoch and of every locality. Revolutions

follow as the necessary consequence of economic change. In the scramble

for sustenance and wealth class war is postulated as natural and

ceaseless. The old Hegelian antithesis of idea versus personality took

the new form of "the masses" versus "the great man," both of whom were

but puppets in the hands of overmastering determinism. As often

interpreted, Marx's theory replaced the Hegelian "spirits of the time" by

the classes, conceived as entities struggling for mastery.

This brilliant theory suffered at first in its application, which was

often hasty, or fantastic. As the economic factor had once been

completely ignored, so now it was overworked. Its major premise of an

"economic man," all greed and calculation, is obviously false, or rather,

only half true. Men's motives are mixed, and so are those of aggregates

of men. There are other elements in progress besides the economic ones.

The only effective criticism of the theory of economic determination is

that well expressed by Dr. Shailer Mathews, that it is too simple.

Self-interest is one factor in history, but not the only one.

[Sidenote: Bax]

Exception can be more justly taken to the way in which the theory has

sometimes been applied than to its formulation. Belfort Bax, maintaining

that the revolt from Rome was largely economic in its causes, gave as one

of these "the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obviously due to

its increasing exactions." Luther would have produced no result had not

the economic soil been ready for his seed, and with that soil prepared he

achieved a world-historical result even though, in Bax's opinion, his

character and intellect were below those of the average English village

grocer-deacon who sold sand for sugar. Luther, {726} in fact, did no

more than give a flag to those discontented with the existing political

and industrial life. Strange to say, Bax found even the most radical

party, that of the communistic Anabaptists, retrograde, with its program

of return to a golden age of gild and common land.

A somewhat better grounded, but still inadequate, solution of the problem

was offered by Karl Kautsky. [Sidenote: Kautsky] He, too, found the

chief cause of the revolt in the spoliation of Germany by Rome. In

addition to this was the new rivalry of commercial classes. Unlike Bax,

Kautsky finds in the Anabaptists Socialists of whom he can thoroughly

approve.

The criticism that must be made of these and similar attempts, is that

the causes picked out by them are too trivial. To say that the men who,

by the thousands and tens of thousands suffered martyrdom for their

faith, changed that faith simply because they objected to pay a tithe,

reminds one of the ancient Catholic derivation of the whole movement from

Luther's desire to marry. The effect is out of proportion to the cause.

But some theorists were even more fantastic than trivial. When Professor

S. N. Patten traces the origins of revolutions to either over-nutrition

or under-nutrition, and that of the Reformation to "the growth of

frugalistic concepts"; when Mr. Brooks Adams asserts that it was all due

to the desire of the people for a cheaper religion, exchanging an

expensive offering for justification by faith and mental anguish, which

cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible--we feel that the

dish of theory has run away with the spoon of fact. The climax was

capped by the German sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the

Reformation by the law of the operation of force along the line of least

resistance. The Reformers, by sending the soul straight to God, spared

it the detour via the {727} priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it

were, and saving energy.

[Sidenote: Lamprecht]

The genius who first and most fully worked out a tenable economic

interpretation of the Lutheran movement was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in

much the same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, that of an

independent, eclectic and better informed student. Lamprecht, as it is

well known, divides history into periods according to their psychological

character--perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism--but he maintains, and on

the whole successfully, that the temper of each of these epochs is

determined by their economic institutions. Thus, says he, the condition

of the transition from medieval to modern times was the development of a

system of "money economy" from a system of "natural economy," which took

place slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. "The

complete emergence of capitalistic tendencies, with their consequent

effects on the social, and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual

sphere, must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht shows how the

rise of capitalism was followed by the growth of the cities and of the

culture of the Renaissance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in

large part as a natural consequence of the increased power and scope

given to the ego by the possession of wealth. This individualism, he

thinks, strengthened by and strengthening humanism, was made forever safe

by the Reformation.

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points out, to suppose that

we are living in the same era of civilization, psychologically

considered, as that of Luther. Our subjectivism is as different from his

individualism as his modernity was from medievalism. The eighteenth

century was a transitional period from the one to the other.

{728} One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, continues

Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, was the change from

"polydynamism," or the worship of many saints, and the mediation of

manifold religious agencies, to "monodynamism" or the direct and single

intercourse of the soul with God. Still more different was the

world-view of the nineteenth century, built on "an extra-Christian,

though not yet anti-Christian foundation."

In the very same year in which Lamprecht's volume on the German

Reformation appeared, another interpretation, though less profound and

less in the economic school of thought, was put forth by A. E. Berger.

[Sidenote: Berger] He found the four principal causes of the Reformation

in the growth of national self-consciousness, the overthrow of an ascetic

for a secular culture, individualism, and the growth of a lay religion.

The Reformation itself was a triumph of conscience and of "German

inwardness," and its success was due to the fact that it made of the

church a purely spiritual entity.

The most brilliant essay in the economic interpretation of the origins of

Protestantism, though an essay in a very narrow field, was that of Max

Weber [Sidenote: Weber] which has made "Capitalism and Calvinism" one of

the watchwords of contemporary thought. The intimate connection of the

Reformation and the merchant class had long been noticed, _e.g._ by

Froude and by Thorold Rogers. But Weber was the first to ask, and to

answer, the question what it was that made Protestantism particularly

congenial to the industrial type of civilization. In the first place,

Calvinism stimulated just those ethical qualities of rugged strength and

self-confidence needful for worldly success. In the second place,

Protestantism abolished the old ascetic ideal of labor for the sake of

the next world, and substituted for it the conception of a calling, that

is, of doing {729} faithfully the work appointed to each man in this

world. Indeed, the word "calling'" or "Beruf," meaning God-given work,

is found only in Germanic languages, and is wanting in all those of the

Latin group. The ethical idea expressed by Luther and more strongly by

Calvin was that of faithfully performing the daily task; in fact, such

labor was inculcated as a duty to the point of pain; in other words it

was "a worldly asceticism." Finally, Calvin looked upon thrift as a

duty, and regarded prosperity, in the Old Testament style, as a sign of

God's favor. "You may labor in that manner as tendeth most to your

success and lawful gain," said the Protestant divine Richard Baxter, "for

you are bound to improve all your talents." And again, "If God show you

a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, if you

refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of

your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward."

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the controversy caused

by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, like Knodt, denied its validity,

tracing capitalism back of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin;

but most accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it were

offered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky and Ashley. So commonly has

it been received that it has finally been summed up in a brilliant but

superficial epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been coined

by him--though it is not, I believe, from his mint--that the Reformation

was "the Revolution of the rich against the poor."

[Sidenote: Darwinism]

Contemporary with the economic historiography, there was a new

intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but

in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers"

had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new

evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their

own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching

than had been that of the old deism.

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that the Reformation was

the child, or sister, of the Renaissance, and the parent of the

Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We are in the midst of a

gigantic movement," wrote Huxley, "greater than that which preceded and

produced the Reformation, and really only a continuation of that

movement." "The Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude,

incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving after the

liberation of man from the darkness." "The truth is," according to

Symonds, "that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the

emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more

important, indeed, in its political consequences, more weighty in its

bearing on rationalistic developments than was the Italian Renaissance,

but none the less an outcome of the same grand influence." William

Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the essence of the

Reformation was the same in the religious fields as that of the best

thought contemporary to it in other lines.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche]

But these ideas were already obsolescent since Friedrich Nietzsche had

worked out, with some care, the thought that "the Reformation was a

re-action of old-fashioned minds, against the Italian Renaissance." One

might suppose that this furious Antichrist, as he wished to be, would

have thought well of Luther because of his opinion that the Saxon first

taught the Germans to be unchristian, and because "Luther's merit is

greater in nothing than that he had the courage of his sensuality--then

called, gently enough, 'evangelic liberty.'" But no! With frantic

passion Nietzsche charged: "The Reformation, a duplication {731} of the

medieval spirit at a time when this spirit no longer had a good

conscience, pullulated sects, and superstitions like the witchcraft

craze." German culture was just ready to burst into full bloom, only one

night more was needed, but that night brought the storm that ruined all.

The Reformation was the peasants' revolt of the human spirit, a rising

full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. It was "the rage of the

simple against the complex, a rough, honest misunderstanding, in which

(to speak mildly) much must be forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore

apart a culture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not relish.

Behind the formula "every man his own priest" lurked nothing but the

abysmal hatred of the low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at

its worst.

[Sidenote: Acceptance of Nietzsche's opinion]

Quite slowly but surely Nietzsche's opinion gained ground until one may

say that it was, not long ago, generally accepted. "Our sympathies are

more in unison, our reason less shocked by the arguments and doctrines of

Sadolet than by those of Calvin," wrote R. C. Christie. Andrew D.

White's popular study of _The Warfare of Science and Theology_ proved

that Protestant churches had been no less hostile to intellectual

progress than had the Catholic church. "The Reformation, in fact,"

opined J. M. Robertson, "speedily overclouded with fanaticism what new

light of free thought had been glimmering before, turning into

Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic

mysteries and forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined

spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance of their age."

"Before the Lutheran revolt," said Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought

and speech was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after." Similar

opinions might be collected in large number; I {732} mention only the

works of Bezold and the brief but admirably expressed articles of

Professor George L. Burr, and that of Lemonnier, who places in a strong

light the battle of the Renaissance, intellectual, indifferent in

religion and politics, but aristocratic in temper, and the Reformation,

reactionary, religious, preoccupied with medieval questions and turning,

in its hostility to the governing orders, to popular politics.

The reaction of the Reformation on religion was noticed by the critics,

who thus came to agree with the conservative estimate, though they

deplored what the others had rejoiced in. Long before Nietzsche, J.

Burckhardt had pointed out that the greatest danger to the papacy,

secularization, had been adjourned for centuries by the German

Reformation. It was this that roused the papacy from the soulless

debasement in which it lay; it was thus that the moral salvation of the

papacy was due to its mortal enemies.

[Sidenote: Troeltsch]

The twentieth century has seen two brilliant critiques of the Reformation

from the intellectual side by scholars of consummate ability, Ernst

Troeltsch and George Santayana. The former begins by pointing out, with

a fineness never surpassed, the essential oneness and slight differences

between early Protestantism and Catholicism. The Reformers asked the

same questions as did the medieval schoolmen and, though they gave these

questions somewhat different answers, their minds, like those of other

men, revealed themselves far more characteristically in the asking than

in the reply. "Genuine early Protestantism . . . was an authoritative

ecclesiastical civilization (kirchliche Zwangskultur), a claim to

regulate state and society, science and education, law, commerce, and

industry, according to the supernatural standpoint of revelation." The

Reformers separated early and with cruel violence from the humanistic,

philological, and philosophical {733} theology of Erasmus because they

were conscious of an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was

with assurance of salvation, and this could only be won at the cost of a

miracle, not any longer the old, outward magic of saints and priestcraft,

but the wonder of faith occurring in the inmost center of personal life.

"The sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its stead appears

the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and

confidently assent to such a thought." Thus it came about that the way

of salvation became more important than the goal, and the tyranny of

dogma became at last unbearable. Troeltsch characterizes both his own

position and that of the Reformers when he enumerates among the ancient

dogmas taken over naïvely by Luther, that of the existence of a personal,

ethical God. Finely contrasting the ideals of Renaissance and

Reformation, [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] he shows that the

former was naturalism, the latter an intensification of religion and of a

convinced other-worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was based

on "affirmation of life," that of the latter was based on "calling."

Even as compared with Catholicism, Troeltsch thinks, supererogatory works

were abolished because each Protestant Christian was bound to exert

himself to the utmost at all times. The learned professor hazards the

further opinion that the spirit of the Renaissance amalgamated better

with Catholicism and, after a period of quiescence, burst forth in the

"frightful explosion" of the Enlightenment and Revolution, both more

radical in Catholic countries than in Protestant. But Troeltsch is too

historically-minded to see in the Reformation only a reaction. He

believes that it contributed to the formation of the modern world by the

development of nationalism, individualism (qualified by the objectively

conceived sanction of Bible and Christian community), moral health, and,

{734} indirectly, by the introduction of the ideas of tolerance,

criticism, and religious progress. Moreover, it enriched the world with

the story of great personalities. Protestantism was better able to

absorb modern elements of political, social, scientific, artistic and

economic content, not because it was professedly more open to them, but

because it was weakened by the memory of one great revolt from authority.

But the great change in religion as in other matters came, Troeltsch is

fully convinced, in the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: Santayana]

If Troeltsch has the head of a skeptic with the heart of a Protestant,

Santayana's equally irreligious brain is biased by a sentimental sympathy

for the Catholicism in which he was trained. The essence of his

criticism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully remarked, no one could

be more unintelligent, is that he moved away from the ideal of the

gospel. Saint Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic;

Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for it is convinced of the

importance of success and prosperity, abominates the disreputable, thinks

of contemplation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of poverty as a

punishment, and of married and industrial life as typically godly. In

short, it is a reversion to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that

Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for there would have

been, he affirms, a Catholic revival without him. With all its

old-fashioned insistence that dogma was scientifically true and that

salvation was urgent and fearfully doubtful, Protestantism broke down the

authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal to make one part of an

organic system the instrument for attacking the other part." It is the

beauty and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever

beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism.

Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy

have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private

hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the

conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both

disappear, and only "consecrated worldliness" remains.

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive

movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote:

Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism

and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the

latter left much open. "The Reformation," according to H. A. L. Fisher,

"was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had

been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated

European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of

private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned

in all the progressive communities of the West."

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the

medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made

the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the

fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began

in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that

field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free

religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's

opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form, has been expressed by

Salomon Reinach. "Instead of freedom of faith and thought the

Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of

religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that

they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} thanks to the breach made by Luther

in the ancient edifice of Rome."

[Sidenote: German nationalists]

A judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, to the effect that,

though the logical result of some of Luther's premises would have been

individual religion and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out,

"his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no resemblance whatever

to our subjectivism." His true originality was his personality which

imposed on an optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true

that the revolution was profound and yet it was not modern: "the classic

spirit, free institutions, democratic ideals, all these great forces by

which we live are not the heritage of Luther."

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept over Europe with the

Bismarckian wars, men began to judge the Reformation as everything else

by its relation, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. Even

in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to exactly what this

relation was. Paul de Lagarde idealized the Middle Ages as showing the

perfect expression of German character and he detested "the coarse,

scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two hobnailed shoes, and

who by his demagogy, brought in barbarism and split Germany into

fragments." Nevertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation

meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it significant that the

Basques, who were not a nation, should have produced, in Loyola and

Xavier, the two greatest champions of the anti-national church.

The tide soon started flowing the other way and scholars began to see

clearly that in some sort the Reformation was a triumph of "Deutschtum"

against the "Romanitas" of Latin religion and culture. Treitschke, as

the representative of this school, trumpeted forth that "the Reformation

arose from the good {737} German conscience," and that, "the Reformer of

our church was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the road to a

freer civilization." The dogma that might makes right was adopted at

Berlin--as Acton wrote in 1886--and the mere fact that the Reformation

was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historians like

Waitz and Kurtz.

Naturally, all was not as bad as this. A rather attractive form of the

thesis was presented by Karl Sell. Whereas, he thinks, Protestantism has

died, or is dying, as a religion, it still exists as a mood, as

bibliolatry, as a national and political cult, as a scientific and

technical motive-power, and, last but not least, as the ethos and pathos

of the Germanic peoples.

[Sidenote: The Great War]

In the Great War Luther was mobilized as one of the German national

assets. Professor Gustav Kawerau and many others appealed to the

Reformer's writings for inspiration and justification of their cause; and

the German infantry sang "Ein' feste Burg" while marching to battle.

Even outside of Germany the war of 1870 meant, in many quarters, the

defeat of the old liberalism and the rise of a new school inclined, even

in America--witness Mahan--to see in armed force rather than in

intellectual and moral ideas the decisive factors in history. Many

scholars noticed, in this connection, the shift of power from the

Catholic nations, led by France, to the Protestant peoples, Germany,

England and America. Some, like Acton, though impressed by it, did not

draw the conclusion ably presented by a Belgian, Emile de Laveleye, that

the cause of national superiority lay in Protestantism, but it doubtless

had a wide influence, partly unconscious, on the verdict of history.

[Sidenote: Reaction against German ideals]

But the recoil was far greater than the first movement. Paul Sabatier

wrote (in 1913) that until 1870 Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of

thoughtful {738} men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic

virtues and its openness to science and literary criticism. This high

opinion, strengthened by the prestige of German thought, was shattered,

says our authority, by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train

of horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved of their

superiority and attributed to Luther the result of Sedan.

The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of Luther. "Literary and

philosophic Germany," said Denys Cochin in an interview, "prepared the

evolution of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty and

aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and seconded the aberration."

[Sidenote: Paquier]

Paquier has written a book around the thesis: "Nothing in the present war

would have been alien to Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was

violent and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, but it is

the logical conclusion of the religious revolution accomplished by Luther

and of the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant." He finds the

causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two important doctrines and

several corollaries. First, the doctrine of justification by faith meant

the disparagement of morality and the exaltation of the end at the

expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the state. Finally, in

his narrow patriotism, Luther is thought to have inspired the reckless

deeds of his posterity.

On the other hand some French Protestants, notably Weiss, have sought to

show that the modern doctrines of Prussia were not due to Luther but were

an apostasy from him.

Practically all the older methods of interpreting the Reformation have

survived to the present; to save space they must be noticed with the

utmost brevity.

{739} [Sidenote: Protestants]

The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have all, as far as they

are worthy of serious notice, escaped from the crudely supernaturalistic

point of view. Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are

conservative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their own. Harnack

[Sidenote: Harnack] sees in Luther, as he does in Christ and Paul and all

other of his heroes, exactly his own German liberal Evangelical mind. He

is inclined to admit that Luther was little help to the progress of

science and enlightenment, that he did not absorb the cultural elements

of his time nor recognize the right and duty of free research, but yet he

thinks the Reformation more important than any other revolution since

Paul simply because it restored the true, _i.e._ Pauline and Harnackian

theology. Loisy's criticism of him is brilliant: "What would Luther have

thought had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to him with

the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or with this amendment, 'faith

in the merciful Father, for faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of

Jesus'?" The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that accorded by

Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy remarks, deduce from it the same

humanitarian deism as that now fashionable at Berlin.

I should like to speak of the work of Below and Wernle, of Böhmer and

Köhler, of Fisher and Walker and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant

scholars, by which I have profited. But I can only mention one other

Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who find the Reformation

(quite naturally) too conservative for them. Laurent wrote in this sense

in 1862-70, and he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of

Protestant apologists, Charles Beard. [Sidenote: Beard] Beard saw in

the Reformation the subjective form of religion over against the

objectivity of Catholicism, and also, "the first great triumph of the

scientific spirit"--the {740} Renaissance, in fact, applied to theology.

And yet he found its work so imperfect and even hampering at the time he

wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his book was to advocate a new

Reformation to bring Christianity in complete harmony with science.

[Sidenote: Philosophers]

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than creed, adopted the

Protestant standpoint. Eucken thinks that "the Reformation became the

animating soul of the modern world, the principle motive-force of its

progress. . . . In truth, every phase of modern life not directly or

indirectly connected with the Reformation has something insipid and

paltry about it." Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from

mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, and that the

stamp of the conflict between the inner grace and the outward support is

of the _esse_ of Protestanism. William James was also in warm sympathy

with Luther who, he thought, "in his immense, manly way . . . stretched

the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility." James added

that the Reformer also invented a morality, as new as romantic love in

literature, founded on a religious experience of despair breaking through

the old, pagan pride.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher and Gasquet, labored

fruitfully in the field of the Reformation by uncovering new facts, few

or none of them had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the

period. Janssen [Sidenote: Janssen] brought to its perfection a new

method applied to a new field; the field was that of _Kulturgeschichte_,

the method that of letting the sources speak for themselves, but

naturally only those sources agreeable to the author's bias. In this way

he represented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of the

German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting frost to both culture and

morality. Pastor's [Sidenote: Pastor] work, though dense with fresh

knowledge, offers no connected {741} theory. The Reformation, he thinks,

was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly

the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned classes

and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat.

From the learned uproar of Denifle's school emerges the explanation

of the revolt as the "great sewer" which carried off from the

church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's far finer

psychology--characteristically Jesuit--tries to cast on Luther the origin

of the present destructive subjectivism. Grisar's proof that "the modern

infidel theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated way on the

Luther of the first period, is suggestive.

[Sidenote: Acton]

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's favorite topics, I cannot

find on that subject any new or fruitful thought at all in proportion to

his vast learning. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the old

Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it was merely the product

of the wickedness and vagaries of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost

equally blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the English Bishop

Creighton too easy in his judgment of the popes, adding, "My dogma is not

the special wickedness of my own spiritual superiors, but the general

wickedness of men in authority--of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and

Cranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart and Henry VIII, of Philip II and

Elizabeth, of Cromwell and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bossuet

and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the turn of the 15th and 16th

centuries, believing that the fundamental characteristic of the period is

the belief in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that "Luther at

Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," but he

confesses himself baffled by the problem, which is, to his mind, why

Luther did not return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up

{742} all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, then or

later, dropped predestination, and admitted the necessity of good works,

the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of

tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Acton,

the one bar to his return to the church was his belief that the pope was

Antichrist.

It is notable that none of the free minds starting from Catholicism have

been attracted to the Protestant camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul

and Protestantism were coming to the end of their reign. Paul Sabatier

carefully proved that the Modernists owed nothing to Luther, and their

greatest scholar, Loisy, succinctly put the case in the remark, "We are

done with partial heresies."

[Sidenote: Anglicans]

The Anglicans have joined the Romanists to denounce as heretics those who

rebelled against the church which still calls Anglicans heretics.

Neville Figgis, having snatched from Treitschke the juxtaposition "Luther

and Machiavelli," has labored to build up around it a theory by which

these two men shall appear as the chief supports of absolutism and

"divine right of kings." Figgis thinks that with the Reformation

religion was merely the "performance for passing entertainment," but that

the state was the "eternal treasure." A far more judicious and

unprejudiced discussion of the same thesis is offered in the works of

Professor A. F. Pollard. He sees both sides of the medal for, if

religion had become a subject of politics, politics had become matter of

religion. He thinks the English Reformation was primarily a revolt of

the laity against the clergy.

[Sidenote: Other schools]

The liberal estimate of the Reformation fashionable a hundred years ago

has also been revived in an elaborate work of Mackinnon, and is assumed

in obiter dicta by such eminent historians as A. W. Benn, {743} E. P.

Cheyney, C. Borgeaud, H. L. Osgood and Woodrow Wilson. Finally,

Professor J. H. Robinson has improved the old political interpretation

current among the secular historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. The essence of the Lutheran movement he finds in the revolt

from the Roman ecclesiastical state.

SECTION 5. CONCLUDING ESTIMATE

The reader will expect me, after having given some account of the

estimates of others, to make an evaluation of my own. Of course no

view can be final; mine, like that of everyone else, is the expression

of an age and an environment as well as that of an individual.

[Sidenote: Causes of the Reformation]

The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Social

Revolution, was but the consequence of the operation of antecedent

changes in environment and habit, intellectual and economic. There was

the widening and deepening of knowledge, due in one aspect to the

invention of printing, in the other to the geographical and historical

discoveries of the fifteenth century and the consequent adumbration of

the idea of natural law. Even in the later schoolmen, like Biel and

Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger

rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages.

The general economic antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change

in the system of production from gild and barter to that of money and

wages. This produced three secondary results, which in turn operated

as causes: the rise of the moneyed class, individualism, and

nationalism.

All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the religious, the

political and the intellectual, produced the Reformation and its

sisters, the Renaissance and the Social Revolution of the sixteenth

century. The Reformation--including in that term both the Protestant

movement and the Catholic reaction--partly occupied {744} all these

fields, but did not monopolize any of them. There were some religious,

or anti-religious, movements outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran

impulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the intellectual and

political fields, primarily occupied by Renaissance and Revolution.

[Sidenote: Religious aspect]

(1) The _gêne_ felt by many secular historians in the treatment of

religion is now giving way to the double conviction of the importance

of the subject and of its susceptibility to scientific study. Religion

in human life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard all

theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rationalist[1] has remarked,

it is usually priests who have freed mankind from taboos and

superstitions. Indeed, in a religious age, no effective attack on the

existing church is possible save one inspired by piety.

[Sidenote: Parallels to the Reformation]

Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be found both in

Christian history and in that of other religions; they all markedly

show the same consequences of the same causes. The publication of

Christianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the Roman world

and its accentuation of faith against the ceremonialism of the Jewish

church, resembled that of Luther's "gospel." Marcion with his message

of Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a second-century

Reformer. The iconoclasm and nationalism of the Emperor Leo furnish

striking similarities to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started

by the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics Wyclif and Huss,

rehearsed the religious drama of the sixteenth century. Many revivals

in the Protestant church, such as Methodism, were, like the original

movement, returns to personal piety and biblicism. The Old Catholic

schism in its repudiation of the papal supremacy, and even Modernism,

notwithstanding its {745} disclaimers, are animated in part by the same

motives as those inspiring the Reformers. In Judaism the Sadducees, in

their bibliolatry and in their opposition to the traditions dear to the

Pharisees, were Protestants; a later counterpart of the same thing is

found in the reform the Karaites by Anan ben David. Mohammed has been

a favorite subject for comparison with Luther by the Catholics, but in

truth, in no disparaging sense, the proclamation of Islam, with its

monotheism, emphasis on faith and predestination, was very like the

Reformation, and so were several later reforms within Mohammedanism,

including two in the sixteenth century. Many parallels could doubtless

be adduced from the heathen religions, perhaps the most striking is the

foundation of Sikhism by Luther's contemporary Nanak, who preached

monotheism and revolted from the ancient ceremonial and hierarchy of

caste.

What is the etiology of religious revolution? The principal law

governing it is that any marked change either in scientific knowledge

or in ethical feeling necessitates a corresponding alteration in the

faith. All the great religious innovations of Luther and his followers

can be explained as an attempt to readjust faith to the new culture,

partly intellectual, partly social, that had gradually developed during

the later Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Faith vs. works]

The first shift, and the most important, was that from salvation by

works to salvation by faith only. The Catholic dogma is that salvation

is dependent on certain sacraments, grace being bestowed automatically

(_ex opere operato_) on all who participate in the celebration of the

rite without actively opposing its effect. Luther not only reduced the

number of sacraments but he entirely changed their character. Not

they, but the faith of the participant mattered, and {746} this faith

was bestowed freely by God, or not at all. In this innovation one

primary cause was the individualism of the age; the sense of the worth

of the soul or, if one pleases, of the ego. This did not mean

subjectivism, or religious autonomy, for the Reformers held

passionately to an ideal of objective truth, but it did mean that every

soul had the right to make its personal account with God, without

mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma

was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The

shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the

earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell

of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the

story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase

in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and

credit balance of outward work and merit was done away, and for it was

substituted the nobler, or at least more spiritual and less mechanical,

idea of disinterested morality and unconditioned salvation. The God of

Calvin may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by bribes.

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the _esse_ of religion

that it is hard for us to do justice to the importance of this change.

Really, it is not dogma so much as rite and custom that is fundamental.

The sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval Christianity and

to most primitive religions. For the first time Luther substituted for

the sacramental habit, or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely

ethical criterion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and the

categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous _sola fide_.

[Sidenote: Monism]

The second great change made by Protestantism was more intellectual,

that from a pluralistic to a monistic {747} standpoint. Far from the

conception of natural law, the early Protestants did little or nothing

to rationalize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but they

had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy to find scandal in

the worship of the saints, with its attendant train of daily and

trivial miracles. To sweep away the vast hierarchy of angels and

canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to

preach pure monotheism was in the spirit of the time and is a

phenomenon for which many parallels can be found. Instructive is the

analogy of the contemporary trend to absolutism; neither God nor king

any longer needed intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Political and economic aspects]

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the religious expression of the

current political and economic change. In the first place it reflected

and reacted upon the growing national self-consciousness, particularly

of the Teutonic peoples. [Sidenote: Nationalism and Teutonism] The

revolt from Rome was in the interests of the state church, and also of

Germanic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at the hands of the

Northern peoples is strikingly like the break-up of the Roman Empire

under pressure from their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman

church practically coincided with the boundaries of the Empire. The

apparent exception of England proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman

civilization was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth and

following centuries.

That the Reformation strengthened the state was inevitable, for there

was no practical alternative to putting the final authority in

spiritual matters, after the pope had been ejected, into the hands of

the civil government. Congregationalism was tried and failed as

tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation was really

responsible for the new despotism and the divine right of kings, is

clear from a comparison with {748} the Greek church and the Turkish

Empire. In both, the same forces which produced the state churches of

Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, a bigoted Sunnite,

after putting down the Shi'ite heresy, induced the last caliph of the

Abbasid dynasty to surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet;

thereafter he and his successors were caliphs as well as sultans. In

Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, in 1547, head of the national

church.

[Sidenote: Capitalism]

Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic revolution in that

its ethics are, far more than those of Catholicism, oriented by a

reference to this world. The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude,

mortification of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under the sun

of a new prosperity. In its light men began to realize the ethical

value of this life, of marriage, of children, of daily labor and of

success and prosperity. It was just in this work that Protestantism

came to see its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. The man

at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God

better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.

Moreover, the accentuation of the virtues of thrift and industry, which

made capitalism and Calvinism allies, but reflected the standards

natural to the bourgeois class. It was by the might of the merchants

and their money that the Reformation triumphed; conversely they

benefited both by the spoils of the church and by the abolition of a

privileged class. Luther stated that there was no difference between

priest and layman; some men were called to preach, others to make

shoes, but--and this is his own illustration--the one vocation is no

more spiritual than the other. No longer necessary as a mediator and

dispenser of sacramental grace, the Protestant clergyman sank

inevitably to the same level as his neighbors.

{749} [Sidenote: Intellectual aspect]

(3) In its relation to the Renaissance and to modern thought the

Reformation solved, in its way, two problems, or one problem, that of

authority, in two forms. Though anything but consciously rational in

their purpose, the innovating leaders did assert, at least for

themselves, the right of private judgment. Appealing from

indulgence-seller to pope, from pope to council, from council to the

Bible and (in Luther's own words) from the Bible to Christ, [Sidenote:

Individualism] the Reformers finally came to their own conscience as

the supreme court. Trying to deny to others the very rights they had

fought to secure for themselves, yet their example operated more

powerfully than their arguments, even when these were made of ropes and

of thumb-screws. The delicate balance of faith was overthrown and it

was put into a condition of unstable equilibrium; the avalanche,

started by ever so gentle a push, swept onward until it buried the men

who tried to stop it half way. Dogma slowly narrowing down from

precedent to precedent had its logical, though unintended, outcome in

complete religious autonomy, yes, in infidelity and skepticism.

[Sidenote: Vulgarization of the Renaissance]

Protestantism has been represented now as the ally, now as the enemy of

humanism. Consciously it was neither. Rather, it was the

vulgarization of the Renaissance; it transformed, adapted, and

popularized many of the ideas originated by its rival. It is easy to

see now that the future lay rather outside of both churches than in

either of them, if we look only for direct descent. Columbus burst the

bounds of the world, Copernicus those of the universe; Luther only

broke his vows. But the point is that the repudiation of religious

vows was the hardest to do at that time, a feat infinitely more

impressive to the masses than either of the former. It was just here

that the religious movement became a great solvent of conservatism; it

made the masses think, passionately if not {750} deeply, on their own

beliefs. It broke the cake of custom and made way for greater

emancipations than its own. It was the logic of events that, whereas

the Renaissance gave freedom of thought to the cultivated few, the

Reformation finally resulted in tolerance for the masses. Logically

also, even while it feared and hated philosophy in the great thinkers

and scientists, it advocated education, up to a certain point, for the

masses.

[Sidenote: The Reformation a step forward]

In summary, if the Reformation is judged with historical imagination,

it docs not appear to be primarily a reaction. That it should be such

is both _a priori_ improbable and unsupported by the facts. The

Reformation did not give _our_ answer to the many problems it was

called upon to face; nevertheless it gave the solution demanded and

accepted by the time, and therefore historically the valid solution.

With all its limitations it was, fundamentally, a step forward and not

the return to an earlier standpoint, either to that of primitive

Christianity, as the Reformers themselves claimed, or to the dark ages,

as has been latterly asserted.

[1] S. Reinach: _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, iv, 467.

{751}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRELIMINARY

1. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES.

The amount of important unpublished documents on the Reformation,

though still large, is much smaller than that of printed sources, and

the value of these manuscripts is less than that of those which have

been published. It is no purpose of this bibliography to furnish a

guide to archives.

Though the quantity of unpublished material that I have used has been

small, it has proved unexpectedly rich. In order to avoid repetition

in each following chapter, I will here summarize manuscript material

used (most of it for the first time), which is either still unpublished

or is in course of publication by myself. See _Luther's

Correspondence_, transl. and ed. by Preserved Smith and C. M. Jacobs,

1913 ff; _English Historical Review_, July 1919; _Scottish Historical

Review_, Jan. 1919; _Harvard Theological Review_, April 1919; _The N.

Y. Nation_, various dates 1919.

From the Bodleian Library, I have secured a copy of an unpublished

letter and other fragments of Luther, press mark, Montagu d. 20, fol.

225, and Auct. Z. ii, 2.

From the British Museum I have had diplomatic correspondence of Robert

Barnes, Cotton MSS., Vitellius B XXI, foil. 120 ff.; a letter of

Albinianus Tretius to Luther, Add. MS. 19, 959, fol. 4b ff; and a

portion of John Foxe's _Collection of Letters and Papers_, Harleian MS

419, fol. 125.

From the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, collection of

autographs made by Ferdinand J. Dreer, unpublished and hitherto unused

letters of Erasmus, James VI of Scotland (2), Leo X, Hedio, Farel to

Calvin, Forster, Melanchthon, Charles V, Albrecht of Mansfeld, Henry

VIII, Francis I (3), Catherine de' Medici, Grynaeus, Viglius van

Zuichem, Alphonso d'Este, Philip Marnix, Camden, Tasso, Machiavelli,

Pius IV, Vassari, Borromeo, Alesandro Ottavio de' Medici (afterwards

Leo XI), Clement VIII, Sarpi, Emperor Ferdinand, William of Nassau

(1559), Maximilian III, Paul Eber (2), Rudolph II, Henry III, Philip

II, Emanuel Philibert, Henry IV, Scaliger, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert

Dudley (Leicester), Filippo Strozzi, and others.

From Wellesley College a patent of Charles V., dated Worms, March 6,

1521, granting mining rights to the Count of Belalcazar. Unpublished.

Prom the American Hispanic Society of New York unpublished letter of

Henry IV of France to Du Font, on his conversion, and letter of Henry

VII of England to Ferdinand of Aragon.

2. GENERAL WORKS

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_.[11] 1910-1. (Many valuable articles of a

thoroughly scientific character).

_The New International Encyclopaedia_, 1915f. (Equally valuable).

_Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche_.[3] 24

vols. Leipzig. 1896-1913. (Indispensable to the student of Church

History; The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religions Knowledge, 12

vols., 1908 ff, though in part based on this, is far less valuable for

the present subject).

Wetzer und Welte: _Kirchenlexikon oder Encyclopädie der katholischen

Theologie und ihrer Hülfswissenschaften_. Zweite Auflage von J. Card.

Hergenröther und F. Kaulen. Freiburg im Breisgau. 1880-1901. 12

vols. (Valuable).

_Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_, hg. von H. Gunkel, O.

Scheel, F. M. Schiele. 5 vols. 1909-13.