of Protestantism. But strict Calvinism is nearly extinct in Germany, and
the old Lutheran Church itself has almost disappeared. It subsists, not
in any definite reality, but only in the aspirations of certain divines
and jurists. The purpose of the union was to bring together, in
religious communion, the reigning family of Prussia, which had adopted
Calvinism in 1613, and the vast Lutheran majority among the people. It
was to be, in the words of the king, a merely ritual union, not an
amalgamation of dogmas. In some places there was resistance, which was
put down by military execution. Some thousands emigrated to America; but
the public press applauded the measures, and there was no general
indignation at their severity. The Lutherans justly perceived that the
union would promote religious indifference; but at the accession of the
late king there came a change; religious faith was once more sought
after, believing professors were appointed in almost all the German
universities, after the example of Prussia; Jena and Giessen alone
continued to be seats of Rationalism. As soon as theology had begun to
recover a more religious and Christian character, two very divergent
tendencies manifested themselves. Among the disciples of Schleiermacher
and of Neander a school of unionists arose who attempted a conciliatory
intermediate theology. At the same time a strictly Lutheran theology
flourished at the universities of Erlangen, Leipzig, Rostock, and
Dorpat, which sought to revive the doctrine of the sixteenth century,
clothed in the language of the nineteenth. But for men versed in
Scripture theology this was an impossible enterprise, and it was
abandoned by the divines to a number of parochial clergymen, who are
represented in literature by Rudelbach, and who claim to be the only
surviving Protestants whom Luther would acknowledge as his sons and the
heirs of his spirit.
The Lutheran divines and scholars formed the new Lutheran party,[337]
whose most illustrious lay champion was the celebrated Stahl. They
profess the Lutheran doctrine of justification, but reject the notion of
the invisible Church and the universal priesthood. Holding to the divine
institution of the offices of the Church, in opposition to the view
which refers them to the congregation, they are led to assume a
sacrament of orders, and to express opinions on ordination, sacraments,
and sacrifice, which involve them in the imputation of Puseyism, or even
of Catholicism. As they remain for the most part in the State Church,
there is an open war between their confessional spirit and the
syncretism of the union. In 1857 the Evangelical Alliance met at Berlin
in order to strengthen the unionist principles, and to testify against
these Pharisees. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians--sects
connected by nothing but a common hatred of Catholicism--were greeted
by the union divines as bone of their bone, and welcome allies in the
contest with an exclusive Lutheranism and with Rome. The confusion in
the minds of the people was increased by this spectacle. The union
already implied that the dogma of the Lord's Supper, on which Lutherans
and Calvinists disagree, was uncertain, and therefore not essential. The
alliance of so many denominations added baptism to the list of things
about which nothing is positively known. The author of this measure was
Bunsen, who was full of the idea of uniting all Protestant sects in a
union against the Catholic Church and catholicising tendencies.
For the last fifteen years there has been an active agitation for the
improvement of the Church among the Protestant divines. The first
question that occupies and divides them is that of Church government and
the royal Episcopate, which many deem the chief cause of the
ecclesiastical decay. The late King of Prussia, a zealous and
enlightened friend of the Protestant Church, declared that "the
territorial system and the Episcopal authority of the sovereign are of
such a nature that either of them would alone be enough to kill the
Church if the Church was mortal," and that he longed to be able to
abdicate his rights into the hands of the bishops. In other countries,
as in Baden, a new system has been devised, which transfers political
constitutionalism to the Church, and makes it a community, not of those
who believe in Christ, but, in the words of the Government organ, of
those who believe in a moral order. Hopes were entertained that the
introduction of Synods would be an improvement, and in 1856 and 1857 a
beginning was made at Berlin; but it was found that the existence of
great evils and disorders in the Church, which had been a secret of the
initiated, would be published to the world, and that government by
majorities, the ecclesiastical democracy which was Bunsen's ideal, would
soon destroy every vestige of Christianity.
In their doctrinal and theological literature resides at the present day
the strength and the renown of the Protestants; for a scientific
Protestant theology exists only in Germany. The German Protestant Church
is emphatically a Church of theologians; they are its only authority,
and, through the princes, its supreme rulers. Its founder never really
divested himself of the character of a professor, and the Church has
never emancipated itself from the lecture-room: it teaches, and then
disappears. Its hymns are not real hymns, but versified theological
dissertations, or sermons in rhyme. Born of the union of princes with
professors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not
altogether harmoniously blended; and when it is accused of worldliness,
of paleness of thought, of being a police institution rather than a
Church, that is no more than to say that the child cannot deny its
parentage.
Theology has become believing in Germany, but it is very far from being
orthodox. No writer is true to the literal teaching of the symbolical
books, and for a hundred years the pure doctrine of the sixteenth
century has never been heard. No German divine could submit to the
authority of the early articles and formulas without hypocrisy and
violence to his conscience, and yet they have nothing else to appeal to.
That the doctrine of justification by faith only is the principal
substance of the symbolical writings, the centre of the antagonism
against the Catholic Church, all are agreed. The neo-Lutherans proclaim
it "the essence and treasure of the Reformation," "the doctrine of which
every man must have a clear and vivid comprehension who would know
anything of Christianity," "the banner which must be unfurled at least
once in every sermon," "the permanent death that gnaws the bones of
Catholics," "the standard by which the whole of the Gospel must be
interpreted, and every obscure passage explained," and yet this article
of a standing or falling Church, on the strength of which Protestants
call themselves evangelical, is accepted by scarcely one of their more
eminent divines, even among the Lutherans. The progress of biblical
studies is too great to admit of a return to the doctrine which has
been exploded by the advancement of religious learning. Dr. Doellinger
gives a list (p. 430) of the names of the leading theologians, by all of
whom it has been abandoned. Yet it was for the sake of this fundamental
and essential doctrine that the epistle of St. James was pronounced an
epistle of straw, that the Augsburg Confession declared it to have been
the belief of St Augustine, and that when the author of the Confession
had for very shame omitted this falsehood in the published edition, the
passage was restored after his death. For its sake Luther deliberately
altered the sense of several passages in the Bible, especially in the
writings of St. Paul. To save this doctrine, which was unknown to all
Christian antiquity, the breach was made with all ecclesiastical
tradition, and the authority of the dogmatic testimony of the Church in
every age was rejected. While the contradiction between the Lutheran
doctrine and that of the first centuries was disguised before the laity,
it was no secret among the Reformers. Melanchthon confessed to Brenz
that in the Augsburg Confession he had lied. Luther admitted that his
theory was new, and sought in consequence to destroy the authority of
the early Fathers and Councils. Calvin declared that the system was
unknown to tradition. All these men and their disciples, and the whole
of the Lutheran and Calvinistic theology of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, professed to find their doctrine of imputation
laid down distinctly in the Bible. The whole modern scientific theology
of the Protestants rejects both the doctrine and the Lutheran exegesis
of the passages in question. But it is the supreme evangelical
principle, that the Scripture is perfectly clear and sufficient on all
fundamental points. Yet the point on which this great divergence
subsists is a doctrine which is decisive for the existence of the
Church, and most important in its practical influence on life. The whole
edifice of the Protestant Church and theology reposes therefore on two
principles, one material, the other formal--the doctrine of imputation,
and the sufficiency of the Bible. But the material principle is given up
by exegesis and by dogmatic theology; and as to the formal principle,
for the sufficiency of the Bible, or even for the inspiration of the
writings of the disciples of the Apostles, not the shadow of a
scriptural argument can be adduced. The significance of this great fact
is beginning to make its way. "Whilst Rationalism prevailed," says a
famous Lutheran divine, "we could impute to its action that our churches
were deserted and empty. But now that Christ crucified is everywhere
preached, and no serious effect is to be observed, it is necessary to
abandon this mistake, and not to conceal from ourselves that preaching
is unable to revive religious life."
The religious indifference of the educated classes is the chief security
for the existence of the Protestant Church. If they were to take an
interest in matters of worship and doctrine, and to inform themselves as
to the present relation of theological science to the teaching of the
pulpit, the day of discovery and exposure would come, and confidence in
the Church would be at an end. The dishonesty of Luther in those very
things on which the Reformation depended could not be concealed from
them. In Prussia there was a conscientious clergyman who taught his
parishioners Greek, and then showed them all the passages, especially in
the Epistles of St. Paul, which were intentionally altered in the
translation. But one of the Protestant leaders impresses on the clergy
the danger of allowing the people to know that which ought to be kept a
secret among the learned. At most, he says, it may be necessary to admit
that the translation is not perspicuous. The danger of this discovery
does not, however, appear to be immediate, for no book is less familiar
to the laity than the Bible. "There is scarcely one Christian family in
a hundred," says Tholuck, "in which the Holy Scriptures are read." In
the midst of this general downfall of Christianity, in spite of the
great efforts of Protestants, some take refuge in the phrase of an
invisible Church, some in a Church of the future. Whilst there exists a
real, living, universal Church, with a settled system and means of
salvation, the invisible Church is offered in her stead, wrapped up in
the swaddling clothes of rhetoric, like the stone which Rhea gave her
husband instead of the child. In a novel of Jean Paul, a Swedish
clergyman is advised in the middle of winter to walk about with a bit of
orange-sugar in his mouth, in order to realise with all his senses the
sunny climes of the South. It requires as much imagination to realise
the Church by taking a "spiritual league" into one's mouth.
Another acknowledgment, that the Church has become estranged from the
people, and subsists only as a ruin of a past age, is the widely spread
hope of a new Pentecost. Eminent theologians speak of it as the only
conceivable salvation, though there is no such promise in Scripture, no
example in history of a similar desire. They rest their only hope in a
miracle, such as has not happened since the Apostles, and thereby
confess that, in the normal process of religious life by which Christ
has guided His Church till now, their cause is lost. A symptom of the
same despair is the rise of chiliastic aspirations, and the belief in
the approaching end of the world. To this party belongs the present
minister of public worship and education in Berlin. Shortly before his
appointment he wrote: "Both Church and State must perish in their
earthly forms, that the kingdom of Christ may be set up over all
nations, that the bride of the Lamb, the perfect community, the new
Jerusalem, may descend from heaven." Not long before this was published
another Prussian statesman, Bunsen, had warned his Protestant readers to
turn away from false prophets, who announce the end of the world because
they have come to the end of their own wisdom.
In the midst of this desperate weakness, although Catholics and
Protestants are so mixed up with each other that toleration must soon be
universal throughout Germany, the thoughts of the Protestants are yet
not turned towards the Catholic Church; they still show a bitter
animosity against her, and the reproach of Catholic tendencies has for
twenty years been the strongest argument against every attempt to
revive religion and worship. The attitude of Protestantism towards Rome,
says Stahl, is that of the Borghese gladiator. To soften this spirit of
animosity the only possible resource is to make it clear to all
Protestants who still hold to Christianity, what their own internal
condition is, and what they have come to by their rejection of the unity
and the authority which the Catholic Church possesses in the Holy See.
Having shown the value of the Papacy by the results which have ensued on
its rejection, Doellinger proceeds, with the same truth and impartiality,
to trace the events which have injured the influence and diminished the
glory and attractiveness of the Holy See, and have converted that which
should be the safeguard of its spiritual freedom into a calamity and a
dishonour in the eyes of mankind. It seems as though he wished to point
out, as the moral to be learnt from the present condition of the
religious world, that there is a coincidence in time and in providential
purpose between the exhaustion and the despair at which enlightened
Protestantism has arrived, from the failure of every attempt to organise
a form of church government, to save the people from infidelity, and to
reconcile theological knowledge with their religious faith,--between
this and that great drama which, by destroying the bonds which linked
the Church to an untenable system, is preparing the restoration of the
Holy See to its former independence, and to its just influence over the
minds of men.
The Popes, after obtaining a virtual independence under the Byzantine
sceptre, transferred their allegiance to the revived empire of the West.
The line between their authority and that of the emperor in Rome was
never clearly drawn. It was a security for the freedom and regularity of
the election, which was made by the lay as well as ecclesiastical
dignitaries of the city, that it should be subject to the imperial
ratification; but the remoteness of the emperors, and the inconvenience
of delay, caused this rule to be often broken. This prosperous period
did not long continue. When the dynasty of Charlemagne came to an end,
the Roman clergy had no defence against the nobles, and the Romans did
all that men could do to ruin the Papacy. There was little remaining of
the state which the Popes had formed in conjunction with the emperors.
In the middle of the tenth century the Exarchate and the Pentapolis were
in the power of Berengarius, and Rome in the hands of the Senator
Alberic. Alberic, understanding that a secular principality could not
last long, obtained the election of his son Octavian, who became Pope
John XII. Otho the Great, who had restored the empire, and claimed to
exercise its old prerogative, deposed the new Pope; and when the Romans
elected another, sent him also into exile beyond the Alps. For a whole
century after this time there was no trace of freedom of election.
Without the emperor, the Popes were in the hands of the Roman factions,
and dependence on the emperor was better for the Church than dependence
on the nobles. The Popes appointed under the influence of the prelates,
who were the ecclesiastical advisers of the Imperial Government, were
preferable to the nominees of the Roman chiefs, who had no object or
consideration but their own ambition, and were inclined to speculate on
the worthlessness of their candidates. During the first half of the
eleventh century they recovered their predominance, and the deliverance
of the Church came once more from Germany. A succession of German Popes,
named by the emperor, opened the way for the permanent reform which is
associated with the name of Gregory VII. Up to this period the security
of the freedom of the Holy See was the protection of the emperor, and
Gregory was the last Pope who asked for the imperial confirmation.
Between the middle of the ninth century and the middle of the eleventh
the greater part of the Roman territory had passed into the hands of
laymen. Some portions were possessed by the emperor, some by the great
Italian families, and the revenues of the Pope were derived from the
tribute of his vassals. Sylvester II. complains that this was very
small, as the possessions of the Church had been given away for very
little. Besides the tribute, the vassals owed feudal service to the
Pope; but the government was not in his hands, and the imperial
suzerainty remained. The great families had obtained from the Popes of
their making such extensive grants that there was little remaining, and
Otho III. tried to make up for it by a new donation. The loss of the
patrimonies in Southern Italy established a claim on the Norman
conquerors, and they became papal vassals for the kingdom of Sicily. But
throughout the twelfth century the Popes had no firm basis of their
power in Italy. They were not always masters of Rome, and there was not
a single provincial town they could reckon on. Seven Popes in a hundred
years sought a refuge in France; two remained at Verona. The donation of
Matilda was disputed by the emperors, and brought no material accession
of territory, until Innocent III., with his usual energy, secured to the
Roman Church the south of Tuscany. He was the first Pope who governed a
considerable territory, and became the real founder of the States of the
Church. Before him, the Popes had possessions for which they claimed
tribute and service, but no State that they administered. Innocent
obtained the submission of Benevento and Romagna. He left the towns to
govern themselves by their own laws, demanding only military aid in case
of need, and a small tribute, which was not always exacted; Viterbo, for
instance, paid nothing until the fifteenth century.
The contest with Frederic II. stripped the Holy See of most of these
acquisitions. In many cases its civil authority was no longer
acknowledged; in many it became a mere title of honour, while the real
power had passed into the hands of the towns or of the nobles, sometimes
into those of the bishops. Rudolph of Habsburg restored all that had
been lost, and surrendered the imperial claims. But while the German
influence was suspended, the influence of France prevailed over the
Papacy; and during the exile at Avignon the Popes were as helpless as if
they had possessed not an acre of their own in Italy. It was during
their absence that the Italian Republics fell under the tyrannies, and
their dominions were divided among a swarm of petty princes. The famous
expedition of Cardinal Albornoz put an end to these disorders. He
recovered the territories of the Church, and became, by the AEgidian
Constitutions, which survived for ages, the legislator of Romagna. In
1376 eighty towns rose up in the space of three days, declared
themselves free, or recalled the princes whom Albornoz had expelled.
Before they could be reduced, the schism broke out, and the Church
learnt the consequences of the decline of the empire, and the
disappearance of its advocacy and protectorate over the Holy See.
Boniface IX. sold to the republics and the princes, for a sum of money
and an annual tribute, the ratification of the rights which they had
seized.
The first great epoch in the history of the temporal power after the
schism is the election of Eugenius IV. He swore to observe a statute
which had been drawn up in conclave, by which all vassals and officers
of State were to swear allegiance to the College of Cardinals in
conjunction with the Pope. As he also undertook to abandon to the
cardinals half the revenue, he shared in fact his authority with them.
This was a new form of government, and a great restriction of the papal
power; but it did not long endure.
The centrifugal tendency, which broke up Italy into small
principalities, had long prevailed, when at last the Popes gave way to
it. The first was Sixtus IV., who made one of his nephews lord of Imola,
and another of Sinigaglia. Alexander VI. subdued all the princes in the
States of the Church except the Duke of Montefeltro, and intended to
make the whole an hereditary monarchy for his son. But Julius II.
recovered all these conquests for the Church, added new ones to them,
and thus became, after Innocent III. and Albornoz, the third founder of
the Roman State. The age which beheld this restoration was marked in
almost every country by the establishment of political unity on the
ruins of the mediaeval independence, and of monarchical absolutism at
the expense of mediaeval freedom. Both of these tendencies asserted
themselves in the States of the Church. The liberties of the towns were
gradually destroyed. This was accomplished by Clement VII. in Ancona, in
1532; by Paul III. in Perugia, in 1540. Ravenna, Faenza, Jesi had, under
various pretexts, undergone the same fate. By the middle of the
sixteenth century all resistance was subdued. In opposition, however, to
this centralising policy, the nepotism introduced by Sixtus IV. led to
dismemberment. Paul III. gave Parma and Piacenza to his son Pier Luigi
Farnese, and the duchy was lost to the Holy See for good. Paul IV. made
a similar attempt in favour of his nephew Caraffa, but he was put to
death under Pius IV.; and this species of nepotism, which subsisted at
the expense of the papal territory, came to an end. Pius V. forbade,
under pain of excommunication, to invest any one with a possession of
the Holy See, and this law was extended even to temporary concessions.
In the eighteenth century a time came when the temporal power was a
source of weakness, and a weapon by which the courts compelled the Pope
to consent to measures he would otherwise never have approved. It was
thus that the suppression of the Jesuits was obtained from Clement XIV.
Under his successors the world had an opportunity of comparing the times
when Popes like Alexander III. or Innocent IV. governed the Church from
their exile, and now, when men of the greatest piety and
conscientiousness virtually postponed their duty as head of the Church
to their rights as temporal sovereigns, and, like the senators of old,
awaited the Gauls upon their throne. There is a lesson not to be
forgotten in the contrast between the policy and the fate of the great
mediaeval pontiffs, who preserved their liberty by abandoning their
dominions, and that of Pius VI. and Pius VII., who preferred captivity
to flight.