THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1883. 
 
 THE REFORMATION 
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO 
 
 / 
 
 MODERN THOUGHT AND KNOWLEDGE 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED AT OXFORD AND IN LONDON, 
 IN APRIL, MAY AND JUNE, 1883. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES BEAED, B.A. 
 
 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 
 
 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON 
 And 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 
 
 1883. 
 
 [All Rights reserved.] 
 

 Luther du ! grosser, verkannter Mann ! Du hast uns von dem 
 Joche der Tradition erloset : wer erloset uns von dem unertraglichern 
 Joche des Buchstabens ! Wer bringt uns endlich ein Christenthum, 
 wie du es itzt lehren wiirdest, wie es Christus selbst lehren wiirde ! 
 
 Lessing. 
 
te* 
 
 TO 
 
 LEYSOS LEWIS, 
 
 IN 
 
 GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THIRTY-FIVE YEARS 
 UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The only word of preface which this book needs is a 
 request to the reader that he will look at it in the light 
 of its expressed purpose. I have not tried to write, even 
 within the smallest compass, a history of the Eeformation, 
 but only to show the relation in which its results stand 
 to modern knowledge and modern thought. There are 
 many chapters omitted which I would gladly have written ; 
 and critics who have read themselves deeply into certain 
 parts of the story, may look for much in these pages 
 which they will not find. Should I have proved to the 
 satisfaction of only a few that if theology in this age is 
 to keep abreast of advancing science, and to continue to 
 answer to the inexhaustible religious wants of men, a 
 new Eeformation is needed, it will be enough. 
 
 It was in 1483 that Luther was born. I thank the 
 Hibbert Trustees for the opportunity which they have 
 afforded me of adding my humble wreath to the various 
 
Vlll 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 tributes of honour, affection and gratitude, which in his 
 native country will greet the Four-hundredth anniversary 
 of his birth. 
 
 CHAELES BEAED. 
 
 June, 1883. 
 

 Lecture I. 
 
 REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 To look upon the, Eeformation of the sixteenth century 
 as only the substitution of one set of theological doctrines 
 for another, or the cleansing of the Church from notorious 
 abuses and corruptions, or even a return of Christianity 
 to something like primitive purity and simplicity, is to 
 
 ^take an inadequate view of its nature and importance. 
 Granting that it was any or all of these things, the 
 further questions arise, What were the forces which pro- 
 duced it, and why did they operate exactly at that time 
 
 ' and in that way ? From the beginning of the thirteenth 
 century to the end of the fifteenth, a lively sense of the 
 need of reformation was never absent from the Church, 
 and repeated efforts were made to effect it. Why did 
 they all fail ? Why was it left for the reaction of schism, 
 and the existence of Protestant communions in face of 
 the old Church, to produce that reform of discipline 
 and morals which the Council of Constanz found impos- 
 sible ? Whence originated the transfer of religion from 
 the objective to the subjective side of things, which 
 marks the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism ? 
 Were the forces which produced these results exhausted 
 
 B 
 
h> 
 
 A I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 in calling, the Eefo*rmation into being, or are they still 
 active and bearing fruit ? In other words, was the Eefor- 
 mation a finished process, or do its principles still ask to 
 be carried to a further logical development ? 
 
 These questions will receive such complete answer as 
 I am able to give them in the course of Lectures to which 
 this is the introduction. At the same time, that the 
 future direction of our inquiry may be indicated, it is 
 necessary to answer them briefly and provisionally now. 
 
 i The Eeformation, in the view which I shall take of it, 
 was not, primarily, a theological, a religious, an ecclesias- 
 tical movement at all. It was part of a general awaken- ! 
 ing of the human intellect, which had already begun in 
 the fourteenth century, and which the revival of clas- 
 sical learning and the invention of the art of printing 
 
 Lurged on with accelerating rapidity in the fifteenth. 
 It was the life of the Eenaissance infused into religion, 
 under the influence of men of the grave and earnest 
 Teutonic race. It was a partial reaction from the eccle- 
 siastical and ascetic mood of the middle ages to Hellenic 
 ways of thinking: a return to nature which was not a 
 rebellion against God, an appeal to reason which left 
 
 ""room for loyal allegiance to the Bible and to Christ. But 
 this intellectual movement was wider than the Eeforma- 
 tion, and when from various causes the Eeformation was 
 arrested in its development, was only just beginning to 
 
 , manifest itself in its full scope and force. From it have 
 proceeded the physical, the historical, the critical re- 
 searches which during the last three centuries have) so 
 immensely widened the area of human knowledge. The 
 forces which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ffrst 
 began to operate on a large scale, are the forces that 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 6 
 
 have enabled us to look, not only at the physical uni- 
 verse in itself and in its relations to mankind, but at the 
 whole past history of our race,- with new eyes. And the 
 question towards which the inquiries, in which I hope 
 to have your kind encouragement and co-operation, will 
 all converge, is this : Inasmuch as our outlook upon the 
 physical world is quite other than that of the Eeformers 
 as our knowledge of antiquity, both sacred and secular, 
 has, since their day, been greatly widened and made more 
 accurate as these changes directly and largely affect our 
 conceptions of God, of the Divine government, of the 
 nature and authority of Scripture, of the importance to 
 be attached to the opinions of Christian antiquity what 
 ought to be our intellectual attitude towards the creeds 
 and confessions bequeathed to us by the Eeformation ? 
 
 During the whole of the three centuries which preceded 
 the Eeformation, two facts impressed themselves deeply 
 yet from time to time with varying intensity upon the 
 minds of thoughtful and pious Churchmen in Western 
 Europe : first, that the Church was one, authoritative, 
 divine ; and next, that it stood in urgent need of prac- 
 tical amendment. The Latin was to such the only 
 Church ; the Greek and the lesser Eastern communions 
 were too far off and too little known to strike their ima- 
 gination ; with all kindred races they owned one spiritual 
 allegiance. One Pope, one Emperor, the sun and moon 
 in the intellectual sky, who have inferiors but no equals, 
 together make up a logically perfect system, embracing 
 things spiritual and things temporal. 'Nor did this feel- , 
 ing of the unity of the Church greatly depend upon the 
 audacity with which Papal claims were made, or the 
 
 b2 
 
4 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 extent to which they were acknowledged : it was perhaps 
 equally strong when Innocent III. had raised the political 
 influence of Eome to its highest pitch, and when a suc- 
 cession of disregarded Pontiffs held their court in the 
 Babylonian captivity of Avignon. It chiefly depended 
 upon the fact that the tradition of Latin Christianity 
 had come down from antiquity in one clear, unruffled 
 stream. The very recollection of an Arian Church had 
 long passed away ; while, whatever heresies of later date 
 had arisen, had either been completely rooted out, or 
 existed in the heart of the Church only in a condition of 
 suspended vitality. Men's ignorance of the true story of 
 the past had been bolstered up by carefully devised fic- 
 tions : the Donation of Constantine was held to be as 
 indisputable a fact as the Council of Mcsea : the forged 
 decretals of Isidore lay at the basis of all Papal law. 
 The majestic oneness of the Church in creed, in ritual, 
 in discipline the conduct of worship in a sacred tongue, 
 which at once overpassed all national distinctions, and 
 by strong and tender ties connected the present with 
 the past the graduated hierarchy, which united every 
 meanest servant of the Church with the Pope in sole 
 supremacy at its head all combined to make the idea of 
 open separation from the mystic body of Christ one that 
 the boldest spirits did not dare to entertain. 
 
 At the same time, dissatisfaction with the Church's 
 practical working was deep and widespread. There can 
 be no greater mistake than to suppose it to have been 
 confined to the age immediately preceding the Eeforma- 
 tion, or to have been exaggerated by schismatics in order 
 to justify their schism. All through the centuries of 
 which I am speaking, the thirteenth, the fourteenth, the 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 5 
 
 fifteenth, these complaints perpetually recur : now finding 
 a voice in scorn and invective meant to reach the popular 
 ear ; now lending an undertone of seriousness to poetical 
 persiflage; sometimes furnishing matter for the airy scorn 
 of the learned oftenest perhaps of all, the sad burthen 
 of writers filled with a prophetic aspiration after truth 
 and goodness. They touch the same points : the decline 
 of monastic fervour and purity, the heaping up of wealth 
 by both secular and regular clergy, the scandals created 
 by the enforcement of clerical celibacy, the corruptions 
 and exactions of the Papal see. Luther has been blamed 
 for strong speech on these things, but he does not speak 
 one whit more strongly than Petrarch : if Erasmus' Col- 
 loquies and Adages are full of contemptuous scorn of 
 monks and nuns, so is Boccaccio's Decameron. The 
 very abuse which started both Luther and Zwingli on 
 their reforming career that of the indulgences was oip* 
 old standing : Tetzel himself could hardly have been 
 more shameless than Chaucer's Pardoner ; John XXIII. 
 flooded Europe with these commodities ; John Wessel, in 
 the generation immediately before Luther, attacked the 
 whole theory on which they rested even more roundly 
 than he. Indeed, the student of the latter half of the i A J 
 fifteenth century is surprised to find how little that is * / 
 new it contributes to the approaching convulsion. There 
 may indeed have been a feeling that, as so many methods 
 of reform had been tried in vain, some bolder surgery 
 than had yet been applied to the running sores of the 
 Church was imperatively needed. But men were still 
 crying out against the old abuses, without knowing from 
 what quarter of the heavens the reviving and reforming 
 wind would blow. 
 
b I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 The efforts which the Church made through these three 
 centuries to amend herself, may be divided (though not 
 chronologically) into three classes, which I will call, for 
 convenience' sake, the Catholic, the Mystic, the Biblical. 
 But before I proceed to speak of each of these, I must 
 premise that this, like every other classification of the 
 same kind, must not be taken as rigidly true to fact; 
 that the several tendencies which it implies mutually act 
 and re-act ; and that a difference of opinion may often 
 justifiably arise as to the category in which a particular 
 movement of reform ought to be placed. First, then, of 
 the Catholic. 
 
 It appears from what I have already said that nothing 
 could be less fair to the mediaeval Church than to suppose 
 it sunk in torpid self-satisfaction, profoundly unconscious 
 of its weaknesses and its sins. It had its own ideal of 
 the religious life, which, if not ours, was yet a high one : 
 if it produced many worldly Bishops, many profligate 
 Popes, it never was without saintly recluses and learned 
 theologians. But this ideal is one which, above all others, 
 carries within itself the necessity of fallings away and 
 L risings again in those who try to realize it. It involves 
 the exclusive training of one part of human nature at the 
 expense of another : not merely the mastery of the spirit 
 over the flesh, but the abject slavery of the flesh to the 
 spirit intent upon unearthly things. The virgin is purer 
 than the wife ; the monk is nobler than the man. The 
 crown of piety is sought in detachment from the world : 
 it is safest to shun temptation even at the cost of avoid- 
 ing duty : better close the eyes at once to all beauty, 
 better wholly turn away the heart from earthly delight, 
 than run the risk of being caught in the net of self- 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 7 
 
 pleasing. The salvation of a man's own sonl is the one, 
 all-absorbing object of life : compared with it, what other 
 end is worth toil and patience ? by the side of the Bea- 
 tific Vision, what splendour of worldly success would not 
 show poor and common ? Eeflections of this kind first 
 drove Benedict to his cave in the inaccessible cliff above 
 the Anio ; and when in after years Benedictine abbeys 
 had grown rich, and Benedictine monks idle and luxu- 
 rious, reflections of this kind led to the foundation of 
 new orders and the enactment of more stringent rules. 
 So Robert first, and then Stephen Harding established 
 Citeaux ; so, when Citeaux was growing too prosperous, 
 St. Bernard led away his little colony to Clairvaux. '*This\ 
 is the story of all monastic orders both. before and since 
 the Eeformation : a period of fervent zeal, of unbounded 
 self-sacrifice, of miracles of self-conquest; and then a 
 time of slow relaxation, ending often in shameful license, 
 yet followed after a while by another spasm of reform. 
 Such efforts of religious revival carry within them the 
 earnest of their own failure ; they are the attempt M to J 
 wind ourselves too high, for sinful man beneath the sky ;" 
 they involve an outrage upon essential principles of 
 human nature, which in the long run always avenge ) 
 repression by rebellion. 
 
 The close of the twelfth and the beginning of the thir- 
 teenth century were marked by a great outbreak of anti- 
 sacerdotalism over a large part of Europe. At the very 
 moment when Innocent III. had vindicated the Papal 
 power to the utmost against Emperors and Kings, it was 
 assailed by a widespread domestic conspiracy. This con- 
 spiracy assumed different forms : among the "Waldenses, 
 of whom I shall speak more particularly in another con- 
 
8 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 nection, it was Biblical ; the Albigenses were declared 
 to be tainted with Manichsean heresy ; there were other 
 less famous sects which seemed to anticipate the intel- 
 lectual and moral extravagances of the Anabaptists of the 
 sixteenth century. But one hatred and contempt of the 
 priesthood characterized the whole movement. Their 
 ignorance, their worldliness, their avarice, their profli- 
 gacy, had alienated men from the Church. It seemed as 
 if whole provinces were about to be permanently lost to 
 Rome. I need not dwell upon the various forms of 
 forcible repression with which this religious upheaval 
 was met ; the principal result of the rebellion was to call 
 into existence the two great mendicant orders, the Domi- 
 nican and the Franciscan. Did the heretical teachers 
 lead the people astray by the magic of their eloquence ? 
 let the Dominicans outpreach them. Was the wealth of 
 the clergy a perpetual stumbling-block to piety ? let the 
 Franciscans show the world an example of poverty as 
 naked as Christ's. The two new orders spread through 
 Europe with startling rapidity : unconfined in monastic 
 houses, their members pervaded every parish : by means 
 of their lay brotherhoods, they permeated all classes of 
 society : they were a Papal militia, independent of the 
 Bishops, and owning allegiance only to their own generals 
 and the Pope. Soon they laid hold on the Universities, 
 and helped to give its form to scholastic theology: Thomas 
 Aquinas is the boast of the Dominican order ; Bonaven- 
 tura, Duns Scotus, "William of Ockham, were Franciscans. 
 But the universal fate of monastic orders overtook them. 
 Notwithstanding their rigid vows of poverty, they grew 
 rich like the Benedictines before them, and with riches 
 came idleness and moral laxity. A not unnatural shame 
 
 \ 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 9 
 
 drove some of the Franciscans, who recollected the mar- 
 riage of their founder with his mystic bride Poverty, into 
 almost open revolt: the Spiritual Franciscans, as they 
 were called, made an earnest attempt to return to the old 
 simplicity. But the inevitable tendencies of the system 
 were too strong for them ; and by the time of the Eefor- "7 
 mation the mendicant orders were the shame, not the stay, 
 of the Papacy. j 
 
 The self-reforming effort of the Church took another 
 shape at the close of the fourteenth century. The capti- 
 vity at Avignon had ended, but it had ended in schism. 
 The world was scandalized by the spectacle of rival Popes 
 disputing for the honour of the triple crown. Wearied 
 by thirty years of this disgraceful strife, the Church, by 
 an almost desperate effort of independence, took matters 
 into its own hands, and a Council was convened at Pisa, 
 in 1409, neither by Pope nor by Emperor, but by the 
 College of Cardinals. It was an august assembly : the 
 presence of representatives of national Churches, of the 
 Sacred College, of monastic orders, of famous Universi- 
 ties, enabled it to speak with almost the unanimous voice 
 of Western Christendom ; while it acquired a still greater 
 weight from the fact that it was a living protest in favour 
 of the doctrine that the Church was above the Pope, not 
 the Pope above the Church. Its first and indeed its 
 most important act was to depose both the rival Popes, 
 Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII., and to elect Alex- 
 ander V., once a Franciscan friar, in their room. It was 
 not a happy choice. When, after a reign of ten months, 
 the new Pope died, all he had done for the Church was 
 to have dissolved the Council, and to have issued a bull 
 giving quite unprecedented privileges to the mendicant 
 
10 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 orders. His successor was Balthazar Cossa, who, under 
 the name of John XXIII., gave the Church a foretaste 
 of the personal and administrative scandals which have 
 made the Popes of the Eeformation a by-word. And 
 now indeed, if ever, the hour of the Church's self -amend- 
 ment seemed to have struck. The reigning Pope shocked 
 the universal conscience. The deposed Popes still lived, 
 and still maintained their claims. A strong party, of 
 which Gerson, the famous Chancellor of the University 
 of Paris, was the head, was in favour of radical reform. 
 Germany, in the person of Sigismund, the last Emperor 
 of the house of Luxemburg, intervened with decisive 
 force : nothing lay so near to Sigismund's heart, who, 
 though infirm of will, was a man of fine impulses, as the 
 cleansing of the Church from scandals which were fast 
 becoming intolerable. The Council of Pisa afforded an 
 apt precedent : if a Council could depose two Popes, why 
 not three ? At last the stress of politics in Italy threw 
 John into the hands of the Emperor, and with the assent 
 of the former, though hardly with his goodwill, another 
 general Council assembled at Constanz in 1414. The 
 three Popes were summoned to appear before a tribunal 
 which assumed to have the right of adjudicating upon 
 their claims. At last, reformation was made a distinct 
 and avowed end of ecclesiastical policy. The Council set 
 before itself three objects to be attained: to unite the 
 Church under one acknowledged Pope ; to reform it in 
 its head and in its members; to extirpate all heretical 
 and erroneous doctrines. 
 
 Unhappily for the good name of the Council of Constanz, 
 the third of these objects was allowed precedence over the 
 other two. The trial and condemnation of John Huss, who 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 11 
 
 had come to Constanz under an imperial safe-conduct the 
 penal fire which was lighted in the meadow by the lake- 
 side, first for him, and then for his friend and follower 
 Jerome of Prague the " blush of Sigismund,"not the only- 
 mute protest of a royal conscience, drugged by ecclesiastical 
 casuistry, which history records the principle, delibe- 
 rately laid down by the Council, that faith need not and 
 ought not to be kept with heretics are things which 
 must not detain us here. John XXIII. was persuaded 
 or forced, not only to abdicate, but to acknowledge a 
 long and black bead-roll of sins ; and then the issue was 
 joined. The Church was without an autocratic head: 
 should she not use the opportunity to purge herself of 
 scandals'? The Emperor, with his Germans, took the 
 side of reform : Gerson, powerfully aided by Hallam, 
 Bishop of Salisbury, gave to it the whole weight of his 
 intellectual and personal ascendency. Nor could there 
 be any doubt as to what at least the Chancellor wanted. 
 Doctrinal reform was not in his thoughts : the shame of 
 Huss's death rests on him, not less than on his colleagues. 
 But his treatise, " On the Way to unite and reform 
 the Church in a General Council," written in 1410, after 
 the disappointment at Pisa, which still survives, breathes 
 as regards all practical matters the spirit which prevailed 
 at Wittenberg a century afterwards. He draws a sharp 
 distinction between " the one, holy and Catholic Church,' ' 
 of which Christ is the sole head, and the Apostolic 
 Church over which the Pope presides. He asserts that 
 the Council is above the Pope, " above him in authority, 
 above him in dignity, above him in office ;" that Popes 
 are but men, liable to error and to sin ; that a Pope is 
 "in all things subject, like any other Christian, to the 
 
12 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 precept and commandment of Christ." He laughs at 
 the idea that while long-descended secular princes may be 
 deposed for the good of their subjects, a Pope cannot, 
 who owed his dignity to the votes of Cardinals, and 
 " whose father and grandfather probably could not get 
 beans enough to eat." " Should the son of a Venetian 
 fisherman be allowed to hold the Papacy to the detriment 
 of the whole Church commonwealth ?" x Still, with the 
 concurrence of all these favouring circumstances, the 
 opportunity was missed. It was decided (the death of 
 Hallam at this moment had something to do with it) 
 first to give the Church a new head, and then to proceed 
 to its reformation. The choice fell upon Cardinal Colonna, 
 
 1 "Si propter salvationem unius regni, unius provincial, deponitur 
 unus Rex, unus Princeps saecularis, qui per successionem perpetuam 
 descendit : multo magis unus Papa, unus Praelatus est deponendus, qui 
 per electionem Cardinalium fuit institutus, cujus pater et avus forsan 
 ventres implere non sufficiebant fabis. Durum enim est dicere quod 
 filius unius Veneti piscatoris papatum debeat tenere cum detrimento 
 totius reipublicae ecclesiastical " . . . . " Papa, ut Papa, est homo, et ut 
 homo, sic est Papa, et ut Papa potest peccare, et ut homo, potest 
 errare. Subjicitur ergo, ut alter Christianus in omnibus prseeepto et 
 mandato Christi." . . . . " Sed numquid tale Concilium, ubi Papa non 
 prsesidet, est supra Papam? Certe sic. Superius in auctoritate, superius 
 in dignitate, superius in officio. Tali enim Concilio ipse Papa in omni- 
 bus tenetur obedire, tale Concilium potest potestatecn Papas limitare quia 
 tali Concilio, cum repraesentet Ecclesiam universalem, claves ligandi et 
 solvendi sunt concessse. Tale Concilium jura papalia potest tollere, a 
 tali Concilio nullus potest appellare, tale Concilium potest Papam eli- 
 gere, privare et deponere, tale Concilium potest jura nova condere, et 
 facta ac antiqua destruere, talis etiam Concilii constitutiones, statuta et 
 regulee sunt immutabiles et indispensabiles per quamcumquam personam 
 inferiorem Concilio." Gerson, " De modis uniendi ac reformandi Eccle- 
 siam in Concilio universali," quoted by Gieseler, Kirchengeschichte, 
 Vol. II. Partiv. pp. 15, 16. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 13 
 
 who took the name of Martin V., and straightway pro- 
 ceeded to act in accordance with true Papal precedent. 
 His first measure was to confirm all the regulations which 
 had obtained in the Papal Chancery, and with them, 
 therefore, the whole series of practical abuses of which 
 the Church so bitterly complained. His next step was 
 to break the force of the general league for reform, by 
 concluding separate concordats with the Transalpine 
 nations treaties which seemed to promise much, while 
 they really conceded little. The Pope's personal cha- 
 racter did the rest : his office recovered the respect of 
 which the schism and the profligacy of John XXIII. had 
 deprived it: and the Council, which had preceded its 
 election of the Pope by a declaration that it would not 
 dissolve until reforms were achieved, separated without 
 any other result than the kindling of the Hussite war. 
 
 This was the age of reforming Councils. I cannot 
 pause to tell in detail the story of the Council of Basel, 
 which assembled twelve years after the dissolution of 
 the Council of Constanz, and for substantially the same 
 purposes. The same forces, too, met in conflict : on one 
 side, Sigismund and Gerson, still eager for reform; on 
 the other, Pope Eugenius IV., intent upon preserving 
 the Papal prerogative intact, and trying to draw off the 
 attention of Christendom from reform at Basel to a 
 treaty of union with the Greek Church at Ferrara and 
 Florence. ~Nor is it necessary to narrate the way in 
 which the adroit management of tineas Sylvius Picco- 
 lomini afterwards Pope Pius II. who at the right 
 moment transferred his services from the Imperial to the 
 Papal side, broke up the Council of Basel, and once 
 more handed over the Church to the autocracy of Kome. 
 
14 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 The attempt to secure disciplinary reform by means of 
 general Councils had hopelessly failed, shattered against 
 long prescription and the baser ambitions of men. Thomas 
 of Sarzana Nicholas Y. ruled in Borne, a wise and 
 liberal patron of that classical revival which was to prove 
 the true dissolvent of Papal supremacy. Under the long 
 administration of Frederick III., in whom the House of 
 Hapsburg again succeeded to the Imperial throne, the 
 empire was torn by internal dissensions. The misfor- 
 tunes of Henry VI.'s reign, and the subsequent Wars of 
 the Eoses, occupied all England's attention. Charles 
 VII. of France was busy winning back his kingdom from 
 the English, and Louis XI. in consolidating it, by crafty 
 treachery. If the Church were to be reformed, it was 
 clear that it must be by the application of more powerful 
 forces than had yet been tried. But Europe was too 
 busy with wars and schemes of dynastic ambition to 
 think of reforming it. 
 
 I pass now to a series of manifestations also within the 
 Church, which I have called Mystic, and which cannot 
 justly be neglected in any enumeration of internal efforts 
 of reform. The mystic is one who claims to be able to 
 see God and divine things with the inner vision of the 
 soul a direct apprehension, as the bodily eye apprehends 
 colour, as the bodily ear apprehends sound. His method, 
 so far as he has one, is simply contemplative : he does 
 not argue, or generalize, or infer: he reflects, broods, 
 waits for light. He prepares for Divine communion by 
 a process of self-purification : he detaches his spirit from 
 earthly cares and passions : he studies to be quiet, that 
 his still soul may reflect the face of God. He usually 
 sits loose to active duty : for him, the felt presence of 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 15 
 
 God dwarfs the world and makes it common : lie is so 
 dazzled by the glory of the one great Object of contem- 
 plation, that he sees and cares for little else. But the 
 morals of mysticism are almost always sweet and good, 
 even if there be a faint odour of cloister incense about 
 them ; though at the same time there are more ways than 
 one from mysticism to immorality, all leading through 
 the Pantheism into which mystics are ever apt to fall. 
 For shall not one who is mystically incorporate with God 
 live in a region above law ? And if God be the ground 
 and substance of all things, what justification is there for 
 distinction between good and evil ? But these are com- 
 paratively rare aberrations, and the essential weakness 
 of mysticism lies in another direction. It much rather 
 consists in the fact that mysticism cannot formulate itself 
 in such a way as to appeal to universal apprehension. 
 It affirms, it does not reason : all the mystic can say to 
 another is, I see, I feel, I know; and if he speaks to 
 no corresponding faculty, his words fall to the ground. 
 Indeed, the mystic is always more or less indistinct in 
 utterance : he sees, or thinks he sees, more than he can 
 tell : the realities which he contemplates are too vast, too 
 splendid, too many-sided, to be confined within limits of 
 human words : he looks at them, now in this aspect, now 
 in that, and his reports, while each true to the vision of 
 the moment, have a sound of inconsistency with each 
 other. So mysticism usually fails to propagate and per- 
 petuate itself: the mystic faculty is a gift of God, nnt an 
 aptitude that can be communicated by man to man : its 
 appearance in the Church is as that breath of the Sj irit 
 which bloweth where it listeth. 
 
 The monastic life, one might think, would be so favour- 
 
16 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 able to the development of this phase of religiousness, as 
 to make it wonderful, not that the Catholic Church has 
 produced so many mystics, but that she is not the mother 
 of more. But it is a characteristic of mysticism that it 
 is singularly independent of creeds and churches. It is 
 less a matter of belief, or of ecclesiastical environment, 
 than of individual mood and capacity. As a Eaphael 
 must have painted, though he had not been born just 
 when Italian art was putting forth its brightest blossoms, 
 so Tauler, I venture to think, would have been a mystic, 
 even had he received his education in the Oxford of 
 to-day. Give a mystic the thought of God, and his 
 mind wants and can contain no more : from a soul so 
 filled, all peculiarities of ecclesiastical time and place 
 drop away as useless shell or indifferent garment. This 
 is the reason why the works of great mystics have always 
 been the world's favourite books of devotion : they move 
 in a region above diversities of creed : they reach that 
 which is common to every age and sex. The " Imitation 
 of Christ" is a more Catholic book than Protestant trans- 
 lators are always willing to have it appear, but the Catho- 
 lic trappings of the thought do not vex the Evangelical 
 reader ; while it would be difficult to find out from in- 
 ternal evidence whether the Theologia Germanica was 
 written before or after the Eeformation. And so I think 
 it is hardly fair to represent the Catholic mystics of the 
 middle ages as precursors of Luther. He was of kin to 
 them, as indeed all the world's great religious teachers 
 form but one family ; but I do not see that they specifi- 
 cally smoothed his way. In so far, indeed, as mysticism 
 is an intensely personal and individual thing, bringing 
 the single soul face to face with God, without the inter- 
 
T. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 17 
 
 vention of priest or sacrament, it accords with the sub- 
 jective principle of Protestantism. But on the whole it 
 is truer to look upon Catholic mysticism as the effort of 
 pious souls within the church to get rid of superficial 
 corruptions and defacements by going down to the ulti- 
 mate ground of religious reality. 
 
 Mysticism, on the one side, stands so nearly related to 
 all spiritual religion, while, on the other, it is capable of 
 running into such excesses of extravagance and fanaticism, 
 as often to make it very difficult to decide who are to be 
 included in the category of mystics. The centuries of 
 which I am speaking were so far from being marked by 
 a dead level of orthodox obedience, as, on the contrary, 
 to be crowded with sects which ran their brief course of 
 enthusiastic activity, and then either died of spiritual ina- 
 nition or perished under persecution. Some mystics stand 
 out in their separate individuality ; others are founders 
 of schools or hierophants of sects. Mysticism develops 
 itself in many different directions : now it is simply 
 poetical, spending a wealth of metaphor to express that 
 which is inexpressible ; now losing itself in Pantheistic 
 speculation ; again springing up in strong moral aspira- 
 tion; or, once more, animating millenarian, almost revolu- 
 tionary hopes. Such, for instance, was the mysticism of 
 the Fratricelli, the heretical Franciscans, who, not con- 
 tent with trying to bring back the order to the standard 
 of simplicity and purity set up by its founder, meditated 
 mystic revolution. Their book was the " Introduction 
 to the Everlasting Gospel," 1 a work of doubtful author- 
 
 1 In 1254, the Bishop of Paris sent to Innocent IY. a book entitled, 
 "Introductorius in Evangelium seternum, seu in libros Abbatis Joachim ," 
 which the next Pope, Alexander IV., condemned in a bull dated 1255. 
 
 C 
 
18 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 ship, which brought together the characteristic ideas 
 scattered through the hooks of Abbot Joachim of Flora, 
 in the kingdom of Naples, an apocalyptic seer, who lived 
 in the latter part of the twelfth century, and who, though 
 the unconscious inspirer of much heresy and rebellion, is 
 yet a canonized saint of the Catholic Church. In his 
 view the world was growing old : the kingdom of the 
 Father, which had lasted from Adam to Christ, was at 
 an end: the kingdom of the Son, which was to close 
 with the coming of Antichrist, was almost over; 1 and 
 after a struggle with powers of evil, the kingdom of 
 the Holy Ghost was about to begin. The actual carnal 
 church was to pass away, as the synagogue had already 
 done : the new spiritual church was to spring from that 
 part of the order of St. Francis which had been faithful 
 to its founder's spirit. It was to be a reign of poverty, 
 humility, love, in which, therefore, Popes and Bishops 
 had no part : all men were to be converted to Christ, and 
 to love one another so fervently as to have all things in 
 common : all wrongs were to be redressed, and all mise- 
 ries to disappear. Not unconnected with this belief in 
 the Everlasting Gospel, though possibly not directly in- 
 spired by it, were the revolts against Church authority 
 of Gerard Sagarelli and Fra Dolcino of Novara, in 
 Northern Italy, at the end of the thirteenth century, 
 revolts which, aiming at ecclesiastical reform by revolu- 
 tionary means, were finally put down, with copious shed- 
 Its authorship is variously attributed to one of two Franciscans belong- 
 ing to the severer party in the order, Gerhard and John of Parma. 
 Hahn : Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter, III. 160 162. 
 
 1 The dates of the beginnings and endings of the three kingdoms 
 *are variously given by different authorities. Conf. Hahn, III. 106. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 ding of blood. Then there were the Pantheistic mystics, 
 the so-called Brethren of the Free Spirit, who from the 
 thirteenth to the fifteenth century appear all along the 
 course of the Ehine, 1 thence spreading into other parts 
 of Germany, as well as into Switzerland and France, and 
 more than once drawing down on themselves the censures 
 of the Church. It is in this connection, perhaps, that 
 Master Eckhart finds his fit place, a profound Pantheistic 
 thinker, who from the philosophical side is now recog- 
 nized as having anticipated some of the results of later 
 metaphysical speculation in Germany. As a theologian, 
 he was condemned by Pope John XXII. ; as a mystic, 
 he was the precursor of Tauler, some of whose published 
 sermons are more correctly ascribed to him. Eckhart, 
 if heretical in teaching, was pure in- life ; but over the 
 Brethren of the Free Spirit some cloud of uncertainty 
 and suspicion hangs, as if common morality did not well 
 accord with the doctrine of the absorption of the Many 
 in the One. Not so, however, with the Friends of God, 
 a secret fellowship also belonging to the Ehineland, upon 
 which recent research has thrown a much-needed light. 
 You remember the mysterious layman who listened to 
 the Dominican John Tauler, as he expounded, eloquently 
 and successfully as he thought, the deep things of the 
 kingdom, and then, after convincing him of his own 
 unfitness to instruct others, condemned him to a silence 
 
 1 The sect which appeared in Brussels about the beginning of the 
 fifteenth century, under the name of homines intelligent ice, seems to 
 have been an offshoot of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The tenets 
 ascribed to them are a mixture of mystical Pantheism, with highly 
 antinomian views of the relation between the sexes. They, too, held 
 the fundamental doctrine of the "Everlasting Gospel" as to the three 
 successive kingdoms. Hahn, II. 526. 
 
 c2 
 
20 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 which lasted for two years, and was finally broken only 
 with much hesitation and many tears. That name- 
 less one was Nicholas of Basel, the founder and head 
 of the " Friends of God," who comes and goes in the 
 church history of the time in this mysterious fashion, 
 and at last falls into the hands of the Inquisition, with 
 the usual result. "What his peculiar mysticism was, may 
 be seen in Tauler's Sermons, and in the Theologia 
 Germanica, which, though later in date, belongs to the 
 same school. Only in its outward form is his mysticism 
 Catholic, and hardly Catholic even there : its essence is 
 the suicide of self, the moral absorption of the spirit in 
 that which is alone good. 
 
 The Tertiaries of the Franciscan order, men and women 
 who were bound by its principles and animated by its 
 spirit, without incurring the obligation of abandoning 
 their place in the world, form a point of transition to 
 some Christian communities, among whom was developed 
 another form of Teutonic mysticism. 1 These were the 
 Beghards and Beguines. The Beguines, societies of 
 women who lived together, supporting themselves by the 
 labour of their hands, and giving their spare time and 
 strength to works of charity, first appear as early as the 
 
 1 Halm gives a place to all three sects among Biblical heretics. At 
 the same time he says and the remark is worth careful notice " It 
 should not be overlooked that the different parties embraced in this 
 section pass into one another at many points. Thus the heretical 
 Franciscan Tertiaries bore the names Fratricelli and Beghards : thus 
 Gregory XI. places Beghards and Turlupins in one and the same 
 category : thus the terms Lollhards, Beghards and Fratricelli, were 
 synonymous : thus the Beghards and Fratricelli were confounded with 
 the Pauperes de Lugduno, and the Beghards with the Rhenish Friends 
 of God." Hahn, II. 420, 421. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 21 
 
 eleventh century : a male community of the same kind, 
 known as Beghards, was founded at Lou vain in 1220 : 
 and both Beguines and Beghards multiplied rapidly in 
 the Low Countries. They differed little from the older 
 orders, except in the looseness of their association ; their 
 houses appear to have been independent of each other, 
 and were not organized under a common head. The 
 time of their decline came in the fourteenth century. It 
 was the old story: the. first love had waxed cold; they 
 had learned to beg instead of working, and their houses 
 had become no longer the refuge of the devout, but the 
 resort of the lazy. But there were also fanatical Beg- 
 hards, who in their profession of a mystical Pantheism 
 are hardly to be distinguished from the Fratricelli and 
 the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and whose ethical theories 
 are subject to the same reproach. The greatest mystic 
 of the Low Countries, unless we are to account Thomas 
 k Kempis as such, was Johann Euysbroeck, who from 
 1293 to 1381 lived a life remote from the public eye, 
 and died Prior of a monastery of Augustinian Canons, at 
 Gronendal, not far from Brussels. He was younger than 
 Eckhart, whose influence he had felt, standing in the 
 line of mystical ancestry, between that master and Tauler 
 on the one hand, Gerhard Groot on the other. But in 
 Groot, the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, 
 the mystical and the practical were subtly blended. He 
 was born in the year 1340 at Deventer, and it was in 
 that neighbourhood that his society chiefly flourished. 
 It was the monastic life, in a kind of loose formation. 
 The brethren took no irrevocable vows, lived simply, 
 earned their bread by teaching children and copying 
 books, and kept up a friendly intercourse with the world 
 
22 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 which they had left. A fine air of practical Christianity- 
 blows through these brotherhoods : their aim is to realize, 
 under ascetic conditions, yet without fanaticism and 
 exaggeration, the highest ideal of social life, and they 
 succeed in no small degree. Presently we shall see that 
 they rendered important services to education and clas- 
 sical literature in Holland ; but their name would deserve 
 to live if only that in training Thomas k Kempis they 
 produced the " Imitation of Christ." 1 Out of the bro- 
 therhood had grown two houses of regular canons, in one 
 of which, that of St. Agnes, near Zwoll, k Kempis 
 passed almost the whole of his long and innocent life. 
 
 Of a book which has gone through many thousand 
 editions, which has been translated into every European 
 language, and which in actual religious influence probably 
 stands next to the Bible, it is not necessary to speak at 
 length. It is more Catholic in form than the Theologia 
 Germanica: it is Catholic, too, in essence, inasmuch as 
 its piety is the piety of the cloister, not of the world. 
 With all its sweetness and its strength, there are large 
 areas of human life which it does not touch : it deals so 
 exclusively with the soul's personal relation to Christ, as 
 to be justly obnoxious to the charge of being little more 
 than a manual of sacred selfishness. But, such as it is, 
 it is only fair that the Latin Church should have the 
 whole credit of it. When we note the condition of that 
 
 1 I adhere, until conclusive evidence to the contrary is produced, 
 to the traditional belief which connects Thomas Henierken with the 
 " Imitation." Even if he were not the author, he did much to propa- 
 gate the book and give it its vogue. An account of the latest literature 
 on the subject, which is yet far from being fully investigated, will be 
 found in the "Modern Review" for October, 1882, art. " Musica 
 Ecclesiastica," by Alexander Gordon, M.A. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 23 
 
 Church in the fifteenth century, with its life-blood poi- 
 soned by corruptions which only the spasm of revolution 
 could cast out, and its destinies guided by Popes whose 
 very vices were an ironical proof of Divine protection, 
 it is pleasant to be able to turn to Thomas in his cell at 
 Zwoll, meditating on those deep and piercing words which 
 have expressed the love to Christ and the aspiration after 
 goodness of every subsequent generation. But, I repeat, 
 I do not claim him as a precursor of the Eeformation, 
 except in so far as all manifestations of true religion 
 are parts of one silver thread, running through the 
 coarse fabric of the ages. Of the Theologia Germanica, 
 Luther said: 1 "And I will say, though it be boasting 
 of myself, and ' I speak as a fool,' that, next to the Bible 
 and St. Augustine, no book hath ever come into my 
 hands whence I have learned, or would wish to learn, 
 more of what God and Christ and man and all things 
 are." Yet I cannot find any distinctive Lutheranism in 
 it, either the doctrine of the sole sufficiency of Scrip- 
 ture, or that of justification by faith alone. But all 
 true mystics are a church apart, who cannot be prevented 
 by distance of time, or sharp distinctions of sect and 
 creed, from holding out to one another hands of genuine 
 brotherhood. 
 
 We pass now to a third class of Eeformers before the 
 Eeformation the Biblical : men who, both in their reli--" 
 gious method and the conclusions to which it led them, 
 so closely resemble Luther and Zwingli as to excite 
 wonder that they did not anticipate their success. Oldest 
 and in some respects most interesting of these are the 
 
 1 Preface to the Second Edition of 1518. 
 
24 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Waldenses, a still surviving church, the history of which 
 goes back to the beginning of the twelfth century. The 
 more accurate research of recent years traces the origin 
 of the Waldenses to a double fountain, the streams from 
 which soon mingled, and were thenceforth hard to be 
 distinguished. On the one hand, there were the Yaudois, 
 the "men of the valleys," who still hold their ancient 
 seats in the mountains of Dauphine* and Piedmont; on 
 the other, the so-called "Poor Men of Lyons," the fol- 
 lowers of Peter "Waldo, a rich merchant of that city, who 
 gave himself up to apostolic work and adopted an apos- 
 tolic simplicity of living. But the Waldenses, whatever 
 * their origin, were from the first Biblical Christians. They 
 translated the Scriptures into their own tongue, and ex- 
 pounded them in their natural sense only. They main- 
 tained the universal priesthood of the believer. They 
 struck a second blow at sacerdotal doctrine by denying 
 the validity of sacraments administered by a wicked priest. 
 Their only sacraments were Baptism and the Eucharist : 
 they rejected purgatory, indulgences, prayers for the dead, 
 invocation of saints. Their morals were unimpeached 
 even by their enemies; while in "The Noble Lesson," 1 
 a poem in the Provencal dialect, they have left an epi- 
 tome of the Bible history which rises to a high ethical 
 level, but which does not exhibit a trace of distinctively 
 Augustinian theology. There was a moment in the his- 
 tory of the Waldenses which forcibly calls to mind the 
 relations between Wesley and the Church of England. 
 Forbidden to preach, excommunicated, banished, they 
 
 1 "The Noble Lesson" may be found in Hahn, Vol. II. Appendix, 
 pp. 628 et seq. For two distinct statements of Waldensian belief, see 
 the same vol., pp. 138 140. 
 
I. KEFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 25 
 
 went to Borne, where in 1179 1 the third Lateran Council 
 was being held, and appealed to Pope Alexander III. for 
 liberty to expound the Scriptures. It was denied them, 
 not without some contempt ; and their breach with the 
 Church was made irreparable by a decree of Lucius III. 
 (1183), in which, in company with other heretics, they 
 were formally condemned. The development l t)f Walden- 
 sian opinions and practice seems to have been two-fold : 
 they spread over a large part of Europe with great 
 rapidity, so that before they had been very long in exist- 
 ence it was said 2 that a Waldensian, who was travelling 
 from Antwerp to Eome, could sleep every night at the 
 house of a fellow-believer. They thus mingled with the 
 half-secret sects 3 of which I have already spoken: if 
 
 1 Hahn (II. 256), Neander, Kirchengeschichte (V. ii. p. 1192), both 
 give the date 1170. But the third Lateran Council, the eleventh of 
 the (Ecumenical Councils, was held in 1179, which is the date for the 
 interview between the Pope and the Waldenses given by Gieseler, 
 K. G. II. ii. p. 556. We possess a curious account of this interview 
 from the pen of an eye-witness, the English Franciscan, Walter de 
 Mapes, in his book, De Nugis Curialium, preserved in MS. in the 
 Bodleian Library, who, according to his own account, was ordered to 
 confer with the Waldensian Deputies, and easily succeeded in exposing 
 their ignorance. He calls them " Valdesios homines, idiotas, illiteratos 
 (a primate ipsorum Valde dictos qui fuerat civis Lugduni super Rho- 
 danum) : qui libruni domino Papse prsesentaverunt lingua conscriptum 
 Gallica, in quo textus et glossa Psalterii plurimorumque legis utriusque 
 librorum continebatur." Hahn, II. 257, note. 
 
 2 Abbot Trithemius, quoted by Erbkam, Geschichte der Protestant- 
 ischen Sekten im Zeitalter der Reformation, p. 141. 
 
 8 Early in the thirteen th century, certain heretics in Strasburg, 
 whose tenets resembled tujse of the Waldenses, were condemned to 
 the stake, though not with the result of extirpating heresy. For about 
 the end of the fourteenth century appears at Strasburg, with affiliated 
 communities in many cities of the Rhineland and Swabia, a sect called 
 the Winlieler. This was probably a nickname given to them in allusion 
 
26 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 hardly to be counted among mystics, they yet helped to 
 give German mysticism a soberer and more scriptural 
 tone. On the other hand, the Vaudois remained in their 
 own valleys, as they still remain, faithful, under much 
 persecution, to their ancestral principles ; and when, about 
 1526, they opened communications with the Eeformed 
 Churches of Switzerland and Germany, they found that, 
 if they had something to learn, they had nothing to un- 
 learn. Here, it would seem, we have the Eeformation, 
 not merely in germ, but in blossom and in fruit ; and yet, 
 for the general purposes of European life, the tree was 
 barren. The time of ingathering was not yet : the Wal- 
 denses were men born, as it were, out of due season. 
 
 The same is true of John "Wiclif , who may be described 
 as having re-discovered the Waldensian principles, though 
 equally unable to carry them to a successful issue of refor- 
 mation. The external contrast is striking. The "Waldenses 
 were poor and obscure men, illiterate except in their 
 knowledge of Scripture, unsmiled upon by the powerful 
 in Church and State, and hopelessly beaten in their first 
 couflict with constituted authorities. Wiclif, on the con- 
 to the secret element in their association. Both in doctrine and in 
 practice they were akin to the Waldenses. They denied the spiritual 
 powers of the priesthood, and confessed to lay fathers, who, like the 
 apostles, were twelve in number, travelling from place to place, and 
 exercising a general supervision over the whole sect. They attended 
 mass only to avoid suspicion; in their own meetings they heard sermons 
 out of "great books," presumably the Bible. The Ortlieber, also a sect 
 widely spread in Strasburg and its vicinity about the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century, were the followers of one Ortlieb, who had studied 
 in Paris under Amaury de Bene, and, unless much maligned, was an 
 antinomian Pantheist. At a later period, the Ortlieber are not to be 
 distinguished from the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Hahn, II. 362. 
 C. Schmidt, in Herzog : Eeal-Encyclopadie, s. v. Winkeler, Ortlieber. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 27 
 
 trary, was learned with all the learning of his time, a 
 favourite teacher at Oxford, enjoying the patronage of 
 a great political party, protected by Princes of the blood 
 in his contest with the Bishops, and, whatever the tra- 
 ditional ill usage of his bones, dying in his bed and in 
 peaceful possession of his benefice. But both "Wiclif and 
 the Waldenses attacked the Church on the same lines, y 
 He too was a Biblical reformer, appealing to the author 
 rity of Scripture, and placing it, in the vulgar tongue, in 
 the hands of the people. He was an anti-sacerdotalist, 
 not merely out of ethical disgust at the pretensions and 
 vices of the clergy, but deliberately, as a matter of 
 Christian theory. Given these two facts, and it is of 
 comparatively little interest to know to what precise point 
 of doctrinal negation he advanced ; in them, the whole 
 consequences of the Eeformation, as it afterwards came 
 to the birth, are shut up. Why was not Wiclif the 
 Reformer at least of England ? His teachings, as a matter 
 of fact, never wholly died out of the people's heart, but 
 lay there, silently preparing them for the new breath of 
 inspiration when it came : his English Bible circulated 
 secretly in manuscript, till it was lost in the first of that 
 long series of translations which has but just reached its 
 final term. But adverse forces, arising on every side, 
 combined to crush the new religious movement. The 
 House of Lancaster, which had given Wiclif his first 
 great patron, when once it had ascended the throne with 
 a doubtful title, found its account in an ecclesiastical 
 alliance. The insurrection of the Commons, popularly 
 associated with the name of Wat Tyler, brought suspicion 
 on Lollardism, as the Peasants' War afterwards did on 
 Luther. The Wars of the Eoses engaged in dynastic 
 
28 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 struggle the whole heart and strength of the nation. 
 \ Caxton had not yet set up his press in the Westminster 
 Almonry. "With the exception of Lord Cobham, who 
 soon perished by fire, Wiclif does not seem to have left 
 any one behind him with the capacities of a leader, and 
 the statute de hceretico comburendo did the rest. The 
 Eeformation in England was left to illustrate the general 
 law of European revival. 
 
 But while the influence of Wiclif in his own country 
 thus passed away, or at least sank beneath the surface of 
 society, it was strangely revived in a distant and almost 
 alien land. The wife of Eichard II., Anne, daughter of 
 Charles IV., King of Bohemia, not only felt a deep per- 
 sonal interest in Wiclif s doctrines, but made herself the 
 channel of communication between Oxford and Prague. 
 Jerome Faulfisch better known as Jerome of Prague 
 who after a brief interval of weakness sealed his faith by 
 martyrdom at Constanz, had studied at Oxford, and had 
 carried Wiclif s books with him to his own country. 
 There had already been a movement of reformation in 
 Bohemia, born of the universal and secular disapprobation 
 of the morals of the clergy ; and when the writings of 
 Wiclif were brought to John Huss, they fell upon a pre- 
 pared mind. I need not enter more particularly into the 
 character of the Hussite reformation; it is sufficiently 
 indicated by what I have already said. But it was 
 national to a far greater degree than that of Wiclif : King 
 and Queen, many great nobles and churchmen, a majority 
 of the common people, were on the side of Huss ; while 
 the fierce and long war kindled by his shameful betrayal 
 amply testifies to the hold which the new doctrines had 
 acquired. In this war, which became a struggle of races 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 29 
 
 between Sclav and Teuton, and in the internal dissensions 
 which are a too sure accompaniment of religious revolu- 
 tion, the Bohemian reformation, as a united national 
 movement, came to an end, though it was not finally 
 stamped out till the House of Hapsburg and the Jesuits 
 applied their united energies to the task. But I cannot 
 find that it had done much for the rest of Europe. Huss 
 was a precursor of Luther, inasmuch as he preceded him 
 in time, but I scarcely think that he prepared his way. 
 Differences of race and language set up a barrier, more 
 impassable than any mountain chain, between Bohemia 
 and Germany. The incidents of the Hussite war, the 
 bloody exploits of Ziska, the signal victories of Procopius, 
 could hardly be helpful in the propagation of religious 
 ideas. What few traces there are of the influence of 
 Huss 1 in German thought in the fifteenth century, are 
 found rather in the region of religious socialism than in 
 that of theology : he was a heretic of an alien race, the 
 object only of hatred and of fear. When in his disputa- 
 tion with Eck at Leipzig, in 1519, Luther was pressed 
 by his adversary to say whether he acknowledged the 
 authority of the Council of Cons'tanz and the justice of 
 
 1 Huss was everywhere well received on his last memorable journey 
 from Prague to Constanz. There is a story that some time in the 
 course of the fifteenth century the Council of Bamberg imposed upon 
 all citizens an oath of renunciation of the Hussite heresy. Hans 
 Bbheim, or Behem, whose name seems to point to a Bohemian origin, 
 was a piper of Mklashausen, in Franconia, who in 1476 drew together 
 a great concourse of people by his preaching of reform, and who finally, 
 after some uproar and loss of life, was burned to death. But facts like 
 these, of which there are more than one, seem to exhibit Huss as the 
 precursor in Germany quite as much of the Peasants' War as of the 
 Reformation. Compare, on this subject, Janssen : Geschichte des 
 Deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, II. 393 et seq. 
 
30 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Huss's sentence, 1 he had the boldness to declare, though 
 Duke George broke out into angry protest, that not all 
 the doctrines condemned by the Council were heretical. 
 But it is very significant that he hardly knew to what 
 he was pledging himself. Before a year passed he had 
 read Huss's books ; he had received congratulatory letters 
 from Bohemia, and he writes to Spalatin in February, 
 1520 : 2 "I have hitherto unknowingly held and taught 
 all John Huss's doctrines ; in a like unknowingness has 
 John Staupitz taught them; briefly, we are all uncon- 
 scious Hussites. Paul and Augustine are Hussites to the 
 letter." But in 1520, Luther was already Luther, and 
 had plainly not become so by help of Huss. 
 
 It is the same with that succession of scholars of whom 
 Ullmann has treated with so much fulness of learning 
 in his book, " The Beformers before the Beformation." 
 John of Goch, the founder and director of a Priory of 
 Canonesses of St. Augustine, near Mechlin, whose life 
 extends from 1400 to 1475, 3 held the sole authority of 
 Scripture, by which he believed that the teachings of 
 fathers and doctors were to be judged, condemned the 
 Pelagian heresy as to grace and the Catholic doctrine 
 of good works, declared the fallibility of the Church, 
 announced a spiritual theory of the sacraments. John 
 of Wesel preceded Luther at the University of Erfurt, 
 where he taught about the middle of the century, was 
 
 1 Luther's Werke, ed. Walch. XV. 1430. 
 
 2 Luther's Briefe, ed. De Wette, I. No. 208, p. 425 : "Ego impru- 
 dens hucusque omnia Johannis Huss et docui et tenui : docuit eadem 
 imprudentia et Johannes Staupitz : breviter, sumus omnes Hussitse 
 ignorantes : denique Paulus et Augustinus ad verbum sunt Hussitse." 
 
 3 Ullmann: Keformers before the Eeformation, Eng. Trans. L 135. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 31 
 
 afterwards a popular preacher in Mainz and in Worms, 
 was tried for heresy, recanted, and died in prison in 1481. 
 He, too, relies on the authority of Scripture, applying it 
 to prove the unlawfulness of indulgences, which he con- 
 demns in seven propositions, hardly if at all less trenchant 
 than Luther's well-known ninety-five. Then there was 
 John Wessel, born at Groningen about the year 1420, 
 educated in the school at Zwoll conducted by the Bre- 
 thren of the Common Life, and possibly therefore a pupil 
 of Thomas k Kempis : wandering as scholar and teacher 
 through many Universities, Cologne, Paris, Heidelberg : 
 so great a doctor as to be adorned with the pompous 
 title of Lux Mundi: the friend of Cardinal Bessarion and 
 Francesco della Eovere, afterwards infamous as Sixtus 
 IV. : connected with the classical revival' in Germany as 
 the teacher of Keuchlin and Eudolf Agricola: and dying 
 at last at Groningen, uncondemned, in 1489, when Luther 
 was already six years old. Wessel held Protestant 
 views on the authority of Scripture, and put forward a 
 doctrine of justification by faith, though always the faith 
 that worketh by love. But although the thought of these 
 theologians was so distinctly on the lines of the Eeforma- 
 tion, we cannot largely credit them with being its active 
 precursors. John of Goch was essentially a recluse, 
 whose writings were first published in the sixteenth 
 century, with the express intention of showing how 
 Lutheran men had been before Luther. John of WesePs 
 books were involved in their author's condemnation: of 
 the only two which survive, one was first published in 
 the sixteenth, the other not till the eighteenth century. 
 So, too, with John Wessel' s works : his Farrago rerum 
 theologicarum, the first to be printed, appeared at Witten- 
 
32 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 berg in 1522. 1 A third edition of the same book, pub- 
 lished at Basel in the same year, is preceded by a remark- 
 able preface from the pen of Luther, 2 in which he declares 
 the almost verbal identity of his own doctrine with that 
 of Wessel, and expresses his wonder that the latter had 
 not been more widely famous. But while so saying, he 
 denies the existence of any actual link between himself 
 and his predecessor : sic pugnavi ut me solum esse putarem; 
 " I fought as thinking myself alone." 
 
 One very remarkable fact in connection with all these 
 efforts of reform remains to be noticed. Not only did 
 they accomplish no permanent amendment, but in spite 
 of them the evil grew. The century which elapsed 
 between the great reforming Councils and the outbreak 
 of the Eef ormation was one more fruitful in scandals than 
 any other. Not even in the days when Theodora and her 
 daughter Marozia made and unmade Popes were there 
 Pontiffs more utterly disregardful, not only of morality, 
 but of decency, than Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Julias 
 II., Clement VII. Alexander VI. is a proverb of human 
 infamy. A scarcely veiled Paganism sat in the fisher- 
 man's chair in the person of Leo X. The fiscal oppres- 
 sions of the Papacy were in no way lightened : the 
 rapacity of Cardinals was unchecked : the sale of indul- 
 gences was shamelessly pressed. Not only was a large 
 part of Germany governed by spiritual princes, but the 
 Emperor Maximilian averred that the revenue which the 
 
 1 Ullraann, Eng. Trans. II. 605, 606. The edition which Ullmann 
 takes to be the earliest is without date or place. He supposes it to 
 have been printed at Heidelberg. 
 
 2 For Luther's preface to Wessel's book, see Seckendorf: Historia 
 Lutheranismi, Book I. sec. 54, cxxxiii. p. 226. 
 
I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 33 
 
 Eoman Curia 1 drew from that country was a hundred 
 times greater than his own. In Italy, the comparatively 
 new abuse of nepotism had been introduced : each suc- 
 cessive Pope busied himself, during his short tenure of 
 power, in carving out principalities for the relatives who 
 were, or were called, his nephews. But at the same 
 time, the doctrinal system, on which these abuses of 
 practice were supposed to rest, had been undergoing a 
 steady development. While monastic orders were passing 
 through alternate periods of reform and decay while 
 mystics were seeking truth and purity in withdrawal 
 from the outer courts of creed and ritual into inner 
 chambers of contemplation the schoolmen were pain- 
 fully building up, stone upon stone, an edifice of reasoned 
 belief, the several parts of which, whatever we may think 
 of the security of its foundations, were held together by 
 good logical cement. The doctrines of the seven sacra- 
 ments, of transubstantiation, of the power of the priest, 
 of the heavenly treasure of merit and the prerogative of 
 the Church to dispense it, of purgatory, of the invocation 
 of saints, of the honour due to Mary, of her assumption 
 and immaculate conception were all reduced to a system, 
 were bound one to another by argument and analogy 
 were followed out to their logical consequences. This 
 system reigned without a rival, supported alike by present 
 authority and past prescription. Except in the mind of 
 a daring thinker here and there, all remembrance of a 
 period during which it was in process of formation had 
 passed away, much more the recollection of a primitive 
 and apostolic Church. The Papacy, with all that it in- 
 
 1 Ranke : Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, I. 56. 
 
 D 
 
34 I. REFORM BEFORE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 volved, never seemed to be more firmly established than 
 when Germany and Switzerland were ready to break out 
 into open revolt against it. 
 
 Why did that revolt succeed, when so many other 
 attempts at reform had failed? Why did Luther and 
 Zwingli do what Wiclif and Huss had not done ? 
 Something no doubt is due to the great personal quali- 
 ties of the men, something more to favouring political 
 circumstance. But the main thing was, that the fulness 
 of time had come, in the intellectual revival which was 
 everywhere breathing life into the dry bones of European 
 thought: in the renewed knowledge, first of classical, 
 next of Christian antiquity, which, kindled at the old 
 lamp of Hellas, had brightly shone in Italy, and from 
 Italy had spread across the Alps : in the invention of 
 the art of printing, and its rapid application to be the 
 handmaid of the new learning. There was fresh oxygen 
 now in the intellectual air, and the fire of reformation, 
 once lighted, no longer burned fitfully and feebly, but 
 with steady and consuming flame. The seed-bed of the 
 human mind had been ploughed and harrowed and nou- 
 rished, so that whatever living germ was committed to it 
 could not but grow and flourish. The Eeformation was 
 part of a mightier movement than itself the manifesta- 
 tion upon religious ground of the intellectual forces which 
 inspire the speculation and have given us the science of 
 to-day. 
 
Lecture II. 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS IN ITALY AND 
 GERMANY. 
 
 The history of European thought is continuous : age 
 grows out of age: in each generation lives and moves 
 the quintessence of all that have preceded it. In dealing, 
 therefore, with any great intellectual movement, it is 
 impossible to select a starting-point which shall not be 
 arbitrary: wherever you begin, you can always trace 
 further back the positive process of development, the 
 negative process of reaction. At the same time, there 
 are epochs at which the human mind has more signally 
 broken with the past, has more decisively entered upon 
 a new path of progress, than at others ; epochs, the sig- 
 nificance of which, only partially apprehended at first, 
 has been fully interpreted by the experience of ages. 
 Such an epoch was that of the Eevival of Letters in the 
 /fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We do not give it 
 too pompous a name when we call it the Eenaissance, 
 the Ee-birth of the human intellect. Its characteristic 
 I and, to a large extent, its moving force, was a renewed 
 \ interest in the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and 
 an earnest attempt to imitate them. For many centuries 
 
 d2 
 
36 II. THE EEVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 men had suffered an unconscious intellectual imprison- 
 ment within limits prescribed by orthodox Christian 
 belief and the scholastic philosophy, and now gradually 
 awoke to the knowledge that there was a freer and a 
 fairer world outside. In philosophy, the first step was 
 ' to turn from meagre abridgments and jejune comments 
 to the works of Plato and Aristotle themselves ; the next, 
 to learn from the Greeks the method of independent 
 observation and reflection upon the universe ; with this 
 result, that when the lesson was thoroughly learned, 
 modern science came slowly and hardly to the birth. 
 The naturalness of the old Pagan life not wholly un- 
 accompanied by its license re-asserted its charm, and 
 powerfully combated the monastic ideal which mediaeval 
 Christianity had set up. But while the Eenaissance was 
 thus a rebellion, quite careless of results, against scho- 
 lastic philosophy and ascetic theories of morals, it was, 
 in its second stage, hardly less powerful within the limits 
 of Christian belief and practice than beyond them. The 
 curiosity which explored the records of classical, did not 
 leave untouched those of Christian antiquity. An appeal 
 was soon made from the canons and traditions of the 
 Church, first to the Fathers and then to the New Testa- 
 ment itself. The Greek Testament, the Septuagint, the 
 Hebrew Bible, took the place of the Vulgate in the 
 hands of the learned. The Scriptures, in the vernacular 
 languages of Europe, brought home to the minds of the 
 people how widely different was the Church of the New 
 Testament from the ecclesiastical system over which pre- 
 sided a Julius II. or a Leo X. Now at last the abortive 
 efforts of reformation, which in the thirteenth, the four- 
 teenth, the fifteenth centuries had flickered and died 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 37 
 
 away, rose into a great and consuming flame of revolt, 
 the end of which was the severance from the Papacy of 
 a large part of Northern and "Western Europe. But the 
 Eeformation itself was only an incomplete movement. 
 The stores of knowledge which alone could make it com- 
 plete were not accumulated till long after its progress . 
 had been arrested. Its rising tide broke itself in vain 
 against the dull and obstinate superstition of the House 
 of Hapsburg and the faithless ambition of the Valois 
 and the Bourbon. Its leaders were unable or afraid to 
 follow its principles to their legitimate issue. A rebel-\ 
 lion against Catholic scholasticism, it built up a new\ 
 scholasticism of its own, upon assumptions hardly less l 
 arbitrary. It was met and checked by a counter-refor- 
 mation, which not only prevented fresh conquests, but 
 won back part of the ground that the Church had lost. 
 But while the development of religious thought was 
 thus practically stayed, the general movement of the 
 human mind held on its triumphant way : Philosophy 
 fearlessly sought for the word that should solve the 
 enigma of the universe : Science gradually plumed her 
 wings for the magnificent flights of discovery which she 
 now makes with so superb a confidence : History re- 
 interpreted the antiquity of the human race, and in 
 disinterring the secrets of speech penetrated to a period 
 beyond written record. We are in the full tide still 
 of that flood of intellectual life which Petrarch witnessed 
 in its first feeble rise. What wonder that theological 
 landmarks which Luther and Calvin established in the 
 sixteenth century have long been submerged ! 
 
 It would lead us too far astray to discuss the primary 
 causes of this great re-awakening of intellectual activity. 
 
38 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 Probably the darkness of the dark ages has been some- 
 what exaggerated by theological prejudice: within the 
 limits imposed by the Church there may have been more 
 movement of mind than some Protestant critics have been 
 willing to admit. But whether the revival of classical! 
 learning were cause or effect of the first stirring among 
 the dry bones of European thought, it soon came to be 
 the characteristic feature of the Eenaissance. Europe 
 gradually awoke to the knowledge of what men had 
 speculated and discovered and sung, before it had been 
 lulled to sleep in the arms of the Church. It was no 
 longer an offence against ecclesiastical propriety or good 
 morals for a cleric to occupy himself with profane learn- 
 ing. Men went back for examples to a time beyond 
 Jerome, who thought it impossible to be Christian and 
 Ciceronian at once, and Augustine, who bewailed the 
 hours he had lost in the company of Homer and Yirgil. 
 Presently teachers were brought from Constantinople, 
 where Greek was still a living language : manuscripts of 
 Greek poets and historians were collected and copied: 
 the convent libraries of East and West were searched for 
 remains of antiquity: the charm of Hellas began to work. 
 Popes vied with merchant princes, and despots with both, 
 in the encouragement of learning: Nicholas V., the founder 
 of the Vatican Library, made Eome, during his pontifi- 
 cate, the centre of the classical reaction: the learned 
 labours of Poggio, the honeyed verse of Politian, the 
 Platonic academy of Eicino, suggest the name of Lorenzo 
 de Medici : the Yisconti and the Sforzas alike protected, 
 flattered, pensioned Filelfo : Lorenzo Yalla, Pontano, 
 Sannazaro, grouped themselves round the Arragonese 
 dynasty of Naples. When in the fifteenth century the 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 39 
 
 humanists were in full force, the possibilities of the 
 Italian tongue were left unimproved, though Dante and 
 Petrarch in verse, and Boccaccio in prose, had already- 
 shown of what great things it was capable : what the 
 men who thought themselves the literary kings of Italy 
 cared for was to be able to write prose, for every phrase 
 of which a precedent could be quoted from Cicero, and 
 verses which, if not precisely Ovidian or Yirgilian, might 
 be mistaken for the work of Statius or Silius Italicus. 
 The matter of prose or verse was of small importance: 
 correctness of diction, elegance of form, were everything. 
 The humanists attacked one another, flattered their 
 patrons, rang the changes on classical imitation, in the 
 full conviction that in their labours the golden age of 
 literature had returned. They were the furthest possible 
 from the knowledge that all that they were doing was 
 to gain a mastery over classical methods of thought and 
 speech, which another generation and a graver race might 
 turn to good account. 
 
 The revival of letters in Italy neither led to any acti- \ 
 vity of theological thought nor produced any religious 
 reformation. Lorenzo Valla 1 is the only humanist whose 
 
 1 Valla's works were taken up by the Germans, and made to do 
 duty a second time in the controversy against Rome. Ulrich von 
 Hutten republished the pamphlet on the Donation of Constantine in 
 1517; Erasmus, the Notes on the New Testament in 1505. Valla may 
 be credited with the honour of being the first critic in modern times 
 who attempted to correct the text of the New Testament by comparison 
 of MSS. "Si Laurentius, collatis aliquot vetustis atque emendatis 
 Grsecorum exemplaribus, qusedam annotavit in N. T." Erasmus, Ep. 
 ciii., ad Christopherum Fischerum. Opp. III. 98 C. It is a curious 
 sample of the inconsistencies of this strange age that Pope Nicholas V. 
 invited Valla, after he had been brought to trial by the Inquisition 
 (whose clutches he escaped by a cynical profession of conformity to the 
 
40 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 name can be mentioned in this connection. He exposed 
 the fiction of the Donation of Constantine : he criticised 
 the Latin of the Vulgate : he expressed doubts as to the 
 authenticity of the Apostles' Creed : his Notes on the 
 New Testament are the earliest work of modern Biblical 
 criticism. But, with this single exception, the fashion 
 of classical reaction carried all before it. There was no 
 open rebellion against the Church ; that was reserved for 
 the time of Ochino and the Sozzini : the humanists, as a 
 rule, were faithful to the common practice of Italy : they 
 conformed and they disbelieved. The existing organiza- 
 tion of Christianity they accepted as a fact, while to its 
 dogmatic system they were profoundly indifferent, and, 
 in common with Popes and Cardinals, laughed at its 
 moral restraints. Those were days of open vice, of 
 brazen -fronted license, when crime went straight to 
 results of which it was not ashamed, and foul corruption 
 poisoned the life-blood of society. And the humanists 
 were neither better nor worse than their contemporaries. 
 The frank naturalness of classical literature contained 
 little that could brace them against the universal disso- 
 lution of morals ; nor when Zion ran riot was it to be 
 expected that austere modesty should have taken refuge 
 upon Olympus. To some it may seem only an instance 
 of perverted taste, to others it may indicate almost a 
 degraded turn of mind, that when the exigencies of their 
 verse required the mention of God, He figured as u Jupiter 
 Optimus, Maximus" or even as " Superum Pater nim- 
 
 Church), to Kome, to occupy the post of Apostolic writer, with a large 
 salary. The purity of Valla's Latin style outweighed all other con- 
 siderations with the humanist Pope. 
 
m ITALY AND GERMANY. 41 
 
 bipotens" and " regnator Olympi" 1 The greatest truths, 
 the most awful realities of faith, were made to bend to 
 artificial necessities of style. In a word, the classical 
 revival filled the humanists' whole souls. Christian anti- 
 quity they despised, and they did not see that the morals 
 of the Church needed to be reformed. 
 
 Two reasons may be given why the Italian Eevival I 
 should have blossomed into Eeformation only upon soil i 
 which was not Italian. | The first is the Italian character, 
 coupled with the peculiar relation of the nation to the 
 Papacy. .Italian religion has rarely been of the ethical 
 kind. It is capable, perhaps beyond all others, of erotic 
 rapture : it will kindle into the fiercest fanaticism ; but 
 it is very apt to cool into an easy cynicism, smiling at 
 moral distinctions, the obligation of which it does not 
 care to deny. Lorenzo de Medici, who writes with the 
 same pen pious dramas and lascivious songs who pre- 
 sides over a Platonic academy and intrigues to make 
 his son a Cardinal, and strangles his country's liberties 
 is not more characteristic of the Italy of the Eevival 
 than Savonarola thundering in the Duomo, or kindling 
 on the Piazza della Signoria the bonfire of Florentine 
 gauds and vanities. The one represents Italy in her 
 ordinary mood ; the other, Italy in her moments of pious 
 
 1 There are worse things even than these. In describing the death 
 of Christ, Yida, in his Christiad, "introduces a gang of Gorgons, 
 Harpies, Centaurs, Hydras, and the like. The bread of the Last 
 Supper appears under the disguise of sinceram Cererem/ The wine 
 mingled with gall offered to our Lord upon the cross is . ' corrupti 
 pocula Bacchi."' Cardinal Bembo "described the Venetian Council 
 bidding a Pope l uti fidat diis immortalibus, quorum vices in terra 
 gent.'" Symonds : Kenaissance in Italy : The Revival of Learning, 
 pp. 399, 400. 
 
42 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 excitement. "We may compare her to the acolyte who 
 has been all his life too close to the mysteries of the altar 
 to have any reverence for them left. She knew what 
 Popes and Cardinals and Bishops were. To her the 
 \ perpetual rush of Christendom to Eome to join in the 
 struggle for power and help was a familiar thing. No 
 one was so well acquainted as she with the dissolute- 
 ness, the corruption, the cruelty of the sacred city. The 
 
 ) very oppressions which goaded Germany and England to 
 revolt, brought gold into her coffers : rents and tithes, 
 exacted in every corner of Europe, were spent in Italy. 
 Except Adrian VI., in the brevity of whose pontificate 
 Eome openly rejoiced, every Pope of these ages was 
 Italian. Of all nations, the Italian was that least likely 
 to feel the moral reproach of a system which thus re- 
 
 i I dounded to its own advantage. If reform was to come 
 
 \ at all, it must spring from the heart of a race endowed 
 with a deeper moral consciousness. 
 
 f^ ^ But, again, the humanists of the first century of the 
 Eevival were too much occupied in learning the lessons 
 of classical antiquity to think of applying them or to find 
 out that they had any application. In them the mind 
 of Europe was undergoing a training which could not 
 till later develop into creative effort. The classic lan- 
 guages of antiquity were being appropriated as literary 
 instruments: the results of Greek and Eoman thought 
 were slowly sinking into men's minds, and so preparing 
 them for fresh and independent activity. In the work 
 of the Italian humanists there was no element of ori- 
 ginality; nothing that they did is valued now for its 
 own sake ; or, if there be anything, it is the vernacular 
 prose and verse of which they thought little. The cen- 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 43 
 
 tury which is peculiarly their own is almost a blank in 
 the history of Italian literature : we pass at a bound from 
 Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, to Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto. 
 It was the second age of the Eevival which became cre- 
 ative, and that was, German, French, English. Italy 
 handed on the torch of learning to the Transalpine 
 nations: while she herself, always more careful of the 
 form than of the matter of speech, continued the task of 
 polishing her language, the graver Northern nations were 
 shaking the foundations of thought. And to their aid 
 came, at precisely the right moment, the invention of \ 
 printing. It was about 1455 that Gutenberg sent out 
 rronrtris press at Mainz the first printed book, the 
 Mazarin Bible. In the same year Eeuchlin was born, 
 and in 1467, Erasmus. 
 
 Germany, as we might naturally expect, was far behind I 
 Italy in the race of classical revival. In the latter, 
 Latin, up to at least the fifteenth century, could hardly 
 be said to be a dead language : it had never ceased to be 
 the dialect of literature and the Church, and the Italians, 
 in renewing their acquaintance with Eoman orators and 
 poets, seemed to themselves to be only reclaiming a 
 neglected national inheritance. It was Italy, too, that 
 had been in direct communication with the East, and by 
 Italian teachers that the knowledge of Greek was com- 
 municated to the rest of Europe. The great Councils of 
 Constanz and of Basel did something to bring the Ger- 
 man and the Italian mind together. Poggio Bracciolini 
 attended the first, then and afterwards, either in his own 
 person or by deputy, searching the convent libraries of 
 Germany and Switzerland for manuscripts of the classics. 
 One result of the second was the appointment of iEneas 
 
44 II. 1HE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 Sylvius Piccolomini, the celebrated Siennese diplomatist, 
 as secretary to the Emperor Frederick, and his conse- 
 quent residence for some years, between 1440 and 1450, 
 at Vienna. He is a good representative of the Eenais- 
 sance on its practical side : a man of letters, who, if not 
 learned, was fully equipped with the culture of his times : 
 a Churchman, who availed himself of the advantages of 
 his calling, without submitting to its restraints : a poli- 
 tician, who, after spending years in the service of the 
 Emperor, adroitly changed sides and made himself Pope. 
 Germany, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, 
 had already five Universities, those of Prague, Vienna, 
 Erfurt, Heidelberg and Cologne, to which in 1409 
 Leipzig was added, and in 1419, Eostock. 1 But if we 
 may judge from the report which JEneas Sylvius makes 
 of the University of Vienna, the instruction given in 
 these institutions was not worth much. 2 Too much 
 
 1 The University of Prague was founded in 1348, Vienna in 1365, 
 Erfurt in 1378, Heidelberg in 1385, Cologne in 1388. Erfurt will 
 be recognized as the fountain of Lutheranism. Heidelberg was esta- 
 blished with an express view to breadth and comprehensiveness of 
 training. Cologne, on the contrary, was almost exclusively theological, 
 and soon became the head-quarters of reaction. It was the chief seat 
 of the Inquisition in Germany. Conf. Ullmann : Reformers before the 
 Reformation, Eng. Trans. II. 278 et seq., 328 et seq. 
 
 2 Maximum autem hujus gimnasii vitium est, quod nimis diutinam 
 operam in dialectica, nimiumque temporis in re non magni fructus 
 terunt. Qui magisterii artiuni titulo decorantur, hac una in arte maxime 
 examinantur. Caaterum neque Musicae neque Rethoricse neque Arith- 
 metics curam gerunt : quamvis metra qusedam et epistolas ab aliis editas 
 imperite exhibentem magistrandum compellant. Oratoria et Poetica 
 apud eos penitus incognita, quibus omne studium in elenchis est variis- 
 que cavillationibus, solidi haudquaquam multum. Qui libros Aristotelis 
 et aliorum philosophorum habeant raros invenies, commentariis plerum- 
 que utuntur." iEn. Sylvii Piccol. Opera Omnia, Basel, 1551, p. 719. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 46 
 
 attention, he complains, was bestowed npon dialectics, 
 and too much time spent on matters of little importance. 
 Men who were decorated with the title of Master of 
 Arts, were for the most part examined in dialectics alone. 
 *No attention was paid to music, or rhetoric, or arithmetic. 
 Oratory and poetry were almost unknown. The books 
 of Aristotle and other philosophers were rarely to be 
 found : most men were content with commentaries. Pic- 
 colomini represents himself as the defender of poetry, 
 or, as we should now say, of polite literature, among a 
 coarsely practical generation, whose allegation was that 
 poetry neither clothed nor fed them : 1 " only Justinian 
 and Hippocrates filled the purse." u When I came to 
 Austria as Imperial Secretary," he says, " I offended all 
 who were counted men of mark among the Yiennese, 
 and who detested poetry as a pernicious and abominable 
 thing." 2 He himself was proud of the title of poet, though 
 without much pretension to it in the modern sense of the 
 word : he had been solemnly crowned at Frankfort by 
 the Emperor Frederick, and, till he became a Cardinal, 
 signed all his letters, " .ZEneas Sylvius Poeta." But 
 in espousing the cause of the poets and the historians 
 against the schoolmen, he evidently had a hard battle to 
 fight. 
 
 Some half-century later, Conrad Celtes could write to Momerlochus of 
 Cologne : "In your city have I become acquainted with the empty 
 and deceitful inferences of dialectics. No one here teaches the Latin 
 grammar : no one studies the orators : Mathematics, Astronomy, 
 Natural History, are unknown : Poetry is ridiculed : men draw back 
 in horror from the books of Ovid and Cicero, as the Jew from swine 
 flesh." Quoted by Hagen, Deutschlands Literarische und Eeligiose 
 Verhaltnisse im Eeformationszeitalter, I. 374. 
 
 1 Opp. p. 619 : Ep. cxi. to Wilhelm von Stein. 
 
 2 OPP- P- 937 : Ep. ccccii. to Sbigneus, Cardinal Archbishop of Krukau. 
 
46 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 It was a little later than this that Eudolf Agricola, 
 who deserves to be called the restorer of Greek learning 
 in Germany, crossed the Alps in search of knowledge 
 which he conld find nowhere else. He was a pnpil of 
 Thomas k Kempis in one of the schools of the Brethren 
 of the Common Life. To the merits of that fraternity in 
 the matter of education I have already allnded : so far 
 as was possible with the means at their command, they 
 seem to have applied to teaching the principles of common 
 sense, and to have directed the attention of their scholars 
 from mere words to thoughts and things. But it was 
 with something of a prophetic insight that k Kempis 
 advised six of his best pupils to repair to Italy for a 
 more thorough course of instruction than he could give 
 them. These were Eudolf Lange, Count Moritz von 
 Spiegelberg, Eudolf Agricola, Alexander Hegius, Ludwig 
 Dringenberg, Antonius Liber. Only the three first fol- 
 lowed perhaps were able to follow their teacher's 
 advice: Lange and Spiegelberg, before they went to 
 Italy, visiting the University of Erfurt, where at least 
 one Italian humanist was teaching about 1460. Agricola 
 followed them to Italy not long afterwards. There he 
 formed a close friendship with Johann von Dalberg, after- 
 wards Bishop of Worms and Curator of the University 
 of Heidelberg, the result of which was an invitation in 
 1482 to introduce the new learning into that institution. 
 The originally broad lines of the foundation accorded 
 with the enlightened plans of the Curator and the new 
 Professor ; and Heidelberg, soon to be illustrated by the 
 name of Melancthon, became the centre -point of the 
 modern tendency, in opposition to the obscurantism of 
 Cologne. Agricola was a fine example of the grave and 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 47 
 
 religious German humanist : from a. Kempis and the 
 Brethren of the Common Life he had imbibed a real 
 interest in theology, and, like Erasmus after him, was 
 ready to dedicate all his erudition to the service of her 
 whom he regarded as the Queen of sciences. His death 
 in 1485, at the early age of forty-two, prevented him from 
 playing the important part which he otherwise must 
 have done in the literary and religious revival of Ger- 
 many. But the movement was already too national in 
 its aims and extent to suffer even a momentary hindrance 
 from the loss of one man. 
 
 Of the other pupils of Thomas k Kempis, Dringenberg 
 is known as the teacher of a school at Schlettstadt, 1 
 which, founded in 1450, soon numbered 900 pupils, and 
 was the centre from which the new learning spread itself 
 along the upper Ehine. Eudolf Lange was head of a 
 similar school at Munster ; Antonius Liber taught suc- 
 cessively in Amsterdam, Kempen and Alkmar. But the 
 most important of these schools was that founded in 1481 
 at Deventer by Alexander Hegius. Hegius, who had 
 not crossed the Alps, possibly owed what knowledge of 
 Greek he had to his old friend and schoolfellow Agri- 
 cola. 2 No work that can be called original is attributed 
 to him. But the glory of a schoolmaster is in his scho- 
 lars ; and the chief claim of Hegius to remembrance is, 
 that he taught Erasmus the rudiments of learning. 
 
 1 Now Schelestadt, on the western side of the Ehine, above Stras- 
 burg. 
 
 2 Another distinguished scholar of Hegius, Hermann von deni Busche, 
 says of him in a Latin epigram : 
 
 Hoc duce, Westphales intravit Grsecia muros, 
 Et Monastriacas Pegasus auxit aquas. 
 
48 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 The years during which Erasmus was laying the foun- 
 dations of that unrivalled erudition which made him the 
 first scholar of Europe from 1480 to the end of the 
 century were years of rapid intellectual progress in 
 Germany. Everywhere, but especially along the course of 
 the Bhine, schools were being founded, libraries collected, 
 classical authors translated and imitated, grammars and 
 other school books compiled. After an interval of be- 
 tween thirty and forty years, during which no University 
 had been founded, a new group came into existence. 
 The zeal of a wise Burgomaster gave Greifswalde its 
 University in 1456 : a little later, Duke Albrecht of 
 Austria founded Freiburg. Basel followed in 1460, 
 Ingolstadt and Trier in 1472. In 1477, Duke Eberhard 
 with the Beard established Tubingen, and in the same 
 year Archbishop Diether, Mainz. Elector Frederick the 
 Wise called "Wittenberg into existence into 1502 ; while 
 Albrecht of Brandenburg, another Elector Archbishop 
 of Mainz, incited by his minister, Eitelwolf vom Stein, 
 who had been Dringenberg's pupil at Schlettstadt, gave 
 Northern Germany a University at Frankfort -on- the - 
 Oder in 1506. At the end of the century, almost every 
 German city of importance possessed some educational 
 institute, or, if not, at least a resident scholar, who kept 
 up a close intercourse with the learned world, and raised 
 the intellectual level of the place. Of Heidelberg and 
 its University, now flourishing in renewed activity, I 
 have already spoken. At Speier was Jacob Wimpheling, 
 another pupil of Dringenberg's the typical scholar of 
 the Bhineland, bound by close friendship to all the vota- 
 ries of the new learning an author of very various acti- 
 vity, especially interested in education and the training 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 49 
 
 of young men in the best scholarship. Over the Bene- 
 dictine monastery of Spanheim presided Abbot Trithe- 
 mius, the well-known annalist, who died, as he had lived, 
 a Catholic a pupil of Agricola's, who had collected a 
 library of 2000 volumes, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. At 
 Basel, already becoming, a centre for printers and pub- 
 lishers, lived Sebastian Brandt, a teacher both of law 
 and polite literature, the author of that pungent satire, 
 the " Ship of Fools," which, with " Eeinecke Fuchs," also 
 belonging to this period, directed against the corruptions 
 of the Church the batteries of a humour level to the 
 apprehension of the common people. Freiburg was the 
 home of Ulrich Zasius, the Rector of the Latin school, 
 a learned jurist and a correspondent of Erasmus: Tu- 
 bingen, that of Heinrich Bebel, an energetic and success- 
 ful teacher, whose Facetice and " Triumph ofYenus" 
 show in the unrestrained freedom of their satire the less 
 worthy side of the German revival : Augsburg, of Conrad 
 Peutinger, a patrician of that free city, and its Secretary, 
 who, having studied in Italy, where he enjoyed the 
 friendship of Politian, had returned home to form a col- 
 lection of antiquities, and to pursue the study of classical 
 and German archaeology. 1 Nurnberg, where the artists, 
 who, with Albrecht Diirer at their head, made it almost 
 a German Florence, were already at work, was the abode 
 of Willibald Pirkheimer, one of the most characteristic 
 
 1 The name of Conrad Peutinger is preserved among scholars by the 
 famous Tabula Peutingeriana, an ancient map, based on an Itinerarium 
 of the time of the Emperor Theodosius, which gave the military roads 
 through the greater part of the Western Empire. Peutinger got it 
 from Conrad Celtes, who had found it in a Benedictine monastery on 
 the Tegernsee. It was, however, not published in a complete form till 
 1753. 
 
 E 
 
50 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 figures of this period; like Peutinger, a patrician and 
 servant of his native city, who had lingered long in Italy 
 and brought home many Italian friendships ; a votary as 
 well as a patron of arts and letters, at once a translator 
 of the Fathers and a writer of pasquinades; a stately 
 burgher, not untouched by the self-indulgence which 
 belonged to the Italian humanist ; who welcomed Luther, 
 yet had two sisters Abbesses, and who died at last satis- 
 fied with neither the old church nor the new. At In- 
 golstadt, a few years later, lived and taught Johann Eck, 
 a humanist, who had not yet made the mistake of seeking 
 notoriety in disputation with Luther, and who, though a 
 Professor of Theology, eagerly associated himself with 
 the classical revival. Turning our eyes northwards, we 
 find, in the Saxon towns of Gotha and Erfurt, a company 
 of friends devoted to one another and the new learning, 
 of whom the chief was Mutianus Eufus, a Canon of Gotha, 
 called by his admirers the German Cicero, and Eoban 
 Hess, a Latin poet of great contemporary fame, who 
 might in like fashion claim the name of Ovid or Virgil : 
 the one, a grave scholar, who never committed his 
 thoughts to writing, except in familiar letters, and who 
 hid behind a decent conformity opinions with which 
 neither Luther nor Eck would have sympathized ; x the 
 other, a joyous son of the Muses, who had an ode for 
 every occasion and a feast for every friend. And besides 
 
 1 Non incepit Christi religio cum illius incarnatione, sed fuit ante 
 omnia ssecula, ut prima Christi nativitas. Quid enim aliud est verus 
 Christus, verus Dei filius, quam, ut Paul us inquit, sapientia Dei, quce 
 non solum affuit Judseis in angusta Syria? regione, sed Grsecis et Italis 
 et Germanis, quanquam vario ritu religiones observarentur. Mutianus 
 Eufus, Ep. 36, quoted by Strauss, U. v. Hutten, I. 46. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 51 
 
 these to abridge a catalogue already too long there 
 were the travelling scholars, of whom Conrad Celtes, 
 Hermann von dem Busche, and above all Ulrich von 
 Hutten, may be taken as the type. These were the knights 
 errant of the Bevival, whom we find teaching in every 
 University in turn, always eager to sow their knowledge 
 broadcast, always ready for hot dispute with monks and 
 schoolmen, and for the most part living a life of frank 
 enjoyment. Germany was all astir with intellectual life : 
 the fabric of old beliefs was tottering to its base : some 
 new thing was coining, though as yet men hardly knew 
 what. 1 
 
 At the same time we must be careful to notice that 
 the new movement is not as yet specifically directed 
 against the Church. It rather produced an atmosphere 
 in which the Church's tapers would not burn, and flick- 
 ered out of themselves. Every variety of theological 
 opinion obtained among the humanists. Some, as for 
 instance Trithemius and Wimpheling, were always devout 
 Catholics : Eck became the champion of the Church. 
 Others, though not many, imitated the Italian scholars 
 in their secret or open disregard of all religion. Erasmus, 
 who had no sympathy with dogmatic Lutheranism, yet 
 felt profoundly the errors and corruptions of the Church, 
 and would have reformed them in his own way, is the 
 type of another class. Others yet again, like Mutianus 
 Eufus, yielded themselves to the stream of tendency at 
 first, but when they found whither it was hurrying them, 
 
 1 For many of the foregoing facts I am indebted to Hagen, " Deutsch- 
 land's Literarische und Religiose Verhaltnisse im Reformationszeitalter," 
 Vol. I. 
 
 v 9 
 
52 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 drew back into orthodox conformity. But while the 
 new scholars were thus, in part at least, unconscious of 
 their goal, the monkish theologians, the disciples of the 
 schoolmen, made no mistake. An unerring instinct told 
 them that they had a mortal battle to fight with this 
 arrogant generation of students, who would have nothing 
 to say to Duns Scotus, and preferred Cicero to Thomas 
 Aquinas. It was a hopeless struggle : not only the con- 
 flict of darkness with light, but between combatants on 
 the one side stupidly and ludicrously ignorant, on the 
 other equipped with the best learning of the age. And 
 it marks the essentially literary character of the new 
 movement, that the monks unanimously called their oppo- 
 nents "the poets," a word of contempt in clerical circles 
 "a brand mark," as Strauss remarks with somewhat 
 rueful humour, "like Pantheist nowadays." 1 
 
 The war was waged all over Germany. Argument 
 was hardly possible : the poets despised the verbal sub- 
 tleties of the scholastic theologians, while, on the other 
 hand, the schoolmen blinked, like owls in sunshine, in the 
 light of the new learning. But it was possible enough 
 to silence intrusive teachers, to call hard names, to affix 
 the stamp of heresy, to condemn, to excommunicate, to 
 burn, if not men, at least books. At last, however, in 
 a way almost without precedent, the two armies joined 
 issue in one decisive battle, that of Eeuchlin with the 
 theologians of Cologne. 2 Johann Eeuchlin, born at Pforz- 
 heim in 1455, is, with one exception, the greatest figure 
 
 1 Strauss, U. v. Hutten, I. 49. 
 
 2 I may refer here generally to MayerhofT, Reuchlin und seine Zeit ; 
 L. Geiger, Johann Reuchlin; and D. F. Strauss, Ulrich v. Hutten, 
 particularly Vol. I. chaps, vii. viii. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 53 
 
 of the German revival. Men called him and Erasmus 
 "the two eyes of Germany." 1 Entering at an early age 
 into the service of the Counts of Wiirtemberg, his native 
 princes, he had studied letters at Paris, law at Orleans : 
 whatever Italy and the Greek scholars there resident 
 could teach him, he had learned in repeated journeys to 
 Eome and Florence : Hermolaus Barbarus had Grsecized 
 his name into Capnio : Argyropulos, when he heard him 
 read and expound Thucydides, declared that in his person 
 exiled Greece had fled across the Alps. But he was 
 more of a theologian than a stylist : other men of his day 
 wrote more elegant Latin prose than he, though none 
 had done so much to promote the study of the classical 
 languages by the compilation of dictionaries and grammars. 
 But his especial merit was in connection with the Hebrew 
 language, which he had taken up in deliberate opposition 
 to the Pagan tendencies of the Italian humanists. Wher- 
 ever he could find an instructed Hebrew, he took lessons 
 of him, sparing no cost. Mutian heard a story in Bologna 
 that he had given a Jew ten gold pieces for the explana- 
 tion of a single obscure phrase. His Hebrew Grammar, 
 though not absolutely the earliest to bear that name, is 
 the first that deserves it. 2 Half a century later, Melanc- 
 thon speaks of him as indisputably the introducer of \ 
 
 1 U. v. Hutten says : " Duos Germanise oculos (Erasmum et Capnio- 
 nem) omni studio ainplexari debemus : per eos enim barbara esse 
 desinit hsec natio." Mutian uses stronger language still : " Erasmus 
 surgit super hominis vices. Divinus est, et venerandus religiose, pie, 
 tanquam numen," quoted by Strauss, U. v. Hutten, I. 189. 
 
 2 Reuchlin's " Rudimenta Hebraica" was published in 1506. Conrad 
 Pellicanus, who had learned from Reuchlin nearly all the Hebrew he 
 knew, issued in 1503 his "De modo legendi et intelligendi Hebraea." 
 Mayerhoff, pp. 44, 45, 262. 
 
54 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 Hebrew learning into Germany. 1 But Keuchlin, although 
 he had spent a large part of his life in teaching and other 
 purely literary occupations, was by profession a lawyer 
 and a statesman, not a man of letters. He was a favourite 
 servant of Eberhard with the Beard, the first Count of 
 "Wurtemberg who assumed the title of Duke, and was 
 sent by him on many embassies to the Papal and Imperial 
 Courts. The Emperor had ennobled him: he was one 
 of the Judges, elected by the Suabian League, to decide 
 international disputes. No man was held in higher 
 honour than he : the great humanists of Italy, as well 
 as all the rising scholars of Germany, were his friends : 
 Universities competed for his services: already on the 
 verge of old age, he had retired into the country, and 
 exchanged diplomacy for study and the breeding of white 
 peacocks, when the great storm of his life burst upon 
 him. 
 
 Hebrew was a dangerous thing to touch in those days. 
 When Eeuchlin in his earlier life lectured upon it in 
 Heidelberg, he had to do it privately, for fear of the 
 monks. The Jews, evermore an accursed people, had 
 crucified the Lord : what could be plainer than that any 
 one who tampered with their tongue was a heretic and 
 an outcast ? If the plea was urged that the Old Testa- 
 
 1 Declamatio "De Capnione Phorcensi," Ph. Melanthonis Opp. Cor- 
 pus Reformatorum, XL 1006. Reuchlin's own language on this point is 
 clear. In his " Consilium pro libris Judaeorum non abolendis," he says, 
 in answer to the taunt of Pfefferkorn that he had not written his own 
 Hebrew Grammar, " So ist doch vor mir nie kainer kummen, der sich 
 understanden hab, die gantzen hebraische sprach inn ain buch zu regu- 
 liern, das sie moecht von den latinischen gefasst und empfangen werden, 
 und solt den neid sein hertz zerbrechen, dannocht bin ich der erst." 
 H. v. d. Hardt : Historia Literaria Reformationis, ii. 49. 
 
IX ITALY AND GERMANY. 55 
 
 ment was written in Hebrew, the ready answer was, that 
 the Vulgate was the Bible of the Church, and quite good 
 enough for any sound churchman. And Eeuchlin had 
 more than a philological interest in his Hebrew studies. 
 Early in life he had come under the influence of John 
 Wessel, of Groningen, who exhorted him to study the 
 Bible, and, if Melancthon is to be believed, taught him 
 the rudiments of Hebrew. Like Erasmus, and unlike 
 the Italian scholars, he applied himself to the ancient 
 languages with a theological purpose. He had not scru- 
 pled to point out errors in the Vulgate, appealing from it 
 to the Hebrew original ; and when reproved for so doing, 
 had replied in the true spirit of the Christian scholar: 
 " I revere St. Jerome as an angel ; I respect De Lyra as 
 a master ; but I adore Truth as a God." l But more than 
 this, he was caught in the fantastic net of the Cabbalists, 
 to whom Pico della Mirandola had first introduced him. 
 He believed in mystic meanings of the words and letters 
 of the Hebrew Scriptures. He taught a Canon of Bam- 
 berg how to find in one verse of Exodus the seventy-two 
 unspeakable names of God. 2 This delusive shadow of 
 erudition was the pre-occupation of his life; he expounded 
 it in a treatise, De verbo mirifico, published in 1495, 
 and again twenty years later in another, De arte cab- 
 balisticd, dedicated to Leo X. He was thus a man 
 about whom hung an undefined suspicion of unsoundness : 
 if, as the monkish saying went, every good grammarian 
 was a heretic, how much more a man who dealt in such 
 unlawful learning ? 
 
 1 Strauss, U. v. Hutten, I. 192. The influence of De Lyra's Com- 
 mentary on Luther is well known. It was said, " Si Lyra non lyrasset, 
 Lutherus non saltasset." 
 
 2 Ibid. I. 191. 
 
56 H. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 To Eeuchlin, then, about the beginning of the year 
 1510, came a converted Jew, by name Jobann Pfeffer- 
 korn, on a strange errand. 1 The visitor, who, if accounts 
 may be trusted, was as unwholesome in appearance as in 
 character, brought with him an order from the Emperor 
 Maximilian, then busy with his campaign against Venice, 
 requiring all Jews within the limits of the empire to 
 bring their books to the town-halls of their respective 
 abodes, to be submitted to the inspection of PfefTerkorn 
 and such assistants as he might choose, and if they con- 
 tained any insults to the Christian religion, to be straight- 
 way burned. This, then, was the purpose for the exe- 
 cution of which the aid of the greatest Hebrew scholar 
 of the day was asked. For the time, Eeuchlin got rid 
 of his visitor upon allegation of some informality in the 
 mandate, which his legal knowledge enabled him to point 
 out. But Pfefferkorn was persistent, and, besides, had 
 powerful friends behind him. Before long, Eeuchlin was 
 required by the Archbishop of Mainz, in pursuance of 
 an imperial order, to give his opinion on the question, 
 whether all Hebrew books, except the Old Testament, 
 ought not to be forcibly taken from the Jews and burned. 
 To this the scholar could give only one reply. He pre- 
 pared a memoir, in which he divided Hebrew literature 
 into seven categories, of which only one, and that doubt- 
 fully, was declared worthy of the fire : while the general 
 conclusion was, "that the Jews' books should not be 
 burned, but that with reasonable debate they should, by 
 God's help, be gently and kindly brought over to our 
 
 1 The most important documents in the controversy between Eeuch- 
 lin and the Dominicans of Cologne will be found reprinted in Hermann 
 v. d. Hardt : Historia Literaria Reformationis, Part ii. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 57 
 
 faith" an attempt which Eeuchlin proposed to further 
 by founding Chairs of Hebrew in the German Universi- 
 ties. This, however, was not what Pfefferkorn wanted ; 
 and the first result was a bitter personal controversy 
 between him and Eeuchlin, in which so at least thought 
 the friends of learning the latter lost dignity, first by 
 engaging such an adversary at all, and next by too much 
 descending to his level. But now, as it was too plain 
 that Pfefferkorn was no match for Eeuchlin, who was 
 supported by the whole of learned Germany, new bat- 
 teries were unmasked. Behind Pfefferkorn were the 
 Dominicans of Cologne ; behind the Dominicans, the 
 Inquisition. The Jew retires from the fray, but his 
 place is taken by Jacob Hoogstraten, the chief Inquisitor. 
 It is not a question now of collecting and burning Hebrew 
 books, but of compelling Eeuchlin to pay the penalties of 
 heresy: 
 
 The story of the struggle, which lasted for six years, 
 cannot now be told in detail. An attempt to condemn 
 Eeuchlin at a court of the Inquisition held at Mainz, 
 broke down. A second inquiry, held by the Bishop of 
 Speier, resulted in his acquittal, and the condemnation 
 of his opponents in costs. Then the case went by appeal 
 to Eome, where Hoogstraten appeared in person, confi- 
 dent in a full purse and the influence of the mendicant 
 orders. But here, too, after long delays, a theological 
 commission, over which the Archbishop of Nazareth pre- 
 sided, gave judgment in Eeuchlin' s favour. It proves, 
 however, how much Leo both feared and hated the 
 Dominicans and Franciscans, that he could not bring 
 himself to strike a decisive blow against them, and that, 
 instead of confirming the judgment of the court, he 
 
58 II. THE REVIVAL OE LETTERS 
 
 issued a mandatum de supersedendo, imposing silence on 
 both parties. 1 But it is important to notice that it 
 was by no means a struggle between the Church, as 
 such, and the humanists. The Emperor seems soon to 
 have become ashamed of the part which he had been 
 made to play, and actually wrote to the Pope on behalf 
 of Eeuchlin. The Chapter of Mainz took the same side. 
 The Pope himself was reported to have said privately 
 that he would see that Eeuchlin came to no harm. The 
 persecuted scholar found many friends among the various 
 clerical judges before whom the case was heard. His ene- 
 mies were the mendicant orders and the Universities over 
 which they had control ; Paris, Mainz, Erfurt, Louvain, 
 all pronounced against him, as Cologne had already done. 
 The rage of the Dominicans when Hoogstraten was com- 
 pelled to leave Eome without obtaining the desired con- 
 
 1 The subsequent fortune of Keuchlin's case is worth recording. His 
 enemies at Cologne had carried on the war for some time in books and 
 pamphlets when Franz v. Sickingen, in his character of a general 
 reformer of abuses, took up his cause, probably at Hutten's instigation. 
 He addressed a letter to Hoogstraten, requiring the Dominicans to 
 write to Rome to announce their retirement from the case, to cease 
 from all persecution of Eeuchlin, and to pay the costs in which they 
 had been condemned at Speier. Should they fail to comply with these 
 conditions, he signified his intention of ravaging the diocese of Cologne 
 with fire and sword. It was impossible to argue with a master of 
 legions : the conditions were accepted, the costs paid, and Hoogstraten 
 laid down his office of Inquisitor. But nullum tempus occurrit eccle- 
 sice. Within a few months a favourable opportunity presented itself : 
 the letter to Rome was declared to have been written under compulsion : 
 Leo X., who by this time had been enlightened by events at Witten- 
 berg, issued a brief, questioning the judgment given at Speier and con- 
 demning Reuchlin, and Hoogstraten was restored to his functions and 
 dignities. MayerhofF : "Reuchlin, p. 241. Strauss: IT. v. Hutten, II. 
 19 et seq. Geiger : Joh. Reuchlin, pp. 436 et seq. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 59 
 
 demnation, knew no bounds : they denounced the Pope ; 
 they talked of appealing to a general Council ; they even 
 threatened schism. On the other hand, the scholars, the 
 poets, rallied round Eeuchlin, knowing that his cause 
 was their own. All the men whom I have mentioned as 
 the leaders in the literary movement, and many more, 
 were his enthusiastic friends. They called themselves 
 Eeuchlinists : Salve Eeuchlimsta, was a common form 
 of address in speech and writing. They defended his 
 cause in prose and verse, serious argument and biting 
 satire : they encouraged him in letters : even Erasmus 
 so far forgot his habitual caution as to write to Pope and 
 Cardinal on his behalf. 1 The printers and booksellers 
 were on the same side : the complaint was made, both 
 then and later, that the conservative party did not receive 
 fair play from the new art of printing. 2 It was a struggle 
 to the death, the young men against the old, the classics 
 against the schoolmen, scholarship against ignorance, 
 light against darkness. 
 
 One literary device, adopted by Eeuchlin's friends to 
 show the kind and extent of the support which was given 
 him, was the publication in 1514 of a collection of letters 
 addressed to him by the scholars of Germany. Claro- 
 rum virorum Epistolce ad Johannem Eeuchlin. 3 By this 
 
 1 Erasmi Opp. III. Epp. clxviii. p. 146, clxxiv. p. 154. 
 
 2 See a curious and angry confession, from the pen of a bitter enemy, 
 of the favour in which the Lutherans stood with the printers and pub- 
 lishers. Cochlaeus, Acta et scripta M. Lutheri, under the year 1522, 
 p. 82. 
 
 3 On the title-page of the " Illustrium virorum Epistolae," a collection 
 of letters which followed the Epp. Obsc. Vir. in 1519, and must not, 
 therefore, be confounded with the * Clarorum virorum Epistolae," pub- 
 lished in 1514, was the notice, " Reuchlinistarum exercitum pagina 
 
60 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 was suggested the idea of perhaps the most celebrated 
 pasquinade recorded in the history of literature. If the 
 illustrious men thus saluted and supported their cham- 
 pion, why should not the obscure men do the same ? It 
 was felt, however, that it would hardly do to select 
 Hoogstraten as the recipient of these letters ; inquisitors, 
 however stupid and ignorant, are dangerous men to laugh 
 at; and the figure-head put forward, therefore, was Ortui- 
 nus Gratius, Professor of polite literature at Cologne, 
 and a scholar of Alexander Hegius at Deventer. To 
 him, then, were addressed the Epistola Obscurorum 
 Virorum, which burst upon amused and applauding 
 Germany in the last months of 1515. 1 The book in its 
 original form consisted of forty-one letters, written in 
 the choicest bad Latin not much worse Latin, it may 
 be inferred, than the monks commonly used and sup- 
 posed to be addressed to Ortuinus Gratius by men of the 
 party of reaction. The writers, who bear feigned and 
 absurd names, proposed to their leader the most ridiculous 
 questions, complain of the treatment which they receive 
 from the poets, are made to display as if unconsciously 
 the most astounding ignorance, as well as a revolting 
 coarseness of life and conversation, which has yet its 
 
 invenies mox sequenti." The letter of Joh. Cocleariligneus, in the 
 Epp. Obsc. Vir. (Part ii. No. 59), contains a burlesque list of the same 
 kind, as does also the " Carmen rithmicale Magistri Philippi Schlau- 
 raff" (Part ii. No. 9). Their opponents, in modern German literature, 
 are the " Dunkelmanner," the "EinsterJinge," each of which terms is 
 rather a play upon the word "obscuri" than a translation of it. 
 
 1 The first edition of the Epp. Obsc. Vir. bore on its title-page the 
 impress of Aldus of Venice : the second purported to have been printed 
 at Rome. They were really printed, so far as it can now be ascertained, 
 at Mainz or Hagenau. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 61 
 
 comic side. Unlike other books of the same kind, the 
 Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum has not lost its power of 
 amusement with lapse of time : the vileness of its Latinity 
 is as quaint as ever : and it is a curious evidence allow- 
 ing for the caricature of ways of living and thinking 
 which literature might otherwise have been too dignified 
 to record. A second part, adding seventy letters con- 
 ceived in the same spirit to the first collection, followed 
 in 1517. The effect was prodigious. The trial at Eome 
 was in a state of suspended animation : but now sol- 
 vuntur risu tabulce. There were monks in Brabant, 
 says Erasmus, who took the book seriously, as a genuine 
 tribute of respect to Ortuinus ; and Sir Thomas More sent 
 him a similar report of English stupidity. 1 ' He himself 
 was hugely delighted with the one or two of the letters 
 which were sent him in proof before the publication of 
 the whole : an old tradition affirms that his laughter 
 over them cured him of a quinsy. But when all Ger- 
 many was ringing with the blow that had been struck, 
 and especially when the second part appeared, in which 
 his own name was freely used, his characteristic timidity 
 drove him to the other side ; and in a letter to Csesarius, 2 
 which Pfefferkorn and his friends did not fail to pub- 
 lish, he complained that the satire of the epistles was too 
 personal. Luther 3 never cared for them : he is on the 
 point of nailing his Theses on the Indulgences to the 
 church door of Wittenberg, and is in much too serious a 
 
 1 Erasmi Opp. III. Epp. dcccclxxix. p. 1110 C, Appendix lxxxvii. 
 p. 1575 A. 
 
 2 Erasmi Opp. III. Appendix, Ep. clx. p. 1622. 
 
 8 Briefe, ed. De Wette, Epp. 20, 21, I. pp. 37, 38. 
 
62 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 mood for such light-hearted trifling. 1 But the human- 
 ists, upon whom no shadow of the coming storm rested, 
 were in an ecstacy of delight. 
 
 The dates alone are sufficient to show that the " Letters 
 of the Obscure Men" were no such powerful factor in the 
 production of the Eeformation as has been sometimes 
 alleged. Even if pasquinades played a more important 
 part in popular revolutions than they do, the Eeformation 
 in 1516 was already too far prepared for the Letters 
 greatly to help or hinder it. Who was their author? 
 They have been commonly associated with the name of 
 Ulrich von Hutten, a man of noble birth, whom love of 
 literature made into a wandering scholar ; through almost 
 the whole of his brief life the sport of poverty and the 
 prey of disease; the Lucian of Germany, whose prose 
 and whose verse were equally pungent; who was the 
 friend of Sickingen and of Luther, and who would have 
 been the friend of Erasmus too if Erasmus would have 
 permitted it ; always a stout and not too scrupulous war- 
 rior for German freedom, and good letters, and when 
 it dawned for new religious light. But we have the 
 letter which Hutten, then at Bologna, wrote on receiving 
 the first part of the book ; and, unless it were deliberately 
 intended to mislead, it is impossible to reconcile with it 
 the supposition that he had any share in the authorship. 
 
 1 Hoogstraten, in the dedication to Leo X. of a work published in 
 1519, was astute enough to point out to the Pope the close connec- 
 tion between Reuchlin's case and Luther's movement at Wittenberg. 
 Eeuchlin himself is reported to have said of Luther : " Gottlob, nun 
 haben sie einen Mann gefunden, der ihnen so blutsaure Arbeit machen 
 wird, dass sie mich alten Mann wohl in Frieden werden hinfahren 
 lassen." Mayerhoff : Reuchlin, p. 234. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 63 
 
 That he made large contributions to the second part is 
 amply attested by internal evidence; among others, a 
 most amusing letter in doggrel verse, 1 describing the 
 adventures of an unhappy monk among the humanists of 
 Germany, is plainly his. The critics are now settling down 
 to the belief that while more Eeuchlinists than one had a 
 hand in the original volume, its conception and execution 
 are chiefly due to Johann Jager, better known as Crotus 
 Eubianus, a scholar who was Hutten's earliest and closest 
 friend. Its humour answers to what we know of his 
 character. Had it been Hutten's, it would have had a 
 sharper edge, a more definite moral purpose. The creator 
 of the " obscure men" loves his puppets, while he laughs 
 at their antic ways : no seriousness, as from' a dissolving 
 world, broods over him : the struggle between light and 
 darkness is only matter for a capital joke. Hutten died, 
 only thirty-five years old, penniless, friendless, solitary, 
 worn out with conflict ; Crotus lived to an obscure old 
 age, returning at last, not .without suspicion of sordid 
 inducement, to the fold of Eome. 2 
 
 The one name, however, in which the classical revival 
 of Germany is summed up, is that of Erasmus. He is 
 
 1 Epp. Obsc. Vir. Part ii. No. 9. 
 
 2 Karapschulte, who, in his interesting book on the University of 
 Erfurt, has given a minute account of the band of " poets " there 
 assembled round Mutian and Eoban Hess, adheres to the idea that 
 Hutten was associated with Crotus in the composition of the first part 
 of the Epp. Obsc. Vir., and that the letter from Bologna was only part 
 of a deliberate plan of concealment. He also names Eoban Hess 
 himself and Petrejus (George Eberbach) as fellow-workers. He is, 
 however, a little inclined, in the interest of his subject, to rush to con- 
 clusions not fully warranted by evidence. Kampschulte : Die Univer- 
 sitat Erfurt in ihrem Verhaltnisse zu dem Humanismus und der Refor- 
 mation, Part i. pp. 192 ei seq. 
 
64 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 the typical northern scholar. No contemporary Italian 
 humanist had so great a reputation : he was recognized 
 on both sides of the Alps as the literary chief of Europe. 
 Like Agricola and Keuchlin, he travelled for purposes of 
 study: Paris and Borne, Bologna and Florence, were 
 familiar to him : he corrected the press for Aldus at 
 Venice : he learned Greek at Oxford and taught it at 
 Cambridge : all the rising scholars of England looked up 
 to him as their head. No one else wrote Latin with such 
 ease and elegance : the letters which he exchanged with 
 Popes, Cardinals, Kings, scholars, were eagerly read : 
 his books had an enormous circulation. The " Praise of 
 Polly," in its first imperfect form, went through seven 
 editions in a few months, 1 and, when acknowledged and 
 published by its author, was repeatedly reprinted. The 
 "Adages," though a much longer and more learned work, 
 were hardly, if at all, less popular. One bookseller, 
 hearing that the University of Paris was about to con- 
 demn the "Colloquies," 2 printed, as a measure of pre- 
 caution, 24,000 copies. What income Erasmus derived 
 from his works it would be difficult to say, but he was 
 pensioned by more than one crowned head, and was in 
 
 1 R. B. Drummond: Life of Erasmus, I. 201. 
 
 2 The Colloquies were in fact condemned by the Sorbonne, after- 
 wards solemnly burned in Spain, and finally placed by Rome (though 
 only after Erasmus' death) in the Index. Midler : Erasmus, p. 242. 
 "De Colloquiis damnatis, scholasticus erat ludus. Colineus quidam 
 excuderat, ut aiunt, ad viginti quatuor millia Colloquiorum in modum 
 Enchiridii, sed eleganter. Id fecerat non studio mei, sed amore questus. 
 Quid multis 1 Nihil erat in manibus praeter Colloquia. Praecesserat 
 nescio quis rumor, forte a typographo studiose sparsus, fore ut hoc 
 opus interdiceretur. Ea res acuit emtorum aviditatem." Erasmi Opp. 
 III. Ep. dxxxi.*1168D. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 65 
 
 the constant receipt of valuable presents. 1 There has 
 been no such literary reputation since; for with the 
 disuse of Latin as the universal language of educated 
 men, passed away the possibility of a single Eepublic of 
 Letters. England never acknowledged the supremacy 
 of Yoltaire; France never found out the greatness of 
 Goethe. But before the sickly scholar of Basel throw- 
 ing on every controversy of the age the light of his 
 genius and his learning, though too cautious to take a 
 decisive part in any, the derider of monks, who yet clave 
 to the Church, the Eeformer who shrank from reform, 
 the humanist who would not desert the Papacy all 
 Europe bowed. 
 
 To over-estimate the worth of what Erasmus did for 
 scientific theology is simply impossible. Like most of 
 the other great German humanists, he was a sincere 
 Christian believer, who desired to apply the new know- 
 ledge furnished by the classical revival to the service of 
 religious truth and the Church. As early as 1505 h? 
 republished the Notes on the New Testament by Lorenzo 
 Valla, the single theological product of the Italian Ee- 
 vival. This was followed in 1516 by his edition of the 
 New Testament in Greek, 2 with a Latin version and 
 
 1 See a remarkable letter (No. 1103, Opp. Vol. III. p. 1284) to a 
 Spanish correspondent, in which he recounts a long list of letters and 
 gifts received from men of note. 
 
 2 Erasmus' Greek Testament counts as the editio princeps. The 
 Greek Text of the Complutensian Polyglot, so called from its having 
 been printed at Alcala (Complutum), was out of the printer's hands as 
 early as January, 1514; but Leo X.'s license to publish was not granted 
 till March, 1520. This, too, was a critical edition, though it is now 
 uncertain what MSS. were employed in its preparation. Erasmus' 
 second edition was published in 1518, the third in 1522, the fourth 
 
 F 
 
(j6 it. the eevival of letters 
 
 notes, printed by Froben at Easel an edition which, it 
 should not be forgotten, was the first attempt to form a cor- 
 rect text by collation of manuscripts. Subsequent editions, 
 of which four were printed in the lifetime ,of Erasmus, were 
 accompanied by paraphrases, which, however wordy and 
 unnecessary they may seem to modern critics, were highly 
 esteemed and of great use in popularizing a knowledge 
 of the New Testament. To us, at least, it is interesting 
 and important to know that the influence of Erasmus' 
 version can be distinctly traced in those labours of Tyn- 
 dale and Coverdale 1 which lie at the basis of our English 
 Bible, and that in 1547 Edward VI. ordered a copy of 
 his Paraphrases of the Gospels, in English, to be set up 
 in every parish church. 2 But, besides this, the labour 
 which other humanists applied to editing the classics, 
 Erasmus largely reserved for the Fathers. He super- 
 intended the publication, with more or less addition of 
 preface and comment, of the works of Cyprian, Jerome, 
 Augustine, Ireneeus, Basil, Chrysostom. His was.a scho- 
 lar's conception of reform: he rightly apprehended the 
 necessity of placing before men's eyes, in as unadulterated 
 a form as possible, the records of Christian antiquity. 
 Both his New Testament text and his editions of the 
 Fathers have long been superseded ; but it should be 
 recollected that without the first neither Luther nor 
 Tyndale could have made their translations from the 
 Greek original, and that the second were the arsenal from 
 
 in 1527, the fifth in 1535. In 1536, Erasmus died. Conf. Scrivener : 
 Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, chap. v. 
 
 1 Westcott : General View of the History of the English Bible, 
 pp. 179, 257. 
 
 2 Westcott, p. 116. Milman: Latin Christianity, VI. 439. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 67 
 
 which the Eef ormers drew all their weapons of Patristic 
 controversy. 
 
 Erasmus had a keen eye for ecclesiastical abuses, and 
 especially hated the monastic system. It had fastened 
 the stain of illegitimacy upon his birth ; it had robbed 
 him of both his patrimony and his personal liberty. No 
 one knew more than he of the ignorance, the self-indul- 
 gence, the bigotry of monks, or satirized them with a 
 sharper pen. That the " Praise of Polly" and the " Collo- 
 quies" were in the hands of every educated man, meant 
 that all the world was laughing at the follies and super- 
 stitions of popular religion. Erasmus might find fault 
 with the satire of the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum as 
 having a personal mark; but their humour, if more 
 broadly comic, is certainly not more incisive than his 
 own. On every side of his literary activity, therefore, 
 Erasmus belonged to the religious humanists, who hoped 
 that the revival of good letters might end in the refor- 
 mation of the Church. And yet he stands apart from 
 all the rest. In the burlesque enumeration of the friends 
 of Eeuchlin given by one of the obscure men, he finds 
 only a doubtful place : " Erasmus est homo pro se." 1 He 
 does not march in line with the army of the Eeuch- 
 linists. While all the rest of the world is sure that new 
 learning must lead to reformed faith, he professes not 
 to see the connection. " What have I to do," he asks 
 
 1 " Tunc qusesivi ab aliis an etiam Erasmus Roterodamus esset cum 
 eis. Respondit mihi quidam kaufmannus dicens, * Erasmus est homo 
 pro se. Sed certum est quod nunquam erit amicus illorum theologorum 
 et fratrum, et quod ipse manifeste in dictis et scriptis suis defendit 
 et excusat Johannem Reuchlin, etiam scribens ad Papam.'" Epp. 
 Obsc. Vir. Part ii. Ep. 59. 
 
 F2 
 
68 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 again and again, in various phrase, " with the cause of 
 Eeuchlin and of Luther ?" 1 He hardly knows Eeuchlin, 
 he says ; he has only seen him once or twice : the Cabbala 
 and the Talmud are things that he does not care about. 
 So with Luther: in the one letter which he writes to 
 him before the correspondence which preceded their final 
 rupture, he accepts his offer of friendship only coldly, 
 and advises him to moderate his tone. To other cor- 
 respondents he declares that he has not read the books 
 of which all the world is talking : he even takes credit 
 for an attempt to prevent Froben of Basel from printing 
 Luther's works. 2 All this is in his letters to such men 
 as Leo X., Cardinal Wolsey, the Elector Archbishop of 
 Mainz : but there were times at which he knew himself 
 and his true allies better. When in 1522 he published 
 the third edition of his " Colloquies," it was found to 
 contain a dialogue called the " Apotheosis of Eeuchlin." 3 
 
 1 " Primum illud prsefandum est, mihi neque cum Reuchlini negotio, 
 neque cum Lutheri causa quicquam unquam fuisse. Cabala et Thai- 
 mud, quicquid hoc est, meo animo nunquam arrisit Primum 
 
 enim, quid rei bonis studiis cum fidei negotio 1 deinde, quid mihi cum 
 causa Capnionis ac Lutheri 1" Ep. 477, to the Elector Archbishop of 
 Mainz, Opp. III. pp. 514 A, 516 F. Conf. Ep. to Wolsey, 317, III. 
 p. 322 B, F. 
 
 2 "Testatus sum te mihi ignotissimum esse, libros tuos nondum esse 
 lectos : proinde nee improbare quicquam, nee probare." Ep. to Luther, 
 427, Opp. III. p. 444 F. "Lutherum non novi, nee libros illius unquam 
 
 legi, nisi forte decern aut duodecim pagellas, easque carptim 
 
 Proinde minis etiam egi cum Johanne Frobenio typographo, ne quid 
 operum illius excuderet." Ep. to Leo X., 529, III. p. 578 C. 
 
 3 It is entitled, " De incomparabili heroe Joh. Eeuchlino in divorum 
 numerum relato." A Franciscan monk sees in a vision Eeuchlin con- 
 ducted into heaven by a choir of angels, under the especial escort of 
 St. Jerome. The interlocutors in the dialogue express their intention 
 of counting him among the Saints, and the whole winds up with a 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 69 
 
 The great Hebrew scholar was dead, and this was the 
 eloquent and touching tribute which Erasmus laid upon 
 his grave. Again, in 1520, Elector Frederick the Wise 
 journeyed to Aachen, accompanied by his secretary, 
 George Spalatin, to be present at the coronation of 
 Charles V. "Thereby, at Cologne," says Spalatin, "the 
 highly learned man, Erasmus Eoterodamus, was with 
 this Elector of Saxony, and talked with him of all manner 
 of things ; and was asked whether it was his opinion 
 that Dr. Martin Luther had erred in his writing and 
 preaching. Whereupon he answered, in Latin, 'Yea, 
 indeed, in two things: that he has attacked, first, the 
 Pope's crown, and next, the monks' bellies.' Thereupon 
 this Elector smiled, and bethought him .of this answer, 
 hardly a year before his death." 1 
 
 collect in his honour. "Amator humani generis Deus, qui donum 
 linguarum, quo quondam Apostolos tuos ad Evangelii prsedicationem per 
 Spiritem tuum Sanctum ccelitus instruxeras, per electum famulum tuum 
 Johannem Reuchlinum mundo renovasti," &c. &c. Erasmi Opp. I. 
 p. 692 D. 
 
 1 G. Spalatin: Leben und Zeitgeschichte Friedrichs des Weisen, 
 164. Erasmus' way of speaking of Luther and his work differed greatly- 
 according to his mood at the time and the person whom he was address- 
 ing. He not unfrequently recognized himself as the precursor of the 
 Reformation. In a letter to Zwingli (Huld. Zuinglii Opera, edd. Schuler 
 et Schulthess, VII. 310) he said, " videor mihi fere omnia docuisse, quae 
 docet Lutherus, nisi quod non tarn atrociter, quodque abstinui a quibus- 
 dam senigmatibus et paradoxis." The story of the egg that Erasmus laid, 
 Luther hatched, seems to have been current at the time : Erasmus himself 
 alludes to it (Ep. to Caesarius, 719, III. p. 840 D): "Ego peperi ovum, 
 Lutherus exclusit. Minim vero dictum Minoritarum istorum, magna 
 que et bona pulte dignum. Ego posui ovum gallinaceum, Lutherus 
 exclusit pullum longe dissiniillimum." Perhaps an extract from the let- 
 ter before quoted to the Archbishop of Mainz best defines the position 
 which he would like to have occupied had he not been driven from it 
 by the remorseless logic of events : " De articulis, quos objiciunt Lu- 
 
70 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 At first sight, this looks like mere time-serving ; and 
 no doubt there was in Erasmus a distinct element of both 
 personal and intellectual timidity. He wished to stand 
 well with all the world, and especially with his royal and 
 ecclesiastical patrons : he was reluctant to do anything that 
 might imperil his intellectual supremacy. It was one 
 thing to scatter abroad general sarcasms, and another to 
 face personal opposition : there was a cry for reformation 
 of abuses with which it was easy to mingle his voice, yet 
 at the same time to protest against ill-regulated zeal and 
 ungoverned impetuosity. But to stop here is to take 
 only a superficial view of the character and action of 
 Erasmus. He believed in the dissolvent power upon 
 old abuse of intellectual culture. The reform which he 
 desired, and which he did so much to prepare, would, he 
 thought, come slowly, gradually, surely, as the horizon 
 of human knowledge widened, and men laid upon truth 
 
 thero, in praesentia non disputo, tantum de modo et occasione dispute 
 Ausus est Lutherus de indulgentiis dubitare, sed de quibus alii prius 
 liimis impudenter asseveraveraiit. Ausus est immoderatius loqui de 
 potestate Rom. Pontificis, sed de qua isti nimis immoderate prius 
 scripserant, quorum praecipui sunt tres praedicatores, Al varus, Sylvester 
 et Cardinalis Sancti Sixti. Ausus est Thomae decreta contemnere, sed 
 quse Dominicani pene praeferunt Evangeliis. Ausus est in materia 
 Confessionis scrupulos aliquos discutere, sed in qua monachi sine fine 
 illaqueant hominum conscientias. Ausus est ex parte negligere scho- 
 lastica decreta, sed quibus ipsi nimium tribuant, et in quibus ipsi nihilo 
 minus inter se dissentiunt ; postremo, quae subinde mutant, pro veteribus 
 rescissis inducentes nova. Discrueiabat hoc pias mentes, cum audirent 
 in scholis fere nullam sermonem de doctrina Evangelica, sacros illos ab 
 ecclesia jam olim probatos auctores haberi pro antiquatis : imo in sacris 
 concionibus minimum audiri de Christo; de potestate Pontificis, de 
 opinionibus recentium fere omnia. Totam orationem jam palam quaes- 
 tum, adulationem, ambitionem, ac fucum prae se ferre. His imputandum 
 opinor, etiamsi qua intemperantius scripsit Lutherus." Ep. 477, Opp. 
 III. pp. 515, 516. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 71 
 
 a firmer grasp. Such a reformation would involve no 
 violent break with the past : there was no need of a rebel- 
 lion against the Pope, or of an upturning of Europe, or 
 of the founding of a new church upon the ruins of the 
 old. Luther's masterful ways disturbed this literary 
 dream : his theses against indulgences, his resistance to 
 Papal argument and menace, his abjuration of his monas- 
 tic vows, his marriage, his communion in both kinds, 
 were so many successive blows against the only theory 
 of reformation which Erasmus could entertain. Nor 
 must it be forgotten that he was absolutely without 
 sympathy for Luther's characteristic theology. Justifi- 
 cation by faith was a thing abhorrent to him. Erasmus 
 thought the progress of Lutheranism an injury to good 
 morals as well as to good letters. His own theology 
 readers may find it in his Enchiridion militis Chris- 
 tiani 1 was a strongly ethical faith, out of which the 
 characteristic superstitions of Catholicism had disap- 
 peared, but which Luther would certainly have declared 
 to be nought. 2 He is the Jerome of the Eeformation, as 
 
 1 The "Enchiridion" was written about 1501, and probably published 
 not long after. But Erasmus reprinted it, with a letter in its defence, 
 in 1518. We may take it therefore as representing his matured opi- 
 nions. 
 
 2 For a number of characteristically violent criticisms on Erasmus, 
 see Luther's Tischreden, ed. Forsteniann, sec. xxxvii. Nos. 106 135. 
 The following are worth quoting. "Anno 36. 1 Augusti, Martinus 
 Lutherus solus in speculationibus sedens creta in mensem scripsit. 
 Ees et verba Philippus. Verba sine re Erasmus. Ees sine verbis 
 M. Lutherus. Nee rem nee verba Carolostadius."' Tisch. II. 409. 
 Again : " Erasmus ist ein Feind aller Religion und ein sonderlicher 
 Feind und Widersacher Christi, ein vollkommen Conterfeit und Eben- 
 bild des Epicuri und Luciani. Dies hab ich, M. Luther, mit meiner 
 eigenen Hand geschrieben Dir, mein lieber Sohn Johannes, und durch 
 
 I < 
 

 72 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 Luther is its Augustine. But it is not wonderful that 
 as time went on, as Luther's aims became more definite 
 and his success more assured, Erasmus found it ever 
 more difficult to preserve even the appearance of neu- 
 trality, and at last was forced by the solicitations and 
 remonstrances of his friends to enter upon a controversy 
 in which neither he nor Luther reaped many laurels. 
 His book, De Libero Arbitrzo, was published in 1524, 
 and from that time to his death, in 1536, he watched 
 the progress of the Eeformation with jealous and jaun- 
 diced eyes. 1 
 
 It is easy at this distance of time to see that, without 
 the vigorous personality of Luther, little would have 
 been accomplished for the reformation of the church; 
 and that such a doctrine as that of justification by faith, 
 in virtue of its capacity for popular impression and its 
 innate motive power, was a main element in his success. 
 But nothing can well be more unjust than to find fault 
 with Erasmus for not being Luther, or even for unwill- 
 ingness to place himself at Luther's side. Neither his 
 strength nor his weakness was Luther's : he was a scholar, 
 
 Dich alien meinen Kindern und der heiligen Christliehen Kirchen." 
 Tisch. II. 419. A more deliberate though hardly more favourable 
 estimate may be found in Luther's letter to Amsdorf, Feb. 1534 : Briefe, 
 ed. De Wette, IV. 507. 
 
 1 In 1534, Erasmus published a project of reform in his little work, 
 " De amabili Ecclesiae Concordia," an exposition of the seventy-third 
 Psalm, undertaken at the request of Julius Pflug, Bishop of Naumburg. 
 But he was then sixty-seven years of age, and within two years of his 
 death : the Confession of Augsburg is already four years old, and there 
 is no longer any room for reforming initiative, even had Erasmus been 
 able to take it. We need not wonder, therefore, that there is little in 
 the book beyond deprecation of abuse and excess, and a recommenda- 
 tion to all parties to live and let live in matters of religion. 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 73 
 
 not a religious reformer: a sickly man of letters, not a 
 hero of faith. I should as little think of dwelling upon 
 his timid caution in shifting his sails to suit the wind, as 
 upon Luther's ungoverned violence of speech: like all 
 men who play a great part, each had the defects of his 
 qualities. But events have amply justified both. The 
 Eeformation that has been, is Luther's monument : per- 
 haps the Eeformation that is to be, will trace itself back to 
 Erasmus. He was mistaken in thinking that the reform- 
 ing efficacy of culture was of quick operation, or that no 
 more sudden and sharp cautery than his own method sup- \ 
 plied was needed to cure the abuses of the time. But he 
 is the father of the theological scholarship of the Eeformed 
 Churches. His New Testament lies at the base of all 
 subsequent textual criticism. His editions of the Fathers 
 first made possible the study of Christian antiquity. He 
 compassed what was then almost the whole of human 
 knowledge, and brought it to bear upon religious truth. 
 This is, after all, the scientific method, the only method 
 which produces results safe from ultimate disturbance. 
 Luther's personal inspiration still lives and works among 
 men, who learn from him the secret of faith, who catch 
 from him the contagion of heroism ; but the spirit of 
 Erasmus is the life of scientific criticism, the breath of/ ^/ 
 modern scholarship. 
 
 There is a story 1 which, though of respectable anti- I 
 
 1 I cannot trace this story, in the form in which it is given in the 
 text, further back than to a tract by J. L. Fabricius, " De Ludis Sceni- 
 cis Dialexis Casuistica quinquepartita," first published at Heidelberg 
 in 1663, and afterwards reprinted in Gronovius' " Thesaurus Grsecarum 
 Antiquitatum," Vol. VIII. 1699. But there is a curious record of a 
 similar play performed before Francis I. in Paris in 1524, which was 
 from the pen of Johann Lange, Prior of the Augustinian convent, and 
 
74 II. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS 
 
 quity, is perhaps more apt than authentic, that when 
 Charles V. was holding the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, 
 a party of actors asked leave to present before him a 
 play in dumb show. Permission being granted, there 
 entered the hall a masked figure, in a doctor's gown, 
 upon whose back was a label, M Johann Keuchlin." He 
 threw down upon the floor a bundle of sticks, some 
 straight, some crooked, and so departed. Next followed 
 another, in like attire, whose name was Erasmus of Eot- 
 terdam: for a long time he tried to make the crooked 
 sticks square with the straight ones, and then, finding 
 his labour in vain, retired in manifest disturbance of 
 mind. The third masked figure was that of a monk, 
 labelled Martin Luther, who, bringing in fire and fuel, 
 set a light to the crooked sticks, and when the flame 
 had caught them retired in his turn. Then came in one 
 clad like an Emperor, who with drawn sword tried to 
 keep the fire and the sticks apart, but, when the flame 
 gathered strength all the more, went away in great 
 anger. Last of all a Pope, bearing the name of Leo X., 
 came in, wringing his hands, till, looking about him for 
 help, he saw two jars, one full of oil, the other of water, 
 and, rushing to them like a madman, seized the oil and 
 poured it upon the fire, which, spreading itself all abroad, 
 
 afterwards Lutheran pastor, at Erfurt. This appears to have been 
 printed in two different forms, though whether either or both are now 
 extant I am unable to say. They are mentioned in Burckhard's " Com- 
 mentatio de vita et fatis Ul. Hutteni," whence the " argumentum tra- 
 goediae" has been transferred by Dan. Gerdes to the second volume of 
 his well-known " Historia Eeformationis," where it will be found at 
 p. 48 of the " Monumenta" in the Appendix. But the Paris play was 
 not in dumb show, and both Hutten and a mendicant friar, " fratercu- 
 lus, obeso et protentiore ventriculo, capite pingui," play a part in it, 
 
IN ITALY AND GERMANY. 75 
 
 compelled him to flee. Who these actors were no one 
 knew ; for without waiting for reward they disappeared. 
 But the moral of their play was such as even Charles V. 
 might draw. 
 
Lecture III. 
 
 THE REFORMATION IN ITS EXTERNAL 
 
 ASPECTS. 
 
 The specifically religious revolution in Germany which 
 we call the Beformation, was part of a more general 
 movement of thought from which it finally, though only 
 gradually, disengaged itself. Germany, as we have 
 already seen, had caught from Italy that impulse of 
 renewed mental activity which was then diffusing itself 
 Jover civilized Europe, and which even yet shows no sign 
 of exhaustion. It shared in the universal revolt against 
 ecclesiastical oppression, the long-standing disgust with 
 clerical laxity and vice which at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century was made more intense by the shame- 
 less administration of successive Popes. And in this 
 respect it had special reasons fon discontent. It was the 
 milch cow of the Papacy, which at once despised and 
 drained it dry. An examination of the map reveals a 
 state of things to which no other European country can 
 show anything parallel. 1 At least a fourth of the whole 
 
 1 See especially Spruner-Menke : Hand Atlas fur die Geschichte des 
 Mittelalters und derneueren Zeit Map 43: Deutschland im Zeitraum 
 der Reformation. 
 
III. THE REFORMATION IN ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 77 
 
 area of Germany was under ecclesiastical rule. On the ex- 
 treme north-east were the wide domains of the Teutonic 
 knights, not yet converted into an hereditary appanage of 
 the House of Hohenzollern. On the north-west stretched 
 in continuous line the dioceses of Bremen, Utrecht, 
 Munster and Paderborn. The Bishopric of Liege occu- 
 pied a not inconsiderable part of the Netherlands, while 
 those of Metz and Strasburg covered the French frontier. 
 The great Electoral Archbishoprics of Cologne, Trier and 
 Mainz, ran along the course of the Ehine. In Central 
 Germany, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wiirz- 
 burg and Bamberg, were all ecclesiastical states, while 
 Salzburg and Trent carried the line of clerical fortresses 
 down to the confines of Italy. "Whenever the Diet met, ' 
 three out of the seven Electors who made up the first 
 line of the political hierarchy were ecclesiastics, while the 
 great Bishops successfully held their own with the crowd 
 of minor potentates. It is quite true that the wealth and 
 power of these Bishoprics made them objects of ambition 
 to members of royal and noble families, and so usually . 
 prevented them from falling a prey to Italian rapacity ; 
 but they were not the less outworks of the Papacy, and 
 instruments of Papal corruption and oppression. And it I 
 is not wonderful, therefore, that with other feelings of 
 discontent mingled a desire for national independence f 
 of Italy. The cry for reform constantly took the shape 
 of a demand for a German Council. The nation would 
 willingly, if it could, settle its own ecclesiastical affairs. 
 The Holy Eoman Empire was yet much more than a 
 pale shadow of the past, and if any Emperor had been 
 found willing to put himself at the head of his Estates, 
 
78 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 in direct opposition to the Pope, he might have had a 
 united people at his back. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that the neces- 
 sity of reform in the Church was felt only by those whom 
 we call Eeformers. All through the struggle, which 
 we may take as lasting from 1517, when Luther nailed 
 his indulgence theses to the church door at Wittenberg, 
 to 1552, when the Peace of Passau was signed, two 
 ft voices are to be heard that of the Protestants, who 
 demand a reform of doctrine as well as of discipline; 
 that of the Catholics, who are ashamed of abuses which 
 they cannot deny, and angry at their own inability to 
 correct them. Throughout all negociations between the 
 opposed parties runs a thread of reference to a general 
 Council or a national Assembly, which is ta make the 
 crooked straight. Though the precedents of Constanz 
 and of Basel were not wholly encouraging, they were too 
 recent to b^ forgotten. Even before the Papal bull had 
 made its Wc +o Wittenberg, Luther sought to turn aside 
 its blow by an appeal to a general Council. 1 A little 
 later, when the Diet of Worms was waiting for the 
 Reformer's appearance, the Emperor asked from the 
 
 1 The idea of appeal to a general Council was neither a new one nor 
 confined to Germany. On the 19th of March, 1518, the Parliament 
 of Paris, engaged in a controversy as to what were afterwards known 
 as the Gallican liberties, appealed "au Pape mieux conseille, et au 
 premier concile general, legitiment assemble," while, a few days after, 
 the University, evidently not forgetful of the traditions of Gerson and 
 Jean d'Ailly, followed with another appeal, "ad futurum concilium 
 legitime ac in loco tuto (congregatum) et quod libere, et cum securitate 
 adire poterimus." Gieseler, K. G. II. iv. p. 204, note. Kbstlin, Martin 
 Luther, I. 233, says that Luther in his appeal was careful to follow 
 these precedents. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 79 
 
 Estates a written statement of ecclesiastical oppression 
 and abuses, a document to which Duke George of Saxony, 
 the very representative of Catholic orthodoxy among the 
 German princes, contributed a list of grievances which 
 struck dismay into the heart of Aleander, the legate of 
 Leo X. 1 When another legate, Chieregati, asked the 
 Diet at Niirnberg, in 1522-3, why the Edict of Worms 
 against Luther and his followers had not been enforced, 
 he was answered by the production of 100 gravamina 
 a long and heavy bill of indictment brought by united 
 Germany against the Church, which it was demanded 
 should be tried by a national Council, to be held within 
 a year in a German city, under the presidency of the 
 Emperor. 2 Afterwards, when the opposition between 
 parties had become more decisive and more bitter, Catho- 
 lics were naturally reluctant to identify themselves with 
 Protestant demands. But it is instructive to note how, 
 during the latter part of the period of which I have 
 spoken, the opposition to a Council comes chiefly from 
 the side of the Pope. The Emperor desires it. The Pro- 
 testants only ask for guarantees that it shall be equitable 
 and independent. It is the Pope who refuses it, who 
 puts it off, who seeks to retain it within the sphere of 
 his own influence. At last it met at Trent in 1546, and 
 after many adjournments accomplished its work. But 
 long before this time, it had been seen that doctrinal 
 accommodation was out of the question : all that the 
 Council could now do was to re-settle Catholic faith on 
 an authoritative basis. From it nevertheless dates that 
 movement of counter-reformation which, while it poured 
 
 1 Kostlin t Martin Luther, I. 435. 
 
 2 Marheineke : Geschichte der Teutschen Reformation, I. 430. 
 
80 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 fresh blood into the veins of the Chnrch by renewing its 
 religions life, at once removed its worst scandals, and 
 enabled it to make a successfnl stand against aggres- 
 sive Protestantism. In one aspect the Conncil of Trent 
 sufficiently justifies the action of the Eeformers. It 
 was the tardy confession of the Papacy that at least 
 disciplinary reform was imperatively necessary. 
 
 It need hardly be said, however, that the chief motive 
 power of the Eef ormation was distinctively religious, and 
 that it sprang in large part from the intense personal 
 conviction and contagious faith of one man, Martin 
 Luther. The humanism of the time at best provided 
 an air in which the new thoughts could breathe and 
 burn : no Eeuchlin, no Erasmus, no Pirkheimer, would 
 have dashed themselves, as did Luther at Worms, upon 
 the serried spears of the Papal army. The condition of 
 Germany, divided among so many princes and princelets, 
 jealous of each other and kept apart by conflicting inte- 
 rests, was unfavourable to political action against Italy : 
 three centuries were to elapse before it could be made 
 one, and then only by the stern logic of force. The only 
 manifestation of popular political life was in the free 
 cities ; nor, except through its religious consciousness, 
 was there any means of banding the nation together and 
 making it feel its power. But this is precisely what 
 Luther did. Himself, as he gloried in saying, " a 
 peasant and the son of a peasant,'' he never but for 
 one moment, when the Peasants' War seemed to threaten 
 the work of his life with destruction lost his deep and 
 vivid sympathy with the people. His doctrine of the 
 natural priesthood of the Christian believer was, within 
 the limits of the Church, profoundly democratic. So, 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 81 
 
 too, was that still more central article of his creed, jus- 
 tification by faith alone ; for it made religion a matter 
 entirely between Christ and the believing soul, needing 
 the intervention of neither priest, nor visible church, 
 nor sacrificial rite. Luther's rugged, yet always nervous 
 and moving eloquence his mastery over the German 
 language, then just beginning to be a literary tongue 
 his deliberate use of popular phrases and proverbs his 
 translation of the Scriptures, which made the Bible 
 everywhere a household book the prayers, the cate- 
 chisms, the hymns, in the composition of which he always 
 had the common people in view combined to make him 
 a natural leader, in a way which would have been impos- 
 sible on^any other than religious ground. When, all 
 over Germany, from Liibeck and Bremen, where the 
 [Reformation triumphed, to Austria and Bavaria, where 
 persecution at last succeeded in effacing it, men repeated 
 Luther's prayers at night and morning, and taught their 
 children the hymns in which he had embodied the essen- 
 tials of the faith, and saw in the New Testament which 
 he had given them how different was the primitive from 
 the Papal Churcb, it was no wonder that their hearts 
 went out to Wittenberg and the man who had thus made 
 himself the representative of the best national aspirations. 
 There was a moment at which it seemed possible that 
 the religious enthusiasm which Luther inspired and led 
 might take a political form. Under the influence of 
 Ulrich von Hutten, he was more than half inclined to 
 throw in his lot with the schemes of revolution cherished 
 by Franz von Sickingen. But that movement ended in 
 speedy and ignominious failure, and for the rest of his life 
 Luther confined himself to a purely religious activity. He 
 
82 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 was a loyal subject of the Electors of Saxony. He never 
 wavered in his allegiance to the Emperor, notwithstand- 
 ing a thousand proofs that the Imperial and the Papal 
 policies were, so far as he was concerned, substantially 
 the same. He discouraged all leagues and alliances in 
 defence of Protestantism which seemed to have an outlook 
 towards war. He would have the Gospel triumph only 
 in the strength of truth and patient endurance. This 
 may have been a Utopian view, but it at once concen- 
 trated his religious influence and gave it something of a 
 national tone and spirit. 
 
 Luther's was a singularly strong and intense nature. 
 Only Catholic libellers have ever affected to doubt his 
 absolute sincerity. One spirit ran through all his days, 
 animating them by the same passionate piety. We do 
 not know what were the inward conflicts which drove 
 him into the Augustinian convent at Erfurt, in defiance 
 of the wishes of a father whom he loved and honoured : 
 the story of the thunder-storm in which a friend perished 
 at his side, if more than a legend, only gives picturesque 
 form to the crisis of a struggle which must have been 
 spiritual, and was probably long and doubtful. But 
 once a monk, he applied himself with eager earnestness 
 to the ascetic life, fasting, praying, reading with un- 
 wearied assiduity, shrinking from no labour however 
 painful, from no penance however disgusting. He ex- 
 hausted the possibilities of this method of perfection 
 before, with equal zeal, he applied himself to another 
 and a better: "If ever a monk," he said, "had got to 
 heaven by monkery, I should have been he." 1 From 
 
 1 Wahr ist's, ein frommer Monch bin ich gewesen, und so gestrenge 
 meinen Orden gehalten, dass ichs sagen darf : ist je ein Mbnch gen 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 83 
 
 the first, men augured great things of him. His father 
 thought that a distinguished worldly career had been 
 marred by his sudden entrance into the cloister. The 
 Provincial of his Order, Staupitz, made him his special 
 care, watched over him in his spiritual struggles, and 
 designated him for work in the newly-founded University 
 of Wittenberg. There is even a faint halo of prophecy 
 about his head, as of one in whom the long -desired 
 reform of the Church might find consummation. For 
 good or evil, he draws men's eyes to himself: Frederick 
 the Wise protected, though he never saw and only par- 
 tially sympathized with him: Cardinal Cajetan, after his 
 conference with him at Augsburg in 1518, is reported 
 to have said: 1 "I will talk no more with this animal; 
 for he has deep eyes, and wonderful speculations in his 
 head." Luther's personal ascendancy throughout life was 
 immense. He had not to wait for fame ; it came to him 
 unasked. Already, in 1519, Froben, the printer of Basel, 
 writes to him, not only that the edition of his works which 
 he had published is exhausted, but that the copies are 
 dispersed through Italy, Spain, England, France and 
 Brabant. 2 At the Frankfort fair of 1520, one bookseller 
 alone sold 1400 copies of his books. 3 Within two or three 
 years after the burning of the Pope's bull, he was a power 
 
 Himmel kommen diirch Mbncherey, so wollte ich auch hinein kommen 
 sein ; das werden mir zeugen alle meine Klostergesellen die mich 
 gekannt haben. Denn ich hatte mich, wo es langer gewaret hatte, zu 
 Tode gemartert mit wachen, beten, lesen, und anderer Arbeit. Luther's 
 Werke, ed. Walch, XIX. 2299. " Kleine Antwort auf Herzog Georgen's 
 zu Sachsen nachstes Buch." 
 
 1 Myconius : Hist. Reform ationis, p. 33. 
 
 2 Luther's Briefe, ed. Pe Wette, 132 to Joh. Lange, I. 255. 
 
 3 Vid. a letter from Glareanus to Zwingli, quoted by Hagen, II. 97. 
 
 82 
 
84 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 in Europe, already the equal of Erasmus in influence, and 
 soon to surpass him. It is almost a rival Papacy which 
 he sets up in Wittenberg, though a Papacy the authority 
 of which is based on his own strength of character, his 
 own clearness of intellectual insight : on the one hand, 
 Melancthon obediently holds the pen which he guides ; 
 on the other, Carlstadt pays the penalty of individual 
 thought by exclusion from the charmed circle. When, 
 in 1529, it is plain that union among Protestants is 
 above all things necessary to the safety of the cause, 
 and Philip of Hesse lends all the weight of his rank and 
 character to effect an agreement between the theologians 
 of Wittenberg and of Zurich, it is Luther who breaks up 
 the Conference of Marburg by his determination to yield 
 nothing. As long as he lives, he is the Saxon Eeforma- 
 tion : one of the strongest, bravest, ruggedest of mortal 
 men, who unhesitatingly identifies truth with his own 
 view of it, and will not yield a hair's breadth, though 
 Emperor and Pope, devils and men, be arrayed against 
 him/ 
 
 Naturally, he had the defects of his great qualities. 
 He saw religious truth too clearly, and with outlines too 
 sharp, to be indulgent to what he thought to be errors 
 of conception and inaccuracies of statement: if he re- 
 frained from setting up against the religious system of 
 the schoolmen another as elaborate, as detailed, as minute 
 (as indeed his followers did afterwards), it was only that 
 his characteristic doctrine, as he conceived it, was too 
 spiritual to lend itself readily to that kind of treatment. 
 In his confident moods, no one was ever so confident. 
 He spoke as magisterially as if he sat in the fisherman's 
 chair. He had the rough tongue of the Saxon peasant, 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 85 
 
 made rougher still by many a theological affray, and he 
 called names with a burly vehemence which modern ears 
 find it hard to endure. When he is dealing with Pope 
 or heretic, Clement VII. or Miinzer, he either forgets all 
 rules of Christian mildness and courtesy, or thinks that 
 in such extreme cases they do not apply. I dare not 
 quote illustrative passages, for then, to mitigate the effect 
 which they would undoubtedly produce, I should have 
 to bring parallels from the works of his opponents, and 
 try to estimate the relation in which he stood to the 
 practice of the times. Certain it is that, if most men 
 scolded, few could scold with such blusterous bitterness 
 as he. But we must not forget that his friends loved 
 him as affectionately as his foes hated him heartily. He 
 kept open house at Wittenberg, with what hospitality, 
 what generosity, what unrestrained kindliness of inter- 
 course, his Table-talk remains to tell. There was a per- 
 petual coming and going of grave theologians, curious 
 students, travellers from every country in Europe, young 
 Protestant princes anxious to see the great leader, royal 
 and noble ladies seeking consolation and advice ; and all 
 had their tale to tell of his accessibility, his frank and 
 pleasant bearing, his cheerful acceptance of the burthens 
 laid upon him. His letters to his children are among the 
 most charming of their kind ; while his half-fond, half- 
 jesting references to the domestic masterfulness of his 
 Kathe, unconsciously reveal the light of love with which 
 his home was flooded. When I think of these things, I 
 am not disposed to lay too much stress on an unrestrained 
 loudness of speech, which in part belongs to the age, in 
 part to the circumstances, and only for the rest to the 
 man; and without which, after all, it might have been 
 
86 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 hard for him to have done his work. It is on a lower 
 moral level, I know, than the sweet reasonableness which 
 once before conquered the world ; but will mankind ever 
 again see that strange commingling of the mildest gen- 
 tleness with the most resolved strength ? Courage was 
 the universal note of the Beformers' character : when the 
 Eegent Morton said at John Knox's grave, 1 M There lies 
 one who never feared the face of man !" he was uttering 
 Luther's epitaph too. 
 
 Luther had that directness and clearness of insight 
 which come of assured religious conviction, and make 
 every great religious teacher what he is. God and 
 Christ, heaven and hell, were very near and real to him. 
 He prayed much, with a profound belief in the answer 
 to prayer ; telling God what he wanted in the simplest, 
 most straightforward way, and not scrupling to press for 
 a favourable reply. When, after the unhappy affair of the 
 Landgrave's double marriage, Melancthon, utterly beaten 
 down by the reproaches of his own conscience and the 
 shame of exposure, took to his bed at Weimar in despair 
 and disgust of life, Luther went to him, and looking at 
 his worn and wasted form, exclaimed to his companions, 
 " God keep us ! how has the devil brought me to shame 
 this creature !" Then he turned to the window and 
 prayed, after a fashion which he must be left to describe 
 in his own words: "Then indeed our Lord God had to 
 pay me for it, for I threw the sack before the door, anjl 
 rubbed His ears with all the promises that He would listen 
 
 1 Mr. J. Hill Burton (History of Scotland, V. 87) will not allow 
 that this story, in the common form given in the text, is true. His 
 version of it is that Morton said of Knox " that he neither feared nor 
 nattered any flesh." Either saying is equally applicable to Luther. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 87 
 
 to prayer that I could recount out of Holy Scripture, 
 so that He must hear me, if ever I was to put faith in 
 His promises again." Thereupon he took Philip by the 
 hand and said, " Be of good cheer, Philip, thou shalt not 
 die ; although God have reason to slay, yet desireth He 
 not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn 
 from his wickedness and live." 1 And indeed, under 
 the influence of these and other such comforting words, 
 Melancthon roused himself to life and hope once more. 
 Again, when Luther was at Coburg in 1530, waiting for 
 news from the Diet of Augsburg, his companion, Yeit 
 Dietrich, writes thus to Melancthon : 2 
 
 " No day passes that he does not give three hours, and those 
 the fittest for study, to prayer. Once it happened to me to hear 
 him praying. Good God ! how great a spirit, how great a faith, 
 was in his very words ! With such reverence did he ask, as if 
 he felt that he was speaking with God; with such hope and 
 faith, as with a Father and a Friend. ' I know/ he said, ' that 
 Thou art our Father and our God. I am certain, therefore, that 
 Thou art about to destroy the persecutors of Thy children. If 
 Thou doest this not, then our danger is Thine too. This business 
 is wholly Thine we come to it under compulsion : Thou, there- 
 fore, defend' and so forth. In almost these words, I, standing 
 afar off, heard him praying with a clear voice. And my mind 
 burned within me with a singular emotion when he spoke in so 
 friendly a fashion, so weightily, so reverently with God." 
 
 At the same time, this was only one side of Luther's 
 religiousness, though the side which his biographers 
 most love to display. It would not have been as 
 deep and as genuine as it was if it had not had 
 
 1 Ratzeberger's MS., ed. Neudecker, pp. 103, 104. 
 
 2 June 30, 1530 : Corp. Ref. II. 159. 
 
88 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 another. Whenever this distinctness of religions insight 
 is real, men pay for it by days and honrs when a 
 great heaviness settles on the soul, when all that once 
 seemed clear and vivid is shrouded in blinding mist, and 
 faith is exchanged for an unbelief that is itself a hell. 
 In another connection I shall have to return to these 
 times of trial, which recur in much the same form 
 throughout Luther's life, and to show what was their 
 intellectual relation to his more abiding moods. A 
 mythology has grown up around them, taking them out 
 of the class of sober psychological fact ; and instead of 
 watching the death-struggle of a strong soul with un- 
 belief and distrust, we are invited to see the ink-stain 
 upon the wall of the Wartburg which records the repulse 
 of a visible Satan. But these temptations, too, were in 
 their way a part of his strength. They gave him a know- 
 ledge of that valley of the shadow which enters into all 
 Christian experience; and if, when the dark hour was 
 passed, they did not abate the confidence of his dogmatic 
 asseverations, they did something to make him tender as 
 well as strong. 
 
 Even in the briefest enumeration of the worthies of 
 the Eeformation, a place beside Martin Luther must be 
 kept for Philip Melancthon. Usually the two are com- 
 pared and contrasted only in regard to vigour and mild- 
 ness ; and Melancthon's function is supposed to be shut 
 up in the moderating influence which he exerted over 
 his more vehement colleague. But this is only a very 
 superficial view of the matter. That Melancthon was 
 far less courageous, both mentally and morally, than 
 Luther, is quite true ; but I doubt whether, unless it be 
 very carefully limited and explained, mild is the right 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 89 
 
 epithet to apply to him. His advocacy of stern repres- 
 sion in the Peasants' War was as uncompromising as 
 Luther's, if also less violent; 1 while whenever heretics 
 of any kind were to be dealt with, he was much readier 
 to recommend fire and sword. 2 I am sure that the 
 stronger man of the two was also the tenderer : nor am 
 I prepared to confound readiness of intellectual conces- 
 sion with gentleness of heart. Both friends and enemies 
 of his own age understood Melancthon better ; and while 
 acknowledging his abounding merits, his patient industry, 
 his untiring obligingness, his reckless generosity, gave 
 him no credit for qualities which he did not possess. He 
 represented Protestantism at the crisis of the Diet of 
 Augsburg ; and but for the fatuity of the Catholics, who 
 thought that, as he had conceded so much, those for 
 whom he spoke would concede everything, would have 
 succeeded in betraying the cause which he was set to 
 serve. Twice he was invited by Catholic princes, Francis 
 I. and Henry VIII., to effect a reconciliation in their 
 respective countries between old and new religion, and 
 twice the cautious wisdom of the Elector of Saxony kept 
 him at home. No sooner was Luther dead, than the 
 sceptre of authority fell from his feeble hands : his last 
 years were years of Protestant dissension, in the treat- 
 ment of which he calls out our pity rather than compels 
 our admiration. He was a timid and an anxious man, 
 painfully feeling the weight of responsibility, easily 
 
 1 Letter to Camerarius, Corp. Ref. I. 747. " Confutatio Articulorum 
 Rusticanorum," Corp. Ref. XX. 641 et seq. 
 
 2 Letter to F. Myconius, Corp. Ref. II. 17; to the Elector of Hesse, 
 "depuniendis Anabaptistis," Corp. Ref. III. 195; to Calvin, approving 
 the execution of Scrvctus, Corp. Ref. VIII. 362. 
 
90 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 moved to resentment and as easily placated. He was 
 by nature and preference a humanist, not a theologian. 
 When in 1518 his kinsman Eeuchlin sent him, then only 
 nineteen, to Wittenberg to teach Greek, he was the rising 
 hope of German scholarship*- He never took orders : he 
 married early : though he caught the prevailing enthu- 
 siasm of the place, he was always to some extent a theo- 
 logian against his will. It is true that his Loci Com- 
 munes, originally a Commentary on the Epistle to the 
 Eomans, became, as enlarged in successive editions, the 
 systematic exposition of Lutheran theology ; but he was 
 the presenter of another's thoughts; he lent to Luther 
 the services of a more elegant style, a purer Latinity, a 
 more methodical mind than his own. He lamented the 
 way in which at Wittenberg theology swallowed up all 
 the other sciences: he complained that he had to give 
 theological lectures when he would willingly be expound- 
 ing the classics : Homer, he said, went a begging, De- 
 mosthenes could get no hearers. 1 I do not mean that 
 he did not play an important and in some respects an 
 individual part in the drama of the Eeformation : he was 
 its scholar, its systematizing theologian, its doctor, its 
 diplomatist. But I think I can see that if he had not been 
 overpowered by the more vigorous personality of Luther, 
 his own inclination would have made him a Protestant 
 
 1 " Nunc tantus est contemptus optimarum rerum, ut nisi gratis offer- 
 antur, et quidem praeleguntur a peritis, mendicare Homerus auditores 
 
 cogatur Speravi, me suavitate secundae Olynthiacse invitatunini 
 
 esse auditores ad Demostheneni cognoscendum. Quid enim dulcius 
 aut melius ea oratione cogitari potest % Sed ut video, surda est hsec 
 setas ad hos autores audiendos. Vix enim paucos retinui auditores, qui 
 mei honoris causa deserere me noluerunt, quibus propter suum erga me 
 officium habeo gratiam." Quoted by Hagen, III. 199. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 91 
 
 Erasmus, more pious perhaps, but certainly without the 
 wit. It was a turbulent sea upon which he had ventured, 
 and only with many faintings of heart did he reach the 
 haven at last. Among his papers were found some rea- 
 sons why he should not stand in terror of death. Is it 
 not pathetic that, after a life spent in the service of theo- 
 logy, Melancthon should enumerate among these, "Thou 
 wilt be set free from misery and the rage of theologians"? 1 
 The intellectual centre from which Luther worked was 
 the University of Wittenberg. Founded by Frederick 
 the Wise in 1502, while Luther was still an undergra- 
 duate at Erfurt, it had at first no feature which distin- 
 guished it from the other High Schools of Germany. 
 Frederick was a prince of renowned piety: at a time 
 when such acts of faith had gone out of fashion, he had 
 made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and it was his 
 pride to enrich with abundant relics of saints the church 
 which he had built at Wittenberg. 2 But the destiny 
 of the new University was fixed when Luther, at the 
 prompting of Staupitz, went there in 1508. The degrees 
 which he afterwards took of Bachelor and Doctor of 
 Theology were to him no formal academical honours: 
 they bound him, as he thought, to the eager and per- 
 
 1 Meurer: Melancthon's Leben, p. 176. 
 
 2 These relics, which were 5000 in number, were exposed once a 
 year, on the Sunday called Misericordias, to the gaze of the faithful, 
 who were induced to attend the show by the promise of indulgences. 
 It was calculated that an indulgence of 1443 years was thus placed 
 within the reach of pious zeal. Something like 100,000 masses were 
 celebrated in the same church every year. It is curious to read of 
 these things in a church at Wittenberg built in Luther's lifetime. 
 Kostlin : Luther, I. 92, 
 
92 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 sistent study of the Bible : for it, he deserted first the 
 schoolmen, then Aristotle. When in 1518 Melancthon 
 came to Wittenberg to teach Greek, Luther's impetuous 
 zeal bore off the young humanist in the same direction ; 
 and though classical and legal studies were still pursued 
 with some success, the bent of the new University was 
 henceforth theological, and indeed chiefly Biblical. The 
 number of students, which in the first year had been 
 416, gradually sunk to 127; and in 1508, the year of 
 Luther's coming, was still only 179. Under the new 
 influences, however, this state of things was soon changed. 
 Young men from every part of central Europe, and of 
 every rank in life, flocked to Wittenberg to sit at Luther's 
 feet as he preached or lectured upon various books of 
 Scripture. The Eeformer himself compares the activity 
 of the place to that of an ant-hill. 1 Says Frederic Myco- 
 nius, a contemporary witness : " Up to this time Witten- 
 berg was a poor, insignificant town : little, old, ugly, low 
 wooden houses: more like an old village than a town. 
 But now came thither people from the whole world, 
 desiring to hear, to see, and some to study." 2 In 1521, 
 a student writes : 
 
 "There* are more than 1500 students here, nearly all of whom, 
 walking or standing, carry their Bibles about with them. All 
 go unarmed, and complete concord obtains among them, as 
 among brothers who are brought together in Christ. .... There 
 are here Saxons, Prussians, Poles, Bohemians, Suabians, Swiss, 
 Franconians, Thuringians, Misnians, and many from other regions ; 
 and yet, as I have said, all live in the finest unity The 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, I. 193. 
 
 2 Myconius, Hist. Keformat. p. 27. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 93 
 
 whole city is, as it were, taken possession of and held by 
 students." } 
 
 As it was to Wittenberg that men came to be indoc- 
 trinated in the theology of the Beformation, so from Wit- 
 tenberg they were sent out, not only to preach it, but to 
 introduce the new ecclesiastical organization which it ren- 
 dered necessary. It was naturally the centre from which 
 was made the visitation of the Saxon churches. From it, 
 Bugenhagen started on many journeys of reformation in 
 Northern Germany. The new gymnasium at Nurnberg, 
 under Camerarius, owed its organization to Melancthon. 
 Till Philip of Hesse founded the University of Marburg in 
 1527, Wittenberg was the only High School in which the 
 new learning was taught. But for many years more, 
 until the death of Melancthon in 1560, it continued to 
 be the heart of Protestant Germany. 
 
 Over against Luther, as protagonists in this great 
 drama, stand Charles Y. and the contemporary Popes, 
 Julius II., Leo X., Adrian YL, Clement VII. and Paul 
 III. Of these I must attempt to draw some picture 
 before I proceed to indicate the way in which events 
 worked themselves out. 
 
 Charles V. was the issue of the two most splendid 
 marriages which the House of Hapsburg, always for- 
 
 1 Baum : Capito und Butzer, p. 55. Melancthon on one occasion 
 writes to Justus Menius : " At my table to-day were spoken eleven 
 languages : Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Magyar, Venetian, Turkish, 
 Arabic, Romaic, Indian and Spanish." Meurer: Melancthon, p. 19. 
 A lively picture of university life in Wittenberg in its best time, from 
 the pen of an eye-witness, will be found in Mathesius' Life of Luther, 
 Sermon viii. 
 
94 III. THE KEFORMATION IN 
 
 tunate in wedlock, 1 ever made. His grandfather, the 
 Emperor Maximilian, married Mary of Burgundy, the 
 sole child and heiress of Duke Charles the Bold, who fell 
 at Nancy, in battle against the Swiss, in 1477. Upon his 
 death, Louis XI. of France seized the opportunity of 
 incorporating with his own dominions that region which 
 we now call Burgundy, leaving to the heiress, however, 
 the still ample inheritance of the undivided Low Coun- 
 tries, then the richest and most flourishing part of Europe. 
 Maximilian's only son, Philip (who died before his father), 
 married Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand 
 and Isabella of Spain, whose dowry was the whole of the 
 Iberian peninsula, except Portugal, the southern half of 
 Italy, with Sicily and Sardinia, and the wealth which 
 newly- discovered America began to pour in ever acce- 
 lerating flood upon the Old World. "When, therefore, in 
 1519, Charles, the eldest son of this marriage, was elected 
 Emperor, in succession to his grandfather Maximilian, 
 his position and prospects were such as no European 
 prince had ever before or has since inherited. Emperor 
 of the Eomans, and as such, <not only holding the world's 
 supreme place open to a lay ruler, but wielding the whole 
 force of the German Confederacy, he succeeded to impe- 
 rial claims upon northern Italy, Italy of which the 
 southern half was already his own. His hereditary 
 States, Austrian on the south-east, Burgundian on the 
 north-west, embraced Germany, as it were, between 
 
 1 The epigram, ascribed to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, is 
 almost too well known to quote : 
 
 Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nubes, 
 Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus.. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 95 
 
 them. He had old claims to pursue and old enmities to 
 gratify against France. Spain, which he ruled in the 
 name of his mad mother, gave him the finest troops in 
 the world : American treasure helped to equip them : 
 the fleets of the Netherlands transported them beyond 
 sea. In 1526, Bohemia, in 1527, Hungary, fell to the 
 House of Austria in the person of his brother Ferdi- 
 nand. The circumstances of his birth so placed him 
 in a position of preponderating influence in Europe, as 
 to render it almost inevitable that he should try to make 
 that preponderance absolute and complete. Why should 
 not he and the Pope divide the world between them, one 
 wielding the temporal, the other the spiritual sword] 
 Some more or less distinctly conceived scheme of this 
 kind seems to have floated before his eyes all his life, 
 and, had fortune favoured him, might possibly, from the 
 patient astuteness, the unscrupulous persistence, which he 
 brought to bear upon it, have been carried to completion. 
 But the Eeformation divided Germany against him: 
 Francis I., as ambitious and as unscrupulous as himself, 
 was eager and obstinate in asserting French claims upon 
 Italy : successive Popes had their own purposes to serve, 
 their own families to endow : all through his reign, the 
 Turks were a standing danger to eastern Germany, and 
 once had to be beaten back from the very gates of Vienna. 
 It is no wonder that a man who was sustained by no 
 higher an ambition than that of the aggrandizement of 
 himself and his house, succumbed at last to such a com- 
 bination of enemies. Charles Y., at Juste, taking refuge 
 in the cloister, yet unable to detach himself from the 
 world rehearsing his own funeral rites, while eagerly 
 expecting despatches from Vienna and Brussels and 
 
96 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 Madrid repenting of the gluttony from which he could 
 not wean himself complaining of the ingratitude of 
 those to whom he had given everything furnishes the 
 moralist with a too obvious occasion for reflecting on the 
 vanity of human wishes. 
 
 Perhaps Charles Y. was more of a Fleming than either 
 a German or a Spaniard. Something of the black blood 
 which made his mother one of the unhappiest of women, 
 and condemned the last Austrian Kings of Spain to me- 
 lancholy idiocy, lurked in his veins, subtly poisoning his 
 temper, while leaving his intellectual powers untouched. 
 He never learned to speak German fluently : what German 
 he had was the " Piatt Deutsch" of the Low Countries : 
 to the last he communicated with his German subjects 
 either in Latin or by the mouth of his brother Ferdinand. 
 All the magic of Titian's pencil could not invest his 
 homely face and figure with an imperial grace : even in 
 the equestrial portrait which represents him triumphing 
 over the Protestants on the battle-field of Miihlberg, he 
 does not sit his horse like an Emperor. He was slow 
 of speech, meditative, cold ; with a German homeliness 
 among Castilians, with a Castilian haughtiness among 
 Germans. He had many able ministers and servants : 
 Gattinara, the two Granvellas, Davalos, Pescara, Alva: 
 but he kept the final decision of all important matters in 
 his own hands. He pursued his ends with quiet persist- 
 ence, could wait long for a favourable opportunity of 
 striking, concealing all the while his intention to strike ; 
 was moved by no foolish scruples as to faith and honour, 
 nor was easily accessible to pity. It was not in the 
 nature of things that he should in the least understand 
 the Protestant rebellion. When, at Worms in 1519, he 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 97 
 
 for the first and only time saw Luther, the resolved yet 
 modest bearing of the Eeformer made no impression upon 
 him: all he said was, "This man will never make a 
 heretic of me." Adrian of Utrecht had carefully brought 
 him up in the Catholic faith, and the rigidity of Castilian 
 doctrine and practice completed the process. Like all 
 Princes of the time, he had his grievances against the Pope: 
 his grandmother's and his own great minister, Cardinal 
 Ximenes, had remonstrated against indulgences as firmly, 
 if not as bitterly, as Luther : x he felt the necessity of a 
 disciplinary reform of the Church, and a Council to effect 
 it. But the Council of Trent, when at last it met, fairly 
 satisfied him : nor did he see why the Protestants should 
 not submit themselves to its decisions. With the doc- 
 trinal demands of Protestantism still more with the 
 changes which it sought to introduce into the practice of 
 the Church, the communion in both kinds, the marriage 
 of the clergy, the curtailment of Papal and Episcopal 
 power he had no sympathy whatever : they offended at 
 once his autocratic disposition and his conservative habits 
 of mind. It is quite touching to see how, after years of 
 adverse experience, Luther and Melancthon continue to 
 believe in him : they cannot bring themselves to think 
 that a young German Emperor can be really opposed to 
 the wishes and aspirations of the German people : they 
 are sure that if only they can counteract the influence of 
 bad advisers, and make their appeal to his own native 
 sense of truth and right, he will take their side. Never 
 was there a greater delusion : at first, intent upon what 
 he thought matters of more importance, he despised the 
 
 1 Ranke, I. 303. 
 H 
 
98 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 whole movement ; once aware of what it was, he never 
 wavered in his intention of stamping it out, utterly and 
 remorselessly, as soon as the favourable moment should 
 arrive. 
 
 The external history of the Eeformation in Germany 
 can be understood only by keeping steadily in view the 
 fact that the centre of gravity of Charles's policy was not 
 German or even Spanish, but Burgundian. What he 
 cared for was the aggrandizement of the House of Austria 
 as enriched by the great marriages of which I have 
 spoken. He rarely visited that part of his dominions 
 which had given him his highest title : the consolidation 
 of German power, the settlement of German disputes, 
 the welfare of the German people, were with him quite 
 secondary to the grasp which he tried to get of Milan, or 
 the possibility of compelling France to restore the lost 
 provinces of Burgundy. Later in his life this passion 
 took a meaner and more selfish form. At first it was so 
 completely a part of his policy that his brother Ferdinand 
 should succeed him in the empire, that he procured his 
 election as King of the Eomans : afterwards he attempted, 
 though in vain, to induce him to abdicate, that the double 
 inheritance of Spain and the empire might fall upon his 
 own son Philip. \ This dynastic selfishness on the part of 
 Charles was the safety of the Eeformation. An Emperor 
 whose attention was confined to German affairs alone, 
 would have utterly crushed it out before it had had time 
 to gather strength and permanence. One who was in- 
 vading France, seizing Milan, sacking Eome, chastising 
 African pirates, thrusting back the Turks from Yienna, 
 and for these purposes always weaving the changeful 
 web of treaties, truces, alliances, intrigues, could hardly 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 99 
 
 - be expected to understand the nature and the importance 
 of the religious phenomena which occasionally invited his 
 attention in a part of his dominions over which he had 
 no personal control. He never had but one opinion of 
 Protestantism ; namely, that it was a mischievous revolt 
 against authority, which he intended to put down when- 
 ever a favourable opportunity offered. But when the 
 occasion came, he found that it was too late. 
 
 The peculiar political constitution of Germany had 
 much to do, if not with the origin, at least with the 
 protection and maintenance, of Protestantism during 
 those early years in which it might not have been dif- 
 ficult to suppress it. It was a loose confederation of 
 States, ecclesiastical and civil, varying in size and im- 
 portance from the seven great Electorates to the tiny 
 territory of the robber noble, who claimed right of war 
 against his neighbours, and the free city, which was 
 independent so long as its walls were strong enough to 
 withstand assault. These States met in Diet almost 
 every year, under the presidency of the Emperor or his 
 deputy, to declare war and to make peace, to raise money 
 for imperial purposes, to settle disputes among them- 
 selves, to take measures for securing general order. But 
 the authority of the Emperor depended largely upon his 
 position as an independent Prince and his personal qua- 
 lities as a ruler, while the decisions of the Diet were 
 often impossible of enforcement against a recalcitrant 
 minority or even a single stiff-necked member. It might 
 not be impracticable to put even the most powerful 
 Elector, clerical or lay, under the ban of the empire, but 
 who was to execute the decree and reduce the offender 
 
 h2 
 
100 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 to submission ? Whatever the rivalries and dissensions 
 which separated the Estates, to protect the independence 
 of each against the central authority was always more or 
 less the interest of all : nor was this motive practically 
 outweighed, except in cases where the execution of an 
 imperial decree coincided with the grasp of personal 
 ambition or the wreaking of private vengeance. "When, 
 therefore, Protestantism established itself under the pro- 
 tection of the Ernestine line of Saxon Princes, and from 
 Saxony not only spread into the neighbouring states of 
 Hesse and Liineburg, but made its way into all the free 
 cities that were not dominated by ecclesiastical influence, 
 what could be done to dislodge it? If Frederick of 
 Saxony would not execute the Edict of Worms in his 
 ow^ dominions, who was to compel him to do so ? To 
 march troops to force Nurnberg or Strasburg, Constanz or 
 Ulm, to send away the preachers and to restore the Mass, 
 would be to kindle the flame of civil war in Germany, 
 after a fashion for which only a fanatical Papalist here 
 and there was ready. After events showed that within 
 any single State it was not impossible to put down the 
 Eeformation by a steady system of persecution. Austria 
 and Bavaria were once almost as completely penetrated 
 by the new spirit as Hesse and Brandenburg. Alva and 
 the Inquisition won back Flanders to the Church, when 
 it was hardly less lost in heresy than Holland. England 
 under Henry VIIL, France under Francis I., show how 
 in a homogeneous State the fate of the Eeformation was 
 overpoweringly affected by the character and caprice of 
 a monarch. It was the fact, that in a divided Germany 
 the new teaching was able to avail itself of the various 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS-. 101" 
 
 dispositions of rulers and the democratic independence of 
 the free cities that gave the Eeforniation the breathing 
 time it needed. 
 
 Critics who think that they discern in the first stir- 
 rings of reform the promise of a great national movement 
 towards German unity and German liberty, have ex- 
 pressed their deep disappointment that the Eeformation 
 afterwards fell so completely into the hands of Princes. 
 Luther and Melancthon are politically the most devoted 
 subjects of rulers, to whom nevertheless they do not 
 scruple to speak their minds freely : Bucer propounds a 
 theory of civil obedience as servile as that defended by 
 the Church of England in the days of Charles II. But 
 whatever truth there may be in this complaint should not 
 blind us to the fact that some at least of the Eeforming 
 Princes were men of singularly pure and noble character, 
 who at certain crises of the story show to advantage by 
 the side of the theologians themselves. What the Eefor- 
 mation would have been without the three Saxon Electors, 
 Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast, and John Fre- 
 derick the Magnanimous, it is impossible to say. The 
 first was the most powerful Prince of the empire, though 
 far less from the extent of his territory or the weight of 
 his material resources, than from the universal respect 
 paid to his character. There was even a moment at 
 which he might have succeeded Maximilian as Emperor, 
 with what effect of change upon the history of modern 
 Europe who shall say ? His relation to Luther was sin- 
 gular. He never saw him. His communications with 
 him were chiefly carried on through Spalatin, his chaplain 
 and historiographer. Beginning life as a devout Catholic, 
 he never wholly broke with the Church. The most deci- 
 
102 IIJ. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 sively Protestant thing he ever did was to receive the 
 Communion in both kinds on his death-bed. 1 But he 
 felt a sincere admiration for Luther's courageous honesty ; 
 and without committing himself to much that the Ke- 
 former said and did, was determined that he should have 
 fair play, freedom to speak, room in which to act. His 
 brother John well deserved his name of Steadfast. Of 
 less powerful and individual mind than Frederick, he 
 was a convinced Lutheran, and resolved to stand by his 
 convictions, cost what it might. It was characteristic of 
 him that he went to the Diet of Speier in 1526 with the 
 letters Y. D.M.I. M. conspicuous upon all his ensigns and 
 liveries : Verbum Dei manet in ceternum. His was the 
 first name to the immortal Protest of 1529. When at 
 Augsburg, in 1530, his theologians, afraid of the possible 
 political consequences, proposed that they alone should 
 sign the Confession, he simply answered, "I, too, will 
 confess my Christ with you." " Deny God, or the world," 
 he said; "who could doubt which were better? God 
 has made me an Elector of the empire, of which I was 
 never worthy : for the rest, let Him make of me what 
 He will." 2 His son John Frederick; was a child of the 
 Eeformation, for his devotion to which he paid by the 
 loss of his Electorate and the larger half of his hereditary 
 dominions. He, too, though hardly an able, and cer- 
 tainly not a fortunate Prince, did not fall away from the 
 religious and ethical standard of his predecessors. Mis- 
 fortune neither deprived him of his cheerful imperturba- 
 bility nor made him unfaithful to his creed. On the 
 
 1 Spalatin : Friedrich der Weise, p. 65. 
 
 2 Ranke, III. 274, 275. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 103 
 
 character of Philip of Hesse rests a blot such as indeed 
 smirches the fair fame of almost all Princes yet which 
 the unscrupulous bitterness of Catholic controversialists 
 has enlarged and blackened to the uttermost, in the hope 
 of involving Luther and Melancthon in its shame. But 
 apart from this, he is the most attractive of the Princes 
 of the Eeform. Young, eager, enthusiastic, struggling 
 between his religious principles and the vices almost 
 incident to his station, capable of swift decision, able to 
 strike a sudden blow, he is far more a hero of romance 
 than Wise Frederick, looking out with sad, dying eyes 
 upon a world that seemed to be going to pieces all around 
 him ; or Steadfast John, too fat to mount his horse with- 
 out the aid of machinery, and going to sleep under 
 Luther's sermons, though all the while standing by his 
 Eef ormer with unshaken firmness ; or Magnanimous John 
 Frederick, almost too patient in captivity, too resigned 
 under dethronement. To Philip of Hesse also belongs 
 the credit of discerning, with a liberal statesmanship far 
 in advance of his times, the unimportance of doctrinal dif- 
 ferences in comparison with the necessity of union among 
 Protestants : it was he who called the Conference of 
 Marburg, the effect of which, had not the obstinacy of 
 the Wittenberg theologians stood in the way, would have 
 been that Protestant Germany and Protestant Switzerland 
 would have presented to the Emperor at Augsburg a 
 united front. Could Philip have prevailed, the Church 
 would have been built up from the first on a broader 
 foundation; and the long dissensions between German 
 and Swiss, between Lutheran and Keformed, perhaps 
 even those between Lutheran and Lutheran the bitterest 
 of all might have been avoided. When in a private 
 
104 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 audience before the opening of the Diet of Augsburg, 
 Charles Y. demanded of the Princes that they should 
 silence the Protestant preachers who had taken possession 
 of the churches, they answered that they could not with a 
 good conscience comply with the request of his Majesty. 
 Upon which Ferdinand of Austria, " That was what 
 Imperial Majesty could not suffer." Philip of Hesse 
 broke in, " Imperial Majesty's conscience was no lord 
 and master over their conscience." The Margrave George 
 of Brandenburg cried out, " Before I will suffer the word 
 of God to be taken from me and deny my God, I will 
 kneel down here and let my head be hewn off my shoul- 
 ders." This outbreak seems to have startled even the 
 saturnine Charles out of his coldness, for he raised up the 
 kneeling prince, saying to him in his Flemish German, 
 "Nit kopf ab, nit kopf ab, liever Fiirst." "Not head 
 off, not head off, dear Prince." 1 But these were brave 
 and true men, worthy to be leaders in a religious revo- 
 lution. 
 
 Many influences combined to give a character of world- 
 liness to the Popes of this period, and to dye that world- 
 liness with a stain of infamy. It was in Italy the age of 
 the despots ; a time when all the great republics except 
 Yenice had been robbed of their liberties by men who, 
 both in the Greek and in the English sense of the word, 
 were tyrants ; that is to say, who had taken the govern- 
 ment of the State into their own hands, and who admi- 
 nistered it with arbitrary cruelty. The Medici at Flo- 
 rence, the Yisconti and the Sf orzas at Milan, the Scaligeri 
 at Yerona, the Baglioni at Perugia, were all families of 
 
 1 Letter from Brenz to Isenmann, June 19, 1530, Corp. Kef. II. 115. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 105 
 
 this kind, who conspired and intrigned and poisoned and 
 slew with the single object of confirming and increasing 
 their own power at home and abroad. Over most of 
 them the breath of the Eenaissance culture passed, bid- 
 ding them fill their lives with luxurious splendour : they 
 built castles, palaces, villas, and, in their moments of 
 remorse, churches : they were liberal customers of the 
 painters and the goldsmiths : they pensioned and pro- 
 tected scholars : they collected libraries : some of them 
 really loved literature and fostered art with a discerning 
 taste. But they were unscrupulous, faithless, cruel, las- 
 civious ; men who had lost the very conception of virtue, 
 and in its place, as the rule of life, had set up a remorse- 
 less selfishness, varnished over with a certain stately 
 courtesy. Out of this class of men came, with this class 
 of men lived, the Popes of the Eeformation, not superior 
 in character, using the power of the Church to serve a 
 dynastic ambition, all the more feverish for the brief 
 period during which it could work its will, and display- 
 ing an unscrupulous worldliness, which to us shows the 
 more revolting from the contrast, which they never felt, 
 between their office and their ends. The Papacy was 
 to them a mere political engine ; the Church, a weight 
 which they could throw into this or that scale of political 
 intrigue ; the Papal territory, that out of which appan- 
 ages might be carved for nephews or sons. These Popes 
 began to build St. Peter's ; collected the treasures of the 
 Vatican ; employed Eaffaelle and Michael Angelo, Sebas- 
 tian del Piombo and Giulio Eomano ; drew to Eome the 
 great men whom, of all Italian cities, she was most chary 
 in producing ; but all, as worldly potentates might have 
 done, without a touch of religious awe upon their own 
 
106 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 soiils, or even a sense of administrative responsibility as 
 Yicars of Christ. The Pontiff who was reigning when 
 Luther came to Eome in 1510 was Julius II., a terrible 
 old man, of whose nostrils the life-breath was war, and 
 who deluged Italy with blood that he might enlarge and 
 cement the Papal territory into a solid sovereignty. He 
 was followed by Leo X., 1 Giovanni de Medici, son of 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent, a coarse sensualist, whose name 
 has wrongfully become associated with a period of literary 
 and artistic splendour which was already passing away. 
 " Since God has given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it," 
 was his remark to a kinsman when he assumed his dig- 
 nity: and he enjoyed it to the full, if by enjoyment be 
 meant delicate meats, rare wines, splendid pageants, the 
 homage of painters, the flatteries of poets, never embit- 
 tered by a moment's fear of the storm that was gathering 
 in the North. For Leo was a pagan in grain, almost a 
 pagan in outward contempt of Christianity : his heart was 
 with neither the past glories of the Church nor its present 
 dangers, but with the last discovered fragment of ancient 
 sculpture, the newest offering of classically turned flattery. 
 Then for a little while came the Cardinal of Tortosa, 
 Adrian YL, the son of a ship-carpenter of Utrecht, once 
 a Professor at Louvain, and the preceptor of Charles Y., 
 
 1 When Leo became Pope, the banker Agostino Chigi publicly exhi- 
 bited the following epigram : 
 
 Olim habuit Cypria sua tempora, tempora Mavors 
 Olim habuit, sua nunc tempora Pallas habet. 
 To which the goldsmith Antonio di San Marco replied in a single line, 
 which speaks volumes as to what Eome thought of her Popes : 
 
 Mars fuit : est Pallas : Cypria semper ero. 
 Symonds ; Italian Renaissance, Age of the Despots, pp. 369, 370. 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 107 
 
 a simple and austere old man, who had never been in 
 Eome till he entered it as Pope, fully conscious of the 
 sins and miseries of the Church, and dreaming the vain 
 dream that his feeble hand could sweep out this worse 
 than Augean stable of abuse. But he reigned barely a 
 year ; and when he died, the people of Eome wrote over 
 his physician's door the words, " The Eoman Senate and 
 People to the Liberator of his country." J Him followed 
 Clement VII., again a Medici, though in defiance of 
 canonical law an illegitimate one ; the most unhappy of 
 all Popes, who, himself a prisoner in the Castle of St. 
 Angelo, saw Eome sacked and all but destroyed by the 
 Constable Bourbon and his army of German lanzknechts. 
 He had brought it on himself: he had striven to hold 
 the balance in Italy between Charles V. and Francis I. ; 
 marrying a Medici to the Emperor's natural daughter ; 
 binding himself to Francis by the woful gift of his own 
 niece Catharine ; for yet another Medici seizing Urbino. 
 Then, last of all, came Alessandro Farnese, Paul III., 
 he who summoned at Trent the long-promised Council : 
 born before Luther, and therefore an old man when he 
 mounted the fisherman's chair, but intriguing, marrying, 
 clutching for the Farnesi, just as Leo X. and Clement 
 VII. had done for the Medici, and with as little care for 
 the cause of religion and the welfare of the Church. The 
 Popes, it is not too much to say, never discerned the 
 danger that lay in Protestantism till it was too late either 
 to combat or to avert it. They had a thousand things 
 in hand which to them were infinitely more important. 
 When at last they were aroused, their only chance was 
 
 1 Symouds : Age of the Despots, p. 378. 
 
108 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 to set Loyola against Luther, and to begin the Counter 
 Reformation. 
 
 All this may help to explain why Protestantism was, 
 in face of such tremendous forces of opposition, suffered to 
 grow and gather strength. Pope and Emperor, Francis I. 
 and Henry YIIL, the armies of the Turk and the pirates 
 of Algiers, unconsciously fought for it in turn. Charles 
 was never wanting in the will to crush it : it was always 
 an article of his numerous treaties with the Pope and 
 Francis I. that their joint arms were to be turned against 
 the heretic and the Turk. But just when the blow was 
 about to descend, some exigency of politics always inter- 
 vened to prevent or to turn it aside. When in 1521 the 
 Edict of Worms was adopted by the Diet, Charles betook 
 himself to his Italian wars, not to re-appear in Germany 
 till in 1530 he came to Augsburg, to find himself con- 
 fronted, no longer by a solitary monk, but by Electors 
 and Princes, nobles and free cities, who had already at 
 Speier announced the new and startling doctrine, that in 
 matters of conscience they, the minority, could submit 
 themselves to no majority, but only to the Word of God. 
 During these nine years his own hand had never been 
 free to strike, and his policy towards the Lutherans had 
 varied, as he hoped to be able to execute speedy justice 
 upon them, or felt that the day of suppression must be 
 again postponed. The Pope had been against him, or 
 Francis had broken the Treaty of Madrid, or the Turk 
 had appeared before Yienna. At Augsburg, it seemed 
 as if the decisive moment had at last come: the Pro- 
 testants recorded their Confession : the Emperor and the 
 Pope replied with a futile document, which they called 
 a refutation, and in which they refused to give way even 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. 109 
 
 a hair's-breadth. But still war does not break out. The 
 Emperor needs the help of a united Germany, now against 
 France, now against the Turk, and cannot afford to 
 quarrel with the Protestant Princes. All the while Pro- 
 testantism is spreading and gathering strength : Catholic 
 princes die to make way for Protestant heirs : city after 
 city adopts the new faith: in many parts of Germany 
 the goods of the Church receive fresh appropriation, more 
 or less worthy: there is even a report that the Arch- 
 bishop Elector of Cologne is bringing over his diocese to 
 the Lutheran side. At last, in 1545, the war actually 
 begins. Leagues and counter-leagues have been formed 
 long ago : but the Protestant theologians ' have doubts as 
 to the lawfulness of war even in defence of the faith, and 
 their leaders quarrel for the post of command. It is per- 
 sonal ambition which after all applies the torch : Maurice, 
 the Protestant nephew and successor of Duke George of 
 Saxony, coveting the lands and dignities of his Electoral 
 cousins, lends the Emperor the aid of his astute states- 
 manship and his military genius, and after a brief cam- 
 paign the Protestant cause goes down upon the field of 
 Muhlberg. For a time it seems as if all were lost. An 
 oppressive ecclesiastical rule, under the title of the Inte- 
 rim, which is intended to keep Protestantism within 
 strict bounds till the Council of Trent shall speak with 
 a voice of authority, is imposed upon Lutheran Germany. 
 The Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse lan- 
 guish in a captivity from which they have no prospect 
 of escape but by the scaffold. Maurice receives from the 
 Emperor, as the price of his help, the Electorate and 
 the larger part of the dominions hitherto attached to it. 
 
110 III. THE REFORMATION IN 
 
 Everywhere Charles's Spanish soldiery, under the com- 
 mand of Alva, give German cities a foretaste of that 
 brutal repression which in Philip II.'s time was to whet 
 its sharpest edge in the Netherlands. Then, goaded by 
 the general discontent, and unable any longer to bear the 
 reproaches which the captivity of his cousin and father- 
 in-law drew down upon him, Maurice again changed 
 sides, as secretly, as astutely, as successfully as before ; 
 and the Emperor, utterly unprepared for the blow, hur- 
 ried, a helpless fugitive, up the passes of the Tyrol. " I 
 have no cage big enough to hold such a bird," answered 
 Maurice, when he was urged to finish the war at a 
 stroke by taking Charles prisoner : he preferred to treat. 
 So in 1552 was signed the Treaty of Passau, by which, 
 Council or no Council, the position of Protestantism was 
 assured, until the flame broke out with redoubled vehe- 
 mence in the Thirty Years' "War. It was but a maimed 
 victory : cufus regio, ejus religio, was its principle : the 
 subject follows the religion of the state. It vindi- 
 cated Saxony, for instance, against Austria ; but in Aus- 
 tria it offered no effectual protection to Protestants ; in 
 Saxony, none to Catholics. Yet a victory it undoubtedly 
 was, such as no man hoped to see a year before, closing 
 that act of the great drama with which alone we are at 
 this moment concerned. Luther has gone to his rest 
 before the outbreak of war : Calvin is now shaping 
 French and Swiss Protestantism in the mould of his 
 relentless logic and his iron will : the Lutheran theolo- 
 gians, under the nominal presidency of Melancthon, use 
 the opportunity of peace to pursue dissensions which are 
 as bitter as the subjects of them are obscure : the Council 
 
ITS EXTERNAL ASPECTS. Ill 
 
 7* 
 
 of Trent resumes discussions, henceforward important to 
 Catholics alone ; and Charles V. retires to Juste, worn 
 out before his time, and weary of a power which he can 
 resolve neither to retain nor to relinquish. 
 
Lecture IV. 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 It lias often been said that Catholicism is an objective, 
 Protestantism a subjective form of religion, and that 
 when the more obvious differences between them are 
 traced to their root, they issue in this fundamental dis- 
 tinction. The statement, if only it be clearly understood 
 and sufficiently guarded, is both true and suggestive. 
 In one sense, indeed, all genuine religion is subjective; 
 it is the meeting of God and man within the soul in awe, 
 aspiration, affection. There is no distinction here between 
 Tauler and "Wesley, between Pascal and Channing : in 
 proportion as chosen saints consciously penetrate into the 
 secret of saintliness, they come to think that the things 
 in which they differ are of infinite unimportance, com- 
 pared with those in which they are at one. But on a 
 lower level of discipleship these diversities become more 
 accentuated, and religious men are seen to belong to 
 either of two great Churches, one of which interposes a 
 machinery of mediation sacraments, priesthoods, disci- 
 pline, ritual between the soul and its infinite Object, 
 while the other, denying the reality or the efficacy of 
 these things, is content to leave the spirit face to face 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 113 
 
 with God. The danger on the one hand is, we are told, 
 that forms should stiffen into fetters, the shell be mis- 
 taken for the kernel, the means by which it was intended 
 to lead the worshipper into the presence-chamber con- 
 verted into a perpetual bar to his entrance ; on the other, 
 that ecstatic raptures should take the place of sober affec- 
 tion fruitless emotion, of solid obedience a succession 
 of excited moods, of a steady growth in holiness. There 
 is something formal, external, historical, dramatic, in one 
 way of looking at the facts and truths of Christianity, 
 while the other runs the risk of being merely emotional, 
 lawless, individual. One principle preserves the unity I 
 of the Catholic Church, the other splits Protestantism I 
 into innumerable sects : Authority is the watchword there, 
 and here Liberty. That bids a man keep his face stead- 
 fastly turned towards the past ; this compels him, often 
 against his will, to take into his account the future too. 
 One is the spirit of rest the other, of change and pro- 
 gress; this presents religion as one eternal truth, ex-, 
 pressed in the same fixed forms that owns truth one 
 and eternal, but confesses it only half perceived as yet, 
 and expects it to assume new forms as man grows and 
 knowledge widens. 
 
 This statement, with whatever degree of accuracy it 
 may represent the differences between Catholic and Pro- 
 testant religion as now understood, would, I need hardly 
 say, be far less true to the consciousness of Luther and 
 Melancthon three centuries and a half ago. They under- 
 stood neither the system which they attacked nor that 
 which they founded, in its full relation to the long 
 progress of the human mind. They worked in the twi- 
 light : only sbwly and tentatively did they come to 
 
114 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 comprehend their own activity: more than once they 
 turned their back on the logical development of their 
 own principles : in many ways their work was greater 
 than they knew. But I think that I can fairly state 
 what was the religious change which the Eeformation 
 wrought in them and their contemporaries, and the means 
 by which it was accomplished. This, then, will be the 
 subject of the present Lecture. It will be at once under- 
 stood that I approach the subject only from the stand- 
 point of historical criticism, and that I have nothing to 
 do with the abstract truth or error of the beliefs which 
 will come within our view. 
 
 The devout Catholic believer before the Eeformation 
 found himself in presence of a vast and variously organ- 
 ized Christianity. Wherever he went, he was confronted 
 with the visible church. The Greek Church was far 
 away and, moreover, defamed of heresy : beneath the 
 surface of society there were secret religious communities, 
 which to a pious son of the Church were not only dis- 
 reputable but criminal. But externally there was one 
 (hierarchy, one faith, one ritual. Christendom was visibly 
 one in its Papal head : Rome was the capital of a believ- 
 ing world. This actual unity was the result of organic 
 growth. The Church of the fifteenth century was the 
 Church of councils and schoolmen, of fathers and martyrs, 
 of apostles and Christ himself. No voice which Europe 
 had consented to hear had yet brought its historical claims 
 to the test : it presented itself to every succeeding gene- 
 ration with the unbroken weight of the past at its back. 
 But it did much more than thus impose itself upon the 
 believer in the majesty of an unquestioned authority. It 
 demanded his assent to a vast body of theological dogma, 
 
XCIPLE8 OF THE REFORMATION. 115 
 
 carefully reasoned out, with all its parts logically subor- 
 dinated to one another and the whole, and that under 
 penalties, temporal and eternal, of the most tremendous 
 kind. There were, so to speak, no alternative means of 
 theological knowledge : the Bible had disappeared from 
 the general eye : the schoolmen had reduced Scripture,; 
 the Fathers, tradition, to a system upon which the Church, 
 had set the seal of its approval. And among the theolo- 
 gical truths which a man was thus compelled to accept 
 upon pain of not being a Christian at all, were, that the 
 religious life could be nourished only by sacraments, 
 and that sacraments could be administered only by a 
 duly ordained body of priests. I will not waste time in 
 trying to give an accurate definition of the word sacra- 
 ment and the word priest: they stand for co-ordinated 
 ideas : and the outcome of the system which they denote 
 is, that what some would call a way of communication, 
 others a wall of severance, is built between the soul 
 and God. A man can no longer open his heart to the 
 Divine grace, and be refreshed by the dew of benediction 
 which falls upon it : he must be blessed by way of water or 
 of oil, of bread or of wine ; and these have no supernatural 
 virtue if the priest's breath have not passed upon them. 
 And it is unhappily a law of human nature that these 
 hindrances between the soul and its Divine Object, once 
 admitted, grow and multiply : the sacraments are acces- 
 sible only on conditions of which the Church is the sole 
 judge : the intercession of saints becomes desirable, if 
 not necessary, to the weakness of humanity : the be- 
 nignity of Mary wins all hearts, till at last the Saviour 
 becomes an angry judge, whose avenging arm is averted 
 
 i2 ^ 
 
116 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 from his people only by his Mother's gracious pleading. 1 
 I Nor is the power of the Church confined to this life : she 
 can bind and loose in purgatory as on earth : her favour 
 and displeasure are as the favour and displeasure of 
 God. Add to this the corruptions necessarily engen- 
 dered in such a system by the ignorance, the coarse- 
 ness, the love of rule, the moral callousness of those 
 by whom it was often administered, and you will to 
 some extent understand the sins and shortcomings of 
 the Catholic Church before the Eeformation. But neither 
 with these, nor with its undoubted strength and merits, 
 have we at this moment anything to do. The one point 
 on which I desire to fix your attention is, that the be- 
 liever found himself separated from God by a thousand 
 barriers which he could not overleap, and which drew 
 his attention on themselves as the proper objects of reli- 
 gious desire. For all good, he was the suppliant of the 
 Church. She led him, she fed him, she imposed her own 
 laws upon him, she rewarded him upon her own terms. 
 He accepted her word for everything. She was the 
 perpetual, the all-powerful mediator between earth and 
 heaven. Without her there was no access to God, no 
 spiritual life now, no salvation hereafter. 
 
 What, more than anything else, characterized Luther's 
 ; attack upon this system, was his substitution of the 
 | authority of the Bible for the authority of the Church. 
 This was not so much the result of closely-reasoned theo- 
 logical theory in his or any other mind, as the conse- 
 
 1 See Michael Angelo's well-known picture of the Last Judgment, 
 on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel, painted between 1533 and 1541. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 117 
 
 quence of facts, which could not be debarred from their 
 natural operation. It is a well-known story that the 
 first beginnings of change were produced in Luther him- 
 self by his discovery, when a student at Erfurt, that the 
 Latin Bible contained much more than the lessons which 
 he had been wont to hear read in church, 1 and by the 
 eager study which he thenceforth gave to the book. At 
 the moment when the abuses and oppressions of the Papal 
 system weighed most heavily upon Germany, and at the 
 same time the liveliest curiosity as to all the literary 
 monuments of antiquity filled men's minds, the art of 
 printing put the Bible into all hands. At first, of course, 
 it was only the Vulgate, written in the language of 
 Eome, and dating from a time when Boman religion was 
 already being moulded into its characteristic shape. But 
 the re-conquest of the human intellect by the Bible took 
 place, so to speak, in two opposite directions at once: 
 scholars penetrated beneath the Latin to the Hebrew 
 and the Greek, while translations into the vernacular 
 
 1 Mathesius : Luther, Sermon I. p. 3 b. Dr. S. R Maitland, in his 
 learned and lively Essays on "the Dark Ages" (pp. 468, 508 et seq.), 
 pours contempt on Mathesius, and utterly refuses to believe his story. 
 But what is to be made of Luther's own words (Tischreden, III. 229) : 
 " Vor dreissig Jahren war die Bibel umbekannt, die Propheten waren 
 ungenannt und gehalten, als waren sie unmbglich zu verstehen. Da 
 ich zwanzig Jahr alt war, hatte ich noch keine gesehen. Ich meinete 
 es waren kein Evangclia noch Episteln mehr denn die in den Postillen 
 sind. Endlich fand ich in der Liberei zu Erfurt eine Bibel, die las 
 ich oftmals mit grosser Verwunderung D. Staupitzen." On the other 
 hand, it is curious that the University of Erfurt distinguished itself 
 above other High Schools of Germany in the fifteenth century by its 
 attention to Biblical exegesis, a fact to which the number of works on 
 that subject in MS. still preserved in its libraries bears convincing tes- 
 timony. Kampschulte : " Die Uiriversitat Erfurt," Part i. p. 22, note. 
 
118 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 tongues restored the book to the people. A vivid illus- 
 tration of the former process is supplied by the story of 
 Luther's delighted astonishment 1 when he found that 
 the pcenitentia of the Latin was the ^rdvoia of the 
 Greek; or, in other words, that what had always pre- 
 sented itself to him as penance, an external form, an 
 ecclesiastical penalty, was really an inward and spiritual 
 thing, repentance, change of mind : while, on the other 
 hand, it is impossible to conceive what must have been 
 the effect, especially at a time of freshly-aroused mental 
 activity and deep religious commotion, of disinterring and 
 making widely known the Biblical literature in all its 
 antique vividness, with all its intellectual charm, in the 
 plenitude of its moral persuasiveness, its spiritual force. 
 I will say nothing here of what its power must have 
 been over the individual heart and conscience : that is a 
 fact which belongs to no age of the church in especial. 
 But one thing must have been abundantly clear to the 
 reader of the New Testament in the first years of the 
 sixteenth century: that the church of Julius II. and 
 Leo X. was in both form and spirit singularly unlike the 
 church of Paul and John. 
 
 i This result was quickened and enhanced by Luther's 
 method of Biblical interpretation. In a very important 
 sense he anticipated a well-known aphorism of our own 
 day, namely, that the Bible is to be interpreted like any 
 other book. 2 It was a mediseval maxim, which no one 
 thought of questioning, that the language of the Bible 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, I. 116: letter to Staupitz. 
 
 2 Essays and Reviews (Jowett on the Interpretation of Scripture), 
 I>. 377. 
 
y 00 C IV - PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 119 
 
 had four senses the literal, the allegorical, the tropo- 
 logical, and the anagogical, of which the three last were 
 mystical or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first. 
 The literal sense preserves the record of facts ; the alle- 
 gorical teaches us what we are to believe ; the topolo- 
 gical, what we are to do ; the anagogical, what we are 
 to hope. 1 If this is so, it is obvious that the meaning 
 which lies on the surface is the least important of the 
 four, and that the true gold of Scripture can be got only 
 by digging with this added difficulty, that in the ab- 
 sence of an infallible touchstone, each delver in the mine 
 is apt to mistake whatever rubbish he comes across for 
 the precious ore. Against this manifold Sense of Scrip- 
 ture, which, it is plain, destroyed all certainty of inter- 
 pretation and left the field open to the wildest absurdities, 
 Luther set his face stoutly and on the whole consistently. 
 "The Holy Ghost," 2 he said, in controversy with Emser, 
 "is the all simplest writer and speaker that is in heaven 
 or on earth ; therefore His words can have no more than 
 one simplest sense, which we call the scriptural or literal 
 meaning.' ' But no declaration could possibly surpass 
 this, which Luther repeats in a thousand different forms, 
 in power of angering and alarming his opponents. It 
 was the axe at the root of their dogmatic system. Poor 
 Emser exclaimed in his rage, that if this were so, it was 
 better to read a legend of Virgil's than the Bible. 3 But 
 indeed Erasmus, standing with all his learning in the 
 
 1 Litera gesta docet, quid credas Allegoria, 
 Tropologia quid agas, quid speres Anagogia. 
 
 2 Luther's Werke, ed. Walch, XVIII. 1602 : Answer to Emser. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 1601. 
 
120 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 full dawn of the new day, says much the same thing. 1 
 The story of Adam is not better worth reading than that 
 of Prometheus, if yon take it only in its literal sense. 
 " "What does it matter whether you read the Books of 
 Kings or Judges, or Livy's History, if in neither you 
 look to the allegory ?" Of interpreters of Holy Scripture 
 he says, in another place : 2 " Choose those in especial 
 who depart as far as possible from the letter" and then 
 goes on in scornful disparagement of the innovators who 
 uphold the grammatical sense. But this principle of the 
 Eeformation effected a greater change than is implied in 
 the mere simplification of exegesis, by cutting away all 
 that undergrowth of mystical teaching which hid the 
 plain significance of the text. It converted the Scrip- 
 tures from a dialectic armoury from which weapons of 
 argument could be drawn in favour of any dogmatic 
 subtlety or extravagance, into an historical record of 
 God's dealings with mankind, full of life and inspiration 
 and comfort. The soul had hitherto been nourished on 
 sacraments alone : it was now to hold converse with the 
 Spirit in the pages of the Bible. What God had done 
 for faithful men of old, He would still do for the faithful : 
 the words in which He had once spoken had an eternal 
 and ever-present application. The Scriptures were no 
 longer a closed treasury of truth and grace of which 
 orthodox learning alone held the key, but an open garden, 
 in which any devout soul might wander, plucking flowers 
 and fruit. 
 
 There is no kind of hesitation in Luther's assertion of 
 
 1 Erasmus : Opp. (Enchiridion), V. 29, B, C, D. . 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 8, D. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 121 
 
 the authority of Scripture. He rises to its full height 
 only by degrees : he makes the Bible the test, first of 
 the scholastic theology, next of the Papacy, and only at 
 last, when brought to bay by Eck at Leipzig, admits that 
 even General Councils, tried by its standard, must be 
 pronounced to have erred. But having once taken up 
 this position, he never abandons it. It is unnecessary 
 to quote illustrative passages from his writings : we 
 might almost say that the authority of Scripture is their 
 animating principle. But looking at the matter with 
 nineteenth-century eyes, it is very curious to remark 
 how absolutely unconscious the Eeformers seem to be of 
 the necessity of supporting this affirmation by any kind 
 of proof, or even of defining the exact sense in which 
 they make it. This is, no doubt, in part due to the fact 
 that none of their opponents questioned it: it was an 
 universal postulate of controversy. The debate with the 
 Catholics was not as to whether Scripture was authorita- 
 tive, but whether tradition and the Church were to be 
 admitted to an equal position of influence: the quarrel 
 w^th Protestant heretics was, again, one not of authority, 
 but of interpretation. Still it is singular to find in 
 Melancthon's Loci Communes, 1 the great repertory of 
 Lutheran theology, absolutely no attempt to lay a surer 
 
 1 Conf. the section, "De discrimine V. et N. Testamenti." "Quare 
 cogitemus ingens Dei beneficium esse, quod certum librum Ecclesise 
 tradidit et servat, et ad hunc alligat Ecclesiam. Tantum hie populus 
 est Ecclesia qui hunc librum amplecitur, audit, discit, et retinet pro- 
 priam ejus sententiam in invocatione Dei et in regendis moribus. Non 
 igitur est Ecclesia Dei, ubi rejicitur hie liber, ut apud Mahometistas, 
 aut ubi, gxtincta propria sententia, proponitur commenticia, ut apud 
 hajreticos." Corp. Kef. XXI. 801. 
 
122 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 foundation for the edifice of systematic dogma which he 
 builds up than this assumption. It is like the Hindu 
 cosmogony, with its tortoise resting upon nothing. An- 
 other curious fact, that the authority of Scripture is not 
 expressly formulated in the Confession of Augsburg, is 
 probably in part due to Melancthon's unwillingness to 
 cut himself off from the ancient and mediaeval Church 
 by the implied denial of the authority of General Coun- 
 cils. 1 Calvin, as we might expect, both from the more 
 logical and systematizing quality of his mind and the 
 already changing character of controversy in his day, 
 gives more attention to the subject, devoting to it three 
 sections of the first book of his " Institution.' ' But even 
 he treats it with what we should now think a very inade- 
 quate apprehension of its importance. All rationalistic 
 cavils he meets with lofty contempt, resting the authority 
 of the Bible on its own inherent force and majesty, and 
 the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the soul. 2 
 
 " Eead Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any 
 other of all that sort : I grant they shall marvellously allure, 
 delight, move and ravish thee. But if from them thou come to 
 this holy reading of Scriptures, wilt thou or not, it shall so lively 
 move thy affections, it shall so pierce thy heart, it shall so settle 
 within thy bones, that, in comparison of the efficacy of this feeling, 
 all that force of rhetoricians and philosophers shall in manner 
 
 1 It is curious, in this connection, to note that the Confession of 
 Augsburg begins by basing the doctrine of the Trinity on the decree 
 of the Council of Nicsea. " Ecclesise magno consensu apud nos docent, 
 decretum Nicense synodi, de unitate essentia? divinae, et de tribus per- 
 sonis, verum. et sine ulla dubitatione credendum esse." Sylloge Con- 
 fessionum (Oxford, 1827), p. 123. 
 
 2 Calvin : Institution, Book i. chap. viii. I have used in the text the 
 old English translation of Thomas Norton, 1634. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 123 
 
 vanish away : so that it is easy to perceive that the Scriptures, 
 which do far excel all gifts and graces of man's industry, do 
 indeed breathe out a certain divinity." 
 
 And again: 1 
 
 " Let this therefore stand for a certainly persuaded truth, that 
 they whom the Holy Ghost hath inwardly taught do wholly rest 
 upon the Scripture, and that the same Scripture is to be credited 
 for itself sake, and ought not to be made subject to demonstra- 
 tion and reason : but yet the certainty which it getteth among 
 us, it attaineth by the witness of the Holy Ghost. For though 
 by the only majesty of itself it procure th reverence to be given 
 to it, yet then only it thoroughly pierceth our affections when 
 it is sealed in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. So, .being lightened 
 by his virtue, we do then believe, not by our own judgment or 
 other men's, that the Scripture is from God : but above all man's 
 judgment we hold it most certainly determined, even as if we 
 beheld the majesty of God Himself there present, that by the 
 ministry of men it came to us from the very mouth of God." 
 
 This, then, in the most precise form in which I am 
 able to give it, is the theory of the Eeformation as to the 
 authority of Scripture. It is based upon the concurrent ! 
 witness of the Holy Spirit in the written word and in 
 the believer's soul. And beyond doubt it expresses a 
 spiritual truth, deeper than which no subsequent age has 
 been able to penetrate : the only question is, to what 
 kind of scriptural statement does this authentication 
 extend, and what is its precise value ? Does it cover 
 historical, scientific, philosophical affirmations, or is it 
 confined to the region of the theological and the moral ? 
 But the Eeformers did not ask themselves these questions, 
 
 1 Calvin : Institution, Book i. ch. vii. 
 
 
124 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 and would have thought it a concession to blasphemy to 
 answer them if asked by others. 1 
 
 It is logically involved in the substitution of the autho- 
 rity of the Bible for the authority of the Church, that 
 every believer has the right of interpreting Scripture for 
 himself. Luther has said some clear and decisive words 
 on this subject. He maintains, in the first place, that 
 Scripture is easy of interpretation. 2 " The Bible belongs 
 to all, and so far as is necessary for salvation is clear 
 enough, but also dark enough for souls that pry and seek 
 to know more." And again, in controversy with Eras- 
 mus : 3 " I say that no part of Holy Scripture is dark. . . . 
 Christ hath not so enlightened us that any part of his 
 doctrine and his word which he bids us regard and follow 
 should be left dark." Once more: "It belongs to each 
 and every Christian to know and to judge of doctrine, 
 and belongs in such wise that he is anathema who shall 
 have diminished this right by a single hair." 4 I shall 
 
 1 Conf. Luther's Tischreden, I. 28. " Wer nachgiebet, dass der 
 Evangelisten Schriften Gottes Wort sein, dem wollen wir mit Dispu- 
 tiren wol begegnen : wer es aber verneinet, mit dem will ich nicht ein 
 Wort handeln. Denn mit dem soil man nicht disputiren, der da prima 
 principia, dass ist die ersten Griinde und das Hauptfundament ver- 
 neinet und verwirft." 
 
 * Werke, ed. Walch, XVIII. 1416. Melancthon is equally explicit. 
 " Verbum Dei non est obscurum aut ambiguum, quia lex est perspicua 
 et clara." And again : " Scribebat quidem, nullum vocabulum esse in 
 Scriptura quod non varie possit exponi. Hsec est mera petulantia et 
 
 diabolica sophistica In principalibus capitibus pertinentibus ad 
 
 legem et Evangelium, Scriptura est aperta, et sine obscuritate. Sed 
 certamina et rixae tribuendse sunt pravitati et malitise ingeniorum quae 
 corrumpunt Scripturam." Corp. Ref. XXV. 225, 226. 
 
 3 Werke, ed. Walch, XVIII. 2163, 2164. 
 
 4 Quoted by Kdstlin, Luther's Theologie, II. 61. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 125 
 
 have to qualify the Ml breadth of this statement pre- 
 sently by mentioning certain laws of interpretation which 
 Luther laid down ; but even then it will be broader than 
 the practice of the Eeformers. For they soon felt the 
 difficulty that the authority of the Scriptures could not 
 be used for authoritative purposes in the same way and 
 to produce the same results as the voice of the Church. 
 The Bible once thrown open to private interpretation, it 
 was impossible to provide that everybody should deduce 
 from it the same doctrinal results as those contained in 
 Melancthon's Loci Communes. All the Swiss Eeformers 
 held their own theory of the Eucharist, which was not 
 Luther's. The general body of heretics, comprised under 
 one name of infamy as Anabaptists, wandered into innu- 
 merable byeways of belief. Campanus, Denck, Hetzer, 
 early struck the path which Servetus and the Socini 
 followed. What was to be done? Melancthon 1 seems 
 to have indulged the dream of a consensus of pious and 
 learned opinion, though how this was to be imposed upon 
 recalcitrant heretics he does not tell us. Calvin 2 went 
 so far as to say that the written oracles of God were not 
 of private interpretation, yet without showing how this 
 statement was consistent with the maintenance of his 
 Protestant position. Luther held on his way stoutly, not 
 obscurely intimating in the general tone of his dogmatic 
 
 1 Hue accedat et pia communicatio, conferant inter se pii de doctrina 
 et audiantur etiam aliorum peritiorum sententise, et hi benigne et candid e 
 suam sententiam exponant et vicissim etiam alios comiter audiant. 
 Talis sit consensus piorum, qui pio studio quserentes veritatem et cum 
 timore Dei secundum Scripturam pronuntient. Hoc concilium audiatur ! 
 Melancthon, quoted by Schenkel, Wesen des Protestantismus, I. 93. 
 
 2 Schenkel, I. 94. 
 
A 
 
 I 
 
 126 IV. PRINCIPLES OP THE REFORMATION. 
 
 affirmations, that if other people did not see things as he 
 did, it was their own fanlt. But difference of opinion 
 seems to have taught no one the lesson of tolerance. The 
 making and branding of heretics went on as actively on 
 one side of the great controversy as on the other. 
 
 Luther, and Melancthon, who may be taken in the 
 general as the systematizer of Luther's thoughts, in part 
 evaded this difficulty by their conception of the Bible 
 as an organic whole, containing in all its several parts, 
 from first to last, the development of a single divine 
 purpose. It was, in Old and New Testament alike, a 
 gospel, a revelation of God's grace to man. But as this 
 idea could hardly be made to cover the Law, the Mosaic 
 legislation was held to have been temporary and local, 
 and even its moral element, as for instance the Decalogue, 
 only binding upon Christians in so far as it agreed with 
 the law of nature. It will at once suggest itself ta those 
 whose eyes have been opened by the literary criticism of 
 modern times, that Luther could hardly trace the gospel 
 through the very various regions of Old Testament his- 
 tory, prophecy, philosophy, without a copious use of that 
 figurative method of interpretation which he had theo- 
 retically abandoned. But there is no reason to suppose 
 that he was at all conscious of this inconsistency. " The 
 gospel," 1 he says, " according to Paul in the first chapter 
 of his Epistle to the Eomans, is a proclamation of the 
 Son of God, who became man, and, without any desert 
 of our own, is given to us for blessedness and for peace." 
 This gospel was antecedent to any written promise or 
 record. " Look at Adam and Eve f they are full of sin 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XVIII. 504. 2 Ib id. I. 362. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 127 
 
 and death: yet because they hear the promise of the 
 seed of the woman, who shall bruise the serpent's head, 
 they hope for the same things as we, namely, that death 
 will be done away, and sin wiped off, and righteousness, 
 life and peace, restored." Noah and Shem were preachers 
 of the promise. 1 Jacob 2 "lived in faith in Christ," 
 wherefore his works, however contemptible in them- 
 selves, were well-pleasing to God. Abraham and Moses 
 were "two good Christians," 3 Abraham especially "a 
 right, yea a perfect Christian, who lived in the most 
 evangelical fashion possible, in the spirit of God and in 
 faith." 4 These instances may suffice to prepare us for 
 the abstract rule which Luther lays down,, namely, that 
 the Scriptures are to be interpreted by the gospel, not 
 the gospel by the Scriptures. 5 And this rule is not 
 only applicable to the Old Testament, but supplies a test 
 by which the differing values of the New Testament 
 writings may be judged. 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, I. 700, II. 131. 2 Ibid. II. 2574. 
 
 3 Ibid. III. 997. 4 Ibid. III. 410. 
 
 5 Wir erleuchten die alte heilige Schrift durch das Evangelium, und 
 nicht wiederum, und vergleichen oder halten zusaramen die Meyimng 
 des Alten Testaments mit der Mcynung des Neuen Testaments. Ibid. 
 IV. 1728. Und darinne stimmen alle rechtschaffene heilige Biicher 
 uberein, dass sie allesamt Christum predigen und treiben. Auch ist 
 das der rechte Priifestein alle Biicher zu tadeln, wenn man siehet ob 
 sic Christum treiben oder nicht, sintemal alle Schrift Christum zeiget 
 (Rom. iii. 21) und St. Paulus nichts denn Christum wissen will (1 Cor. 
 ii. 2). Was Christum nicht lehret, das ist noch nicht apostolisch, wenn 
 es gleich St. Petrus oder St. Paulus lehrete. Wiederum, was Christum 
 p'rediget, das ware apostolisch, wenns gleich Judas, Hannas, Pilatus und 
 Herodes that. Preface to the Epp. of James and Jude, ibid. XIV. 
 149. 
 
128 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 " Those Apostles/' 1 says Luther, " who treat oftenest and 
 highest of how faith in Christ alone justifies, are the best Evan- 
 gelists. Therefore are St. Paul's Epistles more a Gospel than 
 Matthew, Mark and Luke. For these do not set down much 
 more than the story of the works and miracles of Christ ; but 
 the grace which we receive through Christ, no one so boldly 
 extols as St. Paul, especially in his letter to the Eomans." 
 
 Again : 2 
 
 "John's Gospel, St. Paul's Epistles, especially that to the 
 Romans, and St. Peter's First Epistle, are the right kernel and 
 marrow of all books .... for in them thou findest written down 
 not many works and miracles of Christ, but in a quite masterly 
 way expounded how faith in Christ overcomes sin and death 
 and hell, and gives life, righteousness and peace. Which is, as 
 thou hast heard, the right kind of gospel." 
 
 After this it is quite consistent that he should add : 3 
 
 " Therefore is St. James' Epistle, in comparison with these, a 
 mere letter of straw, for it has nothing evangelical about it." 
 
 How far this theory may contain in it a secret impli- 
 cation of what would now be called rationalism, I must 
 leave to be discussed at another time. At present it 
 serves as a natural transition to the characteristic Lu- 
 theran doctrine of justification by faith alone. This 
 doctrine, as Luther found it expounded in St. Paul's 
 Epistles, furnished the standard to which all other scrip- 
 tural statements of the method of salvation were brought 
 to be judged, and 'to which they were made to conform. 
 
 1 Preface to the Exposition of 1 Peter : Werke, ed. Walch, IX. 626. 
 
 2 Preface to the New Testament, 1524 : ibid. XIV. 104. 
 
 3 Ibid. XIV. 105. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OP THE REFORMATION. 129 
 
 Let us take it in the words of the fourth Article of the 
 Confession of Augsburg : T 
 
 We teach that men cannot be justified before God by their 
 own strength, merit or works, but that they are freely justified, 
 because of Christ, by faith, when they believe that they are 
 received into grace, and that their sins are remitted because of 
 Christ, who by his own death has given satisfaction for our sins. 
 This faith God reckons for righteousness before Him." 
 
 In order to give this doctrine its true place in a spiri- 
 tual system of religion, we must not forget the belief, and 
 still more the practice, to which it was opposed. When 
 the greatest value was being set on mere ritual observ- 
 ance when the inner pains of repentance were being 
 hidden behind the ecclesiastical form of penance which 
 too often took their place when benefactions to the 
 Church were accepted in atonement for flagrant sin, and 
 escape from purgatory was to be bought of wandering 
 indulgence-mongers in any market-place it was a great 
 thing to recall men's minds to the fact that religion is an \ 
 invisible frame of mind, from which alone can spring 7 
 actions acceptable to God. This was indeed the antithesis 
 of the New Testament over again, in a shape but slightly 
 altered. Once more there was a ceremonial law, a reli- 
 gion of ritual acts, an intolerable burthen of formal obe- 
 dience laid upon the conscience of the believer, in opposing 
 to which a spiritual gospel, a consecration of the affec- 
 tions, a service of the heart, Luther might well think 
 that he was following in the footsteps of Paul. Nor, so 
 long as the doctrine of justification by faith was preached 
 
 1 Sylloge Confessionum, p. 124. 
 K 
 
130 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 by Luther himself, could there be any pretext for assert- 
 ing that he was indifferent to the sanctity of moral law, 
 or that the good works on which he poured scorn and 
 contempt were those without which the manly or the 
 Christian character cannot be conceived. Only those 
 critics who have utterly failed to understand both the 
 great Eeformer and his characteristic position, can accuse 
 him of a personal tendency to Antinomian heresy. It is 
 true that the heat of controversy, and his own power of 
 paradoxical statement, sometimes led him to make affir- 
 mations which will not bear to be taken literally : it is 
 true that after he was gone, men of a harder logic than 
 his, and a less vigorous moral instinct, developed his 
 doctrine into forms which are ethically repulsive. But 
 he delighted in preaching moral sermons. He expounded 
 the Decalogue more than once : he returned again and 
 again for the material of teaching to the Lord's Prayer 
 and the Apostles' Creed. He was uneasy lest the con- 
 stant preaching of justification by faith alone, by men 
 whose enthusiasm for righteousness was cooler than his 
 own, should lead to consequences of which he could not 
 approve. That note of a great religious teacher a pas- 
 sionate conviction that holiness is the one thing needful- 
 is almost as conspicuous in him as in his master, Paul. 
 
 At the same time, he would hear of no modifications of 
 his central doctrine. It was faith alone, not even faith 
 working by love, that justified. He was too jealous of 
 the operative power of his great principle to admit any 
 other to even a subordinate partnership with it. But 
 then with him, at least in his better moments, faith \ 
 no mere intellectual acceptance of Christ and his atoning 
 death, even if that acceptance were of a strictly personal 
 
 > 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 131 
 
 kind i 1 it was such a spiritual incorporation of the soul 
 with its Saviour as involved a changed individuality, a 
 renewed and strengthened nature, out of which all the 
 fruits of righteousness naturally grew. For the Christian 
 so transmuted, it was no longer a question of doing good 
 works in obedience to an external law and, so to speak, 
 to order ; they were the natural expression of the new 
 man, as inevitable as breathing and speaking. 2 The 
 doctrine so stated has the advantage of being true to two 
 well-known and indisputable facts of human nature : first, 
 that the motive power of character lies in the affections, 
 and that to produce a cleansed, strengthened, renewed 
 man, there is no other way than to inspire into the heart 
 a passionate love and trust of some worthy object : next, 
 that actions do not so much determine character as are 
 determined by it, and that, to go back to the familiar 
 phrase of the New Testament, if you would have good 
 fruit, you must make the tree good. But the difficulty 
 is, that this doctrine is peculiarly liable both to ambi- 
 guous statement and practical abuse. All the words to 
 which " faith" answers wbrnt, fides, glaube have, in 
 different proportions, an intellectual and a moral side. 
 On one they rise into "trust," and imply a personal 
 affection; on the other they sink into " belief," and may 
 mean no more than an intellectual assent. But unhappily 
 " glaube" alone covers the whole ground. It is faith and 
 belief too. There is no other word in common use for 
 either. Of what a shock are we conscious when for 
 " justification by faith" we substitute " justification by 
 
 1 Vid. Luther's Sermon, "Von der Freyheit eines Christenmen- 
 schen," Werke, ed. Walch, XIX. 1206, especially p. 1215 et seq. 
 
 2 Ibid. XIX. 1223. 
 
 K2 
 
132 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 belief" ! yet for Luther the two phrases were and must 
 have been identical. There is a dynamic force in faith, 
 especially if it be conceived of as inseparable from love ; 
 but what strength of change and renewal in mere belief? 
 And it cannot be denied that, as Luther grew older, his 
 conception of faith became more and more intellectual, 
 till at last it comprised little beyond the assent of the 
 mind to certain articles of an orthodox creed. 1 But, 
 once more, what is to prevent the practical abuse of this 
 doctrine by men who accept it on authority, without 
 being conscious of its efficacy in their own hearts, or 
 discerning its justification in facts of human nature ? It 
 is a doctrine which fires and fortifies great saints, but 
 is terribly apt to delude common men with a show of 
 religion. "What guarantee can there be in any parti- 
 cular case that faith is that transforming passion of the 
 soul which really makes it one with Christ, and not a 
 cool adherence of the intellect, or a passing spasm of 
 excitement, either quite unable to produce such an effect ? 
 "While if, on the one hand, faith have worked no spi- 
 ritual change if, on the other, the moral law have been 
 systematically disparaged into what hideous mockery of 
 true religion may not men fall who are cherishing all the 
 while the conviction of their most perfect orthodoxy ! 
 
 But whatever the merits or the dangers of this doc- 
 trine, it was admirably adapted to work the great change 
 of which I have spoken. For it led the soul straight to 
 its Divine Object. It made religion a matter only for 
 the believer and Christ. The promise of the gospel was 
 made known everywhere, from the pulpit and in the pages 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, X. 1314, 1341, VIII. 2623 et seq., especially 
 VIII. 2660 et seq. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 133 
 
 of the Bible : when once it was accepted, what more was 
 necessary ? The need of a priesthood, of a visible church, 
 even of sacraments, fell away. The whole fabric of the 
 Catholic Church crumbled to pieces under the operation 
 of this powerful solvent. Christianity was once more a 
 personal thing, a power within the soul placing it in 
 direct relation to God. 
 
 Closely connected with this is the doctrine which 
 Luther held, in common with the Waldenses, with Wiclif, 
 and with Huss, of the priesthood of every Christian / 
 believer. He will admit of no distinction between clergy 
 and laity except one of office only. 1 
 
 " For all Christians," he says, " are truly of the clergy, and 
 there is among them no difference, save of office alone, as Paul 
 says, that we are all one body, yet has each member its own office, 
 that it may serve the others. This is the all-important thing, 
 that we have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all alike 
 Christians. For baptism, gospel and faith these alone make 
 men clerical and Christian." 
 
 He explicitly denies all efficacy to Papal or Episcopal 
 ordination. Baptism makes a man a priest. 2 
 
 " A Bishop's ordination is no more than this, that in place of 
 the entire congregation he takes one out of the whole body of 
 those who possess equal power, and commits to him the exercise 
 
 of that same power for the rest And that I may put it still 
 
 more clearly, if a little body of pious Christian laymen were 
 taken, and placed in a desert, who had not among them an 
 episcopally ordained priest, and being there agreed, were to choose 
 one among their own number, married or not, and were to commit 
 to him the office of baptizing, saying mass, absolving, preaching 
 he would be as truly a priest as if all Bishops and Popes had 
 ordained him." 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, X. 302. 2 Hid. X. 303. 
 
134 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 He thinks that the spiritual dignity conferred upon 
 the Christian by baptism is so high that nothing can be 
 added to it. "Whoever is baptized, needs only to be 
 chosen by his fellows to be fit to fill the highest place. 1 
 
 " What is common to all/' he says, " may no one take to him- 
 self without the will and command of the congregation. And 
 whenever it happens that any one chosen to such an office is 
 deposed for misconduct, then is he straightway what he was 
 before. Therefore the priestly status among Christian people 
 should be only that of a public officer, who, so long as he holds 
 his office, has precedence, but when he is deposed is a peasant 
 or a citizen like another. Thus, truly, is a deposed priest a 
 priest no longer. But now have they invented characteres inde- 
 libiles, and prate that a deposed priest is nevertheless something 
 other than a bad layman .... all of which are laws and talk 
 invented of men." 
 
 I have given this trenchant doctrine in Luther's own 
 words, as they are found in one of his most characteristic 
 works, his "Address to the Christian Nobility of the 
 German Nation," published in 1520. For this is the 
 centre point of his opposition to the Catholic system. In 
 regard to every other matter of dispute with the Eeformers, 
 it is possible to conceive that a church sincerely desirous 
 of reform should have met them at least half-way. The 
 abuses of the Eoman Curia might have been removed, 
 and the Pope's autocracy modified into a constitutional 
 rule. The history of French Jansenism shows into how 
 close a likeness to Calvinism Catholic doctrine may deve- 
 lope. Even the tenet of justification by faith has been 
 held within the Church in forms which it needs some 
 ingenuity to distinguish from that of Wittenberg. The 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, X. 304. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 135 
 
 present attitude of Catholicism towards the Scriptures is 
 quite different from that against which Luther protested. 
 The Counter Eeformation removed many practical abuses, 
 and might have proceeded to legalize even the marriage 
 of the clergy, without touching the essential principle of 
 Catholic Christianity. That principle is the nourishing 
 of the religious life by sacraments, which can be duly 
 administered only by a sacerdotal order. Whatever 
 church says and means "priest," is on the Catholic side 
 of the great controversy of Christianity ; whatever church 
 says and means " minister," in that act proclaims itself 
 Protestant. The one in effect declares its belief that 
 Divine grace and help can descend upon human nature 
 only by certain fixed channels, of which a supernaturally 
 endowed class of men have the control ; the other asserts 
 that the intercourse between the Eternal and the human 
 spirit is absolutely free, and that all its conditions are 
 fulfilled in Infinite Love on the one hand, and on the 
 other in awful aspiration and the passionate desire of 
 holiness. Neither can free itself from the necessity of 
 defining the visible Church ; but in one case it is simply 
 the assembly of the faithful, united by common beliefs, 
 hopes, purposes ; in the other it is a mystic communion, 
 inheriting authority from the past, wielding supernatural 
 power by organized instruments, and standing perma- 
 nently between the soul and God. It was from one of 
 these entrenched heights of Christian theory to the other 
 that Luther made the irrevocable transition. 
 
 Sacraments and priests commonly stand or fall toge- 
 ther ; but they are not united by any logical bond that 
 cannot be broken. If a sacrament be a divinely -ap- 
 
136 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 pointed means by which grace is imparted to the soul, 
 it may as well accord with the purpose of God to entrust 
 its administration to a minister duly elected by a Chris- 
 tian community, as to a priest who claims succession 
 from the Apostles by the channel of episcopal ordination. 
 Luther's theory of the universal priesthood of the be- 
 liever does not therefore necessarily conflict with the 
 conception of a sacrament even in its severer form. But 
 this is not the case with his general idea of the relation 
 of the faithful disciple to Christ. If all that is necessary 
 to secure salvation, both in its narrow and its spiritual 
 sense, is to have faith, and if faith must be taken to mean 
 that mystic incorporation with Christ in which all strength 
 and holiness and blessing are shut up, what is there left 
 for the sacrament to do ? Push the conception of faith 
 to the uttermost, and it is recognized as all-powerful: 
 without faith, the sacraments are only empty forms ; 
 while with it they are at best occasions of recollection, 
 spurs to effort, opportunities of devotion. This is in fact 
 Zwingli's doctrine of sacraments : deriving the word from 
 sacramentum, the military oath of fidelity, he looked upon 
 them as visible marks of allegiance, which the Christian 
 puts on, and which therefore draw their efficacy from the 
 faith of the receiver. And, at first, this was to a large 
 extent Luther's view also. He is so possessed by his 
 central principle of justification by faith alone, as to feel 
 little inclination to spend time and thought upon the 
 modification, in a Protestant sense, of this part of tradi- 
 tional theology. He does not know how many sacra- 
 ments there are : he is uncertain as to the definition of a 
 sacrament : it is only by degrees that, with Melancthon, 
 
IT. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 137 
 
 lie settles down to the- affirmation of two. 1 But as lie 
 grows older, and especially as he sees to what excesses, 
 as he thinks, Carlstadt and the radical enthusiasts of 
 the party are dragging him, his conception of a sacrament 
 stiffens and becomes more external. But the two oppos- 
 ing principles always remain in conflict in Luther's mind, 
 and will not be reconciled. Are we to suppose that an 
 ordinance instituted by direct command of God can fail, 
 and must there not be something given which is inde- 
 pendent of the receiver's state of mind ? And yet, again, 
 how can spiritual changes be produced by other than 
 spiritual causes, or what effect upon the soul can water 
 or wine have without faith ? So Luther is- very hard put 
 to it to reconcile his subjective principle with any sacra- 
 mental conception of baptism : he shrinks from acknow- 
 ledging a purely supernatural effect of the water and the 
 words upon the unconscious child : on the one hand, he 
 declares that the water is not mere water, but water 
 deified by the Word, so as to have become something 
 quite other than its natural self: 2 on the other, he falls 
 back upon a theory which would be ludicrous but for the 
 perplexity of mind which it betrays, that the representa- 
 tive faith of sponsors somehow stands *m the place of the 
 genuine spiritual affection in the subject of the sacra- 
 ment. 3 But the illogical character of Luther's sacra- 
 mental theory is still more manifest in the case of the 
 Eucharist. He denied its validity as a sacrifice, repre- 
 sentative and repetitive of that on Calvary : he would 
 not look upon it as an opus operatum, a spiritual benefit 
 
 1 Von der Babylonischen Gefangniss der Kirehen : Werke, ed. Walch. 
 XIX. 13, 14. . 
 
 2 Werke, cd. Walch, X. 2539. 3 Ibid. XIX. 88, 1625. 
 
138 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 conferred irrespective of the frame of mind of celebrant 
 or receiver. But still lie could not shake off the influ- 
 ence of that Catholic doctrine of sacraments which I can 
 only call the magical. He insisted on the Eeal Presence. 
 If he denied Transubstantiation, he substituted the still 
 more cumbrous and less intelligible doctrine of Consub- 
 stantiation for it. He decisively took his stand on the 
 magical rather than the spiritual side of the sacramental 
 controversy, in the declaration that the body and blood 
 of Christ were eaten, not merely by the faithful, but by 
 the ungodly recipient. 1 At the Conference of Marburg, 
 called by Philip of Hesse, in the hope of reconciling the 
 German and the Swiss Eeformers upon this vital point, 
 he wrote with a piece of chalk upon the table-cloth before 
 him the words, "Hoc est corpus meum" and pressed their 
 literal interpretation whenever any concession was asked 
 
 1 Brenz, who after Luther's death was among the most active oppo- 
 nents of union with the Reformed theologians, put the doctrine in a 
 form more vivid than reverent by asking what would be the conse- 
 quence if, by any accident, the consecrated bread were eaten by a 
 mouse. He decides that the mouse would have eaten the true body of 
 Christ. " Soil man aber sprechen, das Brod, so die Maus gessen, sei 
 der Leib Christi, so will es sich nicht reimen oder schicken, dass die 
 Mause sollen den Leib Christi essen. Wohlan ! es Schick' sich oder 
 reim' sich vor der menschlichen Vernunft wie es wolT, so miissen wir 
 eher etwas Ungereimtes und vor der Welt Ungeschicktes zulassen, ehe 
 wir wollten dem wahrhaftigen und ewig bestandigen Wort Gottes eine 
 Unwahrheit und Luge aufburden. Es mussen eher alle Menschen 
 Liigner sein und die Mause Leibesser, ehe unser lieber Herr Christus 
 ein Liigner sollte erfunden werden. .... Demnach dieweil Gottes 
 Wort starker ist denn eine Maus und das Brod einmal durch das Wort 
 Gottes zu dem Leib Christi verordnet ist, eine Maus aber verzehrt 
 dasselbe : so muss bekannt werden, dass das Brod auch der Leib Christi 
 sei, wenn es schon von einer Maus gegessen wurde." Quoted by 
 Schenkel, Wesen d. Prot. I. 563. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 139 
 
 of him. 1 He did not shrink from the most perverse exe- 
 gesis of other apparently plain passages of Scripture, in 
 order to justify his literal acceptance of this. 2 Something 
 of this stubbornness was perhaps due to Luther's high 
 conception of the authority of Scripture, and his deter- 
 mination to subject to what he considered to be its plain 
 deliverance the hesitations and difficulties of human 
 reason; but something more, too, to his inability or 
 unwillingness to follow out his spiritual conception of 
 Christianity to its just issues, and to break, if necessary, 
 with old forms of worship. But to any critic of the 
 present day who has quite passed beyond the influence 
 of sacramental ideas, it is strange and sad to see how the 
 Eeformation was wrecked upon this rock. It made an 
 irreparable breach between Luther and Zwingli, who 
 agreed upon so much else, and who, in face of a united 
 and an implacable enemy, had so much reason to draw 
 together. It defied the reconciling efforts of Bucer and 
 the attempt of Calvin to find a mediating theory. When 
 Luther was gone, his followers wandered away into 
 deserts of Protestant scholasticism in search of a defi- 
 
 1 Zuinglii, Opp. IV. 175. 
 
 2 Luther declares that we might as well interpret the words, " In 
 the beginning God made heaven and earth," " In the beginning the 
 cuckoo eat the hedge-sparrows, feathers and all," as take the words of 
 institution in other than the literal sense. Walch, XX. 571. Being 
 pressed with the words, Gen. xli. 26, "The seven good kine are seven 
 years," &c, he actually says : " Denn die sieben Ochsen bedeuten nicht 
 sieben Jahre, sondern sie sind selbst wesentlich und wahrhaftig die 
 sieben Jahre : denn es sind nicht naturliche Ochsen, die da Gras 
 fressen auf der Weide, welche wol durch alte gemeine Worte (sieben 
 Ochsen) genennet werden. Aber hie ists ein neu Wort, und sind sieben 
 Ochsen des Hungers und der Fiille, das ist, sieben Jahre des Hungers 
 und der Fiille." Walch, XX. 1137. 
 
140 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 nition of the essentially undefinable, and spent their 
 strength in sectarian hatreds and internecine wars. On 
 his own theory of Christianity, the Catholic is justified 
 in attaching the utmost importance to what is at once 
 the central act of worship and the fountain from which 
 the spiritual life is fed ; but once the doctrine of faith, 
 and with it that of the soul's immediate relation to God, 
 is formulated, the Eucharist sinks, or ought to sink, into 
 a secondary place. But experience shows that, in reli- 
 gion at least, it is always the lesser differences which 
 engender the bitterest animosities. 
 
 It must not be forgotten, in the last place, that the 
 movement of human thought of which the Eeformation 
 was the first manifestation on the ground of religion, was 
 a reaction against Medievalism, not merely intellectual 
 but ethical. I do not mean by this that we can set the 
 sixteenth century on a moral pedestal as compared with 
 any that had preceded it every age has its own strength 
 and weakness but that it rejected the ethical ideal 
 which it found in vogue, and set up another. That ideal 
 had been ascetic. The monastic was the highest life. 
 Celibacy was better than marriage, virginity than chastity. 
 The way to the perfection of the spirit was through the 
 subjugation of the flesh. Long fasts, daily scourgings, 
 to wear coarse clothing, to sleep on a hard bed, to rise 
 thrice in the night for prayer, were at once things accept- 
 able to God and a discipline that would purge the eye- 
 sight of the soul. But unfortunately this method had 
 signally broken down. It had produced many saints 
 after its own fashion of saintliness, some famous, more 
 without a name ; but apart from them, a fearful mass of 
 deliberate licentiousness and open-eyed sin. The long 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 141 
 
 struggle of the Popes to enforce the celibacy of the 
 clergy had ended in an external compliance with the 
 rule of the Church ; but almost every parish priest had *y 
 in his house an unacknowledged wife and family, whose 
 position was in some sort assured by a dispensation 
 which any bishop would sell. But this was far from 
 being the worst feature of the case. Without going the 
 full length of Protestant polemics to the assertion that 
 every monastery was a sink of iniquity, we may safely 
 affirm that monastic scandals were frequent and grievous. 
 From the eleventh century downwards, before the Poor 
 Men of Lyons had lifted up their protest, or Wiclif anti- 
 cipated the doctrine of Luther, one perpetual cry of moral 
 remonstrance, expressed in every variety of tone, grave, 
 satiric, carelessly humorous, is being uttered in all lite- 
 rature. The vices of the clergy are at once the complaint 1 
 of the theologian and the motive of the novelist. What 
 the Popes of the Eenaissance were in this respect we 
 know ; few of them but were notoriously foul livers : but 
 as Agamemnon was taller by the head than any of his 
 confederates, so Alexander VI. towers over his predeces- 
 sors and followers in magnificence of infamy. I do not 
 suppose, from anything I know of them, that our good 
 Saxon Eeformers, princes or theologians, were men of a 
 fastidious refinement or a singular niceness of moral 
 discernment ; but their consciences rose up in hot rebel- 
 lion against this frightful state of things, and with a 
 reformation in theology they desired a return to decent 
 and natural life. 
 
 In the language of our own day, we should call this a 
 reversion to Hellenism. In a sense perhaps this may be 
 so, but yet not consciously. I have already pointed out 
 
142 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 the fact that the German, were animated by a severer 
 ethical spirit than the Italian humanists ; and I can ima- 
 gine that Agricola and Eeuchlin, still more Luther and 
 Melancthon, looked with deep disgust at the Hellenism 
 of a man like Filelfo, who, great scholar as he was, emu- 
 lated, as far as his opportunities would allow, the naked 
 vices of his aristocratic patrons. And it is too much for- 
 gotten, in speaking of this matter, that the domestic life 
 of Israel, as recorded in the Bible, is on the whole sin- 
 gularly healthy and beautiful ; while whatever germs of 
 asceticism there may be in the New Testament, did not 
 develope into baneful growth until Europe was within 
 sight of the ages of darkness. And it was therefore to 
 the same scriptural source from which he drew so much 
 other inspiration, that Luther turned for the justification 
 of the universal instincts of the human heart. Perhaps 
 in this respect he did not so much direct events as was 
 carried away by them. The time was ripe for this revo- 
 lution. When he appeared before Charles Y. at Worms 
 in 1521, he still wore a cowl. It was while he was in 
 his Patmos in the Wartburg that the Augustinian monks 
 of his own convent at Wittenberg began to break their 
 bonds and to go out into common life. Nor can I so 
 truly say that the infection spread, as that the disease, if 
 disease it were, manifested itself everywhere : vows were 
 renounced, monasteries dissolved. So in regard to the 
 marriage of the clergy. First one or two obscure men 
 took unto themselves wives, scandals rather than exam- 
 ples : next, in 1522, Carlstadt, Archdeacon of the Stifts- 
 kirche at Wittenberg, yet already regarded as an adven- 
 turous, if not dangerous spirit, married Anna Mochau: 
 at last, in 1525, Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk, 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 143 
 
 espoused Catharine von Bora, the run away mm of Niemtsch. 
 The outcry was prodigious : that a monk should marry 
 at all was bad enough ; that he should marry a nun, an 
 unutterable portent: Catholic controversialists predicted 
 diabolical offspring from such a union. When, two years 
 afterwards, (Ecolampadius also took a wife, Erasmus, 
 with bitter wit, declared that the Lutheran tragedy was 
 nothing better than a comedy, and ended in weddings. 1 
 But the marriage of Wittenberg was well and wisely as 
 well as boldly done; and when the pair plighted their 
 troth, in the house in which they were to live, and in the 
 presence of their friends, they secured the purity and the 
 happiness of innumerable homes. 
 
 It would be difficult to understand how Luther "the 
 monk, who, if ever any, would have got to heaven by 
 monkery,' ' became the loving husband, the tender father, 
 the cheerful friend, who loved music and kindly talk 
 with his fellows, and held out a frank hand to all the 
 lawful enjoyments of life, were it not that we recognize 
 in him one of those strong and many-sided natures who 
 try many extremes before they arrive at an equilibrium, 
 and throw an equal energy into every experiment of life. 
 He frankly trusted nature, and would hear of no scruples. 
 " If our Lord God," 2 he said once, " may make excellent 
 large pike and good Ehenish wine, I may very well 
 venture to eat and to drink. Thou mayest enjoy every 
 pleasure in the world that is not sinful : that, thy God 
 forbids thee not, but much rather wills it. And it is 
 pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or 
 
 1 Ep. 951, Opp. III. p. 1071 E. 
 
 2 Quoted by Hagen, II. 232. 
 
144 IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 laughest from the bottom of thy heart." I freely admit 
 that his theory of the relation between the sexes, if pur- 
 sued into its details, is not untinged with coarseness ; 
 but we must recollect that those relations find their gua- 
 rantee of refinement in unconsciousness ; and unconscious 
 in that regard was precisely what Luther and his age 
 could not be. Mr. Galton has lately asked, in his book 
 on " Hereditary Genius," what loss has been inflicted 
 on the race by the monastic system, in the extinction 
 without offspring, generation after generation, of the 
 lives best fitted to hand down a refined and strengthened 
 humanity. The merit of Luther in counteracting this 
 evil was recognized more than a century ago. " Justus 
 Moser," says Eanke, 1 " reckoned, in the year 1750, that 
 from ten to fifteen millions of human beings, in all lands, 
 owed their existence to Luther and his example, and 
 declared that a statue ought to be erected to him, as the 
 sustainer of the human race." This is, after all, only 
 an arithmetical way of looking at it: some may even 
 say, that as weal and woe are meted out, it is not an 
 unmixed good to be born. But to have lifted the load 
 of sin from many consciences to have reconciled nature 
 and duty, purity and passion to have made woman once 
 more the faithful helpmeet of God's servants as of other 
 men to have been the founder of countless sweet and 
 peaceful homes is no small part of Luther's true glory. 
 And he has this appropriate reward, that while it is pos- 
 sible to arraign his intellectual methods of inconsistency 
 and incompleteness, to convict him of passionate self-will 
 and unchecked vehemence of controversy, to show that 
 
 i Kanke, II. 465. 
 
IV. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION. 145 
 
 . > "> 
 
 he was sometimes bitter to his enemies and arrogant to 
 his friends, no shadow of criticism can rest upon him in 
 that simple home at Wittenberg, where he was as a little 
 child among his own little children, and bravely bore, 
 with his true yokefellow, the daily burthen of his life. 
 
 Note to Lecture IT. 
 
 A question has been raised, and in some quarters very eagerly dis- 
 cussed, as to the moral effects of the Keformation. Dr. v. Dollinger, 
 in especial, in his book, " Die Keformation, ihre innere Entwicklung 
 und ihre Wirkungen im Umfange des Lutherischen Bekenntnisses," 
 has accumulated a vast mass of evidence to show that the immediate 
 result of the Reformation was a dissolution of morals; that the restraints 
 of religion were relaxed ; on the one hand that the characters of the 
 Protestant preachers were by no means without stain, on the other 
 that they were treated with indifference and almost contempt by the 
 people. Part of this evidence is drawn from the works of Catholic 
 theologians, who were altogether out of harmony with the Reformation ; 
 part from those of humanists, who, like Mutian and Pirkheimer, grew 
 dissatisfied with it before they died ; part from the utterances of such 
 men as George Wizel, who retreated from the Protestant intr the 
 Catholic ranks, and pursued their old faith with the bitterness of 
 deserters. In the case of all these, one thing is eminently noticeable : 
 they lay the blame of the neglect of morals, which they deplore, 
 upon the doctrine of justification by faith alone, denouncing it as 
 utterly subversive of old impulses and sanctions of duty. Evidence 
 proceeding from such sources might fairly be taken with more than a 
 grain of salt ; but there remain a painful series of confessions ol dis 
 appointment with the moral results of their work on the part of th< 
 Reformers themselves, and especially of Luther. It is difficult to give 
 an idea of the weight of this evidence, except by such an accumulat km 
 of quotations as is impossible in this place. In passage after pas 
 Luther declares that the last state of tilings was worse than the firs. ; 
 that vice of every kind had increased since the Reformation ; that the 
 nobles were greedy, the peasants brutal ; that the corruption of morals 
 in Wittenberg itself was so great that he contemplated shaking off the 
 dust of his feet against it; that Christian liberality had altogether 
 
 L 
 
146 IV. PRINCIPLES OP THE REFORMATION. 
 
 ceased to flow; and that the preachers were neither held in respect nor 
 supported by the people. Towards the close of his life, these com- 
 plaints became more bitter and more frequent. Sometimes the Devil 
 is called in to account for so painful and perplexing a state of things ; 
 always Luther and Melancthon are sure that they have fallen upon the 
 last days, when the temporary triumph of evil is permitted to precede 
 the final victory of good. But it is significant that Luther himself does 
 not altogether acquit the doctrine of justification though in his view 
 misapprehended of blame in this matter. 
 
 On the other side, it must be remembered that the Eeformation, in 
 introducing a new ideal and fresh types of goodness, excited bitter 
 criticism in all who adhered to the old j that such facts as the abandon- 
 ment of monastic vows and the marriage of monks and nuns were 
 regarded with a moral loathing of which it is now hard to form a concep- 
 tion. Again, in a certain way, the Reformation inherited the sins of the 
 preceding age. It arose in part out of the dissolution of morals in which 
 mediaeval Christianity had ended, and with which it had, more or less 
 successfully, to cope. May not the worst that can be truly said of it 
 be, that it had to deal with a corrupt generation, and left it little better 
 than it found it ? The monasteries were full of monks and nuns, with- 
 out vocation, who embraced Protestantism for the sake of the liberty 
 which it offered them, and were afterwards its disgrace. Something, 
 too, in the case of such men as Luther and Melancthon, we may put 
 down to a kind of " divine despair," the disappointment which comes 
 of a high ideal confronted with ordinary facts of life. Still, when all 
 these allowances have been made, I am afraid that we must admit that, 
 whatever its after effects (and certainly no grave moral charges can be 
 justly made against English and Scottish Puritanism), the Eeformation 
 did not at first carry with it much cleansing force of moral enthusiasm. 
 The question is only indirectly connected with my main subject ; but 
 it will require much more careful treatment at the hands of any future 
 historian of the Eeformation than it has yet received. 
 
Lecture V. 
 
 THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 REASON AND LIBERTY. 
 
 It is now, after the lapse of four centuries, possible 
 to state with something like accuracy the nature of that 
 movement of the human mind which began with the 
 Eevival of Letters, and has gone on with accelerating 
 rapidity to the present moment. It has been, in the first 
 place, an effort to bring both traditional and new know- 
 ledge to the test of reason, rejecting as untrue whatever 
 will not stand it, and building up all that it approves 
 into a compact system of fact and inference ; in the 
 second, a slow struggle towards a state of society in 
 which every man is permitted to think and speak as he 
 will, without incurring legal penalty or social disability. 
 I use the word reason here, in its largest sense, as denot- 
 ing the faculties of the human mind in their collective^ 
 application to all problems of science and of life, and 
 without wishing to imply that methods of inquiry are 
 absolutely the same in all branches of knowledge. There 
 are degrees of certainty in truth; and the severe pro- 
 cedure of mathematics is not applicable to history, to 
 morals, to religion. But the period of which I have 
 
 l2 
 
148 Y. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 spoken has been marked throughout by the development 
 of the scientific method. Men have learned the folly 
 of making large assumptions, and then trying to force 
 facts into agreement with them : it is an accepted prin- 
 ciple that the collection, the comparison, the classifica- 
 tion of facts must precede and justify generalization. 
 Every science in turn has abandoned the principle of 
 authority, and now expects belief only for what it can 
 prove. And liberty of thought, speech and life, is the 
 practical corollary of the scientific method. Nothing can 
 be less logical than to subject everything to inquiry and 
 yet to annex penalty to the result. First, toleration 
 next, equality before the law last of all, social equality 
 are stages of progress in the art of life necessarily in- 
 volved in the development of the scientific spirit. The 
 final consummation will be reached when all belief rests 
 upon adequate evidence, and none affects a man's, rela- 
 tions to his neighbours. 
 
 Perhaps it is only of late years that the scientific 
 method has become sufficiently self-conscious to be thus 
 defined. It certainly was very far from being so in the 
 first half of the sixteenth century. Then, a greater force 
 than they knew was urging men on to issues which they 
 could not foresee. We shall hear presently that Luther 
 speaks of human reason in the most disrespectful terms ; 
 and that the sins of the Eeformers against religious tole- 
 ration were only less heinous than those of their Catholic 
 dversaries. Yet the Eeformation was, however uncon- 
 sciously, both the first great triumph of the scientific 
 \spirit and a very effectual assertion of human liberty. 
 It was brought about by the application of certain keen 
 and independent minds to the study of theology : the 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 149 
 
 Reformers, at the very moment that they were denounc- 
 ing reason and proclaiming their unconditional submis- 
 sion to Scripture, were, in a very true sense, rationalists 
 without knowing it. They had broken away from tra- 
 dition, the schoolmen, the Church, and, with an audacity 
 the extent of which we are now hardly able to realize, 
 had taken their religious fate into their own hands. Nor 
 does the fact that in their intellectual career they stopped 
 short at a certain point, that they failed to draw what 
 seem to us plain inferences from plain facts, or to follow 
 out their principles to their legitimate issue, at all mili- 
 tate against this view. How can the substitution of 
 Calvin's Institution for Aquinas' Summa be otherwise 
 described than as the consequence of a rational revolt ? 
 So, too, the Reformation undeniably made for liberty. 
 It broke the overwhelming force of a Church that would 
 allow no difference with itself. Even though the new 
 churches very imperfectly understood the principles and 
 the practice of religious liberty, it was a step in advance 
 to have substituted three intolerant communions for one. 
 In spite of persecutions, exclusions, disabilities, men 
 breathed the intellectual air more freely. The sects 
 which the Reformation could not put down, proved how 
 real had been its liberating power. 
 
 The rationalism of the Renaissance on the field of 
 theology cannot be better exhibited than by returning 
 for a moment to Erasmus, its characteristic representative 
 in Germany. Luther and Melancthon looked upon him 
 as a doubter, a scoifer, an Epicurus, a Lucian. His 
 reputation among devout Catholic theologians was not 
 much better. His fertile pen was constantly employed 
 in defending a position which adversaries on opposite 
 
150 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 sides agreed in thinking quite untenable. But the editor 
 of so many Fathers, the scholar who made the first attempt 
 to form a critical text of the New Testament, could not 
 possibly accept many of the conclusions to which orthodox 
 Catholics and orthodox Protestants alike bound them- 
 selves. His " Annotations on the New Testament," and 
 the defences of them which various opponents afterwards 
 drew from him, are full of sound observations, which 
 often anticipate the results of modern criticism. His 
 omission from the New Testament of 1516 of the verses 
 1 John v. 7, known as the Three Heavenly Witnesses, 
 and his subsequent insertion of them in his third edition, 
 when a Greek manuscript containing the words had been 
 brought under his notice, form a well-known episode in 
 the history of the Biblical text. 1 He gives the textual 
 evidence against the story of the. woman taken in adul- 
 tery quite fairly, remarking that it was absent from most 
 Greek manuscripts. At the same time he retains it in 
 the text as found in one, which he had himself seen, 
 and as being universally received. 2 He enters largely 
 into the discussion as to the right way of punctuating 
 Eomans ix. 5, alleging that in any case the text is not 
 an effectual refutation of Arianism. 3 He admits lapses 
 of memory and failures of judgment in the apostles : 
 Christ alone is called the Truth, and is wholly free 
 
 1 His note on the passage (Opp. VI. 1080 D) is, however, couched 
 in terms which show how little he was convinced. " Veruntamen, ne 
 quid dissimulem, repertus est apud Anglos Grsecus codex unus, in quo 
 habetur quod in vulgatis deest. .... Ex hoc igitur codice Britannico 
 reposuimus. quod in nostris dicebatur deesse, ne cui sit ansa calum- 
 niandi. Tametsi suspicor codicem ilium ad nostros esse correctum." 
 
 2 Note to John viii. 1 : Opp. VI. 373 E. 
 
 8 Note to Romans ix. 5 : Opp. VI. 610 B. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 151 
 
 from error. 1 He thinks that the Gospel of Mark is an 
 abridgment of that of Matthew, 2 and calls attention to 
 the fact that Luke is not an eye-witness of the things 
 that he relates. 3 He repeats the opinion of Jerome, that 
 Clement of Eome was very likely the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews: 4 in his own cautious way he 
 casts doubt on the Johannine authorship of the Apoca- 
 lypse, going so far as to say that he could easily believe 
 that the heretic Cerinthus had written the book as a 
 means of spreading his poison through the world. 5 Nor 
 is he less hardy in regard to doctrine. Accused of 
 unsoundness on the subject of the Trinity, he adduces 
 eighty passages from his writings in which he had ex- 
 pressed himself in the true orthodox way ; 6 but not the 
 less he points out how very seldom Christ is called God 
 in the New Testament, 7 and declares that the Holy Ghost 
 is never so denominated. 8 In his dialogue, " The Ship- 
 wreck,' ? he does not scruple to treat the Virgin as the 
 successor of Venus, once the peculiar goddess of unhappy 
 mariners. 9 He was not too orthodox as to the Sacra- 
 ments. In regard to Baptism, he made a distinction, 
 
 1 Note to Matthew ii. 7 : Opp. VI. 13E. 
 
 2 Note to Mark i. 1 : Opp. VI. 151 E. Luke i. 2 : Opp. VI. 217 C. 
 
 8 Note to Luke i. 4, 5 : Opp. VI. 218 D. 
 
 4 Note to Hebrews xiii. 18 : Opp. VI. 1023, 1024. 
 
 5 Note to Apoe. sub fine : Opp. VI. 1124 F. It is only fair to say 
 that Erasmus adds: "At rursum mihi non potest persuaderi Deum 
 passurum fuisse, ut Diaboli techna tot seculis irapune deluderet popu- 
 lum Christianum." 
 
 6 Ad versus Monachos quosdam Hispanos : Opp. IX. 1023 et seq. 
 
 7 Ibid.: Opp. IX. 1040 B. 8 Ibid.: Opp. IX. 1050 D. 
 
 9 Colloquia: Opp. I. 713 B. 
 
152 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 which is certainly inconsistent with Catholic doctrine, 
 "between those who receive the sacrament without its 
 accompanying grace, and the true Christians who answer 
 to it with newness of life. 1 If it were not for the general 
 opinion of the Church, he says that he should adopt 
 (Ecolampadius' opinion as to the Lord's Supper ; 2 while 
 Melancthon boldly declares that the whole Eucharistic 
 strife took its origin from Erasmus. 3 Upon Eternal 
 Punishment he was still more hopelessly rationalistic. 
 " There is no other flame," he said, " in which the sinner 
 is plagued, and no other punishment of hell, than the 
 perpetual anguish of mind which accompanies habitual 
 sin." These statements, which might be made much 
 more numerous, may suffice to show that the Eenaissance, 
 in the hands of serious men, was prepared to bring 
 Scripture and the Creeds to the test of sound reason, and 
 that, but for the action of other and opposing forces, 
 many of the questions which we are apt to think exclu- 
 sively characteristic of our own age, might have taken 
 shape and received at least a tentative answer three cen- 
 turies ago. 
 
 At first it seemed as if Luther might be about to apply, 
 with a more fiery earnestness and a deeper dogmatic 
 
 1 Adversus Monachos quosdam Hispanos : Opp. IX. 1061 A. 
 
 2 Ep. to Pirkheimer : Opp. III. Ep. 723, p. 941 A. 
 
 3 Letter of Melancthon to Camerarius : Corp. Kef. I. 1083. Conf. 
 letter to Aquila : ibid. IV. 970. 
 
 4 Enchiridion : Opp. V. 56 C. " Nee alia est flamma, in qua cruciafcur 
 dives ille comessator evangelicus. Nee alia supplicia inferorum, de quibus 
 multa scripsere Poetse, quam perpetua mentis anxietas, quae peccandi 
 consuetudinem comitatur. Tollat igitur qui velit futuri seculi tarn 
 diversa prosmia : habet annexum sibi virtus propter quod abunde debeat 
 expeti : habet adjunctum peccatum, cujus causa debeat horreri." 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 153 
 
 purpose, the method of Erasmus to theology. His intel- 
 lectual history, from his first attack upon indulgences to 
 the consummation of his revolt against Eome at the Diet 
 of Worms, is one of gradually rising discord between his 
 own mind and accepted opinions. Had I time, I might 
 enumerate its stages and trace its method, showing how 
 he was forced, as it were against his will, to abandon 
 Popes, schoolmen, tradition, fathers, councils, until at 
 last he entrenched himself behind the inexpugnable 
 authority of Scripture. And he knew both what he was 
 doing and on what principle he did it. When at the 
 supreme moment of his life he was asked, in the presence 
 of the Emperor and the assembled States, whether he 
 would retract what he had written, he replied that he 
 could not do so unless he was refuted by appeal to Scrip- 
 ture or by cogent reasons. 1 A few days later, before a 
 Commission presided over by the Elector Archbishop of 
 Trier, he made the same reply in the same terms to the 
 Margrave Joachim of Brandenburg. It is impossible 
 to doubt that he here assigns to reason an independent 
 position by the side of Scripture : the words will bear no 
 other interpretation : while the repetition of them, after 
 some days had passed, forbids us to suppose that they 
 had been lightly uttered. But I know of no later word 
 of Luther's that can be fairly quoted in the same sense. 
 
 1 Sleidan's phrase is (p. 37b), "Quod nisi Scripturae sacra? testimo- 
 niis vel evidenti ratione convictus fuero." The second passage (p. 39 a) 
 is even a little more emphatic : " Turn Brandeburgicus, Nuni hoc, inquit, 
 vis, te non cessurum nisi convictnm sacra scriptura? Plane, inquit 
 Lutherus, aut evidentissimis rationibus." The German original seems 
 to have been, " oder durch helle Griinde." Sleidani De Statu Religionis 
 et Keipublica3 Carolo Quinto Cajsare, Commentarii. 
 
154 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 From Worms he passed to his Patmos on the Wartburg, 
 whence he emerged only to quell the tumult which the 
 so-called Prophets of Zwickau had raised at Wittenberg. 
 And this was the beginning of reaction. First Carlstadt, 
 who had caught the infection of independent thought 
 from the men of Zwickau, seceded from the main body 
 of the Eeformers; next Thomas Miinzer fanned that 
 flame of social discontent which kindled the widespread 
 conflagration of the Peasants' War; then the various 
 forms of free thought and moral revolt which are all 
 comprised in the one word Anabaptism began to perplex 
 and discredit the Eeformation. All these things were, 
 in Luther's view, only so many manifestations of pre- 
 sumptuous human reason intruding itself into the region 
 of faith : it was reason that denied the necessity of bap- 
 tism ; it was reason that would not accept, in their plain 
 literal meaning, the words, "This is my body;" and 
 against reason, therefore, he set himself, with a hardness 
 and a bitterness which grew harder and more bitter to 
 the day of his death. 
 
 It is possible, I know, to quote passages from Luther's 
 works which at first sight do not seem to agree with this 
 account of his position. But on further examination they 
 will all be found so limited by the context as really to 
 fall in with it. For instance, he writes in 1522 i 1 " What 
 then is contrary to reason is certainly much more con- 
 trary to God. For how should not that be against divine 
 truth which is against reason and human truth ?" But 
 then, only a few lines before, he had said that the monas- 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XIX. 1940 : Von den Gelubden der Monche 
 und Nonnen, 246. Conf. Auslegung des Propheten Jona, 43, 44, 
 etseq.: ibid. VI. 2618, 2619. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 155 
 
 tic vows of which he is speaking were "contrary to 
 natural reason, that is, to the dark and gross light of 
 nature. For although," he goes on, "the same can 
 neither understand nor of itself attain to the light and 
 the works of God, so that in affirmativis its judgment is 
 quite gross and uncertain, yet in negativis, that is, in 
 what a thing is not, its judgment and understanding are 
 certain. For reason does not comprehend what God is ; 
 yet it comprehends in the most certain way what God is 
 not." So in certain articles of disputation, of the date of 
 1536, he says i 1 " It is admitted that reason is the chief 
 of all things, and among all that belongs to this life the 
 best, yea, a something divine." She is the inventress and 
 queen of all arts, of all wisdom, power, virtue, honour, 
 which men possess in this life : that which distinguishes 
 man from all other creatures : a sun, and as it were a god, 
 which is set for the ruling of these things in this life. 
 But, again, he proceeds to say that reason knows her 
 own majesty and excellence not of herself, but only from 
 Scripture, and that the moment she sets herself against 
 Scripture her ignorance is manifest. In 1544, he calls 
 reason a very great and priceless gift of God, yet goes 
 on to qualify it as a light that is only darkness ; 2 while 
 in 1546, the last year of his life, he acknowledges it to 
 be a light, and a beautiful light too, yet which cannot 
 find the way out of sin and death into righteousness and 
 life, but abideth in darkness. 3 So that, even taken alone, 
 the passages in which Luther is supposed to sound the 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XIX. 1777 et seq. 
 
 2 Ibid. VI. 181, 182 : Kurze Auslegung iiber den Propheten Jesaiam, 
 51, 52. 
 
 3 Ibid. IX. 1382: on Psalm cxix. 105. 
 
156 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 praises of human reason would justify the assertion that 
 he assigned to it only a narrow place and a low function 
 in relation to the highest subjects of thought. He allows 
 it none but a negative efficacy: he strictly limits its 
 action to the things of this life. But there are other 
 passages again in which, especially when angered by 
 rationalistic objections to the doctrines which were the 
 foundation of his system, he vituperates it with all the 
 energy of which he is capable. "The more subtle and 
 acute is reason, without knowledge of divine grace," he 
 says in :nis Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians, 1 
 "the more poisonous a beast, with many dragons' heads, 
 is it, against God and all His works ;" while a few lines 
 further on he calls it "an ugly Devil's bride" and 
 " God's bitterest enemy." " There is a speculative theo- 
 logy," he is reported to have said in his Table-talk, 2 
 "which men regulate according to reason and their own 
 speculations of things. Such a speculative theology be- 
 longs to the Devil in hell." But it was in a sermon of 
 the date of 1546, 3 the last he ever preached at Wittenberg, 
 that Luther, now upon the verge of the grave, gives full 
 vent, in language that is too gross to be quoted, to his 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, VIII. 2048, 152. 2 Tischreden, I. 9. 
 
 3 Predigt uber die Epistel am andern Sonntage nach Epiphania : 
 Werke, ed. Walch, XII. 1521. One or two extracts may suffice. 
 " Wucherey, Saiiferey, Ehebruch, Mord, Todtschlag, &c, die kann man 
 merken, und verstehet auch die Welt, dass sie Siinde seyn : aber des 
 Teufels Braut, Eatio, die scheme Metze, fahret herein, und will klug seyn, 
 und was sie saget, meinet sie, es sey der Heilige Geist ; wer -will da helfen ? 
 Weder Jurist, Medicus, noch Konig, oder Kayser. Denn est ist die 
 hbchste Hure die der Teufel hat" (p. 1530). Further on, he addresses 
 Eeason, " Hbrest du es, du schabichte, aussatzige Hure, du heilige Ver- 
 nunft?" (p. 1533); and again, "Hore auf, du verfluchte Hure" (p. 1537). 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 157 
 
 hatred and contempt of reason in the domain of theology. 
 It seems now as if the very utterance of the word were 
 enough to throw wide open the flood-gates of his abuse. 
 
 At the same time, nothing can well be more marked 
 than the inconsistency between Luther's theory and his 
 practice in this matter, especially in regard to Biblical 
 criticism. It is quite true that he had little or no con- 
 ception of Biblical criticism as a science, and was very 
 far indeed from working on the lines which Erasmus had 
 begun to lay down. But he formed independent judg- 
 ments as to both the authorship and the contents of Bib- 
 lical books which ate not easy to reconcile with that 
 unconditional submission to the authority of Scripture 
 which he exacted of others. And these judgments he 
 often expressed in very trenchant phrase. I have already, 
 in my last Lecture, quoted passages in which he mea- 
 sures the worth of the various books of the New Testa- 
 ment by the prominence which they give to his peculiar 
 conception of the gospel : strongly preferring the Fourth 
 to the Synoptical Gospels : elevating the Epistle to the 
 Eomans to the highest, depressing the Epistle of James 
 to the lowest place. For this he might plead the prin- 
 ciple of the analogia fidei, although it must be confessed 
 that his application of it was not only uncompromising, 
 but rude. But he looked at the Scriptures with an indi- 
 vidual eye, and was not restrained by any superstitious 
 reverence from reporting what he thought he saw. He 
 asked, what it mattered even if Moses were not the 
 author of Genesis ? x He saw the essential superiority of 
 the Books of Kings over those of Chronicles as an historical 
 
 1 Tischreden, T. 28. 
 
158 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 record, and did not hesitate to pronounce the former the 
 more credible. He discerned the dramatic character of 
 the Book of Job, and compared its structure to that of 
 the Comedies of Terence. 1 The Book of Ecclesiastes, 
 he thought, was not the production of Solomon, but of 
 Sirach, and belonged to the time of the Maccabees. 2 He 
 wished that the Second Book of Maccabees and that of 
 Esther did not exist, partly for their too Jewish tendency, 
 partly because they contain much heathen folly. 3 He 
 points out that the prophecies of Jeremiah, as we have 
 them, are not in chronological order, and hence infers 
 that they were made into a book, not by the prophet 
 himself, but by a compiler. 4 The story of Jonah he 
 stigmatizes in the strongest terms as absolutely incre- 
 dible, "more lying and more absurd than any fable of 
 the poets ; and if it did not stand in the Bible, I should 
 laugh at it as a lie." 5 He declares the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews to be the work neither of Paul nor of any other 
 apostle, and rightly appeals to chap. ii. 3 to prove that 
 the author must have belonged to another generation 
 than the apostolic. "Who wrote it," he says, "is un- 
 known, but also it does not matter." 6 He did worse 
 than call the Epistle of James a letter of straw : he did 
 not believe it to be the production of an apostle at all, 7 
 and would not admit that it was possible to reconcile its 
 doctrine with that of Paul. 
 
 1 Tischreden, IV. 405, 406. 2 Ibid. IV. 400. 3 Ibid. IV. 403. 
 
 4 Werke, ed. Walch, XIV. 50 : Vorreden zu der Deutschen Bibel- 
 iibersetzung, Jeremiah. 
 
 5 Tischreden, IV. 418. 
 
 6 Werke, ed. Walch, XIV. 1 46, 1 47: Vorrede auf dieEp. an die Ebraer. 
 
 7 Ibid. XIV. 148 : Vorrede auf die Epp. St. Jacobi und St. Juda. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 159 
 
 "Many have laboured and sweated over the Epistle of St. 
 James to reconcile it with St. Paul. As also Philip Melancthon 
 has somewhat treated of the matter in his Apologia, but not 
 earnestly: for that faith justifies and faith does not justify are 
 clean contrary the one to the other. Whoso can make them 
 accord, upon his head will I set my doctor's cap, and allow 
 myself to be reproved for a fool." 1 
 
 The Epistle of Jude he clearly saw to be an extract 
 from or a copy of 2 Peter, and to be post -apostolic. 2 
 Last of all, the figurative character of the Apocalypse 
 offended him : he found nothing like it in any prophet 
 either in the Old or the New Testament, and in a Preface, 
 which was afterwards suppressed, he declared that he 
 held it as neither prophetic nor apostolic. 3 
 
 Nor did he apply this freedom of treatment only to 
 questions of authenticity or genuineness. He criticised 
 the matter as well as the form of Scripture. He dispa- 
 raged, for instance, the predictive function of prophecy, 
 appealing for support of his view to the authority of 
 Paul. 4 Such prophecy is in the New Testament unne- 
 cessary, "for it neither teaches nor augments Christian 
 faith. Wherefore it is almost one of the least gifts of 
 God, and sometimes even comes from the Devil." 5 He 
 had no great opinion of the efficacy of miracles in pro- 
 ducing conviction. WTiat, he asked, 6 without faith, is 
 the use of all miracles ? What good to the Jews were 
 the miracles of Christ and his apostles ? He did not 
 
 1 Tischreden, IV. 399. 2 Werke, ed. Walch, XIV. 150. 
 
 3 Ibid. XIV., Preface, p. 13. 4 Romans xii. 6, 7. 
 
 5 Werke, ed. Walch, XII. 451, 452 : Auslegung der Ep. am andern 
 Sonntage nach Epiphania. 
 
 6 Ibid. X. 2308 : Vom Gebet des Herrn. 
 
160 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 care to be able to work miracles himself ; for signs, lie 
 thought, would not move them who did not of themselves 
 turn to that Word against which the whole world can 
 object nothing. 1 Besides, as he said over and over again, 
 miracles may deceive : the Devil can and does work 
 wonders when he chooses. 2 If a saint, after his death, 
 works miracles at his tomb, who knows that God is not 
 thereby tempting us ? 3 He compares the physical with 
 the moral miracles of Christ, greatly to the disadvantage 
 of the former, which he calls " trifling and almost foolish 
 wonders in comparison with the right lofty miracles which 
 Christ performs in Christendom, without intermission, 
 by his divine almighty power." 4 He recognized the 
 existence of discrepancies in Scripture, but thought them 
 of little consequence if the main facts of faith were fully 
 grasped. 5 
 
 "There are and remain questions which I will not resolve: 
 nor are they of any great matter, except that there are many 
 people who are so sharp and subtle, and bring up all manner of 
 
 questions whereof they will have exact speech and answer 
 
 When a contradiction occurs in Holy Scripture, and it cannot be 
 reconciled, so let it go." 
 
 He takes a strong view on the contention of Paul 
 with Peter, 6 being very unwilling to le^the latter off as 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, IX. 574 : Lection wider die Rottengeister. 
 
 2 Ibid. X. 363 : An den Christlichen Adel. 
 
 3 Ibid. XY. 2787 : Wider den neuen Abgott und alten Teufel der 
 zu Meissen soil erhaben werden. 
 
 4 Ibid. XI. 1339 : Kirchen Postill. Am Tage der Himmelfahrt 
 Christi. 
 
 5 Ibid. VIL 1730, 1731 : Auslegung des ersten und andern Capitels 
 Johannis. 
 
 6 Ibid. VIII. 1774 : Erklarung der Ep. an die Galater. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 161 
 
 easily as Jerome does : on the contrary, he declares the 
 apostle not only to have made a mistake, but to have 
 sinned grossly and grievously. "Foolish" is a word 
 which he applies both to James 1 and to Moses : 2 to the 
 former, certainly in sad earnest ; to the latter, usually, if 
 not always, with a tacit reference to that " foolishness of 
 God which is wiser than men," and in not dishonourable 
 contrast to human reason. 
 
 In one sense, the fact that the Bible was a fresh phe- 
 nomenon in Luther's eyes helped him to see it as it was ; 
 nor did his perception of its literary peculiarities at all 
 impair his sense of its wonderful spiritual worth and 
 efficacy. It was an after-thought of less* original and 
 courageous minds to make no distinction between different 
 parts of the Bible, to regard it all with the same dull and 
 superstitious reverence, and to force the most reluctant 
 facts into the mould of this belief. But if it was a neces- 
 sity of Luther's nature and intellectual position thus to 
 look at Scripture with rationalistic eyes, his whole theory 
 of the relation of faith to reason shows that if he were 
 not a rationalist but indeed the logical opposite of one 
 it was in virtue of a rigorous process of self-suppression. 
 With him, reason and faith were mortal enemies. He 
 almost seems to glory in the " credo quia impossibile." He 
 does not shrink from stating in the most uncompromising 
 way that what Scripture imposes upon us is precisely 
 what reason would bid us reject. 
 
 " All the articles of our Christian faith," he says in his Expo- 
 sition of the Epistle to the Galatians, 3 " which God has revealed 
 to us in His Word, are in presence of reason sheerly impossible, 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, I. 2303 : Auslegung des ersten Buch Mosis. 
 
 2 Ibid. III. 548, 700, 1137. 3 Ibid. VIII. 2042. 
 
 M 
 
162 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 
 
 absurd, false. What, thinks that cunning little fool, can be more 
 absurd and impossible than that Christ should give us in the 
 Supper his body and his blood to eat and to drink ? Item, that 
 Baptism should be a bath of regeneration and renewal of the 
 Holy Ghost ? That the dead should rise again at the last day ? 
 That Christ the Son of God should be conceived and borne in 
 the womb of the Virgin Mary, should become man, suffer, die a 
 shameful death upon the cross, sit at the right hand of the Father, 
 and have all power and might in heaven and on earth ?" 
 
 He repeats this thought in a variety of forms. Speak- 
 ing of the Trinity, he says i 1 
 
 "It is only Christians who believe what reason cunningly 
 
 concludes to be such foolish things For reason will never 
 
 be able to reconcile itself to this, that three should be one, and 
 one three; that God should be man; that we, when we are 
 dipped in the font, are cleansed from our sins by the blood of 
 Christ ; that in bread we eat the body of Christ, in wine drink 
 his blood, and thus receive forgiveness of sins. Such articles of 
 faith are held by the worldly wise to be pure foolishness. But 
 whoso believes shall be blessed." 
 
 He describes Paul's teaching of the derivation of human 
 sin from Adam as "a laughable doctrine," 2 and asks 
 what can be more ridiculous than that the fact that Adam 
 took a bite of an apple should have the tremendous result 
 of putting all men, to the very end of the world, into the 
 power of death ? 
 
 " For he had committed," he goes on to say, " neither murder, 
 nor adultery ; he had robbed no one, nor blasphemed God, nor 
 committed any of the horrible sins of which the world is now 
 full ; but only eaten the apple, over-persuaded and deceived by 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XIII. 1528: Die dritte Predigt am Tage der 
 Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit. 
 
 2 Ibid. VIII. 1240, 1241 : Auslegung 1 Cor. xv. 136. 
 
REASON AN") LIBERTY. 163 
 
 the Devil, through the woman. Must we then, says reason, 
 make this single apple of so much account that the whole world 
 must pay for it, and so many fine, excellent, wise folk, yea, God's 
 Son himself, with all Prophets, Fathers and Saints, must die ?" 
 
 To all this, and much more of the same kind, there is 
 but one answer ; let me give it in Luther's own vigorous 
 words i 1 
 
 " It is a quality of faith that it wrings the neck of reason and 
 strangles the beast, which else the whole world, with all crea- 
 tures, could not strangle. But how ? It holds to God's Word : 
 lets it be right and true, no matter how foolish and impossible it 
 sounds. So did Abraham take his reason captive and slay it, 
 inasmuch as he believed God's Word, wherein was promised him 
 that from his unfruitful and as it were dead wife, Sarah, God 
 
 would give him seed There is no doubt faith and reason 
 
 mightily fell out in Abraham's heart about this matter, yet at 
 last did faith get the better, and overcame and strangled reason, 
 that all-cruellest and most fatal enemy of God. So, too, do all 
 other faithful men who enter with Abraham the gloom and 
 
 hidden darkness of faith : they strangle reason, and thereby 
 
 offer to God the all-acceptablest sacrifice and service that can 
 ever be brought to Him." 
 
 But to a mind of the force and vivacity of Luther's 
 a mind, too, which had measured its individual strength 
 against the prescriptions of centuries, and held its own 
 against a world in arms the strangling of reason was 
 not an act to be lightly committed, or to be regarded 
 afterwards without at least passing pangs of remorse. 
 Under certain mythological forms, with which no Chris- 
 tianity in the sixteenth century could dispense, we dis- 
 cern the fact of a perpetual struggle going on in Luther's 
 mind. When his natural reason rebelled against the 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, VIII. 2043 : Erklarung der Ep. an die Galater. 
 
 m2 
 
164 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 violence which orthodox faith offered to it, the revolt 
 was ascribed to the direct agency of the Devil, and was 
 contended against as a suggestion from hell. And, as 
 we might infer from the vivid way in which he puts the 
 contrast between reason and the fundamental articles of 
 dogmatic Christianity, Luther felt that his only safety 
 was in clinging to the clear declarations of Scripture. If 
 he lost that hold, he was lost indeed. 
 
 " Experience," he says, 1 " has taught me this only too often : 
 when the Devil attacks me outside the Scripture, and I begin to 
 wander with my own thoughts, and even to flutter up towards 
 heaven, then he brings me to this, that I know not either where 
 God is or I myself am/' 
 
 Again : 2 
 
 " I am myself also a doctor, and have read the Scripture ; yet 
 it comes upon me daily, that if I do not stand straight in my 
 armour, and therewith be well equipped, such thoughts attack 
 me as would make me lose Christ and the gospel : and I must 
 therefore always hold to the Scriptures, that I may continue to 
 stand." 
 
 Once more : 3 
 
 " All the articles of the Creed are very difficult and high, so 
 that no man can comprehend them without the grace and gift of 
 the Holy Spirit. I speak and witness thereof as one who has had 
 no little experience : wilt thou also gain only a little experience, 
 take any article of the Creed which thou wilt the incarnation 
 of Christ, the resurrection so wilt thou keep hold of none if 
 thou graspest it with reason. It has indeed happened to myself 
 that when I have let the Word go, I have lost God and Christ 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, VIII. 571 : Auslegung des xiv. xv. and xvi. 
 Capitels Johannis. 
 
 2 Ibid. VIII. 1181 : Auslegung 1 Cor. xv. 
 
 3 Ibid. XII, 2070 : Predigt iiber das Evangelium am Ostermontage. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 165 
 
 and all together There is no easier way to lose all articles 
 
 of the faith than to think of them apart from Scripture." 
 
 And in 1524 he confesses, in a very remarkable pas- 
 sage too long to quote, 1 that if, five years before, Dr. 
 Carlstadt or any one else could have convinced him that 
 the Eucharist was nothing but bread and wine, he would 
 have done him the greatest service. He had suffered the 
 severest temptation in regard to this matter : even now 
 the old Adam in him was inclined to the rationalistic 
 view : and what a blow could he not have struck against 
 the Papacy with the simpler doctrine ! 
 
 The Devil plays a large part in Luther's life. His 
 faith in Satanic temptation and possession was not only 
 very real and deep, but of a childish simplicity and 
 credulity. Side by side with passages in his published 
 works and familiar letters where he clothes his spiritual 
 throes and temptations with this mythological form, 
 should be placed the chapter in the Table-talk which 
 shows that his belief in the perpetual and all-pervading 
 energy of Satan was a precise counterpart to his faith 
 in the omnipresent activity of God. But Luther's use 
 of this kind of language at once misleads us as to 
 facts of his life, and tends to hide their real meaning. 
 When we look into it minutely, his personal acquaint- 
 ance with the Devil, if I may use such a phrase, 
 turns out to have been very slight. He heard noises in 
 his solitary cell in the Wartburg 2 which he could not 
 explain, and an unaccountable scratching behind the 
 stove in his room at Wittenberg. 3 Twice he saw the 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XV. 2448 : Warnungsschreiben an alle Christen 
 zn Strassburg, &c. 
 
 2 Tischreden, III. 37. 3 Ibid. III. 93. 
 
166 Y. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 Evil One in the shape of a great hound. 1 He ascribed to 
 Satanic agency a vision of Christ with the five wounds. 2 
 The fact is, that to whatever excesses of credulity his 
 theories of diabolic activity might push him, his intellect 
 was too robust, his common sense too sound, to make 
 him desire or put faith in visions and apparations. At 
 the same time, he was subject all his life to Anfecht- 
 ungen, conflicts, temptations, tribulations, in which the 
 Devil was a chief actor. The years from 1527 to 1530 
 were particularly disturbed in this way. Again and 
 again we find the Eeformer, usually so full of a cou- 
 rageous cheerfulness, and a perennial spring of comfort 
 to other tried and tempted souls, sunk in the depths of 
 despondency, pitifully asking for the prayers of his 
 friends, and only painfully and slowly struggling towards 
 a return of light and peace. Nor are these the throes 
 and agonies which, on a system such as his, naturally 
 precede conversion ; or even the after-pains which come 
 to remind the soul of what it has gone through, and to 
 suggest circumspection. They were struggles in which 
 the whole peace of his life was at stake : storms which 
 shook the very foundations of his faith. I do not believe 
 that we can say we understand Luther so long as these 
 dark and bitter hours remain unexplained. 
 
 Of one of the worst of these Anfechtungen, which 
 occurred in July 1527, we have an elaborate account by 
 Bugenhagen and Justus Jonas, who were called in to 
 help. 3 But it tells us nothing except the visible symp- 
 
 1 Myconius : Historia Eeformationis, p. 42. 
 
 2 Tischreden, I. 400. 
 
 3 Keil : D. Martin Luther's merkwiirdige Lebensumstande, II. 187. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 167 
 
 toms of the case. The word Satan stands in place of an 
 explanation. It is only when we turn to Luther's own 
 letters about this period, that a gleam of light begins to 
 break in upon us. At the time of his seclusion in the 
 Wartburg, he complains in strong terms of temptations 
 of the flesh : but there is nothing of that kind now : the 
 trouble is partly spiritual, partly intellectual. 
 
 "For more than a week," 1 he writes to Melancthon, "I have 
 been tossed about in death and hell: so that, hurt in all my 
 body, I still tremble in every limb. For having almost wholly 
 lost Christ, I was driven about by storms and tempests of despair 
 and blasphemy against God. But God, moved by the prayers of 
 the saints, begins to have pity upon me, and has drawn my soul 
 out of the lower hell." 
 
 Again, a few months afterwards, to Nicholas Haus- 
 mann : 2 
 
 " I truly think that no common devil, but the very prince of 
 the devils, has risen up against me, so great and so equipped in 
 knowledge of the Scriptures is his power against me : so that 
 unless I held to the word of another, my own knowledge of 
 Scripture would not suffice." 
 
 He asks Brenz for the prayers of the church in Halle: 3 
 " for Satan, let loose against me, seeks by his devices to 
 rob me of Christ in secret, since he sees that publicly, 
 and in the confession of my faith, he can snatch nothing 
 from me." He is still in the valley of the shadow when 
 the new year comes. On the 1st of January, 1528, 4 he 
 writes, that with this kind of conflict he had been familiar 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, III. 189. 2 Ibid. III. 222. 
 
 8 Ibid. III. 230. 
 
 4 Ibid. III. 254, to Gerard Viscamp. 
 
168 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 from his youth, but had never thought that it would 
 become so sharp. 
 
 " Christ nevertheless has triumphed so far, though holding me 
 up by ever so little. I commend myself to your prayers, and to 
 those of the brethren. I have saved others, myself I cannot save. 
 Blessed be my Christ, even in the midst of despair, death and 
 blasphemy ; and may he give us to behold one another in his 
 kingdom !" 
 
 I cannot resist the conclusion that the explanation of 
 these things is to be largely found in such passages of 
 Luther's works as I have already quoted and they 
 might be multiplied to almost any extent in which 
 he places faith and reason in vivid and irreconcilable 
 opposition. 1 I do not deny the existence in his tribula- 
 tion of a purely spiritual element: all deeply religious 
 men have their times of darkness and despondency ; nor 
 was Luther likely to escape the common lot. But he 
 has expressed the difficulties of reason in regard to the 
 orthodox creed in terms far too clear and strong to permit 
 us to doubt, not only that he had himself stood in the 
 rationalist's position, but that it was, in a sense, natural 
 to him. The other position was natural too ; for it was 
 that into which he finally settled down ; but after what 
 a struggle ! If a man who has looked at faith and unfaith 
 
 1 It may be worth while in this connection to notice the words used 
 by his contemporary, Hieronymus Weller, in a letter to Wolfgang 
 Heboid, " von den Wundergabe Lutheri," 1561. " Es haben auch seine 
 vielfaltigen und mancherley Anfectungen, Streit und Kampf, ihn oft 
 dahin bewogen, dass er vom Herzen begehret von hinnen zu scheiden, 
 und bey Christo zu seyn, auch oft gesagt, er wollte lieber um Christus 
 willen sein Blut vergiessen denn mit solchen todtlichen Gedanken, des 
 Teufels feurigen und giftigen Pfeilen, geplaget werden." Quoted by 
 Keil, Preface. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 169 
 
 with clear eyes says to himself, I will believe, he may 
 succeed in believing ; but there will be times at which 
 the tension of his will will suddenly relax, and he will 
 find himself at the mercy of the doubts which he thought 
 he had fought down for ever. I take it that the An- 
 fechtungen of 1527 were a turning-point in Luther's 
 life, and therefore in the history of the Eeformation. 
 Up to his return from the "Wartburg in 1522, to allay 
 the disturbances at Wittenberg created by the Prophets 
 of Zwickau, his intellectual history had been one of con- 
 tinual progress. He was not in 1517, the year of the 
 indulgence theses, the finished Protestant champion 
 which some conceive him: then, and long afterwards, 
 he was quickly working his way forward to a completer 
 apprehension of his characteristic principles and a larger 
 sense of their application. But while his mind kept 
 moving in answer to Papal opposition, it crystallized 
 under the influence of division and excess among Ee- 
 formers. First came the Zwickau Prophets, then Carl- 
 stadt claiming to better his instruction. The Peasants' 
 War, with the cruelties committed in its suppression, 
 gravely endangered his work. The Swiss Keformers not 
 only denied his doctrine of the Eucharist, but threatened 
 to draw South Germany away after them. Everywhere 
 Anabaptism was developing into various forms of heresy. 
 In a word, the application of reason to religion was bear- 
 ing its necessary fruits of difference and division : what 
 was there to oppose to the unbroken front of Papal autho- 
 rity, except the uncompromising assertion of the autho- 
 rity of Scripture ? But the adoption of this position was 
 the result, not of any calculation of ecclesiastical expe- 
 diencies on Luther's part, not even of a calm intellectual 
 
170 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 estimate of conflicting evidence, bnt of a terrible struggle 
 in the depths of his fiery soul between two principles, 
 each of which was rooted in his very nature. He saw 
 whither the free working of his own mind would take 
 him, and he dared not make the adventure. He used 
 the weapons of faith to slay reason, lest perchance reason 
 should lure faith to her destruction. But who can tell 
 what might have been the effect upon the Eeformation, 
 and the subsequent development of the intellectual life 
 of Europe, had Luther put himself boldly at the head of 
 the larger and freer thought of his time, instead of using 
 all the force of his genius, all the weight of his authority, 
 to crush it ? 
 
 To turn to the second half of our subject, we find the 
 early documents of the Eeformation full of brilliant 
 declarations of the rights of conscience. It could not 
 well be otherwise. Only by an appeal to those rights 
 could the Eeformers justify their own attitude towards a 
 religious system which, until they attacked it, had com- 
 manded the assent of Europe. To insist upon liberty of 
 thought and speech in matters of religion, apart alike 
 from ecclesiastical censure and civil disability, was no 
 more than a measure of necessary self-defence. We 
 cannot be surprised, therefore, to find Luther, in 1519, 
 distinguishing, in his " Sermon on Excommunication,' ' 
 between inward and outward church communion, and 
 declaring that of the first none can be deprived "by any 
 man, be he Bishop or Pope, yea, not by angels or any 
 creature, but only by God Himself." 1 On the other 
 hand, he defends the rights of conscience as stoutly 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XIX. 1100 : Sermon vom Bann. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 171 
 
 against Kings and Princes. From many passages which 
 illustrate this, I select one or two from his book " On 
 Temporal Authority, and how far -Obedience is due to it," 
 which bears the date of 1523. 
 
 "Worldly rule," he says, 1 "has laws which do not extend further 
 than over body and goods, and what is external upon earth. For 
 over souls God can and will suffer no one to rule, save Himself 
 
 alone." " Beloved, we are not baptized into the name of Kings, 
 
 Princes or Mobs, but into the name of Christ and God only : we 
 are not called after Kings, Princes or Mobs ; we are called Chris- 
 tians. No one can or ought to command the soul, except he who 
 can show it the way to heaven. But that can no man do, but 
 God only. Therefore, in matters which concern the salvation of 
 souls, nothing but God's Word ought to be taught or received." 2 
 
 Again : 3 
 
 " A tribunal, when it pronounces judgment, must and ought 
 to be quite certain, and have everything in a clear light. But 
 the thoughts and mind of man can be open to no one but God ; 
 wherefore it is futile and impossible to command, or by force to 
 compel, any one to believe so, or so. There wants another grip 
 
 for that: force avails nothing." "It is at a man's own risk what 
 
 he believes, and he must see for himself that he believes rightly. 
 For just as little as another can go for me to hell or heaven, can he 
 for me believe or disbelieve : and just as little as he can open or 
 shut heaven or hell for me, can he drive me to belief or unbelief. 
 .... For belief is a free work ; thereto can no man be compelled." 
 
 In the same way Luther had fully grasped the idea 
 that force can produce only an external conformity. 4 
 
 " For the miserable blind people do not see what a quite futile 
 and impossible thing they undertake. For however straitly they 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, X. 452 : Von weltlicher Obrigkeit, wie weit 
 man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sey 1 
 
 2 Ibid. X. 453. 8 Ibid. X. 455. 4 Ibid. X. 456. 
 
172 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 command, however stoutly they rage, they cannot bring people 
 further than to follow them with mouth and hand: the heart 
 they cannot compel, should they even tear at it. For true is the 
 proverb, ' Thoughts are toll-free.' " 
 
 And last of all i 1 
 
 "But thou sayest once more, 'Yea, worldly power cannot 
 compel to belief, but is only an external protection against the 
 people being misled by false doctrine : how else can heretics be 
 kept at bay V Answer : That is the business of Bishops, to whom 
 the office is entrusted, and not of Princes. For heresy can never 
 be kept off by force : another grip is wanted for that : this is 
 another quarrel and conflict than that of the sword. God's Word 
 must contend here : if that avails nothing, temporal power will 
 never settle the matter, though it fill the world with blood. 
 Heresy is a spiritual thing, which no iron can hew down, no fire 
 burn, no water drown." 
 
 Nothing can be clearer or more satisfactory than these 
 declarations, which, it will be observed, cover almost the 
 whole theoretical gronnd of religious liberty. But it is 
 unhappily one thing to claim liberty for oneself, another 
 to accord it to others ; much easier to lay down a general 
 principle than to follow it faithfully into its various prac- 
 tical applications. As we certainly, after the lapse of so 
 many years, have not yet learned either of these lessons 
 thoroughly, we need not wonder that Luther and Me- 
 lancthon repeated them with stammering tongues. Their 
 position was in many respects difficult and painful. They 
 could not confine Protestantism to their own protest. All 
 round about them sprang up a crop of heresies with 
 which they had little or no sympathy, yet for which their 
 Catholic opponents held them responsible. These heresies, 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, X. 461, 462. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 173 
 
 from the opinions of Zwingli on the Eucharist, which 
 were shared by all Switzerland and a large part of South 
 Germany, on the one hand, to the Antitrinitarian views 
 of Denck and Campanus, and the wild excesses of the 
 Miinster Anabaptists, on the other, were in every way a 
 hindrance to their successful maintenance of their own 
 position. They did not permit them to show to Catho- 
 licism a united front ; they embroiled them with Princes 
 naturally jealous of their own authority. I do not wonder 
 that the Eeformers of Wittenberg fell into the trap which 
 lies in wait for all earnestly believing men, in the dis- 
 tinction set up between heresy and blasphemy. Is there 
 not a point at which the expression of misbelief becomes 
 an insult to the majesty of God, and so an offence against 
 laws of man ? And is not all heresy, in proportion as 
 it is bold and outspoken, likely to be interpreted and 
 punished as blasphemy ? Then again, granting that dif- 
 ference of belief is to be tolerated, to what lengths ought 
 toleration to go ? Does it include full right of citizen- 
 ship, with liberty to preach and print ? Or are heretics 
 to be allowed to live side by side with orthodox believers 
 only on condition that they hold their tongues ? Is it in 
 any case right to co-operate with them for political or 
 religious purposes ? Lastly, it is often difficult to draw 
 Luther's theoretical line between temporal and spiritual 
 things, and to decide to which half of human life and 
 therefore to which jurisdiction belong certain opinions, 
 and with them the action in which they necessarily issue. 
 The Peasants' "War was a social and political revolt, but 
 it justified itself upon religious grounds: Anabaptism 
 was a system of theological opinion, which often en- 
 croached upon accepted principles of social life. It is 
 
174 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 easy to see that these things necessarily gave occasion to 
 a series of practical questions, which even yet receive 
 various answer from men who profess an equal allegiance 
 to the principle of religious liberty. 
 
 I have already alluded more than once to Philip of 
 Hesse's well-meaning attempt to bring Lutherans and 
 Zwinglians together, at the moment when the near 
 approach of the Diet of Augsburg made a reconciliation 
 among Protestants in the highest degree expedient. Theo- 
 logically, the Conference of Marburg was a failure: Luther 
 would not consent to modify the Eucharistic doctrine, 
 which was the chief matter in dispute. But it was just 
 as much a failure from the point of view of toleration. 
 When it was plain that no theological agreement could 
 be arrived at, Philip asked the Wittenberg doctors that 
 they would at least recognize the Swiss Eeformers as 
 brothers, a request which Zwingli met with tears in his 
 eyes and outstretched hand. " There were no people on 
 earth," he said, "with whom he would more willingly 
 be at one than with those of Wittenberg." But Luther 
 rudely rejected the offer of friendship : " You are of 
 another spirit," he said, "than ours." 1 Melancthon and 
 Brenz, each in his own way and with different terms of 
 insult, supported the intolerance of their chief. 2 The 
 whole concession to which Luther could be moved he 
 
 1 Brief e, ed. De Wette, Letter to Jacob Probst, IV. 28. 
 
 2 To an earlier letter of Luther's addressed to Agricola, Melancthon 
 added the characteristic postscript : " Valde conteDderunt, ut a nobis 
 fratres nominarentur. Vide eorum stultitiam cum damnent nos, cupiunt 
 tamen a nobis fratres haberi. Nos noluimus eis in hac re assentiri." 
 Ibid. III. 514. For Brenz's account of the transaction, see his letter 
 to Schradinus and the other clergy of Reutlingen. Zuinglii Opp. IV. 
 203. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 175 
 
 himself expressed in the words, "that the Zwinglians, 
 unless they yielded on the Eucharist, might indeed claim 
 their charity, but could not be regarded by them as bre- 
 thren and members of Christ." 1 This grudging friendli- 
 ness the Swiss, greatly to their credit, accepted as far as 
 it went, and a kind of reconciliation was patched up on 
 this narrow and insecure basis. But as soon as the Con- 
 ference of Marburg was over, a meeting of Protestant 
 Princes and Cities was held at Schwabach, soon followed 
 by another at Schmalkalden. At each of these doctrinal 
 articles were drawn up, subscription to which was exacted 
 as a condition of political alliance. "Not even the cost 
 and risk of resisting, peaceably or in arms; the House of 
 Austria and its confederates could be shared by men who 
 were unsound on the Eeal Presence, or who did not see 
 eye to eye with the Wittenberg Eeformers in the matter 
 of predestination. 2 There was no common action at the 
 Diet of Augsburg : in addition to the Confession drawn 
 up and defended by Melancthon, the Swiss Eeformers 
 presented their own ; while a third, known as the Con- 
 fessio Tetrapolitana, was put forward by the four cities, 
 Strasburg, Constanz, Memmingen and Lindau. And 
 when the Diet had come to an end, the policy was deli- 
 berately adopted of narrowing the political basis of Pro- 
 testantism to the ground covered by the Confession ; for 
 the Lutheran States agreed f hat, until the General Council 
 which was to settle everything had met, they would 
 tolerate no other form of it than their own. Under these 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, III. 511, to Gerbellius. 
 
 2 Corp. Ref. II. 386 : Letter of ambassadors of Niirnberg to the 
 Senate. Ranke, III. 182 et seq. 
 
176 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 circumstances, we need not wonder that the only religious 
 toleration provided for by the Convention of Passau was 
 the maimed and ineffectual form expressed in the maxim, 
 cufus regio, ejus religio the subject follows the religion 
 of the State. 
 
 The result of the Peasants' War and its suppression 
 was to throw the Eeformation very much into the hands 
 of the Princes. From a popular it became largely a poli- 
 tical movement. On the one hand, the Princes saw that 
 its effect must be the secularization, to a large extent, of 
 Church property, a process of which they wished to secure 
 the control ; on the other, the Eef ormers, from very dread 
 of being confounded with noisy and seditious heretics, 
 propounded theories of submission to temporal authority 
 which in some cases, as for instance in that of Bucer, 
 assumed the most servile form. This was not inconsistent 
 with the freest speech on Luther's part about and to 
 worldly rulers i 1 his openly expressed contempt of Duke 
 George finds a parallel in the frank, not to say the rough, 
 way in which he constantly offered his advice to his own 
 Prince, the Elector John. But it is important to note in 
 this connection the fact, that the reorganization of the 
 Church, which the Eeformation rendered necessary, was in 
 almost every case undertaken by the State, and conducted 
 on principles laid down by its head, whoever he might 
 
 1 The following passage from Luther's "Schrift vom Weltlicher 
 Obrigkeit," 1523, dedicated to Duke John, is characteristic: "Und 
 sollt wissen, dass von Anbeginn der Welt gar ein seltsam Vogel ist urn 
 einen klugen Fursten : noch viel seltsamer um einen frommen Fiirsten, 
 Sie sind gemeiniglich die grosten Narren oder die argsten Buben auf 
 Erden : darum man sich allzeit bey ihnen des argsten versehen, und 
 wenig Guts von ihnen gewarten muss, sonderlich in gottlichen Sachen, 
 die der Seelen Heil belangen." Werke, ed. Walch, X. 460, conf. p. 464. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 177 
 
 be. We may take as an instance the famous Visitation 
 of the Saxon Churches in 1528, made by Melancthon, 
 with other commissioners, lay and clerical, under instruc- 
 tions given to them by the Elector. It was naturally 
 unavoidable that, in the course of a reorganization the 
 object of which was to Protestantize what had been the 
 Catholic Church of Saxony, offences against the religious 
 liberties of those who still adhered to the old faith should 
 be committed. Ee volutions require and justify revolu- 
 tionary methods. But the Elector's instructions go a 
 good deal beyond this. 1 Not only were priests who 
 would not conform to lose their benefices, but recalci- 
 trant laymen, who after instruction were still obstinate, 
 had a time allowed them within which they were to 
 sell their property and then leave the country. " For 
 al though,' ' said the Elector, "it is not our intention to 
 bind any one to what he is to believe and hold, yet will 
 we, for the prevention of mischievous tumult and other 
 inconveniences, suffer neither sect nor separation in our 
 territory." So the year before this, we find Melancthon 
 writing to the Landgrave of Hesse, 2 asking him to decide 
 controversies among preachers by his own authority, and 
 to put down dissensions by the secular arm. The pretext 
 of danger to the public peace was never wanting when- 
 ever it was desired to crush a nascent sect or to silence 
 an inconvenient opponent. Nor was this a lesson which 
 arbitrary rulers were at all loth to learn from their 
 favourite theologians. 
 
 But the word by which, above all others, the theolo- 
 
 1 Seckcndorf, Bk. ii. Sect. 13, 36. Comp. Kostlin : M. Luther, 
 II. 29. 
 
 2 Corp. Kef. I. 819, Sept. 1526. 
 
 N 
 
178 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 gians justified attack upon the liberty and sometimes 
 the lives of heretics was blasphemy. I shall not attempt 
 to define blasphemy, or even inquire if it have a defi- 
 nition : it is enough to say that it is the word by which 
 the religious opinions of a minority, if sufficiently unpo- 
 pular, have always been designated. And in the intel- 
 lectual tumult to which the Eeformation gave rise, many 
 convictions were expressed which would not square with 
 orthodox Protestantism, whether of the Lutheran or the 
 Zwinglian type. Presently we shall have to look a little 
 more closely into the nature of the religious movements 
 which all went under the generic name of Anabaptism : 
 now we have only to ask, what was the bearing of the 
 four great Eeformers to the men who boldly excluded 
 themselves from the Church as they strove to define it ? 
 Luther was by far the mildest and most tolerant. I 
 think that, stern and violent as he often was, the tender- 
 ness of strength was a part of his character ; and I have 
 given in this Lecture reason enough for believing that 
 he was not without a deep personal sympathy with men 
 who could not bring themselves to stifle reason by the 
 hands of faith. It is true that he writes to the Elector 
 John, 1 begging him to silence a certain Hans Mohr, who 
 was spreading Zwinglian opinions in Coburg ; while, in 
 another place, 2 he lays down as a rule for the treatment 
 of unbelievers in an evangelical state, that if after in- 
 struction they still persist, they are to be made to hold 
 their tongues. But his intolerance chiefly spends itself 
 in violent words. He draws back in horror from inflict- 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, III. 256. 
 
 2 Ibid. III. 498, to J. L. Metzsch. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 179 
 
 ing capital punishment in cases of heresy. He writes, in 
 1528, in reference to Anabaptists : l 
 
 "Yet it is not right, and I think it great pity, that such 
 wretched people should be so miserably slain, burned, cruelly 
 put to death : every one should be allowed to believe what he 
 will. If he believes wrongly, he will have punishment enough 
 in the eternal fire of helL Why should they be tortured in this 
 life too ? provided always that it is a case of mistaken belief 
 only, and that they are not also unruly and oppose themselves 
 to the temporal power. Dear God ! how soon it happens that 
 one goes astray and falls into the Devil's net ! These men should 
 be fought off and withstood with Scripture and God's Word : fire 
 will do very little good." 
 
 "lam slow to adopt the judgment of blood," he says 
 to Link, " even where it is abundantly deserved." Such 
 a precedent would be eagerly caught up and abused by 
 the Papists. "I can in no way," he goes on, " admit 
 that false teachers should be put to death : it is enough 
 that they should be banished." 2 Zwingli, who is in some 
 respects the largest-minded of the Eeformers Zwingli, 
 who speaks of a heaven in which Christians may hope 
 to meet the wise and good of heathen antiquity, had no 
 such scruples. 3 The Anabaptists of Zurich were nume- 
 rous and stiff-necked, poor and untaught men who could 
 not hold their own in debate against the leaders of the 
 Swiss reform. They were not convinced what heretic 
 ever is? by successive disputations, and persisted in 
 both teaching and practising their characteristic doctrine ; 
 till in 1529 their leader, Felix Mantz, was solemnly and 
 
 1 Werke, ed. Walch, XVII. 2644, 2645: Brief an zwei Pfarrherren 
 von der Wiedertaufe. 
 
 2 Briefe, ed. De Wette, III. 347. 
 
 3 Zuinglii Opp. : Fidei Christiana? Expositio, IV. 65. 
 
 n2 
 
180 Y. THE EEFORMATION IN EELATION TO 
 
 judicially drowned for his heresy in the Lake of Zurich, 
 dying with the steadfastness of a true martyr. 1 Two 
 others, Jacob Falck and Heinj Beyman, suffered the same 
 fate not long afterwards, with the same courage and con- 
 stancy. 2 In 1530, 3 Melancthon, writing to his friend 
 Frederick Myconius, expresses his opinion on the proper 
 treatment of obstinate heretics in sufficiently clear terms. 
 At the beginning, when he first became acquainted with 
 Storch and his faction, from whom the Anabaptists took 
 their origin, he was, he says, "foolishly merciful." But 
 that mood is long past. Sedition ought to be suppressed 
 by the sword. Blasphemers, even if not seditious, should 
 be put to death by the civil magistrate. There were 
 precedents for this course in the Law of Moses. The 
 Christian Emperors employed capital punishment against 
 the Arians : Augustine permitted armed force to be used 
 against the Donatists. What Calvin thought in regard 
 to the duty of repressing heresy by the sharpest methods, 
 he let the world know in the most signal way when, in 
 1553, he arrested Servetus, who was only a wayfarer in 
 Geneva, and over whom neither he nor the magistrates 
 of that city had a shadow of jurisdiction, and condemned 
 
 1 Bullinger : Reformationsgeschichte, I. 382. 
 
 2 Ibid. II. 14. 
 
 3 Corp. Ref. II. 17, 18. Another letter, also to Myconius (Oct. 31, 
 1531), is worth quoting, as showing that this was Melancthon's habi- 
 tual mood towards Anabaptists. "De Anabaptistis tulimus hie in 
 genere sententiam : o x uia constat sectam diabolicam esse, non esse tole- 
 randam : dissipari enini ecclesias per eos, cum ipsi nullam habeant 
 certain doctrinam. Nihil igitur est ea secta, nisi confusio et dissipatio 
 publicarum ecclesiarum : prsesertim cum aperte ministerium verbi dam- 
 nent. Ideo in capita factionum in singulis locis ultima supplicia con- 
 stituenda esse judicavimus." Corp. Kef. II. 549. 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 181 
 
 him to the flames. Of this act the "mild" Melancthon 
 did not hesitate to express his entire approval. 1 
 
 " I have read your work/' he writes to Calvin on the 14th of 
 October, 1554, "in which you have lucidly refuted the horrible 
 blasphemies of Servetus, and I thank the Son of God, who has 
 been the arbiter of this your contest. The Church, both now 
 and in all generations, owes and will owe you a debt of gratitude. 
 I entirely assent to your judgment. And I say, too, that your 
 magistrates did right in that, after solemn trial, they put the 
 blasphemer to death." 2 
 
 But I think we are justified in saying that Luther, 
 who when Servetus paid the penalty of free thought had 
 been seven years in his grave, would never have written 
 a letter like this. 
 
 Things grew far worse in the second generation. I 
 shall speak in another connection of the Protestant inqui- 
 sition which Calvin set up in Geneva, the peculiarity of 
 which was that it visited with impartial severity laxity 
 of conduct and error of opinion. But it would not be 
 easy to find a parallel to the hatreds of theologians, con- 
 stantly appealing to, and constantly supported by the 
 civil power, which divided the Protestant churches of 
 Germany from the death of Luther to the breaking out 
 of the Thirty Years' War. Controversy after controversy 
 
 1 Corp. Ref. VIII. 362. 
 
 2 He wrote a very similar letter on the same subject to Bullinger on 
 Aug. 20, 1555 : Corp. Ref. VIII. 523. A week or two before this, 
 he had made it a question for disputation in the University of Witten- 
 berg, "An politica potestas debeat tollere haereticos?" Corp. Ref. X. 
 851. The declaration, though very short, contains the germ of almost 
 every bad argument in favour of relentless persecution. Again, in 
 1557, in a warning which he issued to the world at large against the 
 errors of Theobald Thamer, he calls the execution of Servetus, " pium 
 et memorabile ad omnem posteritatem exemplum." Corp. Ref. IX. 133. 
 
1%2 V. THE REFORMATION IN RELATION TO 
 
 arose on comparatively minute points of doctrine, and 
 each gave rise to a literature unequalled in polemical 
 bitterness and vulgarity. It may be doubted whether 
 Lutherans most hated and abused Calvinists or their own 
 dissidents. Little by little these animosities almost took 
 the place of the old hostility to Catholics and Anabaptists. 
 The Flacianists raged against the Philippists : Jena thun- 
 dered against Wittenberg : whoever would not subscribe 
 every article of ultra-Lutheran orthodoxy was a crypto- 
 Calvinist and therefore a traitor. It is a painful task to 
 watch the bright flame of religious enthusiasm which 
 once lighted all Europe, quickly dying down into these 
 obscene embers of theological strife ; and when I have 
 told one sad and shameful story, I will gladly turn away 
 from it. Among the foreign theologians who found 
 refuge in England during the reign of Edward VI. was 
 John a Lasco, a Pole of noble birth, who had been the 
 friend of Erasmus, who had travelled in Italy, and who 
 had been destined to high ecclesiastical office in his own 
 country. Under the patronage of Cranmer, he had 
 gathered together in London, in that church of Austin 
 Friars which, having happily escaped the Great Fire, 
 still stands, a congregation of foreigners, whom he was 
 permitted to organize on the Presbyterian type, and who 
 adopted the Genevese theology. With the accession of 
 Mary, all this came to an end, and a Lasco, with a large 
 part of his congregation, fled beyond sea. They embarked 
 for Denmark in two small Danish ships which they found 
 lying in the Thames, and to that zealously Lutheran 
 country confidently looked for refuge and welcome. Late 
 in the autumn they arrived, but were warned that they 
 might not so much as land unless they would repeat the 
 
REASON AND LIBERTY. 183 
 
 Lutheran shibboleths. It did not matter that they were 
 flying from Catholic intolerance : Lutheran hearts were 
 shut against Calvinist sufferers. All appeals were fruit- 
 less : the people of Copenhagen were friendly enough ; it 
 was the King and the preachers who would have none of 
 them. So during almost the whole of a stormy northern 
 winter, these poor creatures, among whom were many 
 women and children, were driven from port to port: 
 Rostock expelled them; Wismar allowed them a brief 
 respite, making them the while the object of abusive 
 preaching; Liibeck turned them out; Hamburg raged 
 against them with special bitterness ; at last in Emden 
 they found a little rest. The very seas and storms were 
 kinder to them than those who ought to have been their 
 brethren. Calvin, who was at this very moment burning 
 Servetus, raised a loud voice of protest, for the sufferers 
 were his fellow-believers; but I cannot find that any 
 word of remonstrance came from Wittenberg. It was 
 but in 1553 : so soon had died away even the faintest 
 echo of that claim of liberty of conscience in which the 
 Reformation took its birth : so soon had new and more 
 savage theological hatreds replaced the old. 1 
 
 1 H. Dalton : Johannes a Lasco, pp. 427 et seq. Henry : Leben 
 Calvins, III. 303, note. 
 
Lecture VI. 
 
 THE SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 Many forces combined to produce the Eeformation, 
 some of which, when once it had assumed its permanent 
 shape, gradually disengaged themselves and began to 
 manifest a separate activity. The phase of the movement 
 which finally prevailed may be called the biblically 
 orthodox. It set up against the old forms of doctrine 
 and practice a new one, regarded as exclusively true, 
 deviations from which were to be discouraged, or, if suf- 
 ficiently wide, suppressed and punished. This was, 
 further, based upon the authority of Scripture, assumed 
 to be final, and substituted for the rejected authority of 
 the Church. In these terms we may succinctly describe 
 the Lutheran Eeformation, expounded by Melancthon in 
 his Loci Communes, and reduced to practice by the Saxon 
 Visitation and similar measures of organization in other 
 Protestant States. The same general description applies 
 to the Eeformation of Zwingli in German Switzerland, 
 as well as to the later activity of Calvin in Geneva. 
 Each set up a strict standard of orthodoxy. Each 
 deduced that standard from Scripture, more or >less 
 rigorously interpreted. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 185 
 
 According to the common view, this constitutes the 
 Keformation. It was simply the substitution of one 
 form of theological authority for another, and the conse- 
 quent replacement of a false and corrupt by a true and 
 pure body of doctrine. And on the same theory, the 
 process was accomplished once for all : after ages have had 
 nothing to add to or to take away from it. On the other 
 hand, we have been learning to look at the Eeformation 
 as only a partial manifestation of forces which were of 
 wide and prolonged operation, the activity of which, in 
 other men and other religious movements than were 
 acceptable at Wittenberg, it will be necessary for us to 
 trace, if we are to give any completeness to our picture 
 of the period. There was the pure humanistic impulse, 
 the form taken in that age by the simple love of know- 
 ledge for its own sake. There were the mystic desires 
 and aspirations which the history of the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries shows to belong to the very essence 
 of Teutonic religion. There was the deep social dissatis- 
 faction, and the desire for an immediate fulfilment of the 
 promise of the kingdom of God, which always follow 
 upon a fresh and vivid presentation of the gospel. There 
 was the critical and rationalistic spirit, which desired to 
 dig down to the basis of all religious authority, and 
 rejecting not only the Church and the Schoolmen, but 
 the Creeds, accepted Christianity, if at all, in quite ano- 
 ther than the orthodox form. But though these currents 
 of opinion may be accurately discriminated, we must 
 beware of thinking that it is possible to divide men or 
 sects into corresponding classes. Many tendencies of 
 thought unite in one thinker. Your mystic often has in 
 him something of the revolutionary : the line between 
 
186 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 mysticism and rationalism is easy to draw in theory, but 
 also easy to overpass by a soul of apt constitution. If 
 much that I shall say appears indistinct, by reason of its 
 necessary brevity, I must beg you to remember that rigid 
 outlines and sharp contrasts of colour are always untrue 
 to the shifting lights, the changeful glooms, the subtly 
 shaded hues of the natural landscape. 
 
 The sects of the Eeformation are usually regarded as 
 the opprobrium of a great and beneficial religious move- 
 ment. The attempt which the Prophets of Zwickau 
 made in 1522 to take the management of the Eeform 
 into their own hands an attempt the later stages of 
 which are associated with the better -known names of 
 Carlstadt and Munzer was directly connected with 
 the Peasants' War of 1525-26, which shook the whole 
 fabric of German society to its base, and not only gravely 
 endangered Luther's work, but did much to change its 
 character. Again, the seizure of Munster by the Ana- 
 baptists in 1535, the wild and wicked parody of the 
 kingdom of God which they there set up, and the blood 
 in which the fire of their fanaticism was finally quenched, 
 made the very name of Anabaptist a by -word in every 
 country of Europe where the new thought was wrestling 
 with the old. But no philosophical historian can afford 
 to pass by these and many other allied phenomena as 
 mere blots upon the face of human affairs, which he may 
 regret, but for which he is not called upon to account. 
 Some good Protestants would have us believe that as, 
 on the Aristotelian principle, virtue is the mean between 
 two extremes of vice, so the Eeformation of Luther and 
 Calvin stands, in the equilibrium of eternal truth and 
 right, between reprehensible excesses of Catholicism on 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 187 
 
 the one side, of Anabaptism and Eationalism on the 
 other. Those who see somewhat deeper into the facts, 
 attempt to purge the Keformation of complicity with its 
 own abnormal manifestations, by tracing them to their 
 origin in peculiarities of German religious thought in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But a little closer 
 inspection will show that this is only a part of the truth. 
 These sects of the Eeformation represent tendencies of 
 the human mind in dealing with the mysteries and diffi- 
 culties of religion, which are peculiar to no century, 
 but appear, under different shapes, in almost all. They 
 pushed, it may be, their principles to one-sided excess ; 
 they lost sight of other guiding and controlling forces ; 
 they had in them little possibility of organization and 
 continuance ; but their leaders were not always wrong, 
 nor Luther, in his opposition to them, always right. In 
 a crude and undisciplined way unavoidable in that age 
 of half-knowledge and undetermined methods of thinking 
 they had a grasp of principles which, as time advances, 
 are destined to play an ever greater part in the deve- 
 lopment of religious thought and life. Theirs were the 
 truths which the Eeformation neglected and cast out, but 
 which it must again reconcile with itself if it is ever to 
 complete its work. 
 
 The old Christian mysticism of Germany, which Tauler 
 and the author of the Theologia Germanica may be taken 
 to represent, had a considerable share in the development 
 of Luther's religious opinions. Justification by faith, at 
 least in its earliest, its deepest, its most spiritual form, is 
 really a mystical doctrine ; that is to say, it brings the 
 soul into immediate contact with its Divine Object, and 
 from that contact expects all the fruits of the religious 
 
188 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 life. But it does not furnish any basis on which an 
 organized church can be built up. It is a matter for the 
 individual soul. It is an invisible thing, which eludes 
 tests and cannot be made into a criterion of fellow- 
 ship. Accordingly the mystics of the Eeformation are 
 usually at one with Luther here : it is when he attempts 
 to erect the edifice of a church on the foundation of 
 sacraments, to insist on the importance of the external, 
 to establish visible tests of discipleship, that they begin 
 to part company with him. But, again, mysticism has 
 comparatively little to object to the Eucharist; on the 
 contrary, it rejoices in signs and symbols which, under 
 the interpretation of faith, help to express that which is 
 essentially ineffable : it may indeed put its own meaning 
 on the Lord's Supper, but it does not feel the temptation 
 to reject it. The contrary is the case with baptism as 
 usually administered to infants. Here there can be no 
 living faith to appropriate the divine grace of the sacra- 
 ment. 1 If the child is benefited at all, it must be by a 
 quasi-magical process which is repugnant to the funda- 
 mental principles of mystical religion. Adult baptism, 
 the conscious assumption by a Christian man or woman 
 of the obligations of discipleship, is evidently a very 
 different thing. Here once more the conditions of a true 
 sacrament are fulfilled : the grace of God, the outward 
 sign, the operative faith, are all present. When this 
 distinction is clearly seen, it at once helps to liberate the 
 mind from the influence of ecclesiastical usage, and to 
 reveal the scriptural justification for infant baptism in its 
 
 1 Vid. Lecture IV. p. 137, and the references there given for Luther's 
 perplexities on this subject, and his theory of the representative faith 
 of sponsors. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 189 
 
 real weakness and insufficiency. It was, therefore, no 
 dogmatic accident which made the mysticism of the 
 Eeformation assume the Anabaptist form. The word 
 Anabaptist, as I have already pointed out, is used to 
 cover very various phases of religious belief. But this 
 one peculiarity was common to all Anabaptists. 
 
 The Anabaptists were the individualists of the Eefor- 
 mation. They took up the protest against ecclesiastical 
 authority, and pushed it to the furthest point. The more 
 thoughtful among them, or the men who, without being 
 of them, gave the tone to their religious thought, clearly 
 saw the distinction between the "Word of God in Scrip- 
 ture, and Scripture as the Word of God, ' and were not 
 slow to carry it to its logical issue. If Luther not only 
 denied to human reason the right of criticising Scripture, 
 but demanded that it should be strangled and slain by 
 the hands of faith, he still based the authority of the 
 Bible on the conjoint testimony of the Holy Spirit in the 
 mind of the believer, and of the Holy Spirit in the written 
 book. But why stop at precisely this point ? Why limit 
 the function of the Spirit in man to establishing the 
 authority and interpreting the deliverances of the Bible ? 
 Why may not God speak to man now as He did to holy 
 men of old ? In other words, the Anabaptists, beginning 
 with the Prophets of Zwickau, had imperfectly and half- 
 consciously grasped the principle of the continuity of 
 revelation, and were coming to see that revelation as 
 recorded in Scripture, and the results of present religious 
 experience, were different phases of one and the same 
 divine phenomenon. Even such a man as Miinzer says :* 
 
 1 Quoted by Keller : Geschichte der Wiedertaufer, p. 19. 
 
190 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 "The Scripture is only a dead letter: man must hear 
 the voice of the Father speaking within him. God still 
 speaks with His own to-day, as once He spake with 
 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.' ' I cannot help thinking 
 that this position was logically very difficult of assault. 
 It was a first feeble attempt to work out that problem 
 of the basis of scriptural authority which the Eeformers 
 systematically neglected. Again, I find Miinzer saying -, 1 
 
 " The Wittenbergers say that we should begin with Scripture, 
 which will bring faith; but we cannot give the godless any 
 certain reason why Scripture is to be accepted and not thrown 
 away, except that it comes from antiquity and has been received 
 by many men. But this is Jewish and Turkish. True faith 
 needs a clearer light than that of the Word : it follows only the 
 moving of the Spirit. And the Spirit a man receives by longing 
 and waiting for enlightenment." 
 
 At the same time, this principle was not worked 
 out into any philosophical coherence, and it manifestly 
 opened the door to every kind of fanatical extravagance 
 and abuse. "When, in December 1521, Claus Storch, 
 the weaver of Zwickau, came to Wittenberg with two 
 companions, one as enthusiastic and ignorant as him- 
 self, the other with some pretensions to scholarship, 
 Melancthon and Carlstadt, in the absence of Luther on 
 the Wartburg, represented the Eeform. Carlstadt, with 
 all the ill-regulated impulsiveness of his nature, threw 
 himself into the new movement. Melancthon at first 
 wavered : the pretensions of the men imposed upon him : 
 
 1 Quoted by Dorner : Geschichte der Protestantischen Theologie in 
 Deutschland, p. 130. For other passages of a similar kind, see Franck's 
 Geschicht Bibel, Part iii. fol. 160. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 191 
 
 lie thought them " prophetic and apostolic." 1 "How 
 much I am moved by them," he writes to the Elector 
 Frederick, "I cannot easily tell." His youth, and the 
 deference which he had already learned to pay to Luther, 
 alone saved him. " Of the spirit that is in them," he 
 said, "only Martin can easily form a judgment." Even 
 Luther, when he came to Wittenberg to calm the tumult 
 which Carlstadt and the men from Zwickau had raised in 
 town and University, was for a moment shaken. But it 
 was only for a moment : and with a " God rebuke thee, 
 Satan !" he dismissed the Prophets from his presence. 2 
 From that time his course was taken, and it led him more 
 and more in the direction of a rigid and arbitrary scrip- 
 turalism, for which he did not even attempt to find a 
 theoretical justification. 
 
 The position of the Anabaptists in regard to Scripture 
 cannot be defined in a word. Some, to whom the name 
 is commonly if not altogether justly applied, were feeling 
 their way towards a deeper and more spiritual theory of 
 inspiration than any which is indicated in the works of 
 the orthodox Eeformers. But the majority deviated 
 from a crude literalness only to wander through the maze 
 of a lawless allegorical interpretation. These two appa- 
 
 1 Corp. Ref. I. 513 : Letter of Melancthon to the Elector, St. John's- 
 day, 1522. "Ex horum motuum auctoribus hue advolarunt tres viri, 
 duo lanifices, literamm rudes, literatus tertius est. Audivi eos. Mira 
 sunt, quae de sese prsedicant : missos se clara voce dei ad docendum : 
 esse sibi cum deo familiaria colloquia : videre futura ; breviter, viros 
 esse propheticos et apostolicos. Quibus ego quomodo commovear, non 
 facile dixerim. Magnis rationibus adducor certe, ut contemni eos 
 nolim. Nam esse in eis spiritus quosdam multis argumentis adparet, 
 sed de quibus judicare prseter Martinum nemo facile possit." 
 
 2 Camerarius : Vita Melancthoni, p. 52. 
 
192 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 rently opposite principles, in practice mingle and cross 
 one another in a most perplexing way. Yet it is the 
 experience of all Christian centuries that men only need 
 to bring to the Bible sufficiently strong prepossessions, 
 sufficiently fixed opinions, to have them reflected back 
 in all the glamour of infallible authority. So there is, 
 if I may use the expression, a flavour of Scripture in all 
 Anabaptist extravagances. Nicholas Storch chose for 
 himself twelve apostles and seventy disciples. Carlstadt 
 gave up his archdeaconry, his professorship, his scholastic 
 philosophy, and, putting on a peasant's coat, tilled the 
 soil as Neighbour Andrew. One of the results of the 
 troubles at Wittenberg in 1522 was that 200 students, 
 convinced of the uselessness of all carnal learning, left 
 the University. Some of the later developments of 
 Anabaptism were stranger still, and at the same time 
 permanent. Bullinger, in his contemporary history, says 
 of certain Anabaptists : 
 
 " They looked to the mere letter of Scripture. Wherefore they 
 roamed about the country, without staff, shoes, wallet or money, 
 boasting of their heavenly call to the work of preaching. And 
 because the Lord said, ' What ye hear in the ear, that preach ye 
 on the house-tops/ they went up to the house-tops and preached 
 thence. They washed one another's feet ; said that with children 
 it was necessary to become children, and behaved therefore in a 
 childish way, which is foolish enough. Item : because the Lord 
 says that whoever does not forsake house and home and all that 
 he has cannot be his disciple, they left wife and child, house and 
 trade, wandering about the country, quartering themselves upon 
 the brethren, and eating them up." 1 
 
 Quoted by Erbkam, p. 559. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 193 
 
 Some adopted a peculiar dress and manner of life, as 
 if they would found a new monastic order ; others gave 
 themselves up to trances and ecstacies, in which they 
 claimed to receive direct inspiration from Heaven ; some 
 spent their days in silence, some in prayer, some in per- 
 petual groaning and tears. Under this various surface 
 lived and moved darker impulses, such as are rarely 
 absent in times of fierce religious excitement. The Ana- 
 baptist theory of marriage pointed not indistinctly to 
 excesses which, as they can hardly be proved, it is not 
 expedient to describe. The Chiliastic predictions of the 
 Apocalypse, floating before the minds of men who found 
 themselves at deadly war with Church and State, encou- 
 raged the frightful idea of a universal blood-bath, which 
 could alone usher in the final reign of the Saints. In 
 a word, Anabaptism ranged over the whole gamut of 
 human passions and possibilities, from the pure and pious 
 enthusiasm of a Balthasar Hubmaier, to the licentious 
 and cruel fanaticism of a John of Leiden. 
 
 Eeligious individualism is always inapt to organize 
 itself, and- when it reaches its highest pitch becomes a 
 dividing force. While Lutheran Protestantism, under 
 the protection of Electors, Princes, Free Cities, crystal- 
 lized itself into a church, taking parochial possession of 
 the country, appropriating what it could of ecclesiastical 
 revenue, and marking its boundaries by confessions and 
 sacraments, Anabaptism also spread with great rapidity 
 through Germany, Switzerland, Holland, but always in 
 isolated communities, more or less secret conventicles, 
 bound together by brotherly ties, but not organized for 
 mutual help and protection. There was no attempt to 
 set up a common standard of faith. Doctrine and prac- 
 
 o 
 
194 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 tice varied from city to city. But there were certain 
 notes of Anabaptism which may serve to explain the 
 dislike with which Anabaptists were regarded by autho- 
 rities in Church and State, even before the catastrophe of 
 Miinster had thrown a lurid light upon the possibilities 
 which lay hid in their theories. They stood outside 
 all Church organizations, the uselessness of which they 
 loudly proclaimed. They did not baptize their children. 
 They thought it sinful to take an oath. They refused 
 military service. They would not admit the duty of 
 obedience to a civil power which was not, in their own 
 sense of the word, Christian. They held that a marriage 
 between a believing husband and an unbelieving wife 
 was ipso facto invalid, and that either was at liberty to 
 contract a fresh union. Modern Protestantism, in some 
 of its more eccentric forms, has accustomed us to nearly 
 all these things, and we have come to think it possible 
 that a man may be under the influence of such scruples 
 and yet fairly discharge his civic duty. But German 
 rulers, in the first half of the sixteenth century, were of 
 a very different opinion, and their theologians for the 
 most part encouraged them in the work of persecution. 
 An Anabaptist was not only a heretic, but a bad subject, 
 and in either capacity deserved the severest treatment. 
 Naturally, Catholic Princes had no mercy upon them : in 
 Austria and the Tyrol, they were slain by the thousand : 
 said Duke William of Bavaria, 1 " Behead those who 
 recant ; those who will not recant, burn." We have 
 seen what was done at Zurich with Zwingli's concur- 
 rence : Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, followed the 
 
 1 Keller, p. 42 et seq. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 195 
 
 evil example. In 1527, at Kothenburg on the Neckar, 
 Michael Sattler had his tongue cut out, and was then 
 committed to the flames. Balthasar Hubmaier, a man 
 not only of genuine piety, but of undoubted learning and 
 a fine and liberal spirit, was executed at "Vienna in 1528. 
 Elsewhere, all through these years, Anabaptists go to the 
 scaffold or the fire, a dozen at a time, yet always with 
 unshaken constancy, as men who have heaven full in 
 view. Luther cannot account for their steadfastness, 
 except on the hypothesis of Satanic inspiration i 1 Capito, 
 in a spirit at once more Christian and more philosophical, 
 says : "I testify before God that I cannot say that the 
 Baptists despised this present life more out of unreason 
 than a Divine Spirit. They show neither madness, nor 
 folly, nor excitement ; but in self-possession and astonish- 
 ing patience they go to death, as confessors of the Chris- 
 tian name." 2 
 
 I have found among Melancthon's letters a Narratio de 
 Anabaptistis, some parts of which I will venture to lay 
 before you, in the belief that any real glimpse we can get 
 of living men and their troubles is more instructive than 
 many general statements. 3 At the end of the year 1535, 
 the plague was raging in Wittenberg, and Melancthon 
 was in Jena. Here certain Anabaptists lay in prison, 
 who, at the request of the Burgomaster and Council, 
 were examined by a clerical commission, consisting of 
 two "Wittenberg professors, Melancthon and Caspar Cru- 
 ciger, and Antonius Musa, the pastor of the town. "What 
 were the circumstances under which they were arrested 
 
 1 To Link, May 12, 1528 : Briefe, ed. De Wette, III. 311. 
 
 2 Keller, p. 44. 3 Corp. Ref. II. 997 et seq. 
 
 o2 
 
196 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 we are not informed ; but the scandal at Miinster had just 
 come to a violent end, and all Germany was in a fever 
 of excitement and horror. They were Heintz Krauth, 
 Jobst Moller, Hans Peissker, all of the simple village sort, 
 who with one accord protested that they had never been 
 at Miinster, and had neither good nor bad to say about it. 
 Interrogated as to the Trinity, they had little that was 
 heretical to confess : " they were not learned men, and 
 could not speak much of this high article of faith." As 
 to forgiveness of sins, they thought it was heartily to be 
 desired, being of opinion that it consisted in perseverance 
 in righteousness, belief and trust in God's Word, follow- 
 ing of Christ, and doing the will of the Father. Their 
 idea of community of goods was, that a Christian ought 
 to stand free and indifferent to all his property, ready to 
 share with a brother in his need, so that if any had a 
 room full of money, he could not say that a single coin 
 of it was his own. They denied the lawfulness of oaths. 
 Christians were all brothers, and therefore none had 
 authority over other. Of the sacrament of baptism, they 
 said that 
 
 "Baptism of children was not enjoined, and that all children 
 were saved, whether of Christians, Heathens or Turks. God was 
 not such a God as would damn a little child for the sake of a 
 drop of water, for all His creatures were good. And they denied 
 original sin in children; for such have never consented to it; 
 hut when a man grows up and consents to sin, then for the first 
 time original sin has power/' 
 
 "When to this Melancthon replied with appropriate 
 texts from David and Paul, they answered, first, that 
 they did not care a farthing for all the Scriptures in the 
 world ; next, with texts on their own side, as, for instance, 
 
VI. SECTS OP THE REFORMATION. 197 
 
 "Of such is the kingdom of God;" and thirdly, with 
 the principle that in all cases belief must go before bap- 
 tism. On a second day's examination, Melancthon pressed 
 them with the same texts "Behold, I was shapen in 
 iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me ;" and, 
 " We were by nature the children of wrath." 
 
 " Magister Philippus asks, whether the children also must be 
 saved through Christ. Answers Heintz Krauth, Yes. There- 
 upon Magister Philippus, ' If they have no sin, they need not 
 the sufferings of Christ,' and asks of him Scripture. Whereupon 
 he answers, ' It stands written in his heart as God had taught it 
 him. The Devil too can write.'" 
 
 Hans Krauth further thought that that was no true 
 marriage where husband and wife were not one in the 
 faith ; but in that case he would have patience with his 
 wife, and pray God for her that she would betake herself to 
 the Word. The question of obedience to civil authorities 
 was much pressed. These poor men said that they wanted 
 no lord and master : One they had to whom they would 
 cleave, God alone. Worldly government was only for 
 the wicked, nor in that respect would they condemn it. 
 All that were his own, Christ had made free. At the 
 same time, if the civil power had let them alone in their 
 faith, they would willingly have paid taxes and done as 
 they were bid. Jobst Moller said that he could neither 
 read nor write. But what God had written in his heart, 
 of that he had been instructed by a man sent of God. 
 Afterwards he had prayed to God, who had given it him 
 into his heart. Not unnaturally this confessor, in the 
 simplicity of what he regarded as his direct intercourse 
 with Heaven, added that "he did not believe in a Lord 
 God made of bread." Upon all this, and much more of 
 
198 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 the same kind, Melancthon makes a report, setting forth, 
 without passion and, so far as I can judge, without ex- 
 aggeration, the tenets held by these poor men, and con- 
 cluding thus : 
 
 " After a friendly and Christian fashion have we prayed and 
 warned them, that they should suffer themselves to be persuaded 
 and have regard to the Scriptures, which we have laid before 
 them ; in time God would enlighten them, if they would set 
 His Word before them and diligently consider it. But they say 
 that they will abide by what God has taught them." 1 
 
 So in truth they did ; for on the 27 th of January, 
 1536, they sealed their faith with their blood. A few 
 days after, Melancthon despatched to the Elector John 
 Frederick a quite conclusive refutation, 2 from his own 
 point of view, of their crude and ignorant heresies, which 
 nevertheless he was able to silence only by the same rough 
 logic of axe and faggot as the Catholic Church was at 
 any moment ready to apply to himself. Since that time 
 the world has threshed out many of the questions which 
 were in dispute between Jobst Moller, who could neither 
 read nor write, and the first Christian scholar of Ger- 
 many; and the result is not in all respects what the 
 theologians of Wittenberg would have expected. 
 
 It would, however, be unjust to the leaders of the 
 Eeformation to omit to mention the connection of Ana- 
 baptism with revolutionary politics. In some of its 
 manifestations, at least, it was much more than a theo- 
 logical opinion. Carlstadt and the men of Zwickau stood 
 in close alliance with Thomas Miinzer, the fanatical pro- 
 phet, and not the least miserable victim of the Peasants' 
 
 1 Corp. Ref. II. 1003. 2 Ibid. III. 28. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 199 
 
 War. It must not be forgotten that though Luther at 
 an after time carefully disengaged himself from national 
 politics, and, by throwing himself on the support of the 
 Princes, signified his acquiescence in things as they were, 
 a distinctly political element mingled in the earliest move- 
 ment of the Eeformation. The age was excited on every 
 side. Men knew not what might result from the new 
 stirring of intellectual and religious life. Hopes, at once 
 wild and vague, were entertained of the young Emperor, 
 who, no German himself, was yet supposed to impersonate 
 the aspirations of Germany. Ulrich von Hutten, in whom 
 the religious was distinctly subordinate to the political 
 purpose, sought to draw Luther into the ' enterprize of 
 Franz von Sickingen, and for a moment it seemed as if 
 he had succeeded. Next, in 1525, the teachings of the 
 early Anabaptists, and especially of Miinzer, blew into a 
 flame, which soon spread over all Germany, the smoulder- 
 ing embers of the Peasants' revolt. It was no new thing : 
 they had risen many a time before, and in Switzerland 
 had conquered their liberty and their rights. The cry 
 of " Bundschuh," the peasants' clog, which they carried 
 before them as a standard, was only too familiar in men's 
 ears ; for it meant, first, the excesses in which the sense 
 of intolerable wrong always seeks revenge, and next, 
 sanguinary and remorseless repression. This revolt ended 
 as all previous ones had done: at first successful, it 
 startled the German Princes into union, and then mad- 
 dened them by cruelties which indeed admit of no excuse, 
 but were nevertheless such as they themselves inflicted 
 with absolute callousness on men of no condition. The 
 process of repression was frightful. Such encounters as 
 that at Frankenhausen were not battles, but massacres. 
 
200 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 The crowds of undisciplined peasants, armed with little 
 more than their implements of husbandry, were simply- 
 slaughtered by the mail-clad knights and their well-drilled 
 and well-equipped retainers. 1 Germany was delivered 
 from a great social danger, but at what a cost ? Serfdom 
 still oppressed the people : a wider gulf than ever, filled 
 with blood and tears, yawned between the owners and 
 the tillers of the soil. Perhaps the most lamentable result, 
 because the most permanent in its effect, was the divorce 
 of the Eef ormation from popular sympathies, and its deli- 
 very into the hands of the Princes. Luther, himself "a 
 peasant and a peasant's son," at first took the side of the 
 class from which he sprang. But their appeal to force 
 alienated him for ever. He was compelled to choose a side 
 decisively, and he declared for the powers that were. In 
 a pamphlet 2 which all his honest admirers must wish had 
 remained unwritten, he exhorted the Princes to slay, and 
 slay, and slay : the peasants were no better than mad dogs, 
 and to be hunted down as such: whoever fell with a good 
 conscience on the side of authority was a true martyr. And 
 from those years 1525-27 a change came over him. He, 
 and the Eeformation with him, became harder, more 
 dogmatic, less spiritual, less universal. He is no longer 
 
 1 Luther says, in a letter to Amsdorf, June 21, 1525 (Briefe, ed. 
 De Wette, III. 13) : "Certa res est in Franconia caesa esse XI millia 
 rusticorum in tribus locis divisa, captae LXI bombardae bonae, arx 
 Wirtenbergensis liberata. Casiniims Marchio vehementer saevit in 
 suos, ob fidem bis violatam. In Wirtenbergensi ducatu VI millia 
 caesa sunt, alibi in Suevia X millia diversis locis : fertur Ducem Lotha- 
 ringiae in Alsatia XX millia cecidisse. Sic ubique caeduntur miseri 
 rustic! " 
 
 2 Wider die rauberischen und morderischen Bauern. Werke, ed. 
 Walch, XYI. 90 et seq. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 201 
 
 a leader of thought, but the builder up of a church, and 
 that within limits and on conditions prescribed by the 
 existing political constitution of Germany. 
 
 "When I look at this story a little more closely, I find 
 something inexpressibly pathetic in it. This is no common 
 Jacquerie; though I think that Jacqueries, in which 
 miserable people, maddened by intolerable wrong, throw 
 themselves upon their oppressors in despair, and are 
 crushed back into a last state worse than the first, are 
 among the saddest of human phenomena. The old story, 1 
 that the revolt began with the peasants of Count von 
 Lupfen, who on holidays and in harvest time were ordered 
 to turn out to collect snail-shells to wind yarn upon, may 
 be taken as sufficient proof that the German peasants had 
 grievances of the most irritating kind ; but in that, this 
 revolt did not differ from many others. The characteristic 
 of it which concerns us is the glimpse which these poor 
 people had caught, as they imagined, of a coming king- 
 dom of God, in which, among other crooked things that 
 were to be made straight, were their own wrongs and 
 woes. They formulated their demands in twelve most 
 temperately worded articles; 2 to which was prefixed a 
 
 1 " Unter vielen Stiicken durch die sie gedrangt seien, klagten im 
 Jahre 1524 die Bauern der Grafen von Lupfen und Fiirstenberg 'dass 
 sie weder Feyer noch Ruh mbchten haben, vielmehr am Feiertag und 
 mitten in der Erndte mussten sie der Grafin Schneckenhauslein 
 suchen, Garn darauf zu winden, und fur sie Erdbeer, Kriesen und 
 Schlehen gewinnen, und anderes dergleichen thun, den Herren und 
 Frauen werken bei gutem Wetter, ihnen selber im Unwetter, und 
 das Gejagd und die Hunde liefen ohne Achtung eigenes Schadens.'" 
 Zimmermann : Allgemeine Geschichte des grossen Bauernkrieges, II. 
 10, quoting from Anshelm, Bern. Chronik. VI. 298. 
 
 2 Werke, ed. Wakli, XVI. 24 ct seq. 
 
202 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 preamble formally declaring that they sought nothing 
 that the gospel did not justify, while the last article pro- 
 vided that all the rest should be brought to the test of 
 Scripture, and stand or fall accordingly. The majority 
 of the articles relate to compulsory service, excessive 
 rents, common lands and forests, feudal incidents and the 
 like. But it is noticeable that the first demands that the 
 whole congregation shall have the right of choosing a 
 minister, whose duty shall be to preach to them the pure 
 gospel, and, if necessary, of dismissing him. The obliga- 
 tion of tithe is to be regulated by the Levitical Law : game 
 laws, and especially the consumption by wild animals of 
 the fruits of the earth intended for man's use, are declared 
 to be contrary to God's will : all bondage and serfdom are 
 put in striking opposition to the fact that " Christ bought 
 and redeemed us all by his precious blood, the shepherd 
 as well as the noblest, none being excepted" wherefore, 
 they go on to say, " it accords with Scripture that we are, 
 and will be free." Of course it is easy to say, in refer- 
 ence to all this, that the promises of the New Testament 
 were not intended to be of literal fulfilment ; that, for 
 instance, freedom, as Luther and Melancthon abundantly 
 proved, signifies spiritual freedom, and is quite consistent 
 with bodily slavery; that what Christ meant by the 
 kingdom of God was the gradual separation, by a process 
 of individual conversion, of the church from the world ; 
 and that, so far from the reign of " righteousness and 
 peace and joy in a holy spirit" being possible here and 
 now, all that lies before society is to go on from bad to 
 worse, till it draws down on itself the consuming anger 
 of the Eternal Judge. At the same time, there is ano- 
 ther reading of the gospel which goes upon the supposi- 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 203 
 
 tion that Christ meant what he said, and in their crude 
 and imperfect way these peasants seem to have made it 
 their own. 
 
 The same aspiration reappears in a shape of the grossest 
 and most repulsive caricature in the Anabaptist kingdom 
 of Minister. But ten years of restless thought and 
 excited religious feeling have elapsed since the Peasants' 
 War, and what was then a vague sense that social ills 
 were all to be remedied by a return to the precepts of 
 the New Testament, has become an ecclesiastical theory 
 which many strange forces have helped to mould. There 
 is the Puritan notion that all true believers must be a 
 peculiar people, not only distinguished from the outer 
 world by invisible states of mind, but fenced off from it 
 by visible tokens. There are the wild millennial ex- 
 pectations which always lend themselves so readily to 
 the impulses of revolutionary fanaticism. But, above 
 all, there is the Antinomianism which lies in wait for 
 enthusiastic Christianity on more than one line of its 
 possible development. It follows logically, though, I am 
 prompt to acknowledge, in practice very rarely, from a 
 hard and external interpretation of the doctrine of justi- 
 fication by faith alone, especially when held, as it often 
 is, in conjunction with a belief in predestination. Once 
 identify faith with belief empty out of it the moral ele- 
 ment and leave only the intellectual make it, not the 
 souFs passionate devotion to its Saviour, but a mental 
 assent to certain historical and theological facts and you 
 have already done much to degrade morals into a subor- 
 dinate place. But when you assure a nature that has 
 thus never known the transforming glow of spiritual 
 affection, but rests in a purely intellectual self-satisfac- 
 
204 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 tion, that, come what will, its eternal salvation is beyond 
 question, and that by no transgression of law it can finally 
 fall out of a state of grace, it is possible that you may 
 obliterate moral distinctions altogether, and make the 
 divorce between religion and ethics complete. And, 
 strange to say, the same result may be arrived at by that 
 path of mystic speculation which claims to lead the soul 
 into the very presence of God. For if once the fortress 
 of individual personality is given up, the control of the 
 will abandoned, and the soul suffered to fall as an indis- 
 tinguishable drop into the infinite ocean of divine exist- 
 ence, man's action becomes God's action, and, whatever 
 its apparent relation to human laws of morality, spiritually 
 right and good. In the Miinster Anabaptists both these 
 tendencies to Antinomianism coincided, and the result 
 was the most hideous parody of the City of God which 
 the world has ever seen. 
 
 We shall not, however, do justice to the dissidents of 
 the Eeformation unless we select for special description 
 some of the men who stood out above their fellows in 
 individuality of thought and character. I take three: 
 Johann Denck, Caspar Schwenkfeld, Sebastian Franck. 
 These men cannot, without inaccuracy, be made the re- 
 presentatives of classes ; the activity of each must speak 
 for itself. 
 
 The date and place of Denck's birth are unknown. 
 When he died in 1527, he was described as still a young 
 man from which we may conclude with some certainty 
 that he was born in the last years of the fifteenth century. 
 He first appears at Basel, where he graduated, and was 
 afterwards employed as a corrector of the press. Even 
 then he was a friend of (Ecolampadius as, indeed, he 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 205 
 
 continued to be throughout the whole of his brief life 
 and attended the lectures on Isaiah in which the Ee- 
 former of Basel put forward the characteristic ideas of 
 the Eeformation. It was on the recommendation of (Eco- 
 lampadius that, in the autumn of 1523, Denck went to 
 Niirnberg, to fill the post of school-rector at St. Sebald's. 
 Here the humanist became the theologian ; the orthodox 
 Protestant if, indeed, he ever were one a heretic. The 
 old and famous free city was, throughout all these years, 
 the centre of a vivid and many-coloured religious life : 
 here lived Pirkheimer, the representative lay scholar of 
 his day, surrounded by a circle of theologians and artists 
 and literary men : here, too, Osiander, the chief pastor 
 of the city, a man of harsh and unlovely character, who 
 anticipated the narrow and rigid Lutheranism of the 
 next generation : while in less conspicuous social regions, 
 every variety of theological speculation developed itself, 
 in reliance upon the free institutions of Nurnberg and the 
 known forbearance of its Council. But Denck had been 
 only a year and a half in Nurnberg when he had a dif- 
 ference with Osiander on the subject of the Eucharist. 
 The result was, that he was called upon to make a con- 
 fession of his faith ; and when this proved unsatisfactory, 
 was expelled from the city, and forbidden on peril of his 
 life to return within ten miles of it. After this, he 
 was a wanderer for the brief remnant of his days. We 
 hear of him at St. Gall, Augsburg, Worms, Strasburg ; 
 and if one tradition be true, in spite of the sentence 
 against him, at Niirnberg once more. At Augsburg, 
 he becomes the head of an Anabaptist community; at 
 Strasburg, he engages in a public disputation with the 
 Lutheran preachers : from both citj.es he is compelled 
 
206 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 to flee. In "Worms he published, in conjunction with 
 Ludwig Hetzer, a translation of the Prophets, which 
 remains to bear witness to the solid and impartial scholar- 
 ship of its authors. Osiander procured the prohibition 
 of its sale in Niirnberg ; but not the less was it reprinted 
 thirteen times within three years, after which we may 
 conclude that Luther's version took its place. Every- 
 where, not only theological controversy and ecclesiastical 
 unsettlement, but religious revival, followed Denck's 
 steps. There is a great concurrence of testimony both 
 to the depth of the influence which he exerted and the 
 integrity and sweetness of character which justified it. 
 Sebastian Franck calls him " a quiet, withdrawn, pious 
 man, the leader and Bishop of the Anabaptists." 1 Ano- 
 ther contemporary chronicler, Johann Kessler, describes 
 him as learned, eloquent, humble. Capito, who, as one 
 of the preachers of Strasburg, was only half a friend, 
 speaks of his great gifts and exemplary life. 2 He be- 
 longed to that best age of Anabaptism, when it was at 
 once a deeply religious and a truly ethical movement, 
 before the relentless rage of stupid persecution had de- 
 prived it of its natural leaders, and handed it over to 
 extravagance and license. Men gathered eagerly about 
 Denck, hung upon his lips, adopted his principles, and 
 were afterwards not afraid to suffer for their faith. He 
 showed himself, in the three years within which all his 
 activity was comprised, a great religious leader, and 
 might possibly, had his life been prolonged, have deve- 
 loped into a philosophical theologian too. In a quite 
 
 1 S. Franck : Chronica, Zeytbuch und Geschichtbibel, III. 135. 
 
 2 Keller : Ein Apostel der Wiedertaufer, p. 6. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 207 
 
 singular way he united the qualities which kindle reli- 
 gious enthusiasm in others with a sweet reasonableness, 
 such as belongs to hardly any other theologian, orthodox 
 or heretical, of the age of the Eeformation. In 1527, 
 expelled from city after city and worn out with persecu- 
 tion, he took refuge in Basel once more, asking (Ecolam- 
 padius, in a very pathetic letter, for a little peace before 
 he died. It was granted, and before many weeks had 
 passed the end came. In the hands of (Ecolampadius 
 he left a so-called recantation, which is really only a 
 re-statement, in careful and measured terms, of his pecu- 
 liar opinions. 1 I do not know whether, if he had lived, 
 the disruptive forces of Anabaptism would not have been 
 too strong for Denck ; but in him radical Protestantism 
 lost a leader whose place no Spanish or Italian rationalist 
 could supply. But is it not a little unjust to class as a 
 sectary one among whose last words were these : " God 
 is my witness that I desire that things may go well with 
 me only for the sake of one sect, the Communion of 
 Saints, let it be where it will"? 2 
 
 In some respects Denck occupied the ordinary Ana- 
 baptist position. He drew the familiar distinction be- 
 tween the outer and the inner Word, that written in the 
 Bible and that inscribed on the fleshly tables of the 
 heart a distinction which at once undermines the ex- 
 clusive authority of Scripture, and provides for the con- 
 tinuity of revelation. "I esteem Holy Scripture," he 
 says, " above all human treasures, but not so highly as 
 
 1 See passages quoted by Heberle in his article in the Theol. Studien 
 und Kritiken, 1851, " Johann Denck und sein Biichlein vom Gesetz," 
 p. 154. 
 
 2 Letter to (Ecolampadius, quoted by Keller, " Ein Apostel," p. 252. 
 
208 VI. SECTS OP THE REFORMATION. 
 
 the Word of God which is living, powerful, eternal, free 
 and independent of all elements of this world : for as it 
 is God Himself, so is it spirit and not letter, and written 
 without pen and paper, so that it can never more be 
 blotted out." 1 He took the side of his sect as to adult 
 baptism, but it was a matter on which he laid no stress. 
 "It harms no faithful man," he said, "to have been 
 baptized in his childhood ; and God asks no other bap- 
 tism, so he observes the order which becomes a Christian 
 community." 2 He had grasped the idea that in a truly- 
 spiritual theory of Christianity sacraments have no autho- 
 ritative place. They are but signs and reminders of love, 
 which is the one thing needful. Whoso has love is above 
 rules and ceremonies. "Love is God Himself: whoso 
 has not God, him cannot all creatures help, though he 
 were already lord of them all. But who has God, has all 
 creatures." 3 But he went much further than this: he 
 abandoned the ground of Eeformation theology in his 
 rejection of its entire scheme of salvation. He denied 
 Luther's fundamental assumption of the slavery of the 
 will, asserting, on the contrary, the existence in every 
 soul of a divine spark, the Christ within, which the 
 charm of the personal Christ fanned into a flame of good- 
 ness. The imitation of Christ was one of his character- 
 istic ideas : without formally denying that Christ suffered 
 for us, he insisted much more upon the thought that we 
 are to suffer with him, and held him up as an example 
 
 1 From Denck's so-called recantation, quoted by G. Arnold, "Kirch en 
 und Ketzer Historie," Part iv. Sec. ii. 31, p. 533. 
 
 2 Quoted by Heberle, Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1855, p. 882. 
 
 3 Ibid. 1851, p. 185. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 209 
 
 rather than pleaded him as a sacrifice. "With these views, 
 it is not wonderful that Denck should have been widely 
 accused of holding the Antitrinitarian opinions which 
 were notoriously entertained by his friend and fellow- 
 worker Hetzer. 1 So far as I can judge, it would not be 
 easy to produce any direct evidence of the fact from his 
 writings. None of them touch upon metaphysical mys- 
 teries of the Divine Nature. They approach Christianity 
 from the spiritual and the ethical side, and are interested 
 in questions of Divine personality only so far as they 
 affect the practical life. Still there are passages in them 
 which the trained theologian will recognize as belonging 
 to quite another region of thought than the Athanasian. 
 Speaking of the inner light, he says : "If now a carpen- 
 ter's son, who had never gone to school, should come and 
 
 1 When and where Denck and Hetzer first met is a difficult point, 
 which I shall not attempt to decide. The lives of these half-forgotten 
 heretics have to be reconstructed out of the scantiest and most scattered 
 materials, the right interpretation of which is often very difficult. 
 Hetzer was a scholar of some accomplishment, and a thinker of much 
 speculative daring ; unhappily, also, a man of many sins and repent- 
 ances, who died upon the scaffold at Constanz in 1529 for breaches of 
 the moral law, which might have been visited upon him less harshly 
 had his heresy not been so notorious. The following rude verses, 
 preserved by Franck, Chronica, III. 139 b, are decisive as to Hetzer's 
 
 opinions : 
 
 Ich bin allein der Einig Gott 
 
 Der ohne Hiilf all Ding beschaffen hat. 
 Fragst du, wie viel meiner sei 1 
 Ich bin's allein, meiner sind nicht drei. 
 Sag' auch darbei ohn alien Wohn 
 Dass ich glat weiss von keiner Person. 
 Bin auch weder diess noch das 
 Wem ich's nicht sag, der weiss nicht was. 
 P 
 
210 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 rebuke the lies of the learned, where should he have 
 learned it ? " * And again : 
 
 " Therefore hath it pleased the Eternal Love that the man in 
 whom love hath been manifested in the highest should be called 
 the Saviour of his people: not as though it were possible to 
 humanity to save any one, but that God was so completely united 
 in love with him, that every act of God was this man's act, and 
 all this man's suffering is to be regarded as God's suffering. This 
 man is Jesus of Nazareth, who was promised in Scripture by the 
 true God, and manifested in his season." 2 
 
 Still Denck's heresy, such as it was, was not developed 
 on these lines. The affection of the soul which Luther 
 calls faith and makes all-important, he declares to be 
 love, self-forgetfulness, trust in the promises of God. 
 And God on the moral side is Love, and Love only. So 
 Denck, anticipating in a very remarkable way the course 
 of the newest thought, could not be brought to believe 
 
 1 Quoted by Keller, p. 191. 
 
 2 Quoted by Arnold, Part iv. Sec. ii. 31, p. 532. Denck's latest 
 biographer, Dr. L. Keller, " Ein Apostel der Wiedertaufer," Leipzig, 
 1882, who has most industriously acquainted himself with Denck's 
 very rare and scattered works, strangely says nothing about the 
 Antitrinitarian opinions which have been so commonly attributed to 
 him. He refrains from investigating the connection with Hetzer, 
 which was certainly very close; and while instructing his readers 
 about everything else nearly or remotely connected with Denck's 
 career, does not mention the notorious heresy of his friend and lite- 
 rary fellow-worker. In this connection I must think it strange that 
 he translates the passage (see below) in Denck's last letter to (Ecolam- 
 padius, "quam ut quam plurimi uno corde et ore Deum et Patrem 
 Domini nostri Jesu Christi glorificarent" "als dass recht Viele eines 
 Herzens und Mundes Gott, den Vater unseres Herrn Jesu Christi, 
 riihmen" (p. 229). This disingenuousness is a blot upon an otherwise 
 meritorious book. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 211 
 
 in an endless hell. The omnipotent love of God must 
 be victorious, and not only all men, but all devils, be 
 saved at last. 1 Critics, indeed, differ as to whether he 
 believed in any material hell at all, or conceived of it as 
 other than the torment of conscience and the conscious 
 sense of God's justice. 1 Texts in support of eternal 
 punishment he answered in part by other texts ; but the 
 necessary and unchangeable love of God was his main- 
 stay. It is plain that we have here a religious phenomenon 
 of quite another kind from those which have hitherto 
 occupied our attention. This theology is as strongly 
 opposed to Wittenberg, to Zurich, to Geneva, as to Eome. 
 In the letter to (Ecolampadius, written near the end of 
 his life, of which I have already spoken, Denck says : 
 
 " I ask no other result, God knows, than that as many men as 
 possible should with one heart and voice glorify the God and 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whether they be circumcised, 
 or baptized, or neither ; for I greatly differ from those, whoever 
 
 1 Keller (p. 76) denies that any proof of Denck's belief in the sal- 
 vability of Satan can be adduced from his works, and goes on to say 
 that it is very doubtful whether he believed in a personal Devil at all. 
 Franck is, however, explicit on the point. " Diser hat under andern 
 gehalten die Meynung Origenis, dass sich Gott werd endtlich aller 
 erbarmen, Gott werd und mbg nit ewig ztirnen noch verstossen, und 
 werd in summa endtlich alles selig, auch die verstossnen Geister und 
 TeufFel." Chronica, III. 135. Denck was here only following the true 
 path of German mysticism. The "Theologia Germanica" says (ch. 
 xvi.) : "If the Evil Spirit himself could come into true obedience, he 
 would become an angel again, and all his sin and wickedness would be 
 healed and blotted out and forgiven at once." Again (ch. li.) : "But 
 in hell every one will have self-will ; therefore there is all manner of 
 sin and wretchedness. So is it also here on earth. But if there were 
 one in hell who should get rid of his self-will, and call nothing his 
 own, he would come out of hell into heaven." Theol. Germ., transl. 
 Winkworth. 
 
212 VI. SECTS OF THE REFOEMATION. 
 
 they may be, who too much bind down the kingdom of God to 
 ceremonies and elements of the world." 1 
 
 Ought not the fact that a man like this was regarded 
 all over Upper Germany as the leader of the Anabaptists, 
 to go some way to relieve Anabaptism of the heavy load 
 of opprobrium which ecclesiastical historians have laid 
 upon it? 2 
 
 Caspar Schwenkfeld fills a much larger place than 
 Denck in the church history of the time, partly, perhaps, 
 because he gave his name to a sect which long lingered 
 in Germany and still survives in America. 3 He was a 
 Silesian nobleman who, having had the best education of 
 his time at Cologne and elsewhere, passed the early years 
 of his manhood in service at some of the petty courts of 
 his own province. Born in 1490, he received the first 
 fresh impressions of the Lutheran Eeformation, with 
 which, for a time, he felt himself in full accord. But he 
 had too individual a mind to follow any master blindly, 
 while the fact that he was a born mystic placed him 
 more and more, as years went on, in opposition to the 
 later developments of Lutheran theology. I have no 
 
 1 Keller, p. 252. 
 
 2 For Denck, vid. Hagen, III. 275 et seq. Trechsel : Die Protes- 
 tantischen Antitrinitarier vor Faustus Socin. I. 13 et seq. G. Arnold: 
 Kirchen und Ketzer Historie, I. 735, II. 530. Keller : Geschichte der 
 Wiedertaufer, p. 33 et seq. Heberle : Two Essays in the Theologische 
 Studien und Kritiken, 1851, 1855; and especially Keller, "Ein Apostel 
 der Wiedertaufer." 
 
 3 A letter addressed in 1875 to Mr. Eobert Barclay, author of "The 
 Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth," by the 
 authorities of the Schwenkfeldian church at Colebrookdale, Pennsyl- 
 vania, states that at that date they had three hundred families com- 
 prising eight hundred persons and two churches. Barclay : Inner Lite, 
 &c, p. 243. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE KEFORMATION. 213 
 
 time to tell his story in detail. His religious position, 
 which in the eyes of partizans was neither Protestant nor 
 Catholic, drew down upon him dislike and persecution 
 from both sides. King Ferdinand of Bohemia, the brother 
 of Charles Y. and his successor in the Empire, brought 
 pressure to bear upon his Prince, the Duke of Liegnitz, 
 to dismiss him from his service, and in 1529 Schwenkfeld 
 betook himself to Strasburg. Here he found an asylum 
 for five years, which were the prelude to many more of 
 wandering and trouble. He was always faithful with a 
 kind of free allegiance to Luther ; but Luther repulsed 
 him with the bitterest reproaches, and Melancthon fulmi- 
 nated a decree of excommunication against both him and 
 Franck, from the half-political, half -religious assembly 
 of Schmalkalden. The much-enduring man took up his 
 abode first in one city of Southern Germany, then in 
 another, always collecting about him a little circle of 
 adherents whom he organized into a congregation apart, 
 always writing books which were proscribed and burnt, 
 always opposing to persecution a mild persistence which 
 it was impossible to overcome. His gentle birth and 
 courtly manners won him a class of converts whom no 
 plebeian Eeformer could have approached, while at the 
 same time they attracted to him the hostile attention of 
 Princes who might have let plebeian Eeformers alone. 
 He was no Anabaptist, though he associated much with 
 them : on the one hand, they listened to him patiently ; 
 on the other, he had too large a soul to believe that piety 
 was peculiar to any church. " The Anabaptists," 1 he said, 
 "are all the dearer to me that they care about divine 
 
 1 Quoted by Erbium, p. 382 
 
214 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 truth somewhat more than many of the learned ones. 
 For whoso seeks God in earnest will find Him." This, 
 like almost everything else in Schwenkfeld, belongs to 
 the character of the mystic. Even while collecting his 
 little conventicles, the only bond of which was the con- 
 sciousness of a common spiritual inheritance, he was 
 careless of church organization. He was not so much 
 heretical in regard to the doctrines of the Eeformation, 
 as felt that he had penetrated beneath them to something 
 more real and stable. The older he grew and the more 
 the spiritual element faded out of Lutheranism, the greater 
 was his insistance that the spirit was the one thing need- 
 ful. When men made, first the sacraments, then preach- 
 ing, mere matters of external administration, declaring 
 that, so the truths were preached, it mattered not how 
 or by whom, and defining faith as no more than an intel- 
 lectual assent to a creed, it was well that Schwenkfeld 
 should reiterate the distinction between the outer and 
 the inner Word, and insist on the direct communication 
 between God and every soul. The peculiarly Protestant 
 character of his mysticism was shown in his doctrine of 
 the deification of the flesh of Jesus, which was his way 
 of explaining the difficulty of the Eeal Presence in the 
 Eucharist. Jesus, sitting at the right hand of God, was 
 in his heavenly humanity truly Lord and God, and the 
 puzzle of the ubiquity of his body in the bread and wine 
 upon the altar fell away of itself. This deified humanity 
 of Jesus was a great point with Schwenkfeld: his fol- 
 lowers called themselves " confessors of the glory of 
 Christ." But notwithstanding he thus put forward a 
 peculiar doctrine of the Eucharist, it was a necessity of 
 his spiritual theory that he should sit loose to all rites 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 215 
 
 and sacraments. The mystic who aims to possess God 
 and believes that he has attained his end, is quite careless 
 of minor matters, and not least of the wings with which 
 less daring souls attempt to fly. That Schwenkfeld, in 
 spite of his long activity and the persecution which pushed 
 him into notoriety, left little permanent result behind, 
 will surprise no one who reflects that mysticism does not 
 easily propagate itself, and can grow only in fit spiritual 
 soil. Still the meditative, patient, persistent man, always 
 striving to sound the depths of religious experience, 
 always endeavouring to draw for others the distinction 
 between the formal and the realjjipt heterodox except 
 out of the necessity of his spiritual nature, and finding 
 brethren everywhere in all true seekers after God, is one 
 of the most characteristic figures of the Eeformation, and 
 not the least amiable. He died at Ulm in 1562. 1 
 
 Sebastian Frances life resembles in many respects 
 those of Denck and Schwenkfeld : there is the same 
 untiring allegiance to theological opinions, the same wan- 
 dering and harassed existence, the same result of con- 
 temporary fame and speedy forgetfulness. He was a 
 native of Donauworth in Swabia, born probably in the 
 last decade of the fifteenth century, though neither the 
 year of his birth nor that of his death is precisely known. 
 We find him about 1527 in Niirnberg, the JSTurnberg of 
 Willibald Pirkheimer, of Albrecht Diirer, of Hans Sachs, 
 and, only a year or two before, of Johann Denck and pos- 
 sibly Ludwig Hetzer. His first work was a translation 
 into German of the Diallage of Althammer, the attempt 
 
 1 For Schwenkfeld, see especially Erbkam, Bk. I. ch. iv. pp. 357 
 475. Conf. also Barclay : The Inner Life of the Eeligious Societies of 
 the Commonwealth, p. 227 et seq. 
 
216 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 of a Lutheran minister to reconcile inconsistencies of 
 Scripture; his next, also a translation of that famous 
 tract, the " Supplication of the Beggars," which played 
 a part in the English Eeformation. From that time, for 
 about fifteen years, his literary activity is incessant and 
 very varied. Popular history and mystical theology 
 divide him between them. He writes a great Geschicht 
 Bibel, or Bible of History, the ecclesiastical part of which 
 characteristically includes a catalogue of heretics, a His- 
 tory of Germany, a Chronicle of the Franks, a Welt Buck, 
 or system of Cosmography. He is the author of a book 
 against the national vice of drunkenness; he translates 
 Erasmus' "Praise of Polly;" he makes a collection of 
 German Proverbs. Then there are his Paradoxes, two 
 hundred and eighty in number, dealing in a startling but 
 suggestive way with all deep theological questions ; his 
 " Golden Ark," a collection of wise sayings, gathered from 
 Scripture, the Fathers, and heathen sages ; and his "Book 
 sealed with Seven Seals," which treats of the contrariety 
 between the written and the inner Word of God, in the 
 spirit and with something of the form of the Paradoxes. 
 During the fifteen or sixteen years in which Franck was 
 producing these voluminous works and there are more 
 than I have enumerated he was driven from city to city 
 of Southern Germany, supporting himself sometimes by 
 soap-boiling, sometimes by printing, but always having 
 his heart in his literary work. Banished from Strasburg 
 for publishing his Geschicht Bibel, he settled in Ulm, 
 where he boiled soap for a while, but afterwards, when 
 he had won his citizenship, turned to book-making again. 
 Here he met with his worst enemy, Martin Frecht, the 
 Lutheran pastor of Ulm, who not only after a long 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 217 
 
 struggle procured his expulsion from the city, but stirred 
 up Melancthon nothing loth to prevent, by his widely 
 extended influence, the hunted man from finding rest for 
 the sole of his foot in any German city. I have already 
 spoken of the denunciation which the humanist of Wit- 
 tenberg directed from the assembly of Princes and Divines 
 at Schmalkalden against Franck and Schwenkfeld, friends 
 and brothers in misfortune, a document which the latter 
 not inaptly described as a " Papal Bull." Then there is 
 another expulsion from Strasburg; and in 1542 we find 
 Franck pursuing the business of a printer in Basel. Soon 
 after, though how and when we do not know, came the 
 end, and Franck' s restless pen no longer provoked the 
 relentless animosity of orthodox Lutherans. 
 
 Franck was not a learned man : he wrote in German for 
 Germans, making no pretensions to exact scholarship. His 
 historical works are largely compilations: except in flashes 
 of insight now and then, they show little trace of the 
 critical spirit. In regard to matters beyond his personal 
 observation, he is as credulous as Sir John Mandeville : 
 " gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire," to say nothing 
 of " men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," 
 figure in his pages ; and, like Milton after him, he goes 
 for the beginnings of native history to the Trojan War. 
 At the same time he had read widely, if not critically : 
 he pours out upon his pages all the wealth of ancient 
 learning, while his accounts of contemporary events are 
 vivid and exact. Melancthon, we are told, was never 
 tired of lavishing contempt upon him in his character 
 of historian; but modern opinion has not ratified the 
 judgment. Men who know comparatively little of Franck 
 as a theologian or a philosopher, declare him to have 
 
218 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 been the father of German history. There is a fine 
 national spirit about him: he appealed, not to the learned, 
 but to the people, and the people rewarded him by buying 
 edition after edition of his books. Had he been less 
 popular, he might have been less persecuted; but this 
 half printer, half soap-boiler, who had never had a uni- 
 versity education, and would not, perhaps could not, 
 write in Latin, was a maker of public opinion such as 
 the new orthodoxy could not afford to despise. But 
 what on this side of his activity is chiefly interesting to 
 us is the religious spirit in which he wrote history. The 
 common distinction between sacred and profane would 
 have been abhorrent to him. He inscribes upon the first 
 page of his Geschicht Bibel the very title of which 
 implies a theory " Come and behold the works of the 
 Lord." History, with him, is the continued exemplifi- 
 cation in human life of what Scripture enjoins, teaches, 
 forbids. It is the peculiar advantage, thinks Franck, of 
 those who live in the last days that so large and various 
 an experience of humanity lies behind them. We might 
 call him a humanist for the interest he takes in mani- 
 festations of life and thought which are neither Hebrew 
 nor Christian, did he not deserve the name in its nobler 
 sense of one upon whom everything that is human makes 
 an equal claim. 
 
 This could hardly have been the case with a theologian 
 like Luther, to whom mankind since the fall lay in moral 
 bondage and corruption, and who could save patriarch and 
 prophet from the general sentence only by attributing to 
 them a kind of Christianity before Christ. From this 
 view of things Franck was saved by his doctrine of the 
 "Word. Like the Anabaptists, with whom he is often 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 219 
 
 unjustly classed, lie distinguished between the written 
 and the unwritten, the outer and the inner Word. This 
 distinction is indeed the key to all his theology. The 
 written Word that which the Eeformers of Wittenberg 
 made their idol often deceived and led astray, as indeed 
 was sufficiently shown by the various and contradictory 
 doctrines which men drew from it. But there is an inner 
 Word, which lives and moves in every man, Jew, Chris- 
 tian, Heathen, Turk, to which the outer is only a witness: 1 
 in one sense the light of nature, in another the Christ in 
 men's souls, the*only true Christ. Franck has indeed 
 very little to say of the historical Christ : it is, so to 
 speak, the universal Christ who engages his attention. 
 It was in the strength of the inner divine Word that not 
 only the prophets spake, but all wise and virtuous hea- 
 thens, Plato not less than Isaiah. Adam and Christ, the 
 bad seed and the good, are in every man's soul : it lies 
 with each to choose to which he will conform himself. 
 But without that inward conformity which involves the 
 putting away of sin and the cleansing of the conscience, 
 the sufferings of Christ are a dead letter to us, just as 
 much as any heathen history. Closely connected with 
 this idea of the unwritten Word is Franck's conception 
 of nature, which is far more modern than any other that 
 I find in the speculations of this age. 
 
 1 "Dies Licht der Natur, so durch die Latern des Fleisches nicht 
 kann leuchten, ist alien Menschen gemein, dass ein Jeglicher das Urtheil 
 in seinem Busen stecken hat, und dies Licht heisst die Schrift das 
 eingepflanzte Wort, Gesetz nnd Willen Gottes. Ans diesem Licht und 
 Grund haben geschrieben Plotinus, Plato, Diogenes, Trismegistus, 
 Seneca, Hiob und alle erleuchtete Heiden." Quoted by Hase : S. Franck, 
 p. 215. 
 
220 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 "The whole world," 1 he says, "and all creatures are only an 
 open book and living Bible, in which, without guidance, thou 
 mayest. study the art of God and learn His will. For all crea- 
 tures preach to a man who is considerate and instructed of God. 
 .... To the devout all is an open book, wherein he learns more 
 from the creatures and works of God, than a godless man out of 
 all Bibles and words of God. For whoso does not understand 
 God's work, does not apprehend His Word also." 
 
 "What is this but that Hellenism made Christian which 
 it is the object of our best religious thought to-day to 
 define and expound ? 
 
 Franck was a Eeformer of the Eef ormers in his hatred 
 of the Papacy, and the sharp criticisms of the Papal 
 system, in which his historical works abound. But his 
 attitude of opposition to Lutheranism was hardly less 
 stiff:. If any doctrine more than another cut athwart his 
 deepest convictions, it was that of the authority of the 
 letter of Scripture. He accused the Lutherans of depos- 
 ing a human, to set up a paper Pope. 
 
 1 Quoted by Hase : S. Franck, p. 30. It is, however, worth while 
 to cite in this connection a passage from Theobald Thamer, a divine 
 who, driven from Lutheranism by disgust at the hard and immoral 
 interpretation of the doctrine of justification by faith, found refuge at 
 last in the Catholic Church. He graduated at Wittenberg in 1539, 
 and died in 1569. "Es ist eine grosse Gotteslasterung zu sagen, die 
 Kreaturen seyen um des menschichen Bauches Willen geschaffen : 
 sondern vielmehr seyen sie geschaffen zu Gottes Ehre, dass der Mensch 
 durch sie Gott in seiner Herrlichkeit erkenne und an ihnen Gott ver- 
 herrlichen lerne. Es ist nichts auf Erden, das nicht ein Element und 
 Anleitung zum wahren Glauben ist und predigt Gottes Ehre. Die 
 Kreaturen sind dem Menschen zu einen sichtbaren, wie die heilige 
 Schrift zu einem hbrlichen Worte vorgestellt : denn wenn die Kreaturen 
 uns nicht lehrten zur Seligkeit, sondern nur zu diesem Leben, wie ihr 
 vorgeht, so waren sie nicht allein unniitz, sondern auch der Sunde 
 unterworfen, und mehreten das Reich des Teufels." Quoted by A. 
 Neander: Th. Thamer, p. 31. 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 221 
 
 "Antichrist," 1 he said, " who is now tired of the Pope, and has 
 well-nigh used him up, will put on another disguise, and set 
 himself in the midst of the letter of Scripture .... and be more 
 learned in Scripture than we. Thus many are now making an 
 idol of Scripture, not even asking God to explain His secret to 
 us ; for nevertheless Scripture can change no bad heart, else were 
 the most learned in Scripture the most pious too." 
 
 Again : 2 
 
 "With many, Scripture and Gospel have now become such 
 an art that no one can understand them who does not know four 
 or five languages. I set much more store upon a quiet, self- 
 denied heart, wherein God may shine and mirror Himself ; for 
 this is what Christ thinks alone necessary to his method and 
 secret." 
 
 So, in like manner, he is indifferent to sacraments. To 
 lose oneself in God, to live in communion with the Divine 
 Word within, is everything; external signs and rites, 
 nothing. 
 
 "Temples," 3 he says, " pictures, festivals, sacrifices, ceremonies, 
 have no place in the New Testament. For this is nothing but 
 the Holy Ghost, a good conscience, love unfeigned, a pure spirit, 
 an innocent life, the righteousness of the heart, proceeding from 
 genuine faith." 
 
 Franck was thus no Anabaptist, for he looked upon 
 baptism as an indifferent thing. And he was profoundly 
 averse, too, to the sectarian spirit of the Anabaptists. 
 He was that strangest of religious phenomena, which the 
 world has not yet learned to understand, a deeply reli- 
 gious man who cared nothing about churches or church 
 organizations. It was not that he wished to stand alone, 
 
 1 Quoted by Hase : S. Franck, p. 78. 2 Ibid. pp. 79, 80. 
 
 3 Franck : Paradoxa, No. lxxxix. p. 116b. 
 
222 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 but that no external exclusions could shut him out from 
 the consciousness of universal brotherhood. He was con- 
 tent to be a Christian only ; and he interpreted that word 
 in so wide a sense, as to make it include the wise and 
 good of every age. 1 
 
 1 " Weil nun bis ans Ende Gut und Bos in einem Netz und Acker 
 dieser Welt bei einander sein werden und Jerusalem mitten unter den 
 Heiden zerstreuet soil liegen, halt ich von keiner Sonderung und Secte 
 nichts. Ein Jeder kann fur sich selbst wohl fromm sein, wo er ist, 
 darf nicht eben hin und her lanfen, eine sondere Secte Tauf, Kirchen 
 suchen, anrichten, und auf einen Haufen sehen und seinem Anhang zu 
 lieb glauben, fromm sein und zu Dienst heucheln." Paradoxa, Preface, 
 p. 7 b. 
 
 "Paulus will nicht leiden, dass sich Jemand nach ihm paulisch 
 nennt : also hoffe ich, begehre auch keiner von uns armen Erdwiirmern 
 dass ich nach ihm Papistiseh, Lutherisch, Zwinglisch, oder Taiiferisch 
 genannt werde, weil ich sammt ihnen auf Christum getauft bin, und 
 Christo nach werde genannt. Ich halte aber mit Petro fur meino 
 Briider alle, die unter alien Volkern Gott suchen." Quoted by Hase : 
 S. Franck, p. 247. 
 
 " Nun sind gewiss alle Secten aus dem Teufel, und ein Frucht des 
 Fleisches, an Zeit, Statt, Person, Gesetz, und Element gebunden, allein 
 das freie, ohn sectisch, unpartelisch Christenthum, das an der Dinge 
 keins gebunden ist, sondern frei in Geist auf Gottes Wort steht und 
 mit Glauben und nicht mit Augen begriffen und gesehen kann werde, 
 
 ist aus Gott Die Kirche nicht etwa ein sonderer Hauf und finger- 
 
 zeig Sect ist, an Elementen, Zeit, Person und Statt gebunden, sondern 
 .... die Versammlung und Gemeinde aller recht gottfrommen und 
 gutherzigen neuer Menschen, in aller Welt durch den heiligen Geist 
 in dem Frieden Gottes mit dem Band der Liebe zusammengegurtet, 
 ausser dem kein Heil, Christus, Gott, Verstand der Schrift, heiliger 
 Geist, noch Evangelium ist. In und bei dieser Kirche bin ich, zu der 
 sehne ich mich in meinem Geist, wo sie zerstreuet unter den Heiden 
 und Unkraut umfahret, und glaube diese Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, 
 kann's aber nicht zeigen, bin aber gewiss, dass ich in der Kirche bin, 
 sei, wo ich wolle." Paradoxa, Preface, pp. 7, 8. 
 
 For Sebastian Franck, vid. Hagen, III. 314 396, who in modern 
 times first called attention to his merits as a philosophic and religious 
 
VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 223 
 
 Perhaps some acute hearer may already have divined 
 that, to describe Franck exactly, we must use not only 
 the word Mystic, but one of worse repute, Pantheist. 
 I might possibly, by invoking the aid of subtle philoso- 
 phical distinctions, deny the charge, but I am not greatly 
 concerned to do so : he saw God in all things, all things 
 in God : and when he tried to define Deity, found it hard 
 to do so in terms which should include personality. But 
 I notice that this is a difficulty into which many pro- 
 foundly religious men are apt to fall ; and I can at least 
 plead for Franck that he held to free-will, and so saved, 
 in his own view, the citadel of human morality. There 
 were more dangerous heresies afloat in that orthodox age 
 yes, and in some of its most orthodox places too than 
 that which discerned the presence of the Living God in 
 all history and in all nature. 
 
 It is a significant thing that Franck, who during the 
 period of his brief literary activity had been so popular, 
 was soon forgotten, and has only within the last few 
 years been restored to the light of human memory. His 
 books ceased to be reprinted: he fell into the general 
 crowd of those Anabaptists who were looked upon as the 
 shame of the Eeformation, and of whom men chiefly 
 thought in connection with the catastrophe of Minister. 
 If, now that he lives again, he is found to be strangely 
 modern, the fact may account both for his own fate and 
 that of many of the sectaries, learned and unlearned, 
 whom I have tried to describe. They were half-blindly 
 reaching forward to something better and more stable 
 
 thinker ; Erbkam, pp. 286 357 ; and particularly the excellent mono- 
 graph of K. A. Hase, " Sebastian Franck, von Word, der Schwarm- 
 geist." 
 
224 VI. SECTS OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 than they knew or could firmly grasp. Those seem to us 
 to have succeeded best who stood on the ground of that 
 pure spiritual intuition which is the same in all ages, and 
 not essentially affected by intellectual change; but in 
 proportion as they succeeded, were they out of tune with 
 their own age and that which came after. These ideas 
 of the continuity of revelation, of the Divine in nature 
 and in history, of the inner, which must in the last resort 
 interpret the outer Word, of the unimportance of sacra- 
 ments compared with the consecration of the life, even 
 of the kingdom of God as a realizable ideal of human 
 society, are only now, after the lapse of so many years, 
 working themselves clear, and winning recognition as the 
 result of a just interpretation of Scripture, of history, of 
 nature. It is impossible to deny the presence in Ana- 
 baptism of an element, coarse, fanatical, immoral ; though 
 we must recollect that the Anabaptists have been chiefly 
 described by their enemies, and may predict that history 
 will be gentler to them in the future than in the past. 
 Nor do I compare Denck, Schwenkfeld, Franck, with 
 Luther, Zwingli, Calvin : each did a necessary work, and 
 each in his own way. But the men whom the world has 
 almost forgotten, and whom it remembers only to blame, 
 saw, though perhaps dimly, truths and principles which 
 the men who have reaped their full harvest of fame as 
 leaders and benefactors of humanity contemptuously 
 neglected. But time brings its revenges: and though 
 men be forgotten, truth cannot die. 
 
Lecture VII. 
 
 THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 The force of. the Eef ormation has been transmitted to 
 modern times in two great currents, that of the Lutheran 
 and that of the Eeformed Church. But these have run 
 a very different course. At first, the centre and turning- 
 point of Protestantism was undeniably Wittenberg. It 
 is Luther who stands in uncompromising opposition to 
 Pope and Emperor, a new Athanasius against the world. 
 He appears before Diets : Cardinals are sent to negotiate 
 with him and those who support him : he is the mark of 
 all Catholic controversialists : a King takes up the pen to 
 refute him: a special bull places him under the ban of the 
 Church. Movements similar to his, but independent of 
 it, are going on all over Europe, a significant testimony 
 at once to the tendency and the ripeness of the time ; but 
 they attract comparatively little attention. Colet and 
 his friends strove to give a new direction to the studies 
 of Oxford before Luther had taken his vows at Erfurt : it 
 has been claimed for France that in the person of Lefevrjg. 
 d^Etaple_s_.she led the way in the van of reformation: 
 when the theses against indulgences were nailed to the 
 church door of Wittenberg, Zwingli was already preach- 
 
 Q 
 
226 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 ing against pilgrimages to the pilgrims at Einsiedeln. 
 Still it was a wise instinct which, concentrated the atten- 
 tion of Eome and Europe upon Saxony. Luther is indis- 
 putably the chief figure of the Eeformation, and the Saxon 
 movement that in which we still rightly study the prin- 
 ciples and motives of the great religious uprising of 
 Europe. But as time went on, all this was changed, and 
 the primacy of the Eeformation was transferred from 
 Wittenberg to Geneva. The Scandinavian kingdoms 
 were the only permanent conquest which, beyond the 
 limits of Germany, the Lutheran Eeform won for Pro- 
 testantism : from whatever footing it gained in the east 
 of Europe, it was gradually expelled by the Counter 
 Eeformation. In truth, it was far too much occupied 
 with arid controversies and ignoble divisions to have the 
 self-forgetting energy necessary for successful missionary 
 effort. ~Not even in Germany did it hold its own: on the 
 one hand, Calvinism soon penetrated into the Palatinate ; 
 on the other, the Catholic Princes of the south, under 
 the astute direction of the Society of Jesus, crushed out 
 Protestantism by slow and persistent persecution. But 
 the Protestant churches of France, Holland, Scotland, 
 were distinctly Calvinistic. The foreign theologians 
 whom the advisers of Edward VI. invited to their aid, 
 either belonged to the Eef ormed Church or were largely 
 under its influence: the Marian exiles breathed the air 
 and imbibed the principles of Zurich : while the same 
 spiritual succession has been continued in Puritanism, in 
 English Dissent, in the prevailing character of American 
 religion. I do not mean that there are no traces of 
 Lutheran influence upon the history of the English 
 Church, but they are comparatively few and mostly 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 227 
 
 beneath the surface. It is Calvinism which has furnished 
 the missionary enterprize of Protestantism. 
 
 The history of Swiss Protestantism is peculiar in the 
 fact that it follows a double line of development. It 
 boasts two names of the first rank, Zwingli and Calvin : 
 it had two centres, Zurich and Geneva. And it is 
 obvious to remark that one of these is German, the other 
 French ; that standing in close relation to the Bhine- 
 land, this to France, Italy, Savoy. The movement in 
 Switzerland divides itself into two parts, chronologically 
 as well as geographically. Zwingli was born on the 1st 
 of January, 1484, and was therefore less than two months 
 younger than Luther. He was at work in his own way . 
 a way which I shall try to describe presently as early as 
 Luther was. The scene of his activity was the northern 
 and German- speaking Cantons of Switzerland, Glarus, 
 Zurich, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and afterwards Basel and 
 Bern ; while many of the free cities on the German side 
 of the frontier, Strasburg, Constanz, Ulm, Augsburg, 
 Eeutlingen, adopted with more or less unanimity his 
 opinions on the Eucharist. But when in 1531 he fell in 
 the Battle of Cappel, in which Zurich was defeated by 
 the five Forest Cantons, and his friend and helper (Eco- 
 lampadius died a few weeks after, it seemed as if the 
 cause of Swiss Protestantism would fall from the compa- 
 ratively feeble hands of their successors. It was at this 
 moment of crisis that a young refugee from northern 
 France, John Calvin, stepped into the breach and held 
 it victoriously. He was a full generation younger than 
 Zwingli and Luther : born in 1509, the first edition of 
 his " Institution" was published in 1536, five years after 
 Zwingli's death : the period of his theocratic sway at 
 
 q2 
 
228 VII. THE KEFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 Geneva extended from 1541 to his death in 1564. 
 Henceforth the little free city on Lake Leman is the 
 centre of Swiss, I had almost said of European Pro- 
 testantism. Here were gradually developed that scheme 
 of theological thought, that method of ecclesiastical 
 organization, those principles of church discipline, which, 
 in more or less modified form, were destined to so wide 
 a prevalence. There is little direct intellectual relation 
 to be traced between Calvin and Zwingli; indeed, the 
 great systematizer was wont to speak in higher terms of 
 the Saxon Eeformer than of his own immediate fore- 
 runner. But not the less was his work a continuation 
 of Zwingli' s. The leading ideas of Calvinism are ideas 
 which Zwingli had already put forward in a less precise 
 and systematic form. There is a well-marked sense in 
 which the Swiss theology as a whole can be compared 
 and contrasted with the German. It would serve no 
 good purpose were I to attempt in this place to define 
 the shades of difference which in the middle years of the 
 sixteenth century separated the Swiss churches from one 
 another, and all from the Saxon Eeformers. They led 
 to many controversies ; they are embodied in many con- 
 fessions. But the final result was that the Calvinistic 
 type of doctrine prevailed, especially in the foreign 
 churches. The Confession of La Eochelle, the Decrees of 
 the Synod of Dordt, the Westminster Confession, have 
 nothing in them which can be called distinctively Zwin- 
 glian. But it is at least an allowable speculation that 
 the milder, more rational, humaner spirit of the great 
 Eeformer of Zurich reappeared in the Arminian theology 
 which in the seventeenth century was so powerful a 
 factor of European thought. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 229 
 
 The doctrine of Zwingli was Lutheranism with a dif- 
 ference. Like Luther, he substituted the authority of 
 the Bible for the authority of the Church ; like Luther, 
 he preached justification by faith alone ; like Luther, he 
 maintained the true priesthood of every Christian man. 
 Under the influence of the same forces, the Eeformation, 
 all over Europe, assumed the same forms : Lutheranism, 
 Zwinglianism, Calvinism, even when the most is made of 
 their differences, resemble each other much more than 
 any of them the faith of the Church to which they were 
 all opposed. And we should miss a significant fact if we 
 failed to note that Zwingli was a religious phenomenon 
 parallel with Luther, but not dependent on him. While 
 the Eeformer of Zurich speaks in admiring language of 
 the Eeformer of Wittenberg^ he will not be called a 
 Lutheran : he drew his doctrine, he said, from the Scrip- 
 tures ; he had preached it before ever he heard the name 
 of Luther : l why should he not rather be called by the 
 
 1 " Es habend die grossen und gwaltigen diser welt angehebt die leer 
 Christi under dem namen des Luters ze durachten und verhasst ze 
 machen, also dass sy alle leer Christi, von wem sy uf erdrych gepred- 
 iget wirt, luterisch nennend. Und ob einer schon des Luters handel 
 nit gelesen hatte, und sich allein des worts gottes hielte, dennoch 
 gdbrend sy jn luterisch schelten : der gstalt mir beschicht. Ich hab 
 vor und ee dhein mensch in unserer gegne iits von des Luters namen 
 gwiisst hat, angehebt das evangelion Christi zu predgen im jar 
 MDXVI ; also dass ich an dhein canzel gegangen bin, dass ich nit die 
 wort, so am selben morgen in der mess zu eim evangelio gelesen wer- 
 dend, fur mich name, und die allein us biblischer gschrift usleite." 
 Uslegen und gnind der Schlussreden oder Artikel : Zwingli. Opp., ed. 
 Schuler und Schulthess, I. 253. 
 
 "Denn wer hat mich ufgeriift das evangelion ze predgen und einen 
 ganzen evangelisten von einet ze predgen 1 Hat das der Luter gethon % 
 Nun hab ichs doch angehebt ze predgen, ee ich den Luter je hab ghort 
 
230 YII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 name of Paul or of Christ ? At the same time there were 
 differences in the original constitutions of the men, as 
 well as in the training which they had received, which 
 influenced their apprehension and presentation of what 
 was substantially the same group of truths. We can find 
 / in Zwingli no trace of the mysticism which Luther had 
 learned from Tauler and the Theologia Germanica. There 
 is nothing in his life-history at all answering to the spi- 
 ritual crisis which drove Luther into the monastery at 
 Erfurt, and there left him to his almost solitary struggle 
 for deliverance and peace. He bears about with him no 
 marks of conflict. He does not, as Luther did, retire 
 into the darkness for a season, coming back trembling 
 and chastened. There is an admirable and cheerful good 
 sense about him, a keen apprehension of the simplicities 
 
 nennen, und hab zu solichem bruch vor 10 jaren angehebt griechisch 
 lernen, damit ich die leer Christi us jrem eignen ursprung erlernen 
 mochte. Wie wol ich. das ergriffen hab, lass ich andre urn urteilen, 
 jedoch hat mich Luter nit angewisen, dess namen mir noch in zweyen 
 jaren unbekannt ist gsyn, nachdem ich mich allein der biblischen 
 gschrift gehalten hab. Aber die papstler beladend mich und ander 
 mit solichen namen us alefanz, wie vor gemeldt, und sprechend : Du 
 must wol luterisch syn : du predgest doch glych wie der Luter schrybt. 
 Antwurt ich jnen : Ich predige doch glych als wol wie Paulus schrybt: 
 warum namst du mich nit als mar einen paulischen 1 Ja, ich predge 
 das wort Christi, warum namst du mich mit als mar einen christen ? 
 Darum ist es nut dann ein alefanz. Luter ist, als mich bedunkt, so 
 ein treffenlicher stryter Gottes, der da mit so grossem ernst die gschrift 
 durchftLndelet, als dheiner in tusand jaren uf erden je gsyn ist (ich 
 acht hie nit, dass mich die papstler mit jm einen ketzer schelten 
 werdend) und mit dem mannlichen unbewegten gmiit, damit er den 
 papst von Rom angegriffen hat, ist jm dheiner nie glych worden, als lang 
 das papsttum gwaret hat, doch alle andren ungescholten. Wess ist 
 aber soliche that 1 gottes oder Luters 1 Frag den Luter selbs : weiss 
 ich wol, er spricht, gottes. Warum schrybst du denn anderer menschen 
 leer dem Luter zu, so er sy selbs gott zuschrybt ?" Ibid, pp. 254, 255. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 231 
 
 of piety, a firm grasp of religion on the ethical and prac- 
 tical side. But the sense of mystery does not weigh 
 upon him: the contemplation of divine things neither 
 excites him to paradox nor awakens him to rapture. 
 
 The fact is that, much more than Luther, Zwingli was 
 a humanist. First at school, at Basel and at Bern, next 
 for two years at the University of Vienna, then for four 
 years more again at Basel, he gave himself up to the 
 studies of the day. It was at Basel, already a centre of 
 busy literary activity, that he fell under the influence of 
 Thomas Wyttenbach, 1 one of those grave scholars of the 
 Ehineland who found the keenest admiration of ancient 
 literature not inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith, 
 and who directed his pupil to the study of the Scriptures 
 apart from scholastic commentary. At a later period he 
 learned for this purpose first Greek and then Hebrew, 
 copying out with his own hand all the Epistles of Paul, 
 that he might know them through and through. But 
 he was not on this account untrue to his first classical 
 preferences. He learned Valerius Maximus off by heart. 
 Thucydides and Aristotle, Plutarch and Lucian, were 
 familiar to him. He thought Plato had drunk at the 
 fountain of Divine Wisdom ; he extolled the piety of 
 Pindar; 2 he gave the great heroes and poets of pagan 
 
 1 In connection with the passage above quoted, Zwingli says that it 
 was from Wyttenbach, and not from Luther, that he learned the true 
 character of indulgences : " dann ich vorhin von dem ablass bericht 
 was, wie es ein betrug und farbe war, us einer disputation die doctor 
 Thomas Wytembach von Biel, min herr und geliebter triiwer leerer, 
 vor etwas zyten ze Basel gehalten hatte, wie wol in minem abwesen." 
 Opp. I. p. 254. 
 
 2 Vid. Zwingli's preface to an edition of Pindar, edited by Coepo- 
 rinus: Opp. IV. 159. 
 
232 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 antiquity a place in the Christian heaven. "When Luther, 
 in the first ardour of his Biblical zeal, was forswearing 
 all philosophy, Zwingli was burying himself in the spe- 
 culations of Pico della Mirandola. In relation to these 
 and similar facts, the word Switzerland is apt to lead us 
 astray. What we have really to do with are not the 
 narrow valleys, the lofty pastures, the sparse population 
 of the Forest Cantons, so much as the wide and fertile 
 Ehineland, a great highway of nations, having on either 
 side a broad belt of cities, free, wealthy, enlightened, the 
 region of central Europe where civilization had reached 
 its highest point, the chosen home of the German revival 
 of letters. Here were the oldest Universities, the most 
 celebrated schools : here had taught the mystics : here 
 the mediaeval sects had honeycombed society : here art 
 went hand in hand with letters: here the citizens of 
 many little republics had learned the secret of a life in 
 loosest dependence on the Church. On the other hand, 
 the learning and civilization of Saxony, and of North 
 Germany in general, were of later origin, and had pene- 
 trated the popular life less deeply : society was constituted 
 on more aristocratic principles : the prince went for more, 
 the burgher for less. It would be difficult to think of 
 Erasmus at Wittenberg, nor had Luther ever a firm hold 
 on the Ehineland. 
 
 In this connection I must point out that the republican 
 constitution of Switzerland gave direction and colour to 
 all Zwingli's activity. He was born only seven years 
 after the Confederates had vindicated their independence 
 in leaving Charles the Bold dead under the walls of 
 Nancy; and the patriotic glow which that marvellous 
 event had kindled in men's hearts must have been fresh 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 233 
 
 as he grew up to manhood. But this victory and those 
 which preceded it taught the Swiss a fatal lesson, in 
 making them acquainted with the strength of their right 
 arms and the force of their disciplined onset : they were 
 brave and they were poor : what more natural than that 
 they should sell their swords? So a system grew up 
 pregnant with national demoralization: now the Pope, 
 now the King of France, recruited in the mountains an 
 army of lanzknechts, whose courage decided many a 
 battle : the spoils of war corrupted the simplicity of 
 republican life: rival potentates bound their friends to 
 their cause by pensions and gratuities : foreign and inte- 
 rested influences turned the currents of Confederate poli- 
 tics. Against this system Zwingli set his face at the 
 very beginning of his career. He had been required as 
 army chaplain to attend more than one expedition into 
 Italy ; he had been present at the Battle of Marignano, 
 and as patriot and reformer he deplored the evils which 
 he could not choose but see in their true colours. These 
 things provided him with a policy which the forms of 
 republican life enabled him to carry out. He aimed at 
 concentrating the life of the Confederacy within its own 
 frontiers, at detaching its several members from foreign 
 alliances, at raising the chief citizens of its republics to 
 a sense of national dignity, and its incompatibility with 
 royal pensions and mercenary service. His friend and 
 biographer Myconius describes his object as the restora- 
 tion of ancient virtue. 1 After the Battle of Pavia in 1525, 
 
 1 "Congredi ccepit juxta Christi normam cum flagitiis quibusque 
 perniciosissimis, ante omnia tamen cum pensionibus (sic appellamus 
 munera principum quae certis, milites parandi bellique conficiendi gratia 
 dabantur hominibus) eo quod eas extirpare et patriam reformare ad 
 
234 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 in which the Swiss soldiers suffered severely, Zwingli, 
 standing in the Minster pulpit of Zurich, drew from the 
 misfortune a trenchant political moral. 1 He told his 
 hearers that when, of old time, their life had been simple 
 and pious, God had given them great victories, and that 
 unless they returned to their former way, there was 
 nothing before them but Divine wrath and utter ruin. 
 All his life long he had a double purpose, the reformation 
 of the Church and the reformation of the State, which 
 were indeed in his view but one. You may say, if you 
 will, that he took religion more on the social, Luther 
 more on the personal side ; that while the latter thought 
 of individual salvation and the soul's union with God, 
 the former had before him the ideal of a well-ordered 
 state, a righteous and peaceful community. But this is 
 the answer to the reproach sometimes directed against 
 Zwingli that he was a politician, and as such degraded 
 religion by bringing it down to the level of earthly 
 intrigue and passion. It is not easy to see what else he 
 could be. He was the first citizen of Zurich, as Calvin 
 afterwards of Geneva ; and in that capacity endeavoured 
 to guide the policy of the Eepublic to the advantage of 
 righteousness and the interests of the Protestant Church. 
 Would he not have been justly open to the imputation 
 of cowardice if, sheltering himself behind his clerical 
 
 sanctitatem pristinam prorsus haberet in votis." 0. Myconius, "De D. 
 Huldrichi Zuinglii vita et obitu," prefixed to D. D. Jo. (Ecolampadii 
 et Huld. Zuinglii Epistolarum libri quatuor: Basel, 1536. In a similar 
 passage (quoted by Hundeshagen, Theol. Studien u. Kritiken, 1862, 
 p. 665, but which I am unable to verify), Myconius says : " Ccepit 
 igitur hue omne conferre studium, si qua ratione res tarn pestilens 
 aboleri, majorum probitas restitui posset." 
 1 Bullinger : Keformationsgeschichte, I. 259. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 235 
 
 character, he had always worked by others' hands and 
 others' voices, and so thrown on his colleagues the respon- 
 sibility of measures which were really his own ? It is 
 impossible now to say that he did not sometimes succumb 
 to the peculiar temptations of politics, and give himself 
 to widely -reaching schemes of European alliance and 
 attack: let the statesman bear the blame of the states- 
 man's errors. Had Zurich conquered on that field of 
 Cappel where Zwingli left his life, had the tide of Swiss 
 Beformation in consequence risen over the whole land, 
 her Eeformer might have escaped heavy censure and 
 much invidious comparison with Luther. 
 
 These facts stand in close relation, on the one hand, 
 with the popular character of ecclesiastical government 
 in the Eeformed Churches ; on the other, with the ethical 
 type of Zwinglian religion. Calvin in Geneva worked 
 under substantially the same political conditions as 
 Zwingli in Zurich, and the result is that the organiza- 
 tion of the churches which descend from him is neither 
 Episcopal nor Consistorial, but Presbyterian. To take 
 the instance with which we are most familiar, it is easy 
 to trace a likeness between the Presbyteries, Synods 
 and Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and the greater 
 and lesser Councils of Zurich or Bern, deriving their 
 power from the citizens at large. I do not mean that 
 one set of institutions is the direct copy of the other, or 
 that the Presbyterian organization of the Church does 
 not sincerely claim for itself the authority of scriptural 
 precedent and primitive example. But men are uncon- 
 sciously swayed by the circumstances in which they have 
 been brought up, and easily find in the Bible what they 
 go there to look for. On the other hand, Zwingli's 
 
236 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 application of religion to the reform and guidance of the 
 State, partly shows how ethical his conception of it was, 
 partly made it more ethical still. One of the distinctions 
 that may be drawn between Lutheran and Zwinglian 
 religion is, that the former is more than anything else 
 a justification of the sinner effected by faith; the latter, 
 a law of God which asks obedience of all believers. And 
 in accordance with this, we find in Zwingli's works many 
 ethical definitions of religion in which an experienced 
 ear will detect the absence of any Lutheran ring. 
 
 11 Piety/' he says, " is a fact and an experience, not a doctrine 
 or a science/' 1 "The Christian life is innocence. . . . But no soil 
 produces innocence more richly than contempt of oneself." 2 "All 
 the writings of the apostles are full of this opinion, namely, 
 that the Christian life is none other than a firm hope in God 
 through Jesus Christ, and an innocent life after Christ's pattern." 3 
 
 There is a little work of Zwingli's, covering only a few 
 pages, " Quo pacio adolescentes formandi" addressed to his 
 step-son, Gerald Meyer, in which he depicts a noble ideal 
 of active manliness : 
 
 " Eor God, as Hejs an Energy, which, itself unmoved, turn s 
 a nd movpR all thing s, will not suffer to be slothful one whose 
 heart He hath drawn to Himself. And the truth of this is 
 approved, not by reasoning, but by experience, for only the 
 faithful know how Christ allows no ease to his own, and how 
 cheerfully and joyfully they engage in toil." 4 
 
 Again : 
 
 " An ingenuous mind will in the first place think thus with 
 
 1 De Vera et falsa religione : Opp. III. 202. 
 
 2 Ibid. III. 285. 3 Ibid. III. 201. 
 
 4 Quo pacto adolesceutes forruandi : ibid. IV. 152. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 237 
 
 itself, that as Christ offered himself for us and is made ours, so 
 it behoves thee to be offered for all, to think thyself not thi ne 
 own but another's ; for we are not born that we may live to our- 
 se lves, but that we may be all things to all men . These things 
 alone, justice, fidelity, constancy, will it meditate from its tender 
 years, in what things it may profit the Christian commonwealth, 
 in what its native country, in what all mankind, one by one. 
 Those are languid minds which look only to the attainment of a 
 quiet life ; nor are they so like God as those who study, even at 
 their own risk, to do good to all." 1 
 
 And once more : 
 
 " It is the part of a Christian man not to talk magnificently of 
 doctrines, but always, with God, to do great and hard things." 2 
 
 In Zwingli's view, the church and the state were 
 practically one body under different aspects. How the 
 realization of this idea is facilitated by republican insti- 
 tutions is clear at first sight. In Germany it was a 
 necessity of the case that the subject should follow the 
 religion of his ruler : but for the succession of three 
 devoutly Protestant Electors, the Eeformation could not 
 have subsisted in Saxony. When Duke Henry succeeded 
 Duke George, his people abandoned Catholicism at once : 
 with the best will in the world, Protestantism was unable 
 to maintain itself in Austria and Bavaria. But in Zurich, 
 in Basel, in Bern, the church and the state were ad- 
 ministered through the same institutions by the same 
 persons. Each step in the process of revolt against Catho- 
 licism, of the adoption of Protestantism, was marked by 
 a public debate, and a solemn decision arrived at by the 
 authorities of the city. The change in religion, with all 
 
 1 Quo pacto adolescentes formandi : Opp. IV. 155. 
 
 2 Ibid. IV. 158. 
 
238 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 that it involved, was the will of the people, and therefore 
 held to be binding upon the people, in the same way as 
 any regularly enacted law, any legally concluded alliance. 
 It is in this light that we have to look at that persecution 
 of Anabaptists which throws a dark shadow upon this 
 phase of religious administration. They were held to be 
 offenders against the expressed will of the commonwealth, 
 and therefore justly liable to be treated like any other 
 criminals. They were fined, they were banished, they 
 were imprisoned; and it was only upon their repeated 
 and impenitent obstinacy that at least some of their 
 leaders were made to pay the forfeit of their lives. And 
 from the same idea of the identity of church and state 
 follows that conception of ecclesiastical discipline as a 
 thing to be enforced by the secular arm, which was after- 
 wards worked out with such relentless logic by Calvin in 
 Geneva. Here, as in so many instances more, the begin- 
 nings of Calvinism are to be traced back to Zwingli. If 
 the citizens of a particular state are also members of the 
 church of Christ, what more natural and expedient than 
 that the laws of the church should be enforced in the 
 same way and by the same means as the laws of the 
 state ? Nor if it is true that the prosperity of the state 
 is built upon the righteousness of the people, is the attain- 
 ment of the political, possible except in the attainment 
 of the moral and religious ideal. In this connection, the 
 Proclamation which was issued on the 26th of March, 
 1530^ by the Burgomaster, in conjunction with the 
 greater and lesser Councils of the city .of .Zurich, .is a 
 curious and significant document. 1 It prescribes that all 
 
 1 Bullinger: Reforniationsgeschichte, II. 277. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 239 
 
 the peopl e shall go to church, remain there till the ser mon 
 is over^ and refrain from talking agallttt the preach er. 
 The number of taverns is to be diminished. All kinds 
 of games not cards and dice only, but others which lead 
 less directly to gambling are forbidden. Profane swear- 
 ing is made an offence against the law. All these moral 
 delinquencies are punished by fines of greater or less 
 amount. In some cases the culprits are to be excluded 
 from their guild, or forbidden the exercise of their trade 
 or calling within the city. These things, as we shall 
 presently see, were carried much further in Geneva, but 
 the principle of Calvinistic discipline is already conceded 
 in Zurich. 
 
 Zwingli adopted to the full the-4teihrinMiojL-prieiple 
 ol Lthe authority of Scripin re. In the public disputations 
 or conferences, which were the republican way of settling 
 all controversies approved at Zurich, the Bible was 
 solemnly put forward as the rule of faith and practice. 
 Each of these disputations, as, for instance, that in which 
 Zwingli defended his doctrine against the Pope's Vicar, 1 
 those against the Anabaptists, 2 that which secured the 
 alliance of Bern, 3 was therefore a public re-assertion of 
 this fundamental principle. But a distinction has been 
 drawn between Luther's attitude to Scripture and Zwin- 
 gli' s, which, if not easy to support by specific quotations 
 from their writings, is, I think, a legitimate deduction 
 from their practice. Luther, it is said, was willing to 
 abide-Ja y any_ ex isting doctr ine or usage which he did 
 n ot find expressly forbidden in Script " re, wJiile Zwingli 
 
 1 January 29, 1523. 2 January 17, March 20, 1525. 
 
 3 January 6, 1528. 
 
240 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 demanded distinct warrant of Scripture for what ever he 
 was willing to allow. It is easy to see that the latter 
 rule is of much more sweeping application than the 
 former, and to trace to its operation the more rigid 
 seve rity of worshi p in the Eeformed than in the Lutheran 
 Church. But if Zwingli was more precise th an Luther 
 in bringing all matters of faith and practice to the test 
 of Scripture, he also took a wider view of what Scripture 
 was. He was more Biblical than Pauline. "While in 
 the main agreeing with Luther in his conception of spi- 
 ritual religion, he did not so exclusively take his gospel 
 from the Pauline Epistles and then read it into the whole 
 Bible. He had a scheme of scriptural instruction, which 
 he explains more than once, as if its use were habitual 
 to him. 1 It began with the Gospel of Matthew, which 
 was succeeded first by the Acts of the Apostles and then 
 by the two letters to Timothy. Only when he had laid 
 this foundation of gospel teaching and primitive practice, 
 did he proceed to explain the Epistle to the Galatians, 
 followed by the Epistles of Peter and that to the Hebrews. 
 It is significant that the Epistle to the Eomans finds no 
 place in this series. This method, which makes a selec- 
 tion from the New Testament in which most of the varied 
 elements of its teaching are fairly represented, would 
 evidently lead to a different result than that which begins 
 and almost ends with Paul. 
 
 The religious faith which Zwingli was engaged in 
 establishing and it must not be forgotten that we are 
 criticising an incomplete and violently interrupted work 
 
 1 Apologeticus Archeteles adpellatus : Opp. III. 48. Conf. I. 151, 
 485, for slightly differing forms of the same statement. 
 
Vn. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 241 
 
 has frequently been charged with containing a rational- 
 izing element. If the word rationalism be used in the 
 definite sense now attached to it, this is no more true 
 of Zwinglianism than of the other great presentations of 
 Eeformation theology. Zwingli neither declaims against 
 reason like Luther, nor, like Luther, erects his own theo- 
 logical preferences, his own untaught insight, into a rule 
 of Biblical criticism. What he might have done had he 
 lived longer, we cannot tell ; bu t as a fact he did not c all 
 i n the aid of human reason, as did Calvin, to pour the 
 fluid and indeterminate elements of his thought into the 
 ri gid mould of a system . But at the same time there is 
 a breezy atmosphere of good sense about his religion. It 
 
 WaS meant for- mroTy-flpY nco omnng flm nffiiirfl f men. 
 
 Its ttl tuaatfl object was practical : if it aspired to soar 
 on wings of faith into the heavenly abyss of the Divine 
 decrees, it always came back to earth with a message of 
 inn ocence^ and purity and justice between man and m an. 
 Zwingli' s sympathy with Erasmus and the scholars of the 
 Ehineland, which never failed him, both prevented him 
 from becoming narrowly ecclesiastical and helped to keep 
 him human. His conception of baptism, as a pledge of 
 fi polit y n fV p a rt of th Q recipien t rather than as a 
 mystical channel of grace- that explanation, in the 
 words of institution, of " is " by " signifies," which 
 so vexed the soul of Luther his designation of original 
 sin as a disease (morbus) rather than as an offence 
 (peccatum) his substitution of a mere figure of rhetoric 
 for the mysterious transference of qualities from the 
 divine to the human nature of Christ, which the Lutherans 
 knew as the communicatio idiomatum are all instances 
 of what we may call his religious common sense. To 
 
 R 
 
242 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 this answered the character of the man, strong, kindly, 
 sincere. He was of untiring energy both in study and 
 in affairs, taking delight in simple pleasures, a musician 
 like Luther, and a performer upon several instruments. 1 
 His disposition and habits were social : his campaigns, no 
 less than his active participation in politics, had given 
 him a large knowledge of men: he mingled with the 
 citizens in their guilds, with the peasants at their merry- 
 makings, and had an acceptable word for all. What 
 would have been the course of events had he lived 
 whether he would have been drawn more and more into the 
 whirlpool of Confederate or European politics whether 
 he would have thrown his thought into a more systematic 
 form, or worked out his principles of faith to further 
 consequences who can say ? "When (Ecolampadius died, 
 no man of originating power was left to take Zwingli's 
 place : Bullinger, Myconius, Leo Jud, fell naturally into 
 the second rank; and after a few years of wrangling 
 controversy on their part, with Geneva on the one side, 
 with Germany on the other, it was clearly seen that the 
 task of moulding and guiding Swiss Protestantism hence- 
 forth belonged to Calvin. 2 
 
 It is, however, impossible to understand Calvin's place 
 and work in the church, until we clearly apprehend that 
 he belongs to a later stage in the development of the 
 Eeformation than Luther and Zwingli. The period of 
 
 1 Bullinger: Keformationsgeschichte, I. 31. 
 
 2 I may refer here to an excellent essay in the Theologische Studien 
 und Kritiken for 1862, p. 631, by Hundeshagen, "Zur Charakteristik 
 Ulrich Zwingli's und seines Reformationswerkes unter Vergleichung 
 mit Luther und Calvin." Another essay in the same periodical, to 
 which I am under obligation throughout this Lecture, is one by 
 Ullmann, "Zur Charakteristik der Reformirten Kirche," 1843, p. 749. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 243 
 
 his commanding influence in Geneva stretches from 1541 
 to his death in 1564. The epoch of creative religious 
 thought is now past. But the process of doctrinal deve- 
 lopment is still going on: systems are being built up 
 and shaped into symmetry : the churches are only just 
 entering upon a period of arid and minute and bitter 
 controversy. The conflict with Eome is without remedy 
 or recall, and the line of battle, from which after ages 
 have found it difficult to depart, is determined. Nor 
 is the Eef ormation any longer a merely national thing, 
 Saxon or Swiss : in France, in Holland, in England, in 
 Scotland, in the Northern kingdoms, everywhere indeed, 
 the struggle is going on with more or less violence, and 
 the time is rapidly coming at which Europe will find 
 itself divided into two camps, a Protestant and a Catholic, 
 owning the force of neither alliances nor enmities but 
 such as spring from this distinction. Think now of the 
 movements and changes of fortune in the religious world 
 upon which Calvin looked out from his fortress under 
 the shadow of the Alps ! The twenty-three years of his 
 rule at Geneva comprehended in Germany the death of 
 Luther, the Schmalkaldic War, the defeat of Miihlberg, 
 the melancholy period of the Interim, the abdication of 
 Charles Y., and the settlement of Passau. Just as it 
 closed, Philip II. and the Duchess Margaret were making 
 ready for Alva in the Netherlands ; while in Scotland, 
 Mary Stuart was contending with John Knox, and in all 
 the insolence of power and beauty preparing the tragedy 
 of her own downfall. During these years the first gene- 
 ration of Huguenots in France are maintaining an unequal 
 fight with Catharine de Medici and the Guises, and the 
 day of St. Bartholomew is soon to follow. They cover 
 
 r2 
 
244 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 in English history almost exactly the interval between 
 the Six Articles of H ejmy^YIII. and the Thirty-nine of 
 Elizabeth : what a time of hope, and feverish expectation, 
 and wild terror, and good cheer renewed, lies between ! 
 The Council of Trent met for the first time in 1545, and 
 was finally dissolved in December, 1563 : to it, the Church 
 of Geneva and the "Institution of the Christian Eeligion" 
 were the most resolute and the most complete answer of 
 the Eeformation. "When Calvin's theocratic rule began, 
 Paul III., a Farnese, the last of the old line of Popes who 
 founded families and clutched their own advantage in 
 utter disregard of the interests of Christendom, sat in the 
 fisherman's chair : when it ended, Pius IV. had succeeded 
 Paul IY., both, by comparison, grave and austere Pontiffs, 
 the Inquisition had been re-founded, and the Counter 
 Eeformation had begun. For already in 1540, Paul III. 
 had sanctioned the incorporation of the Society of Jesus ; 
 and in command of these new and splendid soldiers of 
 the faith, the Church of Eome, stunned and perplexed 
 for the moment by the brilliant onset of Luther, had 
 recovered her courage and advanced once more to the 
 attack. 
 
 During these years, then, Calvin gradually grew to 
 the height of a commanding figure in Europe. He is 
 the only one of the great Eeformers who can justly be 
 called international. Though he never re-entered France 
 after his first flight from it, he is the director of the 
 French Eeformation, dictating, as it were, to the Hugue- 
 nots both their theology and their church government. 
 During the reign of Edward VI. he is the adviser to 
 whom Somerset and Cranmer listen with the deepest 
 respect, while it is from Geneva that John Knox goes 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 245 
 
 out to mould and to teach Scotland. Among the Swiss 
 Eeformers he is something more than primus inter pares : 
 when Luther is gone, and ^felancthon is more and more 
 the mark for the rage of theologians, he represents the 
 Eeformation in the eye of Pope and Emperor. And I do 
 not think that we shall do him justice unless we look 
 upon Geneva as a fortified post of the Eeform, to be held 
 against all comers, and within whose walls, always open 
 to attack, the sternest discipline is necessary. When 
 Calvin took it and made it his own, it was just struggling 
 into independent political life. Originally a free city, 
 subject to its Bishop, it had fallen under the domi- 
 nating influence of the House of Savoy, which it shook 
 off only after many struggles. The Eeformation intro- 
 duced a new line of division among its citizens : the 
 partizans of Genevese independence were mostly Pro- 
 testant; the friends of Savoy clung to the old faith; 
 while there were many who, without any faith at all, 
 disliked the new austerity of manners, the stern restraint 
 of license. Calvin failed in his first attempt to impose 
 his theocracy on the mixed and mobile population of 
 Geneva : I am not sure that if he had had to deal with 
 it alone, he would ever have succeeded. But Geneva 
 soon became a city of refuge. From France especially, 
 and from Italy, men fled for their lives to this secure 
 haven, where they could worship God in their own way 
 (so long as it happened to be Calvin's way too), and bring 
 up their children in the saving knowledge of the gospel. 
 And these men naturally gathered round Calvin, and 
 upheld him in all his measures. His convictions were 
 their convictions, and they found it no hardship to submit 
 to his ecclesiastical rule, however sharp it might seem to 
 
246 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 be to those who remembered and loved the easy days of 
 old. Between them, they made Geneva at once a city 
 of God after their own pattern, and a frontier fortress of 
 the Eeformation. I suppose that, little by little, cruel 
 persecution and stern, steady repression crushed out the 
 rebellious elements of Genevese life : the partizans of the 
 old regime; the sect of the Libertines, in whom wild 
 Pantheistic speculation is said to have undermined all 
 moral conviction; the genuine lovers of freedom, who 
 rebelled against the tyranny of preachers and an inqui- 
 sition disguised under the name and forms of a consistory. 
 But whatever Geneva became, Calvin must have the 
 credit or the shame of it. It is a mistake to suppose, as 
 some seem to do, that he held the reins of power in his 
 own hands and openly wielded the authority of a dictator. 
 It is equally a mistake to attempt to lift from his shoul- 
 ders the responsibility of what was done at Geneva, by 
 pointing to the civil institutions of the place. His was 
 the kind of influence, the most powerful, the most per- 
 vading of all, which bends independent minds to itself, 
 and works by the hands of others. There were councils 
 of various kinds, syndics, a consistory; but from 1541 to 
 1564, Geneva was John Calvin. 
 
 Of Calvin as a systematizing theologian I shall have 
 to speak at another time: we are concerned with him 
 now as the founder and governor of a church. It has 
 been said, with as much truth as such antitheses usually 
 contain, that Catholicism is a religion of priests, Luther- 
 anism of theologians, Calvinism of the believing congre- 
 gation. And it is obvious at first sight that Calvin 
 availed himself of the republican constitution of Geneva 
 to establish a religious community as distinct in its out- 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 247 
 
 line, as definite in its faith, as rigid in its administration, 
 as the Papal system itself had been in its palmiest days. 
 It is not, with Luther, "the freedom of the Christian man" 
 on which he insists ; much more he delights to magnify 
 the office and authority of the church. With him, the 
 individual depends on the community ; the unit is part 
 of a well-ordered whole. Have not the following words, 
 which stand at the beginning of his exposition of the 
 theory of the church, more of a Catholic than a Pro- 
 testant sound ? 1 
 
 " But because our rudeness and slothfulness, yea, and vanity 
 of wit, do need outward helps, whereby faith in us may both be 
 engendered and grow and increase in proceeding towards the 
 mark whereunto it tendeth, God hath also added them thereby 
 to provide for our weakness. And that the preaching of the 
 gospel might flourish, He hath left this treasure with the church. 
 He hath appointed pastors and teachers, by whose merits He 
 might teach them that be His : He hath furnished them with 
 authority : finally, He hath left nothing undone that might avail 
 
 to the holy consent of faith and right order I will begin 
 
 at the church, into whose bosom God will have His children to 
 be gathered together, not only that they should by her help and 
 ministry be nourished while they are infants and young children, 
 but also be ruled by her motherly care till they grow to riper 
 age and at length come to the mark of faith. For it is not lawful 
 that those things be severed which God hath conjoined ; that to 
 whom He is a Father, the church be also their mother ; and that, 
 not only under the Law, but also since the coming of Christ, as 
 Paul witnesseth, which teacheth that we are the children of the 
 new and heavenly Hierusalem." 
 
 This is a very different tone from that of the Saxon 
 Eeformers, who were satisfied with an ecclesiastical con- 
 
 1 Instit. Christ. Rel. IV. 1. I have adopted Norton's translation. 
 
248 VIT. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 stitution which had shaped itself according to circum- 
 stances, or even of Hooker, who strove to penetrate, and 
 as it were to interpret by his own theory, one which 
 had jnst weathered the storm of reformation. It is the 
 utterance of the self-confident legislator who rejoices to 
 be able to go back to first principles and to apply them 
 upon new ground. And not only was Calvin's theory of 
 the relation between church and state definite enough, 
 but he was prepared to carry it out by the use of a dis- 
 cipline which did not yield for weight and edge to any 
 weapon that Catholic Bishop or Inquisitor ever wielded. 
 Discipline is the constant dream of churchmen of every 
 kind. Give them but power enough, they say, and they 
 will cleanse the church of all heresies and unfaithful- 
 nesses, transforming her into the likeness of the pure 
 Bride of Christ, without blemish and without taint. In 
 their rage against error, they forget the wheat and the 
 tares that are to grow together till the final harvest. In 
 their anger against open manifestations of vice, they 
 overlook the subtler sins which no inquisition can detect, 
 which no severity can cast out, but which not the less 
 canker the Christian life at its core. But Europe, in 
 the sixteenth century, had had enough of discipline as 
 administered by clerics ; and when the whole system by 
 whose terrors it had been enforced crumbled into ruins, 
 there was no basis on which to erect another. Princes 
 would not, and churchmen could not, take up again the 
 rod that had fallen from Papal hands. Error indeed 
 might be repressed, but vice was perforce left to itself. 
 So deeply, however, is this passion for moral judgment 
 engrained in the hearts of theologians, that I doubt not 
 Luther and Melancthon would gladly have set up, if they 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 249 
 
 could, a discipline analogous to that of Borne, if perchance 
 milder : fortunately for themselves and the church, they 
 were compelled to rely upon moral and religious influence 
 alone. Still the Eeformation had everywhere to contend 
 against a relaxation of morals which its enemies put down 
 to its own account, which its friends declared to be a 
 legacy of the past : perhaps in Geneva, with its mixed 
 population, with its southern blood, with the turbulence 
 of its recent history, things were worse than elsewhere. 
 However this may have been, reformation of morals was 
 henceforth a matter of life and death struggle between the 
 Genevese and their new pastor. He had come to Geneva 
 for the first time in 1536, and had been expelled from 
 it, on this very quarrel, in 1538 : when in 1541 he was 
 recalled, it was on the understanding that the life of 
 the city was to be controlled and organized as he would 
 have it. 
 
 I cannot here enter into the particulars of the eccle- 
 siastical constitution which Calvin established, or define 
 with accuracy the different functions of the Councils and 
 the Consistory. He calmly lays it down in the " Institu- 
 tion" that the church knows of no punishment save exclu- 
 sion from the Lord's Supper. " For the church hath not 
 the power of the sword to punish or restrain, no empire to 
 command, no prison, no other pains which the magistrate 
 is wont to lay upon men." l But what if the state, pene- 
 trated through and through with the spirit of the church, 
 acts upon its information, makes crimes of its offences, 
 and is prompt to inflict the severest punishments upon 
 its criminals ? Two things are especially to be noticed 
 
 1 Instil Christ. Rel. IV. 11, 3. 
 
250 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 in the holy reign of terror which Calvin established and 
 left behind him as a legacy to Geneva : first, the vast 
 extension given to the idea of crime, and next, the worse 
 than Draconian severity of the punishments inflicted. 
 Adultery was repeatedly punished with death. A child 
 was beheaded for having struck father and mother. 
 Banishment, imprisonment, in some cases drowning, were 
 penalties inflicted on unchastity. To sing or even to 
 have in one's possession lewd songs was a crime: to 
 laugh at Calvin's sermons, or to have spoken hot words 
 of him in the street, was a crime: to wear clothes of 
 forbidden stuff or make was a crime : to give a feast to 
 too many guests or of too many dishes was a crime : to 
 dance at a wedding was a crime : to all of which, with 
 many others of like sort, appropriate punishments were 
 meted out. Everybody was obliged to attend public 
 worship : everybody was required to partake of the Lord's 
 Supper: no sick man might lie in bed for three days 
 without sending for the minister of the parish. Do not 
 let it be thought that these penalties were of infrequent 
 enforcement, unwelcome breaks in a smooth current of 
 civic life : in the years 1558 and 1559 alone, there were 
 in the little city four hundred and fourteen of such pro- 
 secutions. 1 Now and then, as might be expected, there 
 
 1 I lay no stress upon the fact that the registers of the city of 
 Geneva show that within the space of sixty years a hundred and 
 fifty poor wretches were burned for witchcraft ; that the application of 
 the torture was an incident of almost all criminal trials ; that thirty- 
 one persons were burned at one time for the fantastic offence of spread- 
 ing the plague. These cruelties, these popular terrors, were common to 
 all Europe, and cannot be specially laid to the charge of either Calvin 
 or Geneva. Yet they belong to the delineation of this City of God, 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 251 
 
 was a sharp spasm of rebellion against so grinding a 
 tyranny. The Libertines were not wholly suppressed. 
 The old spirit of Genevese freedom was not quite dead. 
 Some man, or as often some woman, was goaded into 
 open revolt, which almost inevitably took such a form as 
 gave a plausible pretext for fresh severity on the part of 
 the guardians of faith and order. Then the prison, the / 
 pillory, the scaffold, did their work, and the reign of 
 repressive holiness was resumed. 
 
 Did this method of church government succeed or fail? 
 This question will be answered differently according to 
 the side from which it is approached. It must not be 
 forgotten that its story has been chiefly told by Calvin 
 and his friends ; and, in particular, that his book against 
 the Libertines is still quoted as the best, and indeed 
 almost the only authority for their false and immoral 
 doctrines. But it is never safe to accept against heretics 
 the testimony of the orthodox doctor who glories in 
 having put them down: heresy, in the common judg- 
 ment, always involves a taint of immorality, and is 
 only too easily associated with it. The Genevese must 
 have been either more or less than human if the rigid 
 and minute discipline of the Consistory had not now 
 driven sin beneath the surface, and again excited it to 
 bravado : an over-strained severity of criminal jurispru- 
 dence is quite as much provocative as remedial. In 
 opposition to the writers who hold up the Geneva of 
 Calvin and Beza as a model community, there are others 
 who, relying on the irrefragable evidence of public 
 records, assert that at no period was its immorality 
 
 upon which so much strange admiration has been spent, and must be 
 suffered to remain and to darken the picture. 
 
252 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 fouler or more deeply seated than when it was covered 
 over with the thickest varnish of religious observance. 1 
 On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in some 
 respects Calvin largely succeeded in reaching his own 
 ideal. Geneva was to all external appearance sound in 
 the faith. The majority of the inhabitants submitted 
 willingly to the new discipline, while those who hated it 
 maintained, with occasional outbreaks, a sullen silence. 
 Eefugees, if only' they reached the standard of Genevese 
 orthodoxy, were safe beneath the shelter of the city 
 walls. A flourishing University became the centre from 
 which the Calvinistic theology was diffused. Geneva 
 was, as it were, the High Change of Protestant thought 
 and action : hither came missionaries to be instructed and 
 inspired : hence they issued, to preach all over Europe 
 the gospel of the Divine decrees. But in spite of the 
 admiration which this polity still continues to excite in 
 some minds, we must pronounce the Geneva which Calvin 
 created but a poor and mechanical imitation of the City 
 
 1 " Je montrerois a ceux qui s'imaginent que Calvin n'a fait que du 
 bien, nos registres convents d'inscriptions d'enfans illegitimes on en 
 exposait dans tous les coins de la ville et de la campagne des proces 
 hideux d'obscenites, des testamens, oil les peres et meres accusent 
 leurs enfans non pas d'erreurs seulement, mais des crimes des transac- 
 tions par devant notaire entre des demoiselles et leurs amans, qui leur 
 donnoient en presence de leurs parens de quoi elever leurs batards, des 
 multitudes de manages forces ou les delinquans eioient conduits de la 
 prison au temple, des meres qui abandonnoient leurs enfans a Thopital 
 pendant qu'elles vivoient dans l'abondance avec leur second mari, des 
 liasses de proces entre freres, des tas des denonciations secretes, des 
 hommes et femmes brules par sortilege sentences de mort en effray- 
 able quantite. Tout cela parmi la generation nourrie de la manne 
 mystique de Calvin." Galiffe : Notices genealogiques sur les families 
 Genevoises ; quoted by Henry, Leben Calvin's, II. 78. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 253 
 
 of God. The true holiness is that which men live and 
 grow into in the strength of high principles and noble 
 affections, not that which is bolstered up by regulations 
 and protected by penalties. I do not even discuss the 
 question whether the ideal of life was in itself a lofty one : 
 the polity by which it was sought to be promoted con- 
 demns itself. 
 
 Calvin's principles of church government led straight 
 to persecution. In this respect he was neither before nor 
 behind his age : he differed from other Keformers, if at 
 all, in the calm and logical outspokenness with which he 
 defended his position. If sins and crimes are obnoxious 
 to the same kind of judgment if adultery is punishable 
 with death, reading loose books with imprisonment, 
 neglect of divine ordinances with a fine why should 
 not heresy, the immoral character of which orthodoxy is 
 always ready to assume, receive the same treatment? 
 Who can be a greater offender in a theocratic state than 
 the heresiarch who is active in the propagation of his 
 soul-destroying errors? Then there is that distinction 
 between heresy and blasphemy of which I have already 
 spoken, and the duty, as to the obligation of which Calvin 
 never entertained a doubt, of being jealous for the honour 
 of God. The chief victims of this theory of upholding 
 religious truth and repressing religious error were Gruet 
 and Servetus. No doubt Gruet was a scoffing unbeliever 
 of a very coarse type ; but the evidence on which this 
 fact rests was not discovered till three years after long 
 torture had crushed out of him a confession which led 
 him to the scaffold r 1 while the crime for which he actually 
 
 1 Gruet was executed in July, 1547: it was not until April, 1550, 
 that a MS. book of his handwriting was discovered under the roof of 
 
254 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 suffered was that of having affixed to Calvin's pulpit at 
 St. Peter's a scurrilous and threatening placard. The 
 case of Servetus I shall not re-open. All the world, 
 except the few persons who are determined to clear 
 Calvin's fame by any means, is agreed about it. His 
 only defence lies in the proof afforded by the approval of 
 Melancthon and the Swiss churches, that the act was not 
 out of accord with the spirit of the age. He wanted to 
 give the world at large, and the Papacy in especial, an 
 assurance of the fact that such heresy as that of Servetus 
 was no more tolerable in Geneva than in Eome, and bade 
 men read his witness in the smoke that went up to 
 heaven from the faggots of Champmel. Two damning 
 facts, neither of which can be denied or explained away, 
 blacken the deed with special infamy : first, that terrible, 
 phrase in Calvin's letter to Farel of February, 1546, seven 
 years before its threat was fulfilled, "nam si verier it \ 
 modo valeat mea auctoritas, vivum exire nunquam patiar ;" 
 and next, that Servetus was only a stranger in Geneva, 
 taking it as one temporary resting-place on his flight 
 into Italy, over whom therefore neither Consistory nor 
 Council had any pretence of jurisdiction. But the lurid 
 light which surrounds the death of Servetus, and the 
 controversy which it continues to excite, have done much 
 to draw away attention from the fact that it was only part 
 of a system and the logical outcome of a theory. In a 
 long letter to the Protector Somerset, written in the name 
 and with assumption of the authority of Christ, Calvin 
 
 his house, severely characterized by Calvin in a still extant document, 
 and ordered to be burned by the Syndics. Henry : Leben Calvin's, 
 II. 439 et seq.; Beilage 16, p. 120. 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 255 
 
 lays down with great distinctness the duty of repressing 
 heresy by force i 1 
 
 " From what I understand, my Lord, you have two kinds of 
 rebels who have risen up against the King and the State of the 
 realm. The one are fantastic people, who under colour of the 
 gospel would cast all into confusion ; the other, obstinate adhe- 
 rents to the superstitions of the Soman Antichrist. Both alike 
 well deserve to be repressed by the sword which is committed 
 to you, seeing that they attack not the King only, but God who 
 has seated him upon the throne, and has entrusted to you the 
 protection as well of his person as of his majesty." 
 
 In the latter part of the same letter, the Protector is 
 exhorted for the honour of God " to punish the crimes 
 which men are not accustomed to hold in much account," 
 adultery, unchastity, blasphemy, drunkenness. The 
 state, however theoretically independent of or even 
 superior to the church, is practically to be its instrument 
 in enforcing a scheme of doctrine, in carrying out a 
 method of polity, which are assumed to be in complete 
 accordance with the mind and purpose of God. 
 
 To turn to considerations of a more general kind, the 
 Calvinistic type of theology differs from the Lutheran, 
 not so much in the doctrines which it includes, as in the 
 relative importance which it gives to such as are common 
 to both. Its centre of gravity is not the same. Both 
 are Augustinian in their origin and essence : both assume 
 the absolute foreknowledge and determining power of 
 God, the servitude of the human will, the corruption 
 and incapacity of man's nature. But while Lutheranism 
 crystallizes round the idea of justification by faith, and 
 
 1 The letter is dated October 22, 1548. Henry: Leben Calvin's, 
 II.; Beilage 4, p. 26 et seq. 
 
256 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 is, so to speak, anthropological, Calvinism, beginning 
 and ending with the supremacy of God, is theological. 
 Another side of this distinction has been expressed in 
 the statement, that while Lutheranism chiefly opposed 
 itself to the Judaizing element in the Papal system by 
 cutting at the root of ceremonial piety, Calvinism stood 
 in stronger contrast to its Paganism by merging all forms 
 of idolatry in the awe of the Supreme. In the one, the 
 main thing is the sinner's personal relation to Christ, his 
 appropriation of the Saviour's work, his resurrection from 
 sin and death to holiness and life; in the other, the 
 majesty of God, who is over all and in all, and the awful 
 omnipotence of the Divine decree fixing the unalterable 
 succession of events, and rigidly determining the eternal 
 fate of men from a period before time was. And when 
 we come to look a little more closely at the constituents 
 of Calvinistic theology, we see how this master-thought 
 runs through it all. In the process of salvation, it at 
 once shuts out all co-operation of the human will, and 
 assures the final perseverance of the elect : shall not God 
 begin, round off, complete His own work ? We have no 
 doctrine here of a communicatio idiomatum : the attri- 
 butes of the deity of Christ cannot be transferred to his 
 manhood. The sacraments may be signs or seals or what 
 you will; a veil of words may be drawn over the too 
 naked simplicity of the Zwinglian conception; but no 
 true Calvinist could admit an actual presence of the 
 Living God under the species of bread and wine. To the 
 same source may be traced the bareness of Calvinistic wor- 
 ship and its unwillingness to charm the soul through the 
 senses: God, the Omnipotent and the Omnipresent, will 
 choose and occupy and mould His own, without the vain 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 257 
 
 help of audible and visible things. The one thought of 
 God dominates, almost engulfs, all others; and it is a 
 God whose will binds the world and men in bonds of 
 adamant. 
 
 It would seem at first sight as if such a conception 
 of religion must be fatal to morals. If the essence of 
 Calvinism be, as John Wesley put it, that the elect shall 
 be saved, do what they will, and the reprobate damned, 
 do what they can, what motive is left for self-restraint 
 in the one, for effort in the other ? In what does the 
 convinced Calvinist differ from the Moslem fatalist who 
 resigns himself with Allah Ackbar, to be a counter in 
 the hands of Omnipotence? Yet so far is Calvinism 
 from producing slackness of will and feebleness of cha- 
 racter, that Calvinists have been among the most stre- 
 nuous of men : Calvin himself, John Knox, "William 
 of Nassau, Oliver Cromwell. The secret lies in that 
 communication between earth and heaven for which 
 Mohammedanism makes no provision, except in the case 
 of the world's great prophets. No true Calvinist, save 
 one perhaps here and there, ever believes that he is 
 finally reprobate : as in the case of Cowper, " that way 
 madness lies :" on the contrary, he feels himself to be an 
 instrument of the Omnipotent Will, and bends to what- 
 ever toil he undertakes in the unshakable conviction 
 that he is on the side of God. How copious a spring of 
 energy lies in this thought I need not tell you ; nor is it 
 without a power of moral consecration too. It is cus- 
 tomary to say that Calvinism is a more distinctively 
 ethical form of religion than Lutheranism : that while 
 the latter represents it as a grace that is imparted, the 
 former holds it up as a law to be obeyed. But does not 
 
258 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 the ethical efficacy of Calvinism take a direction of its 
 own, and act within limits? There are specific moral 
 dangers in the absolute identification of God's will with 
 our own conception of it, from which, it seems to me, neither 
 Calvin nor some of the most eminent of his followers 
 have been able to escape. Nothing is more difficult than 
 to be jealous for the Divine honour and to abate all per- 
 sonal pretension. To hate the enemies of God and to 
 love one's own, are practically incompatible precepts. 
 
 The relations of Calvinist and Lutheran theology to 
 the Bible are in theory the same. Luther and Calvin 
 alike appealed from the authority of Pope, Church, 
 Schoolmen, Tradition, to that of the Scriptures them- 
 selves. The Genevese Eeformer, as I have already 
 pointed out, true to his systematizing instinct, developed 
 the theory of Biblical authority into a somewhat more 
 definite form; but in the general both stand upon the 
 same ground. Yet Calvin, it must be confessed, was 
 the more consistent scripturalist of the two. He was a 
 not less industrious expositor of Scripture than Luther, 
 and probably more acute and systematic ; while the lite- 
 rary and theological difficulties which the latter found 
 in the Bible, and cut asunder rather than solved by his 
 trenchant good sense, did not trouble him. He believed 
 that all Scripture was written under the direct dictation 
 of the Holy Spirit, and was to be received by the church 
 as a living voice from heaven. So given to men, it 
 could not possibly contain discrepancy or contradiction : 
 to question its genuineness, was simple rebellion against 
 God. Calvin went to the New Testament for his theory 
 of church government, and claimed a Divine sanction 
 for Presbyterianism ; while Luther in setting up his Con- 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 259 
 
 sistories did not look beyond the practical necessities of 
 the case and the prejudices of his pious Electors. And, 
 like Zwingli, Calvin took the Bible much more as a 
 whole than Luther did. He was full of a Hebrew spirit : 
 he went back willingly to Jewish precedents, and used 
 them to modify the too great humanity of the gospel. 
 The apologists for some of his questionable actions defend 
 him on this line : " Whoso ventures to judge him," says 
 a late biographer, "judges the Hebrew Prophets too." 
 When the Duchess Bene' of Ferrara alleges that the 
 example of David in hating his enemies is not applicable 
 to those who live under the milder dispensation of the 
 gospel, he sternly replies 1 that "such' a gloss would 
 upset all Scripture," and alleges that the Holy Ghost 
 has in this respect set David before us as a pattern. 
 "And, in fact," so he continues, "it is declared to us 
 that in this ardour he is the type of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. Now, if we assume to surpass in sweetness and 
 humanity him who is the fountain of piety and compas- 
 sion, woe be unto us !" What of this kind the English 
 Puritans thought and said is known to all, and how in 
 the seventeenth century the Old Testament, the Mosaic 
 legislation, the Jewish kingdom and church, assumed a 
 place in religious thought and practice to which the 
 earlier history of Christianity offers little that is like. 
 This particular phase of Calvinistic thought has in the 
 main passed away; nor do fanatical politicians or wild 
 social reformers now, as under the Commonwealth, borrow 
 the language of the Old Testament. But Calvin's way 
 of looking at Scripture still survives in much uncritical 
 
 1 Henry : Calvin's Leben, I. 452, 453. 
 
260 VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 
 
 apprehension of the relation between the Old Testament 
 and the New, and a method of exposition which takes 
 little account of differences of age and authorship. 
 
 To conclude : Calvinism is the last word of what may- 
 be called the orthodox Protestant Eeformation. It stands 
 further from Eome than Lutheranism, and is at the same 
 time a compactor system, a more reasoned protest, a more 
 pronounced antithesis. In its appeal to the authority of 
 Scripture over the whole ground of faith and practice, 
 it breaks more decisively with tradition. "Whatever we 
 may think of Calvin's attempt to find a middle place 
 between Luther and Zwingli for his doctrine of sacra- 
 ments, Calvinistic, in a very different way from Lutheran 
 churches, have always been opposed to Eome in that 
 great and critical controversy. Partly in the line of 
 natural development, partly in that of reaction, the pro- 
 cess of doctrinal decay in the Eeformed Church has often 
 led to rationalism. Calvinism is an intellectual system, 
 proceeding by logical method from premiss to conclusion, 
 having all its parts duly subordinated to the whole, and 
 held together by the strongest argumentative cement. 
 But when thought is once encouraged to activity, who 
 shall prescribe limits? , And, on the other hand, there 
 are demands upon belief of such a kind as to provoke 
 unqualified rejection, if they do not meet with sub- 
 missive assent. Prom the beginning, Calvinism has 
 been at the opposite pole from Eome in the application 
 of art to the service of religion : it rejects all symbolism, 
 it sets up no cross, it lights no candles, it has inspired 
 no architecture, it distrusts even music. Lutheran hymn- 
 ology began with Luther, and from the first put forth a 
 strong and sweet luxuriance; but it was only in the 
 
VII. THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND. 261 
 
 eighteenth century that Calvinism learned how to write 
 hymns, the help of which Scottish piety does not even 
 yet value. But while it is almost Papal in its theory of 
 the church, and would, if it could, exercise as rigid a rule 
 as Eome over men's minds and actions, it stands in long 
 historical opposition to Papal politics. " No Bishop, no 
 King," * said James I. at the Hampton Court Conference ; 
 and, on the other hand, your true Calvinist is always 
 on the side of freedom and national independence. He 
 has not been as tender of others' rights as strenuous 
 to maintain his own: the children of the Dutchmen 
 who had withstood Alva, exiled the Eemonstrants : the 
 Puritans, who had fled for freedom of worship to New 
 England, banished Baptists and branded Quakers. But 
 in the incidental mention of these names, I have done 
 enough to vindicate for Calvinism an honourable place 
 in history. It was the form of faith in the strength 
 of which the Dutch Eepublic was sustained and the 
 American Eepublic was founded: to propagate which, 
 Tyndale gave to the English people the Bible in their 
 own tongue, and with it his life : which formed the royal 
 intellect of Cromwell, and inspired the majestic verse of 
 Milton. Shall I say more, or is not this enough ? 
 
 1 Fuller: Church History of Britain, III. 180. 
 
Lecture VIII. 
 
 THE RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM, 
 
 Church systems which formally reject the use of 
 reason are nevertheless moulded and developed by 
 rational processes; nor is it in the power of authority 
 either to display or to defend itself. Its advocates 
 may go so far as to admit, first, that the principle 
 itself requires intellectual justification, and next, that 
 the claims of rival authorities can be^ettled only by an 
 appeal to reason. But this by no means exhausts the 
 facts of the case. The system which imposes itself as 
 authoritative, either on the bare word of a Church or its 
 own alleged accord with Scripture, still requires and 
 always receives exposition, co-ordination, development; 
 and these are rational processes conducted under rational 
 rules. This is not less true of Catholic than of Protestant 
 systems. The scholastic theology the form of Chris- 
 tianity universally accepted in the middle ages was, if 
 not rationalistic in the sense in which we now use the 
 word, at least a result of the application of reason to 
 religion. A series of very able and acute thinkers took 
 up theology at the point at which the Fathers had left 
 it, and applied themselves through many centuries to the 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 263 
 
 task of moulding it into a complete system of belief. 
 Their materials were of three kinds Scripture, Tradition, 
 the writings of the Fathers all accepted, though as 
 having different degrees of certitude, on the authority 
 of the Church. Their object was to show that the 
 Christian religion, thus conceived, was identical with 
 the results of sound knowledge and right thinking; in 
 other words, to make religion philosophical, and phi- 
 losophy religious. And the philosophical method by 
 which they sought to execute their task was the Aris- 
 totelian dialectic. Plato, and still more some of the later 
 masters of Greek speculation, made a not unimportant 
 contribution to the matter of scholastic thought, but its 
 form was certainly Aristotelian. To the syllogistic 
 method of the Schoolmen much exception has been 
 taken : they used it with tiresome persistence : it led by 
 necessary process to much unprofitable debate, to many 
 needless distinctions, to many oppositions of words which 
 had little or no counterpart in the reality of things. 
 But when all these defects have been fully taken 
 account of, the scholastic theology must be recognized 
 as a masterpiece of the systematizing intellect. It sub- 
 jected its materials to no critical analysis. It com- 
 bined and developed them according to rules of its own. 
 But admit its premisses and allow its method, and the 
 force of its conclusions is very difficult to evade. The 
 reasoning powers of the human mind are substantially 
 the same in one century as in another: the difference 
 in the worth and permanence of the results which they 
 attain, chiefly depends upon the matter in which they 
 work. To reason upon assumptions, ends in scholasticism ; 
 to reason upon ascertained facts, issues in science. 
 
264 VIII. RISE OJF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 It was against Catholic scholasticism, pleading at once 
 and wielding the authority of the Church, with its system 
 of dogma equally symmetrical and minute, covering the 
 whole ground of speculation, yet with a constant practical 
 reference to the supremacy of the Pope and the mainte- 
 nance of the Eoman polity, that Luther rebelled. Nor 
 can he be said to have been ever personally unfaithful to 
 the spirit of that rebellion. He was not the creed-maker 
 of the Eeformation. He left to Melancthon and Calvin 
 the work of consolidating the new truth into a system. 
 His favourite method was that of Biblical translation and 
 exposition. There were certain points of Christian doc- 
 trine on which he laid the greatest stress the Eeal Pre- 
 sence in the Eucharist, justification by faith alone, the 
 true priesthood of every believer ; but there were others, 
 as, for instance, the Trinity, and all metaphysical ques- 
 tions as to the nature of God, on which he accepted the 
 statements of the creeds, unless when he preferred even 
 to these the statements of Scripture. Nevertheless, the 
 course of events and the intellectual habit of the time, 
 coupled with the view entertained by the Eeformers as 
 to the authority of Scripture, gradually led to the forma- 
 tion of a Protestant scholasticism, the effects of which we 
 have not wholly thrown off even yet. I do not say that 
 the Protestant system was as complete, as coherent, as 
 minute, as the Catholic, or weighed as heavily upon the 
 mind of Europe. But it was animated by the same spirit 
 and followed a similar method. The difference was, that 
 while the mediaeval Schoolmen endeavoured to construct 
 their edifice from the three-fold material offered by the 
 Bible, the Fathers, Tradition their Protestant imitators 
 used for this purpose the Bible, and the Bible only. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 2G5 
 
 The growth and characteristics of Protestant Scholas- 
 ticism form the subject of the present Lecture. 
 
 The use which a systematizing Protestant theology has 
 made of the Bible involves more than one very large 
 assumption. I have already pointed out that the Ee- 
 f ormers, with the exception, as we shall presently see, of 
 Paustus Socinus, practically took for granted the autho- 
 rity of the Bible, the substitution of which for the autho- 
 rity of the Church was a central point of their system. 
 But they also, one and all, assumed that the Scriptures 
 of the Old and New Testament contain a complete, self- 
 consistent and symmetrical system of doctrine, which can 
 be extracted from them by the use of ordinary methods 
 of reasoning ; that this system is susceptible of logical 
 statement and amplification; and that rational inferences 
 from the language of Scripture are of co-ordinate autho- 
 rity with Scripture itself. I do not mean that the Ee- 
 formers said this. They did not think it necessary to 
 say it. But it is involved in their very method. Though 
 the conclusions of Socinus differ so widely from those of 
 Melancthon and Calvin, he deduces them from Scripture 
 on precisely the same principle and in precisely the same 
 way. All three construct systems of religious belief 
 which have a logical coherence, which go into minute 
 detail, which cover the whole ground of theological fact, 
 which aim at leaving no mystery unexplained, which are 
 in reality the translation of the Bible into the forms of 
 contemporary dialectic. All claim that there is nothing 
 in their systems which is not explicitly or implicitly 
 contained in Scripture and logically derived from it. It 
 does not occur to any of them that they may be putting the 
 Bible to a use for which its obvious literary peculiarities 
 
266 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 show it to be unfit. In spite of the emancipation from 
 tradition of which they make their boast, it is still too 
 strong for them. Christianity had always been presented 
 to them by the mediaeval Church as a system of reasoned 
 religions truth, complete in all its parts, and they cannot 
 conceive of it in any other way. So they proceed, with 
 less various material and under greater difficulties, to 
 repeat the labour of the Schoolmen, and to construct 
 systems which in process of time not only superimpose 
 themselves on the plain declarations of Scripture, but 
 actually tend to prevent, except for purely controversial 
 purposes, that free and general resort to the Bible which 
 
 f it was one of the first objects of the Keformation to vin- 
 dicate and to secure. 
 
 In a subsequent Lecture it will be my duty to show 
 how one of the results of a scientific literary criticism 
 has been to bring men face to face with the undeniable 
 
 - facts of Scripture, and to prove that the complete logical 
 accord assumed to exist between all parts of the Old 
 and New Testament is a figment of the theological ima- 
 gination. To-day, I have only to exhibit the conception 
 of the relation of Scripture to religious truth which was 
 the common starting-point of all the systematic develop- 
 ments of theology which had their origin in the Eefor- 
 mation. These were three the Lutheran, the Calvinistic 
 and the Socinian of each of which I shall have something 
 to say. The last was latest in date; but as it sprang 
 full-grown from the brain of its author and suffered 
 little subsequent change, it may engage our earliest 
 attention the more as it will introduce us to a chapter 
 of Eeformation history which we have not yet studied. 
 The criticism which the Eeformers directed against 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 267 
 
 the mediseval Church was at first kept within well-defined 
 limits. The greater part of what was regarded as primi- 
 tive truth was accepted, so to speak, as it stood. The 
 theory of the sacraments was profoundly modified: all 
 the body of doctrine which is crystallized about the idea 
 of salvation suffered change, greater or less ; but there 
 was no desire to touch the doctrine of the Trinity, or to 
 question the authority of the three Creeds. The Con- 
 fession of Augsburg, 1 in its first Article, "Of God," begins 
 by accepting the Mcene Creed and anathematizing all 
 heretics, Arian, Unitarian and Mohammedan. It returns 
 to the subject in the third Article, " Of the Son of God," 
 which is little more than the Apostles' Creed in a more 
 theologically dogmatic form, and thenceforth is wholly 
 occupied with the points of difference between the old 
 Catholicism and the new Protestantism. Still there is 
 more than this to be said. At first, the Eeformers mani- 
 fested a distinct repulsion to scholastic speculations upon 
 the nature of God. They preferred to leave this mys- 
 terious subject in the obscurity of scriptural statement. 
 Luther 2 says that the best of the Fathers disliked the 
 word " Homoousion," which Jerome would willingly have 
 done away with, nor will he allow that any one who is 
 reluctant to use it should on that account be deemed a 
 heretic. " For the simplicity of Scripture," he continues, 
 "is to be preserved : nor let men presume to speak more 
 clearly or more simply than God Himself has spoken." 
 He notes 3 that the word Trinity is nowhere to be found 
 
 1 Sylloge Confessionum, pp. 123, 124. 
 
 2 Werke, ed. Walch, XVIII. 1455, 1456: "Dr. M. Luther's Wider- 
 legung der Ursachen Latomi," &c. 
 
 3 Ibid. XI. 1549: "Kirchenpostill. Sonntag der Heil. Dreyfaltigkeit," 
 Ibid. XII. 830 : " Auslegung der Epistel am Sonntagc Trinitatis." 
 
268 VIII. EISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 in Scripture, and does not like the sound of it either in 
 Latin or in German. In his earliest unpublished sketch 
 of the Loci Communes, Melancthon 1 introduces the words, 
 "Dew, unus, trinus," into the list of topics to be treated, 
 but then passes them by without further amplification. 
 The first edition 2 follows the same course, justifying it, 
 however, by the example of Paul and the evil practical 
 result of "the foolish disputations of the Schoolmen." 
 But as time went on, and the necessity of definition was 
 pressed upon him by the rise of various heresies, Me- 
 lancthon became more explicitly orthodox, and dedicated 
 distinct chapters of his book to God, to the Trinity, to 
 the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. 3 Still, even as late as 
 1533, he strongly condemns controversy as to the nature 
 of God, declaring that he is content to base the invoca- 
 tion of Christ upon the authority of Scripture. 4 It is 
 only the heresy and the fate of Servetus which repel him 
 at last into full and precise orthodoxy. 
 
 But it was not possible that speculation, once permitted 
 to employ itself upon the creed of the Church, should 
 be confined to any single group of doctrines. We have 
 seen already that Hetzer, Denck, Franck, were not de- 
 terred by the sacredness of any article of Christian belief 
 
 1 Corp. Ref. XXI. 11. 2 Ibid. XXI. 84, 85. 
 
 s Ibid. XXI. 607 et seq. 
 
 4 Ibid. II. 630 : Letter to Camerarius, Feb. 9, 1533. "De Serveto 
 
 rogas quid sentiam irepl rrjs rpidSos scis me semper veritum esse, 
 
 fore at haec aliquando erumperent. Bone Deus, quales tragoedias exci- 
 tabit bsec qusestio ad posteros el ea-rlv vtv6<jto.(tls 6 Aoyos, et ecrrXv vttoo-- 
 racm to 7rvevfia. Ego me refero ad illas scripturae voces quae jubent 
 invocare Christum, quod est, ei lionorem divinitatis tribuere, et plenum 
 consolationis est. ras 8e ISeas rQ>v vTrocrTacrecov, kou 8ia<j)opas aKpifim 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 269 
 
 from allowing their rationalizing intellect free play upon 
 it. Still it remains true that the moral and practical 
 problems of religion were those which chiefly engaged the 
 Teutonic mind. The current of hardy rationalism which 
 directed itself against the metaphysical forms into which 
 the Schoolmen had thrown the mysteries of Christianity, 
 set in from the South. Servetus was a Spaniard. Ochino 
 and the Sozzini were natives of Sienna. Biandrata and 
 Gentile fled northwards in search of a freer air, the one 
 from Cosenza, the other from Saluzzo. We need not 
 speculate on the intellectual peculiarities of the Latin 
 race, or the efficacy of a dominant Catholicism in engen- 
 dering an all-daring scepticism : the Protestantism which 
 claims to have found a defensible position between Catho- 
 lic orthodoxy and blank unbelief, still leads only a pre- 
 carious life in Italy and in Spain. From 1530 onwards, 
 we meet with these Southern refugees everywhere in 
 Switzerland and Germany, seeking a resting-place, but 
 not finding it. No sooner is it discovered that their 
 revolt against the Church does not take the usual doc- 
 trinal form, than city after city bids them depart. Geneva 
 and Wittenberg are the chief centres of attraction : they 
 have a great desire to measure dialectical swords with 
 Calvin and Melancthon, but they neither convert nor are 
 converted. In the case of Servetus, Calvin appeals to 
 the secular arm, and one pestilent heretic is silenced : in 
 1566, Gentile meets a similar though a less cruel fate at 
 Bern. Neither was a citizen of any Swiss Eepublic or 
 amenable to its laws : there never were more signal cases 
 of usurped jurisdiction. But in those days men killed a 
 heretic as they would set their foot upon a noxious insect : 
 and what Christian state would interfere on behalf of 
 
270 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 a self-convicted blasphemer % All these men tended to 
 Poland, which, for many reasons, was at that time the 
 general refuge of free-thinkers. Thither the doctrines of 
 John Huss had early made their way from Bohemia, with 
 the effect, not merely of turning men's minds in the 
 direction of ecclesiastical reform, but of putting the nobi- 
 lity into permanent opposition to the clergy. These 
 nobles were numerous, wealthy, independent : if stained 
 with the vices, yet not without the characteristic virtues, 
 of an aristocracy. They had received the best education 
 of the time in foreign and especially in German Univer- 
 sities : they had caught the spirit of the Humanists, 
 and, when the signal was given from Wittenberg, ranged 
 themselves eagerly on the side of reform. They lived 
 on their vast estates, surrounded by dependents over 
 whom they exercised a patriarchal authority. To their 
 King they owed only a loose allegiance ; while the liberum 
 veto, the right of every me ^iber to stop by his single vote 
 the action of the States of ^fche realm, helped to maintain 
 them in a condition of careless independence of each 
 other and all central control. They welcomed the Italian 
 refugees as men of learning and refinement; afforded 
 them the protection which the free cities of Germany 
 and Switzerland had refused; allowed them to preach 
 and to print what they would. Side by side with the 
 Catholic Church, Protestantism of both the Lutheran 
 and the Calvinistic type already existed in an organized 
 form in Poland. To these was now added what its ene- 
 mies afterwards called a Unitarian or Socinian Church, 
 in which the rationalism of the Eeformation for the first 
 time took a definite shape. Its existence was brief, its 
 fortunes troubled; but it was too peculiar a thing, and 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 271 
 
 has exercised too large an influence upon the subsequent 
 development of Christian thought, to be passed over with- 
 out due description. 
 
 The name inseparably connected with this Church is 
 that of Socinus. Of this family, two are inscribed in the 
 catalogue of heretics, Lselius and Faustus, uncle and 
 nephew, both born at Sienna, and belonging to the nobility 
 of the robe. 1 The intellectual relation between them, 
 long misunderstood, has been cleared up only by recent 
 researches. Leelius, who was born in 1525, left Italy at 
 an early age, in part, at least, to avoid persecution : tra- 
 velled in an easy patrician way in search of a religion : 
 made the friendship of Calvin in Geneva: studied for 
 almost a year in Wittenberg : extended his wanderings 
 westwards to Holland and England, eastwards to Krakau 
 and Vienna. But the death of his father, and an exile 
 attended by so many circumstances of theological suspi- 
 cion, threw him into pecmrry difficulties, and he died 
 at Zurich in 1562, at the eavly age of thirty-seven, poor 
 and, in comparison with his brighter years, almost 
 neglected. He was not known during his lifetime as an 
 Antitrinitarian. He was simply a theological inquirer, 
 to whose essentially sceptical mind new doubts and diffi- 
 culties perpetually presented themselves. He is always 
 putting questions to Calvin, to Bullinger, to Melancthon, 
 
 1 The chief authority on the subject of Lselius Socinus is F. Trech- 
 sel : Die Protestantischen Antitrinitarier vor Faustus Socin. Zweites 
 Buch. Lelio Sozini und die Antitrinitarier seiner Zeit. Heidelberg, 
 1844. But for both Laelius and Faustus Socinus, I may also refer to 
 two learned and accurate articles in the Theological Review, Vol. XVI. 
 1879, by Alexander Gordon, M.A., "The Sozzini and their School," 
 which contain in a lucid and interesting form the results of the latest 
 research. 
 
272 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 who all mingle careful reply with rebukes, sometimes 
 gentle, sometimes stern, of the itch of inquiry which 
 afflicts him. But it is quite plain that everybody loves 
 him. There is a fascination not to be resisted in his 
 patrician breeding and his candid temper. Nature did 
 not mean him for an heresiarch, and he never tried to 
 play the part. Faustus Socinus went to Zurich to take 
 possession of his uncle's papers, and the story has long 
 been current that he was so deeply impressed by the 
 religious opinions which he found in them, as afterwards 
 to have devoted his life to their propagation. But uncle 
 and nephew hardly ever met in the flesh: the papers 
 were few and fragmentary: and all that we certainly 
 know of the two men reveals much more their intellectual 
 dissimilarity than their likeness. 
 
 Faustus Socinus, whose life extends from 1539 to 1604, 
 passed eleven of the best years of his manhood in the 
 service of Duke Cosmo de Medici, 1 by whom he was 
 much trusted as minister and diplomatist. At the death 
 of that Prince in 1574, he threw off the cloak of con- 
 formity, which he had hitherto loosely worn, and left 
 Italy for ever. "With the opinions which he entertained, 
 he was naturally attracted to the East of Europe ; and, 
 after a brief sojourn in Transylvania, settled in Poland, 
 where, chiefly in Krakau or the neighbourhood, he passed 
 the last twenty-five years of his life. He found there an 
 Antitrinitarian church, on the one hand slowly growing 
 
 1 This is Cosmo I., sometimes called the Great, who, after the 
 murder of Alessandro the last, though illegitimate, scion of the old 
 Medici became Duke of Florence, and afterwards of Sienna. He was 
 the founder of the Ducal dynasty of the Medici, reigning from 1537 to 
 1574. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 273 
 
 into an organized existence; on the other, vexed with 
 the kind of dissension which always troubles "left wings," 
 political or religious. These dissensions he made it the 
 business of his life to allay, and in some considerable 
 degree succeeded. Curiously enough, he never became 
 a member of the church over which his influence was 
 so great ; for it demanded re-baptism, and Socinus would 
 not submit to a repetition of the rite. He had neither 
 the inspiring force of Luther, nor the complete learning 
 of Melancthon : he approached religion from the intel- 
 lectual and ethical sides alone : the deep things of the 
 Spirit were a sealed book to him : while, again, he had 
 never undergone the scholastic training of the age, and 
 the years which some men devote to enlarging and cor- 
 recting the acquirements of their youth, had been spent by 
 him in the service of Florentine diplomacy. But he had 
 the advantage of knowing precisely what he believed, 
 and what he wanted other people to believe : his thought 
 was a middle way between extremes : he was a disputant 
 of imperturbable temper and unwearied perseverance: 
 his dialectic was cold, clear, acute, convincing even 
 when not persuasive. Before his death the tide of Jesuit 
 reaction set in in Poland, and he suffered the fate of 
 Priestley two centuries later, in having his books burned 
 and his life endangered by a fanatical mob. Still a 
 church was founded. It had an organization which we 
 should now call Presbyterian. It possessed flourishing 
 schools, one of which, at Eacow, almost rose to the rank 
 of a university. It exercised a strong moral discipline 
 over its members, whom it restrained as far as possible 
 from recourse to the courts of law, or indeed any parti- 
 
 T 
 
274 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 cipation in political life. Its chief preachers and writers 
 were partly Polish, partly German. In the German Uni- 
 versities the Socinian leaven was always working, de- 
 taching to the service of the Polish chnrch such men as 
 Ostorodt, Crell, Euarus, Wollzogen, and many more who 
 were not ashamed to be enrolled among the " Fr aires 
 Poloni." 1 That this church finally succumbed to per- 
 sistent persecution, no one needs to be told. The Jesuits 
 took possession of successive Kings of Poland, whom they 
 educated to be the tools of their purposes, and the inter- 
 necine hatreds of Protestants gave them all the oppor- 
 tunity they needed. The final blow fell on the 10th of 
 July, 1660, when the Unitarians were compelled either 
 to become Catholic or to leave a kingdom which still 
 affected to tolerate Mohammedans and Jews. One body 
 of them found their way to Transylvania, where they 
 maintained a corporate existence apart from their Tran- 
 
 1 This was particularly the case at the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century at Altorf, a little University not far from Nurnberg, in the 
 territory and under the influence of the Free City. Here one Ernst 
 Soner was Professor of Medicine, a man who had studied at Leiden, 
 and there, through intercourse with Ostorodt and Woidowski, had been 
 converted to Socinianism. He seems to have devoted his energy at 
 Altorf much more to the propagation of his religious views than to the 
 teaching proper to his chair ; but he worked in strict secrecy, and died 
 in 1612 in the odour of unsuspected orthodoxy. After his death 
 his disciples were less cautious : the scandal broke out, and in the sub- 
 sequent investigations, dismissals, burnings of books, it is impossible 
 to say how much blame was cast upon Soner which might have been 
 more properly borne by his living successors. The story of the affair, 
 which made a great noise in Germany, is told by G. G. Zeltner, in two 
 bulky quartos : " Historia Crypto-Socinismi Altorfinse quondam Acade- 
 mic infesti arcana," &c, Leipzig, 1729. Conf. Fock : Der Socinian- 
 ismus, I. 235. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 275 
 
 sylvanian co-religionists 1 till almost the end of the last 
 century. Prussia received some, Holland others, who, 
 theoretically discountenanced but really tolerated, gra- 
 dually lost themselves in the ranks of the Eemonstrants. 
 But all through the years during which the scattered 
 Socinians were gradually losing ecclesiastical cohesion 
 while the tradition was feebly kept alive in the remote 
 valleys of Transylvania, and before English Presbyterian- 
 ism had begun to suffer the process of doctrinal decay 
 Socinianism, both in England and on the Continent, was 
 the readiest and the bitterest reproach which confident 
 orthodoxy could throw at rational or latitudinarian 
 thought. It was the "red spectre" of Protestantism; 
 the reductio ad damnabile of rationalism. Hales of Eton, 
 Falkland, Chillingworth, were all in turn accused of it, 
 and all unjustly. "No man can tell you truth," says 
 Andrew Marvel, 2 "but he must presently be a Soci- 
 nian." And under the cloud of angry prejudice thus 
 
 1 The Unitarian church in Transylvania, which has subsisted ever 
 since the Reformation, and still enjoys a modest degree of prosperity, 
 was distinct in origin and history from the church of Poland. Its 
 first name is also that of an Italian refugee, Giorgio Biandrata, a phy- 
 sician of great worldly skill and address, but of worse than doubtful 
 character, who went back to the Catholic Church, to meet a miserable 
 death at the hands of a kinsman. But its true illustration in the 
 age of the Reformation is Franz David, a noble and pious man, 
 who, refusing to give to Christ the title of God and the honour of 
 invocation, was, at the instigation of Biandrata, tried, condemned, and 
 ended his days in prison. It was in connection with this controversy 
 that Faustus Socinus paid his only visit to Transylvania ; but there is 
 no justification for associating his name with the church. Transyl- 
 vanian Unitarianism is a religious phenomenon parallel to, but not 
 identical with, Polish Socinianism. 
 
 2 The Rehearsal Transposed : the Second Part, p. 307. 
 
 t 9. 
 
270 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 raised, the real features of a very remarkable system of 
 religious thought have almost disappeared from view. 1 
 
 With the doctrinal details of Socinianism, however, I 
 have now nothing to do, except in so far as they stand 
 related to the general movement of human thought which 
 I have been trying to describe. I shall not attempt to 
 distinguish the doctrine of Socinus from that of Servetus, 
 or to re-open the controversy, which was to the former 
 so vital, as to the " invocation" and the "adoration" of 
 Christ. It is more in accord with my present purpose 
 to point out the intellectual hardihood of the method of 
 religious thought which in Poland and Transylvania was 
 made the basis of an ecclesiastical organization. Here 
 was a reaction against Eome which, whatever its logical 
 and historical justification, was at least thorough. 2 I do 
 not think, though I speak with diffidence upon this point, 
 that Socinus adopted the historical method at all, or went 
 back to the ante-Mcene Fathers, to justify himself against 
 the great doctors of the fourth and fifth centuries. Their 
 enemies indeed accused the Socinians of having revived 
 the heresies of Artemon and Paul of Samosata ; but this 
 calling of names, which is so common a device of theolo- 
 gians, does not at all indicate the real lines of attack and 
 defence. Socinus' method consisted simply in the appli- 
 cation of reason to Scripture. He did not believe in the 
 possibility of natural religion : religion is revelation only, 
 
 1 My principal authority for the history of Socinianism is Otto Fock : 
 I)er Socinianismus, Kiel, 1847, 2 vols. 8vo. I may also refer once more 
 to Mr. Gordon's excellent articles, " The Sozzini and their School." 
 
 2 The epigram is well known, but may be once more quoted : 
 
 Alta ruit Babylon : destruxit tecta Lutherus, 
 Muros Calvinus, sed fundamenta Socinus. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 277 
 
 and, in the case of godly men before Christ, must be 
 referred to the fact that in the beginning God made 
 Himself known to Adam. There is no real distinction 
 between law and gospel: Christianity is only a better 
 and more explicit law, to the performance of which the 
 promise of eternal life is attached. And the truths, the 
 precepts, the promises of Christianity are to be extracted 
 from Scripture by the use of human reason, which, how- 
 ever, has not merely an interpretative but a critical 
 faculty. Many things, indeed, in Scripture are to be 
 believed which are above, but none that are contrary to 
 reason ; though the line between what is above and what 
 is contrary was drawn in what to modern apprehension 
 appears a sufficiently arbitrary way. And the application 
 of this method by Socinus to the body of commonly- 
 accepted Christian dogma led to startling results. The 
 doctrine of the Trinity disappeared, and its place was 
 taken by those of the Unity of God and the simple 
 humanity of Christ. The centre-point of Christ's mission 
 is not his death upon the cross, in which he made satis- 
 faction for the sins of the world, but his resurrection, in 
 which he brought life and immortality to light. The 
 whole fabric of a vicarious atonement, its key-stone being 
 thus taken out, crumbled into ruin : the literary antithesis 
 of Anselm's "Cur Deus Homo?" is Faustus Socinus' 
 " De Jesu Christo Servatore," a book in which is to be 
 found every rational and moral argument since directed 
 against the theory of satisfaction. Christianity thus 
 becomes, after a fashion, a rational religion : God speaks : 
 reason listens and accepts. But as God speaks by human 
 voices and through human instruments, it is necessary 
 that reason should also interpret, criticise, discriminate. 
 
278 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 The result is a doctrinal system which rejects ecclesias- 
 tical Christianity in all its stages as a corruption of pri- 
 mitive truth, and represents itself as alone the mirror of 
 apostolical tradition. 
 
 Socinus, therefore, accepted to the full the Eef ormation 
 principle of the supreme authority of Scripture. But it 
 was characteristic of his clear, cold, questioning intellect 
 that he was not content to assume that authority with as 
 little attempt as Luther and Calvin made to prove it. 
 His book "De Sacrce Scriptures Auctoritate" is extremely 
 interesting and valuable, not only as being the first 
 attempt to solve a problem, upon the answer to which 
 depends the whole intellectual justification of the Eef orm, 
 but as the fountain-head of a method of Scripture apo- 
 logetics upon which some reliance is yet placed. The 
 New Testament in comparison with which the Old, in 
 Socinus' view, holds only a subordinate position was 
 written under the immediate dictation of the Holy Spirit, 
 and is therefore, subject to a distinction between the 
 essential and the non-essential, infallible in matters of 
 doctrine. But how is this to be proved ? Not by the 
 authority of the Church, as was the teaching of Eome ; 
 not by the conjoint witness of the Spirit in Scripture and 
 in the mind of the believer, as Calvin asserted ; but by 
 obvious reasons, level to ordinary comprehension. The 
 books are the production of the authors to whom they are 
 assigned : there is no reason to suppose that they have 
 been corrupted : the apostles were men who had abun- 
 dant opportunity of becoming acquainted with the facts 
 which they recorded: they were honest witnesses who 
 sealed their faith with their blood : in everything that is 
 essential they are in full accord with one another and 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 279 
 
 so forth. It is not my object to draw out the argument 
 in its complete form, much less to criticise it : it is suffi- 
 cient to have indicated its character, which was a few 
 years ago, and perhaps still is, familiar enough. This 
 book is the precursor of what we may call the literature 
 of " credibility," and in the honesty and thoroughness of 
 its attempt, if not for the measure of its success, deserves 
 our respect. But it is plain that the superstructure is far 
 too massive for the foundation on which it is erected. 
 No mere literary reasoning of this kind will reach as far 
 as the dictation of the Spirit, and the infallible authority 
 of the word dictated. It is the only way in which the 
 credibility of a Thucydides or a Tacitus can be established; 
 but it does not touch the intellectual region which lies 
 between the general credence which we give to their 
 statements of fact, and the submission with which we are 
 expected to receive authoritative utterances of doctrine 
 from men who are the mouthpieces of God. Nor, again, 
 can anything be more obvious than that Socinus starts 
 from the large assumption as to the literary character of 
 the Bible of which 1 have spoken. He declares that such 
 discrepancies as exist in the New Testament are of small 
 account, and relate only to historical fact. So far from 
 there being any doctrinal diversity in its statements, its 
 extraordinary agreement and consistency with itself are 
 such as of themselves to put it in a position of greater 
 authority than any other book of doctrine. It would be 
 difficult to find an example in which the writings of any 
 one man, however few and brief, manifest this quality 
 to the same extent as these books, 1 the production of 
 
 1 " Dico igitur, quod attinet ad repugnantias aut diversitates quae in 
 N. T. scriptis inveniantur, nullain esse, quae aut non videatur quidein 
 
280 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 many writers. In so saying, the arch-rationalist of the 
 Eeformation is less true to fact than the Eeformer who 
 called upon his disciples to strangle reason like a dan- 
 gerous beast. Luther at least saw that no dialectic inge- 
 nuity would reconcile Paul and James. 
 
 We are at the opposite pole of thought now from the 
 mysticism of Tauler, of the Theologia Germanica, of Sebas- 
 tian Franck. And whatever there is of truth in mysticism, 
 the system of Socinus altogether neglects. It separates 
 God and man, making the relation between them purely 
 intellectual. It leaves no room for a doctrine of the Spirit. 
 There is much meaning in the fact that its characteristic 
 phrase is not inspiration but patef actio divina. God does 
 not enter into men's souls, moulding them to Himself, 
 but declares His will and promises a reward of obedience. 
 There is no opportunity for the manifestation of a divine 
 passion, as in the spiritual form of the doctrine of justi- 
 fication by faith, but only the calm apprehension by the 
 intellect of certain abstract and practical truths of great 
 and eternal importance. But even as a system of avowed 
 rationalism, Socinianism was born prematurely. Had 
 
 vera, sed tamen non sit, aut non in re sit parvi, sen potius millius 
 momenti. Quae videri tantum possunt, nee tamen sunt re vera, ea sunt, 
 quae ad doctrinam spectant : in qua non modo nulla vera in scriptis 
 illis repugnantia aut diversitas invenitur, sed tanta est concordia et 
 convenientia, ut vel hoc satis esse deberet ad conciliandam libro illi 
 auctoritatem majorem, quam quivis alius liber habeat, ubi doctrina aliqua 
 tradatur. Vix enim, aut ne vix quidem, in scriptis unius tantum 
 hominis, licet brevibus et paucis, tanta unquam doctrinae ubique con- 
 cordia et convenientia, reperietur, quanta in eo libro, qui ex tot diversis 
 multorum scriptis constat. Kepugnantiae porro aut diversitates seu 
 verae, seu quae videri tantum possint, quae in rebus sunt parvi momenti, 
 ese sunt, quae pertinent ad historiam." F. Socini Opp. I. 267, "De 
 Auctoritate S. Scripturre." 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 281 
 
 Socinus possessed all the learning of Melancthon, his 
 method would still have been in advance of his know- 
 ledge. Eationalism could not have its perfect work till 
 Biblical, following in the track of all other literary cri- 
 ticism, had accumulated such a store of indisputable facts 
 as would warrant settled inferences. But even when the 
 knowledge is accumulated and the inferences drawn, the 
 rationalists will still have to go to the mystics if they 
 would learn the whole secret of Christianity. 1 
 
 Socinianism, as a dogmatic system, hardly has a his- 
 tory. The doctrine of the Kacovian Catechism is sub- 
 stantially that of Socinus ; and though the Unitarians of 
 the second generation did not in every respect agree with 
 their predecessors, their theory of confessional obligation 
 left the way open to growth and change. 2 In Lutheran- 
 ism, on the contrary, we find going on, for at least two 
 generations, a process of dogmatic development kept as 
 far as possible within the limits of authoritative state- 
 
 1 The Antitrinitarians f Poland, at first organized as a church under 
 the title of " ecclesia minor," had many names applied to them, mostly 
 descriptive, but some that with lapse of time have become almost 
 opprobrious. They certainly never wished to be called Socinians. 
 They preferred the simple designation of Christians. The great collec- 
 tion of Socinian divinity, published at Amsterdam in the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, bears the general title, " Bibliotheca Fratrurn 
 Polonorum, quos Unitarios vocant" The Transylvanian church finally 
 took the name Unitarian. But in 1762, the church of Polish exiles 
 at Kolozsvar published a " Confessio Fidei exulum Christi, qui ab ejus 
 sanctissimo nomine, Christiani tantum appellari amant." Possibly this 
 desire on the part of the Polish Unitarians to be called by no other 
 name than that of Christian, stands in some relation to the deter- 
 mination of their orthodox opponents to deny it them altogether. 
 A. Gordon : Theol. Review, XVI. 568. 
 
 2 See Preface to the Racovian Catechism (ed. Rees, 1818), by Andrew 
 Wissowatius and Joachim Stegman the Younger, p. xcv et seq. 
 
282 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 ments, dissent from which is the sure mark of heresy, 
 and usually attended by pains and penalties. Of these 
 statements, the first in point of date is contained in the 
 fifteen Articles of Marburg, which Luther and the other 
 theologians of Wittenberg drew up in 152&, with a view 
 of defining their position as against Zwingli and the 
 Swiss Eeformers. These were reproduced, after the lapse 
 of a few weeks, in the seventeen Articles of Schwabach, 
 which were made the basis of alliance between the 
 Lutheran States of Germany. And both these documents 
 led up to and were superseded by the Confession of 
 Augsburg, which, in opposition to the Confession pre- 
 sented to the Emperor by Zwingli, and that of the four 
 cities, Strasburg, Constanz, Lindau and Memmingen, 
 known as the Confessio Tetrapolitana, was adopted by 
 the Lutheran Princes and Cities, and is still the central 
 symbolic document of the German Eeformation. Much 
 might be said of this famous Confession which I cannot 
 pause to say now : how it was the work of the temporiz- 
 ing and reconciling genius of Melancthon, who, but for 
 the opposition of the Protestant Princes, would have gone 
 to far greater lengths of concession than are represented 
 in the actual settlement : how it marks not the maximum 
 but the minimum of Protestant revolt against Eome : and 
 how, therefore, while quite useless as a measure of con- 
 ciliation towards Emperor and Pope, it has greatly tended 
 to impress upon Lutheranism its peculiar character of 
 narrow and rigid orthodoxy. But two things may be 
 said of it. First, it was the introduction to the Christian 
 world of a new kind of creed. It is conceived and exe- 
 cuted on quite a different scale from that of the ancient 
 symbols of the Church. It occupies many pages; it 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 283 
 
 covers a large theological area. And next, the selection 
 of the points which it chiefly elaborates was determined 
 by the exigencies of controversy. It has not the scientific 
 symmetry of a general confession of faith. It is anthro- 
 pological rather than theological. It takes for granted 
 the old creeds, which define the nature of God ; while, 
 in regard to matters which touch the relation of men 
 to God faith, works, grace, justification it is full and 
 explicit. 
 
 The Confession of Augsburg, and the Apology for it 
 which soon followed, were Melancthon's work. The next 
 contribution to confessional literature, the Articles of 
 Schmalkalden, came from Luther's pen, and were signed 
 by Melancthon only under protest. Their date is February, 
 1537: they were the confession of faith of the Lutheran 
 States, which had drawn together for mutual defence in 
 what was known as the Schmalkaldic League, and were 
 intended, not only for their own instruction and encou- 
 ragement, but for the information of the Pope, the 
 Emperor and the coming Council. Upon the Articles 
 of Schmalkalden followed a long succession of similar 
 documents. The Confessions of the German and Swiss 
 churches fill more than one portly volume. One series 
 of them took its origin in the differences between the 
 Lutheran, and first the Zwinglian, next the Calvinistic, 
 doctrine of the Eucharist. Bucer, who as the Eeformer 
 of Strasburg held both geographically and theologically 
 a middle position between Wittenberg and Zurich, inter- 
 posed, after the Diet of Augsburg, with proposals of a 
 reconciling kind ; and in 1536 an agreement, more verbal 
 than real, was formulated in what is known as the Con- 
 cord of Wittenberg. But in 1544, two years before he 
 
284 VIII. EISE OP PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM:. 
 
 died, Luther renewed the wordy warfare, 1 and the breach 
 between the two churches became absolute. I will not 
 enumerate the long and elaborate confessions of faith in 
 which the various niceties of this embittered controversy 
 found expression : it would be a mere catalogue of titles, 
 to which hours of patient theological exposition would 
 hardly restore the faintest breath of living interest. But 
 it is curious to remark how the doctrine chiefly in ques- 
 tion, that of the Eeal Presence in the Eucharist, led back 
 the Protestant churches to precisely those scholastic sub- 
 tleties of speculation which Luther and Melancthon were 
 at first so anxious to avoid. Said the Zwinglians, How 
 could the human nature of Christ be present in the bread 
 and wine, when the man Christ Jesus was in heaven, 
 sitting at the right hand of God ? Could a body be at 
 once in more places than one ? Could two bodies be at 
 the same time in the same place ? The answer to these 
 questions was afforded by the peculiarly Lutheran doc- 
 trine of the ubiquity of Christ's body. But how is this 
 ubiquity, in itself contrary to the conditions of physical 
 existence, to be accounted for ? Again, the answer comes 
 in the still more abstruse doctrine of the eommunicatio 
 idiomatum, according to which the divine nature of Christ 
 imparts its mysterious faculties and properties to the 
 human. Whether this doctrine really explains in a satis- 
 factory way the relation between the two natures in 
 Christ, which has so exercised the most speculative minds 
 of the church from the Council of Mcaea downwards, I 
 must leave to acuter theologians to decide; but it is 
 certainly one which the Doctor Subtilissimus among the 
 
 1 In his " Kurzes Bekenntniss vom heiligen Sacrament," Werke, 
 ed. Walch, XX. 2195. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 285 
 
 Schoolmen need not have been ashamed to father. It 
 was stated at great length in that Formula of Concord 
 of 1580, in which at last the rigid Lutherans recorded 
 their agreement among themselves, and their disagree- 
 ment with all Calvinists and crypto- Calvinists. I find, 
 however, that even this did not satisfy the rage for defi- 
 nition, and that the dogmatic theologians proceeded to 
 discuss three separate kinds of communicatio the genus 
 idiomaticum, the genus apotelesmaticum, and the genus 
 majestaticum, phrases which I shall not attempt to explain. 1 
 But here, too, was found fresh opportunity for further 
 distinction and subdivision; while a quite new line of 
 heated and bitter controversy was opened out at the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century by the application 
 of these ideas to the earthly life of Christ. It was con- 
 ceived of as a voluntary self-humiliation, or, as the tech- 
 nical phrase was, an " exinanition." But what during 
 that period became of the divine attributes, the omnipre- 
 sence, the omnipotence, which, in virtue of the communi- 
 catio, belonged to his human nature ? A distinction was 
 made between their kt^o-vs or possession, and their xpw l ? 
 or use ; while as to the xpw 1 * there were two theories 
 one, that Christ secretly exercised his divine powers, 
 Kpv^L<s ; the other, that he, so to speak, emptied himself 
 of them, KevoKTis. Upon this subtle issue a furious dispute 
 arose between the theologians of Tubingen on the one 
 side, those of Marburg and Giessen on the other. But 
 here I pause. We are a very long way now from the 
 
 1 Baur : Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, Vol. III. Part i. chap. 8. 
 Bretschneider : Dogmatik, pp. 575 578. 
 
286 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 point at which Luther objected to the words Trinity 
 and Homoousion that they were not to be found in 
 Scripture. 1 
 
 Other controversies, more in number and not less bitter 
 than those which separated it from the Swiss Protestants, 
 arose in the bosom of the Lutheran Church itself. I have 
 already said that its dogmatic theologian was Melancthon, 
 and its symbolic book his Loci Communes? It is a fact 
 very characteristic of the theology of the Eeformation, 
 that this famous book had its origin in a course of lec- 
 tures on the Epistle to the Eomans, which were given by 
 Melancthon very soon after his arrival in Wittenberg. 
 In its earliest form it was a collection of Heads, or Loci 
 topics for further systematic exposition, which received 
 oral amplification from the Professor at his desk. Nor 
 in the first edition, which was published at Wittenberg 
 in 1521, was it much more than this. The book was 
 received with unbounded applause in Lutheran circles : 
 between 1521 and 1523, seventeen editions were issued : 
 George Spalatin, the chaplain and friend of the Elector 
 Frederick, translated it into German : and in a famous 
 phrase of commendation, which soon found its way on to 
 the title-page of the book, Luther said of it " that it was 
 worthy not only of immortality, but of a place in the 
 
 1 Baur : Dreieinigkeit, III. 450. Gass : Geschichte der Protestant- 
 ischen Dogmatik, I. 277. 
 
 2 The full title of the first edition was "Loci Communes rerum 
 theologicarum, seu Hypotyposes Theologicse. Auctore Philippo Me- 
 lanchthone. Wittembergae, an. MDXXI." In its last form, "Loci 
 Theologici recens recogniti Autore Philip. Melanthone. Wittebergae, 
 anno 1543." 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 287 
 
 Canon of Scripture." 1 On the other hand, Cochlseus, 
 the champion of Borne, called it the Alkoran 2 of Luther- 
 anism, while Eck set to work to produce Loci Communes 
 of Catholic theology. But the book had a curious and 
 significant history. Its last learned editor 3 distinguishes 
 three periods of its development within its author's life- 
 time: the first, from 1521 to 1525; the second, from 
 1535 to 1541 ; the third, from 1542 to 1559. In each 
 of these, the number of Loci was increased and their 
 treatment made more elaborate. The work, from a sys- 
 tematic commentary on the most systematic of Paul's 
 letters, became a compendium of Christian doctrine. To 
 citations from Scripture were gradually added quotations 
 from the Fathers. The Schoolmen, once mentioned only 
 in terms of contempt, were adduced as authoritative. The 
 necessities of system-making were laid upon Melancthon, 
 and the longer he lived, the more he yielded to them. 
 
 The Lutheran Church was not absolutely at one, even 
 while the commanding genius of its founder was still 
 able to assert itself. Eeformation doctrine was on many 
 important points fluid and indeterminate : on the subtle- 
 ties which clustered round the theory of grace and pre- 
 destination, in especial, it was easy for men of inde- 
 pendent minds to take different sides. In 1537, Johann 
 Agricola, of Eisleben, a friend and fellow- worker of both 
 the great Eeformers, started a theory of the relation of 
 the law to the gospel, which, but for his own uncertainty 
 
 1 Selnecker, an early Lutheran divine, was content to call it " the 
 best book after the Bible." Calvin edited, possibly himself executed 
 a translation of it into French, published in 1546. 
 
 2 Corp. Eef. XXL 79. 
 
 3 H. E. Bindseil, in the 21st and 22nd vols, of the Corp. Ref. 
 
288 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 of theological grasp and want of moral steadfastness, 
 might have produced disunion. But when Luther died 
 in 1546, the storm broke from many quarters of the 
 theological sky in succession. Melancthon, it must be 
 owned, had declined from the full rigidity of Lutheran 
 doctrine. He had gradually introduced into his Loci the 
 theory that man's will co-operates with God's in the 
 work of salvation. He had laid down the fine distinction 
 that of salvation good works were not a causa efficiens, 
 and yet a causa sine qua non. On the one hand, Flacius 
 Illyricus, a hard and reckless dogmatist, flew at him 
 with the assertion of a doctrine of human corruption 
 which out-Luthered Luther ; on the other, Amsdorf ad- 
 vanced the paradoxical thesis that to salvation good 
 works were an absolute hindrance. A fourth controversy 
 arose out of a theory of justification peculiar to Osiander : 
 a fifth, as to the extent to which the Church might law- 
 fully submit itself in things indifferent (adiaphora) to 
 unfriendly compulsion. Till 1560, when death delivered 
 Melancthon from "the rage of theologians," these debates, 
 conducted with an incredible arrogance and bitterness, 
 assailed his reputation and destroyed his peace. New 
 names came up : , men were no longer Protestants, but 
 Lutherans and Philippists : Melancthon was called a 
 crypto -Calvinist, and accused of having traitorously 
 transferred his allegiance from Wittenberg to Geneva. 
 Princes as well as divines were bitten by the gadfly of 
 orthodoxy, and spared no pains, shrank from hardly any 
 severity, to enforce a rule of dogmatic soundness in their 
 dominions. At first, Wittenberg was the stronghold of 
 the Philippists ; Jena, with its University newly founded 
 in the interest of the severest Lutheranism, of their oppo- 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 289 
 
 nents; while Philippists and Lutherans alike pursued 
 with a hearty hatred the Calvinism which had now 
 established itself in more than one German State. But 
 professors were invited and dismissed, sometimes even 
 proscribed and imprisoned, as the fortunes of the theolo- 
 gical war changed. Possibly the Christian life and spirit 
 may have survived in some of the obscure places of which 
 the dignified Muse of History takes no cognizance ; but 
 I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more 
 confidently point in illustration of the fact, that where 
 there is most theology there is often least religion. 
 
 It need not be said that such a state of things as this 
 produced a very plentiful crop of creeds and symbolical 
 books. Some of these are truly portentous documents. 
 The fashion grew up that every Protestant State should 
 have its Corpus Doctrince, or body of doctrine, expressive 
 of its own precise shade of orthodoxy, and rigidly en- 
 forced upon all its subjects. When we recollect the very 
 slender dimensions of the Apostles' or the Kicene Creed, 
 we are struck with unpleasing astonishment to find that 
 each of these was a folio volume, containing several inde- 
 pendent expositions of doctrine, all of great length and 
 precision. The first, the authorship of which is due to 
 Melancthon himself, was published in 1559, under the 
 title of Corpus Doctrince Philippicum or Misnicum. It 
 contained -I give its table of contents as a sample of 
 the rest the Confession of Augsburg and Melancthon' s 
 Apology for it, the Loci Communes, the Examen Ordinan- 
 dorum, the Responsio ad articulos Bavaricce Inquisitionis, 
 and the Responsio Serve ti. Such was, in 1560, the 
 standard of Saxon orthodoxy. The cities of Hamburg 
 and Brunswick each had a Corpus not less ample. There 
 
 u 
 
290 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 was the Corpus Pomeranicum of a distinctly Lutheran 
 cas t for Pomerania ; a Corpus Prutenicum for Prussia ; 
 a Corpus Brandeburgicum for Brandenburg. Others were 
 loyally named after reigning Princes : as the Corpus 
 Wilhelminum of Liineburg, and the Corpus Julium of 
 Brunswick- Wolfenbiittel. All these, and others which 
 I have not named, were superseded in 1580 fifty years 
 after the presentation of the Confession of Augsburg by 
 the Formula Concordice, which remains the standard of 
 Lutheran orthodoxy. This document adopts, so to speak, 
 into itself the three Creeds, the Confession of Augsburg 
 in its original form with the Apology, the Schmalkaldic 
 Articles, Luther's two Catechisms, and adds twelve Arti- 
 cles, dealing at great length with the controversies of 
 which I have spoken, in a Lutheran sense. Though not 
 quite universally adopted, the Formula Concordia? was in 
 effect the triumph of rigid Lutheranism over Melancthon 
 and Calvin alike. But while Protestants had thus been 
 spending their strength in ignoble internecine strife, the 
 Counter Eef ormation had been actively at work, Catholic 
 Germany had gathered up its strength for one more 
 desperate contest, and before long the Thirty Years' War 
 involved them in a struggle for very life. 
 
 That struggle, however, interposed no hindrance in 
 the way of the all-powerful dogmatizing impulse. In 
 the very midst of cruel war and reckless devastation, 
 Johann Gerhard of Jena, who is held in honour as the 
 chief of Lutheran dogmatists, quietly toiled at the con- 
 struction of his vast theological system, which filled nine 
 quarto volumes, and, in an edition published a century 
 and a half afterwards, was expanded to twenty of the 
 same goodly dimensions. The work was framed on the 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 291 
 
 Melancthonian pattern, and bore almost the same title 
 as Melancthon's Loci Theologici} As characteristic a 
 figure as Gerhard is Abraham Calov, who a genera- 
 tion later represented at Wittenberg, in opposition to 
 George Calixt, the uncompromising Lutheranism of his 
 day. Calixt, who was the chief ornament of the Uni- 
 versity of Helmstadt, was a man of large and liberal 
 mind, which he had cultivated not only by comprehensive 
 study, but by foreign travel. But he had conceived the 
 dangerous idea that the essentials of Christianity con- 
 sisted in the doctrines which are held by all churches 
 alike, and that their peculiar and characteristic tenets 
 are only of secondary importance : need it be said that 
 the accusation of Eomanism was hurled at him from one 
 side, of Atheism from the other ? Against him, Calov, 
 the very type of a rigid and narrow dogmatist, maintained 
 a life-long war, one ponderous engine of which was his 
 By sterna Locor urn Theologicorurn, in twelve quarto volumes. 2 
 What little excuse can be alleged for these extravagant 
 exaggerations of dogmatic system, is to be derived from 
 the fact that Lutheranism was put on its defence against 
 the subtleties of Jesuit polemic on the one side, of Cal- 
 vinist controversy on the other ; that it was pressed here 
 
 1 Joh. Gerhard, "Loci Communes Theologici cum pro adstruenda 
 veritate turn pro destruenda quorumvis contradicentium falsitate solide 
 et copiose explicati inque novem tomos divisi," Jena, 1610 1622. 
 J. F. Cotta's edition in twenty volumes was published at Tubingen, 
 17621781. 
 
 2 Ab. Calov, "Systema locorum theologicorum e sacra potissimum 
 Scriptura et antiquitate nee non adversariorum confessione doctrinam, 
 praxin et controversiarum fidei cum veterum turn in primis recentiorum 
 pertractationem luculentam exhibens," Wittembergse, 1655 1677, XII. 
 tomi. 
 
 u2 
 
292 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 by Syncretistic liberality, there by Soeinian rationalism, 
 and so became absorbed in the single task of theological 
 self-development. But the religions, and in some degree 
 even the intellectual life of the Church was cankered at 
 the core. The philological studies which had given its 
 first impulse to the Eeformation were neglected. Fanatics 
 were found to assert that philosophy was an invention 
 of the devil, and that what approved itself to the natural 
 reason could not be theologically true. The only philo- 
 sophy which found any favour was precisely that Aristo- 
 telian dialectic which had determined the form of the 
 scholastic theology, and now served the Lutheran system- 
 makers as the basis of their endless definitions and dis- 
 tinctions. Calov, who belonged to the generation between 
 Kepler and Newton, denied on scriptural grounds the 
 possibility of the earth's revolution round the sun. 1 The 
 Bible was still the highest authority in matters of faith ; 
 but the sole object of interpretation was to bring it into 
 accordance with the Lutheran symbols, a task which was 
 much facilitated by a free use of the analogia fidei. The 
 systematic study of Scripture almost disappeared from 
 the Universities. Spener, 2 the famous founder of the 
 Pietistic school and the leader of a Biblical reaction, has 
 left it on record that preaching was to a large extent 
 
 1 Gass, I. 343. 
 
 2 Spener's " Pia Desideria," quoted*" by Hossbach, " Philipp Jakob 
 Spener und seine Zeit," I. 96. The following distich from a poet of 
 the time, shows the connection in the popular mind between Pietism 
 and revived interest in the Scriptures : 
 
 Was ist ein Pietist ! der Gottes Wort studirt 
 Und nach demselben auch ein heilig Leben fiihrt. 
 Hossbach, L 235. 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 293 
 
 confined to texts taken from . the lessons of the day 
 [Perikopen), to the exclusion of continuous exposition. 
 The study of dogma, in and for itself, reigned supreme. 
 There was once more a scholastic system of theology, 
 developed in scholastic form by scholastic methods, 
 which, hardly less than that against which the Eeformers 
 had rebelled, hid the Scriptures and crushed out the life 
 of the Church. 
 
 The doctrinal development of the Eeformed Church 
 ran a similar course. It starts from Calvin's great work, 
 the " Institution of the Christian Keligion," which in its 
 relation to its author has a history not unlike that of 
 Melancthon's Loci. The first extant edition was pub- 
 lished at Basel, in the Latin language, in 1536. 1 The 
 general supposition is, that this was preceded in 1535 by 
 a French edition ; if so, the book has entirely disappeared. 
 But the u Institution" of 1536 was only a skeleton of 
 what it afterwards became. Here, too, there are three 
 well-marked epochs in the history of the work, reckoning 
 from the time of its first publication to the date at which 
 it finally left its author's hands. The Basel edition of 
 1536 contained only six chapters; that of Strasburg in 
 1539 was enlarged to seventeen; while the final and 
 authoritative issue of Geneva in 1559 contained no fewer 
 than eighty. The form of the book, too, underwent 
 
 1 Henry : Joh. Calvin, I. 102 et seq. Conf. Beilage, Literatur der 
 Schriften Calvins, Vol. III. No. 3, p. 177. Paulus Tkurius, an Hun- 
 garian scholar, is the author of the following distich on the "Institution :" 
 Prater apostolicas post Christi tempora chartas, 
 Huic peperere libro saecula nulla parem. 
 But this hardly equals in weight Luther's commendation of Melancthon's 
 Loci. 
 
294 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 important changes. Originally it began with an exposi- 
 tion of the Decalogue, followed by similar expositions of 
 the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. The other 
 three chapters treated of True and False Sacraments 
 respectively, and of Christian Liberty, including the 
 relation of the Church to the State. The final form of 
 the work, however, is that of four Books, divided into 
 eighty chapters. The first treats of the knowledge of 
 God the Creator ; the second, of the knowledge of God 
 the Eedeemer in Christ ; the third, of the manner how 
 to receive (percipiendce) the grace of Christ, what fruits 
 come thereof to us, and what effects follow of it : the 
 last, of the outward means and helps whereby God calleth 
 us into the fellowship of Christ and holdeth us in it. To 
 the first edition and to every subsequent one is prefixed 
 a Dedication to Francis I., stating that the object of the 
 work is to set forth the doctrine which in the author's 
 native land is persecuted with fire and sword. But the 
 changes of form in this celebrated book, of which I have 
 spoken, were accompanied by no change of doctrinal 
 statement. Calvin was only twenty-seven when he wrote 
 it ; but he never afterwards found occasion to withdraw 
 or modify anything. The theology of the edition of 
 1536 is in every respect the same as that of the edition 
 of 1559. The scheme of Calvinistic theology came totus 
 teres, atque rotundus, from the mind of its author. 1 
 
 1 I copy the full title of this celebrated work from an edition pub- 
 lished at Geneva in 1585. "D. Joannis Calvini vigilantissimi pastoris 
 et fidelissimi doctoris ecclesiae Genevensis Institutio Christiana? reli- 
 gionis, ab ipso authore anno 1559 et in libros quatuor digesta, certisque 
 distincta capitibus ad aptissimum methodum : et turn aucta tarn magna 
 accessione ut propemodum opus novum haberi posset." 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 295 
 
 The " Institution" occupies a very different position 
 in theological literature from the Loci Communes. So 
 long as Calvinism retains its attraction for any large part 
 of Christendom, it can never become obsolete. The com- 
 plete occupation of the ground of religious belief, the 
 systematic exposition of doctrine, the logical subordina- 
 tion of point to point, the acute interpretation of Scrip- 
 ture, the deep insight into human nature, all make it 
 difficult, if once its premisses be accepted, to resist its 
 conclusions. I am only expressing the opinion of friend 
 and foe alike, when I say that Christianity has never 
 before or since been so completely cast into the mould of 
 a system. For Luther's brilliant attack, 'now on this, 
 now on that critical point of the Eoman entrenchments, 
 is substituted the careful selection of the Protestant posi- 
 tion, and the scientific construction of works of defence 
 on every side. There was no secret desire in Calvin's 
 mind, as there was in Melancthon's, to explain away 
 differences and to find a reconciliation with Eome: he 
 better knew the enemy with whom he had to contend; 
 and the utter uselessness of concession. The " Institu- 
 tion" was the last, formal, complete answer of the Eefor- 
 mation to the claims of the Papacy. It gathered up all 
 the diverse threads of the new thought, and wove them 
 into homogeneous strength. Against a system, it set up 
 a system, as completely thought out, based on adequate 
 authority, stern in its demands upon the believer, rigid 
 in its application to life. I have already alluded to the 
 fact, that the theology of Calvin supplied and directed 
 the missionary energy of the Eeformation. In Switzer- 
 land, the influence of Zwingli paled before that of the 
 Genevese Eeformer. Lutheranism did not hold its own 
 
296 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 even in Germany, where Calvinism, especially in the 
 Palatinate, soon found and kept a footing. In France, 
 the Huguenots were Calvin's children, and the Confes- 
 sion of La Eochelle an echo of his teaching. It was in 
 the heroic self-devotion which the doctrine of the absolute 
 supremacy of God is well fitted to call out, that William 
 the Silent and his Dutchmen defended Holland against 
 Philip II. Calvinism in part turned the current of the 
 English Eeformation in the direction of Puritanism with 
 what practical results for political and religious liberty 
 you well know and has made Scotland, for good and 
 for, evil, what she is. I frankly and fully admit all that 
 this form of faith has done for modern Europe, especially 
 in deepening the sense of the grandeur of human destiny, 
 and introducing a manlier spirit into politics. But I 
 gravely doubt whether the sum of good which it has 
 effected is not outweighed by the prevalence which the 
 mighty genius of Calvin has given to the idea that Chris- 
 tianity can be presented in dialectical form ; that its 
 aspirations, its affections, its insight into divine things, 
 its half -apprehensions of realities too great for finite 
 grasp, can be stated with scholastic accuracy and tied 
 together by bonds of logic. 
 
 It might have seemed as if Calvin had done once for 
 all the work which the inadequacy of Melancthon's Loci 
 Communes left to the later Lutheran dogmatists. But it 
 was not so. The passion for dogmatic system, once it has 
 laid hold of a church or an age, is insatiable, and can 
 never want material on which to work. As characteristic 
 as the communicatio idiomatum of Lutheran dogmatics is, 
 in the Calvinistic churches, that debate as to the Divine 
 decrees which is conducted by Supralapsarians on one 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 297 
 
 side, by Sublapsarians on the other. "When men under- 
 take on such scant evidence as is afforded by Scripture 
 if, indeed, on such a point it can be called evidence at 
 all to decide whether God, when He framed the decree 
 of predestination, had in His mind man fallen or man 
 unfallen, it is plain that nothing is too sacred for the 
 dogmatic passion to touch, or too difficult for it to attempt 
 to resolve. But a keener edge was given to definition 
 by the fact that within the bosom of the Eeformed 
 Church itself a reaction soon took place. Arminius was 
 a student under Beza at the University of Geneva : it 
 was from the very heart of Calvinism that Arminianism 
 developed itself. I cannot pause to tell the story of the 
 controversies which distracted the Church of Holland, 
 and which were for a time settled at the Synod of 
 Dordt, where in 1618-19 the doctrine of the " Insti- 
 tution" was defined witljmore uncompromising rigidity 
 than ever. In Switzerland and in Holland, the men who 
 are admiringly called by their Scottish disciples and 
 imitators "the great Calvinistic systematic divines of the 
 seventeenth century " Turretine, Heidegger, "Witsius, 
 Yan Mastricht, 1 and many more whose ponderous folios 
 now sleep the sleep of dusty forgetfulness on college 
 shelves pursued their patient toil. 
 
 " Their works," says Dr. Cunningham, 2 " are based wholly upon 
 the theology of the Keformation ; but they carry it out to its 
 completion, and may be said to form the crown and the cope- 
 stone of theological science, viewed as an accurate, compre- 
 hensive and systematic exposition and defence of the doctrine 
 
 1 The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, by W. Cum- 
 ningham, D.D., p. 411. 
 * 2 Ibid. 
 
298 VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 
 
 revealed in the Word of God. We believe that these men have 
 given us an exposition of the doctrines which are made known 
 to us in the sacred Scriptures, and which all men are bound to 
 understand and believe, because God has revealed them, such as, 
 in point of clearness and fullness, accuracy and comprehensive- 
 ness, was never before equalled, and has never since been sur- 
 passed." 
 
 Once more the wheel has come full circle, and, by the 
 side of a Lutheran, a Eeformed scholasticism opposes 
 itself to the scholasticism of mediseval Europe. 
 
 Was, then, the Eeformation, from the intellectual point 
 of view, a failure ? Did it break one yoke, only to impose 
 another ? We are obliged to confess that, especially in 
 Germany, it soon parted company with free learning; 
 that it turned its back upon culture, that it lost itself in 
 a maze of arid theological controversy, that it held out 
 no hand of welcome to awakening science. Presently we 
 shall see that the impulse to an enlightened study and 
 criticism of the Scriptures came chiefly from heretical 
 quarters ; that the unbelieving Spinoza and the Arminian 
 Le Clerc pointed the way to investigations which the 
 great Protestant systematizers thought neither necessary 
 nor useful. Even at a later time it has been the divines 
 who have most loudly declared their allegiance to the 
 theology of the Eeformation who have also looked most 
 askance at science, and claimed for their statements an 
 entire independence of modern knowledge. I do not 
 know how, on any ordinary theory of the Eeformation, 
 it is possible to answer the accusations implied in these 
 facts. The most learned, the profoundest, the most tole- 
 rant of modern theologians would be the most reluctant 
 to accept in their fullness the systems of Melancthon and 
 
VIII. RISE OF PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM. 299 
 
 of Calvin, much more those of Gerhard and of Turretine. 
 They would be slow to pronounce Luther justified in 
 every point of his polemic against Catholic theology, and 
 would recognize in the teachings of the heretics whom 
 he denounced seeds of truth which the influence of three 
 centuries has slowly but surely developed. The fact is, 
 that while the services which the Eeformers rendered 
 to truth and liberty by their revolt against the unbroken 
 supremacy of mediaeval Christianity cannot be over-esti- 
 mated, it was impossible for them to settle the questions 
 which they raised. Not merely did the necessary know- 
 ledge fail them, but they did not even see the scope of the 
 controversies in which they were engaged: It was their 
 part to open the flood-gates ; and the stream, in spite of 
 their well-meant efforts to check and confine it, has since 
 rushed impetuously on, now destroying old landmarks, 
 now fertilizing new fields, but always bringing with it 
 life and refreshment. To look at the Eeformation by 
 itself, to judge it only by its theological and ecclesiastical 
 development, is to pronounce it a failure : to consider it 
 as part of a general movement of European thought, to 
 show its essential connection with ripening scholarship 
 and advancing science, to prove its necessary alliance with 
 liberty, to illustrate its slow growth into toleration, is at 
 once to vindicate its past and to promise it the future. 
 
Lecture IX. 
 
 THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, 
 
 It may have already excited some surprise in your 
 minds that an English writer treating of the Eeformation 
 should not have selected the movement in his own country 
 as typical, and arranged other manifestations of the same 
 kind according to their various relations to it. Such a 
 procedure would have had the obvious advantage of 
 dealing at the outset with known personages and familiar 
 controversies, and forces still in visible operation. But 
 it would have been, in the first place, to reverse the 
 order of history. The German and Swiss Eeformations 
 not only preceded the English, but exercised upon it 
 definite attractions and repulsions. And, next, the En- 
 glish Eeformation, both in its method and in its result, 
 is a thing by itself, taking its place in no historical suc- 
 cession, and altogether refusing to be classified. When 
 a laborious German compiler 1 enumerates the English 
 among the Eeformed Churches which own a Genevan 
 origin, and puts the Thirty-nine Articles, under the name 
 of the Confessio Anglicana, side by side with the Helvetic 
 
 1 Collectio Confessionum in ecclesiis Keformatis publicatarum, cd. 
 H. A. Niemeyor, Lipsia?, 1840. 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 301 
 
 and Belgic Confessions, an Anglican churchman, who is 
 not angry, can only be amused. And in truth such a 
 procedure is conspicuously unfaithful to historical fact. 
 Lutheran, Calvinistic, perhaps even Zwinglian lines of 
 influence upon the English Eeformation may be traced 
 without difficulty; but there was a native element stronger 
 than any of these which at once assimilated them and 
 gave its own character to the result. That after the lapse 
 of three centuries and a half it is still possible to discuss 
 whether the English Church is Protestant or Catholic, 
 that characteristic parties within her pale eagerly claim 
 one name and angrily repudiate the other, sufficiently 
 shows that the Eeformation in England followed no 
 precedents, and was obedient only to its own law of 
 development. 
 
 At the same time it was due to the same general causes 
 as the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. Here, 
 too, there had been a genuine though ineffectual move- 
 ment of reform before the time of change had fully come. 
 John Wiclif exercised a far wider influence upon the 
 English nation than the isolated thinkers of whom I gave 
 a brief account in my first Lecture, upon Germany : he 
 was a popular teacher in a great University : he enjoyed 
 the support of a party in the state : he was involved in 
 public struggle with the hierarchy : his polemical works, 
 as well as his translation of the Scriptures, had a wide 
 circulation. He was a Eeformer in the distinctest sense 
 of the word, upholding the principles, in many cases 
 preaching the precise doctrines, with which Luther after- 
 wards shook the world. That he was suppressed, may 
 be traced to a concurrence of causes not now necessary 
 to be enumerated ; but had England been ripe for refor- 
 
302 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 mation, the process of suppression would not have been 
 as decisive as it was. It was the advent of the new 
 learning that rekindled the flame. England caught the 
 fire of classical enthusiasm from Italy almost as soon as 
 Germany, and perhaps more eagerly. What can be more 
 significant than the fact that it was to Oxford that Eras- 
 mus, unable to make the Italian pilgrimage on which he 
 had set his heart, came to learn Greek? In the last 
 years of the fifteenth, the first of the sixteenth century, 
 his is the name which is a link between English and 
 Continental scholarship: he enjoys the patronage of 
 Henry VII. and Archbishop Warham : he is constantly 
 going backwards and forwards between England and the 
 Continent: he teaches at Cambridge the Greek which 
 he has learned at Oxford : he knits friendships with the 
 best scholars and most liberal thinkers of his time 
 Grocyn, Linacre, Colet, More: to his caustic pen we 
 owe vivid descriptions of the great English shrines at 
 the very moment when desecration was hanging over 
 them: it is from England that he hastens to Basel to 
 print the New Testament in Greek. Colet never left the 
 Church of Eome : More died a martyr for its claim of 
 supremacy: with reformation, as Luther preached it, 
 Erasmus had no sympathy. But these men were not the 
 less the precursors of the great coming change that they 
 could not foresee it, and would willingly have made it 
 other than it was. 
 
 I have pointed out how the Eeformation in Germany 
 and Switzerland was politically conditioned : how much 
 in the former case depended upon the unstable equili- 
 brium of the Empire; in. the latter, on the free deve- 
 lopment possible under republican institutions. In both 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 303 
 
 cases, however, there was a strong, steady tide of reli- 
 gious conviction, a popular enthusiasm which carried all 
 before it. It is difficult to say what the course of refor- 
 mation in Saxony might have been, had the successive 
 Electors not been men who were able to understand the 
 grandeur of Luther's aims, and yielded themselves to the 
 fascination of his enthusiasm; but it is instructive to 
 note that the moment Duke George died, his people fell 
 joyfully and all but unanimously into the general current. 
 But an unpleasant truth, which I think an impartial 
 inquirer cannot help gathering from the records of the I 
 English Eeformation, is, that its motive power was at* 
 least as much political as religious, and that the tone 1 ', 
 which it took and the rapidity of its progress depended \ 
 more upon the caprices of a line of arbitrary princes 
 than upon the serious convictions of the people. I do 
 not mean that there were not at Oxford and Cambridge 
 men who were earnestly studying the Scriptures for 
 themselves ; merchants in London, enlightened and 
 steady friends of the new learning ; a secret leaven of 
 Wiclifs influence working beneath the surface; simple 
 and devout souls upon whom light shone from Witten- 
 berg, or directly from the pages of the New Testament. 
 "Without these, the Eeformation in England would hardly 
 deserve the name of a religious movement at all; and 
 amid discouragements, persecutions, martyrdoms, the 
 force which they exercised gathered energy and persist- 
 ence as years passed on. But the story is sullied at the 
 beginning by the scandal of the Divorce, and it takes a 
 deeper dye when Ann Boleyn's head falls on the scaffold, 
 and no man ventures to say that she is innocent. What 
 a sad and shameful story is that of the suppression of 
 
304 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 the monasteries, and the wasteful distribution of Church 
 lands, under Henry and Edward, to feed the necessities 
 of the Crown and glut the greed of a crowd of hungry 
 courtiers! All through these Tudor times the tide of 
 Eeformation ebbs and flows, as the Monarch wills : now 
 Henry is the Defender of the Faith against Luther, and 
 now is urgent that Melancthon should undertake the 
 task of English Eeformation: he is Protestant in the 
 assertion of his own supremacy, Catholic in his adhesion 
 to sacramental doctrine : the translation of the Bible is 
 promoted or retarded as his royal caprice dictates : and 
 when he has swept the wealth of the monasteries into 
 his coffers, he issues the Six Articles, and burns the 
 heretics who deny the Eeal Presence. I will not inflict 
 upon you the familiar story of the fluctuations of religious 
 policy under Edward, Mary, Elizabeth : the strange thing 
 ^is, how little the nation counts for, how much the Prince. 
 It is true that the tide was slowly rising all the time, and 
 that each successive wave carried it higher on the shore ; 
 till Mary found that she could not burn heresy out of 
 her people's hearts, and Elizabeth, that the surest way 
 to their love was to put herself at the head of the Pro- 
 testant coalition against Spain. But it is impossible not 
 to feel that, had Edward lived, or Mary taken less counsel 
 of her Spanish husband, the course of Eeformation in 
 England might have been very different. No wonder 
 that when Mary's death extinguished the fires in Smith- 
 field, the people threw up their caps for Elizabeth ; but 
 they had acclaimed the principle of legitimacy in her 
 sister just as loudly, and preferred her Catholicism, which 
 they had not yet convicted of cruelty, to the Protestant- 
 ism of an amiable pretender. 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 305 
 
 On this account it is that the English Eeformation 
 produced no great heroes of faith. It has no name to 
 set beside those of Luther, Melancthon, Zwingli, Calvin, 
 Knox. It called forth no commanding soul able to raise 
 and rule the whirlwind of popular enthusiasm. I have 
 sometimes thought that its noblest name is that of William 
 Tyndale, the Gloucestershire scholar, who, after much 
 study and many searchings of heart, resolved to give his 
 life to the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue. 
 Some theologian, disputing with him while he was yet 
 young, said, "We were better without God's law than 
 the Pope's." " If God spare me life," was the reply, 
 " ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the 
 plough to know more of the Scripture than you do." 1 
 It was a pledge that could not be redeemed in England ; 
 but it was nobly redeemed amid perils and hair's-breadth 
 'scapes in Germany and the Low Countries, until the 
 Eef ormer, who meanwhile had flooded his native country 
 with New Testaments, was basely betrayed into the 
 Emperor's hands, and in 1536, without a word of remon- 
 strance from the England on which he had conferred so 
 priceless a gift, strangled and burnt at Yilvoorde. There 
 is no stain of base compliance upon that name : from the 
 first moment of self-devotion to his great purpose to his 
 last dying prayer, "Lord, ope the King of England's 
 eyes," all is strong, constant, pious, pure. But it needs 
 much special pleading to make a hero of Cranmer. His 
 was the mind of an ecclesiastical lawyer rather than a 
 divine : apt to find compromises and to abide in expe- 
 diencies, rather than able to think out a principle, and to 
 
 1 Bagster's English Hexapla, Introd. p. 43. 
 X 
 
306 IX. THE REFORMATION IX ENGLAND. 
 
 recognize it as a thing to be defended, if need be, at the 
 cost of life. Who is not moved at the recollection of 
 the old man's hand, stretched out in his last agony into 
 the cleansing flame ? But history sternly demands her 
 due, and will not suffer the pathos of that hour to wipe 
 out the recollection of many doubtful deeds, of many 
 shameful acquiescences, of even the last fruitless attempt 
 to buy life at the price of recantation. Eecantation, it 
 must be confessed, is a stain upon the garments of too 
 many English Eeformers. Some who were afterwards 
 faithful Garrett, Barnes, Bilney, Bainham had borne 
 the faggot in their hour of weakness. In his earlier 
 days even Latimer had recanted. A short durance in the 
 Fleet had persuaded Hooper of the lawfulness of episcopal 
 vestments. We must in justice own that it was very 
 difficult to move in step with a revolution which arbitrary 
 o * Princes assumed the right to hasten or retard. To cross 
 either Henry VIII. or any of his children was a dangerous 
 thing, and their means of swift punishment were as 
 effectual as their resentment was sudden and sharp. <** If 
 we except some of the humbler sufferers for the new 
 truth, whose fate history passes by with brief but com- 
 passionate record, I am not sure that the purest honours 
 of martyrdom do not rest upon the heads of Fisher and 
 of More. 
 
 What there was of Eeformation under Henry VIII. 
 chiefly consisted in the spoliation of the monasteries and 
 the substitution of the Eoyal for the Papal supremacy. 
 The former was so entirely a financial expedient, as to be 
 altogether unworthy of notice in any religious connection : 
 whatever may have been the sins and laxities of the 
 monasteries, no one who looks at the character of the 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 307 
 
 King, the agents whom he employed, and the uses to 
 which the proceeds were put, can believe that they 
 were dissolved for that reason. But we shall altogether 
 miss the peculiarity of the English Eeformation if we 
 regard the Eoyal supremacy as an arbitrary invention of 
 Henry's, suggested to him, perhaps forced upon him, by 
 the difficulties of the Divorce. From the Norman Con- 
 quest downward, the Pope had never taken tax and toll 
 in England without more or less protest, and except 
 under conditions. In virtue of its insular position on 
 the verge of the great European Commonwealth, yet 
 only in part belonging to it a certain quasi - imperial 
 dignity attached to England, and the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury was alterius orbis Papa. Throughout the 
 whole mediaeval period, there is a constant record of 
 struggle between King and Pope, with the maintenance 
 of which, whatever influence we may ascribe to the cha- 
 racter of successive monarchs, the existence of free insti- 
 tutions had much to do. However self-willed the King, 
 however caught in the necessities of foreign politics, it 
 could not be without importance that the great Councils 
 of the nation afforded opportunity for the formation and 
 expression of public opinion on matters that concerned 
 all citizens. The struggle of Eufus and Henry I. with 
 Anselm, the struggle of Henry II. with Becket, the 
 Constitutions of Clarendon, the Statute of Mortmain, the 
 Statute of Provisors, the Statute of Praemunire, all mark 
 as many epochs in this unintermitted warfare. The 
 King established the right of investing Bishops with 
 their temporalities; criminous clerks were compelled to 
 submit themselves to the civil tribunals ; the accumula- 
 tion of wealth in the hands of the Church was checked ; 
 
 x2 
 
303 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 appeals to Eome were restrained ; Papal bulls might not 
 be brought into England, nor Papal legates allowed to 
 land, without permission. These statements probably 
 express the maximum of national demand, rather than 
 the actual amount of Papal concession at any given 
 moment: on both sides rights were always reserved, 
 claims always renewed ; and Popes of high spirit and 
 arbitrary temper knew how to avail themselves of the 
 political necessities of Kings, as when Alexander III. 
 absolved Henry IL of the murder of Becket, or Innocent 
 III. sent Pandulf to restore England to John as a Papal 
 fief. Nor, especially in the fight for patronage, was 
 right always on the side of royalty : if the Pope some- 
 times thrust into English sees Italian ecclesiastics who 
 unblushingly spent their revenues in Eome, the King 
 often kept bishoprics vacant, that the income might find 
 its way into his own coffers ; while, between the two, the 
 rights of chapters dwindled almost to nothing. Still the 
 formal assumption of supremacy by Henry VIII. was but 
 the last stage of a process which had been going on for 
 almost five hundred years. It was an act that could be 
 defended by many precedents, and was fully in accord 
 with national feeling. When Henry dexterously turned 
 the acceptance by the clergy of Wolsey's legatine autho- 
 rity into a pretext for inflicting the penalties of prae- 
 munire upon the whole English Church a position from 
 which it extricated itself only by the payment of an 
 enormous fine his conduct may have been criticised as 
 arbitrary and even treacherous, but it was never im- 
 pugned as illegal. And it is curious to note how Mary, 
 when in the last year of her reign she was more than 
 ever anxious to show her devotion to the Pope and to 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 309 
 
 reconcile England with the Holy See, ordered the bearer 
 of a red hat to her confessor William Peto to be stopped 
 at Calais, because Paul IV. had also appointed him to 
 supersede as legate her cousin and favourite, Eeginald 
 Pole. 
 
 Under Wolsey there had been some faint beginnings I 
 of disciplinary reform. He had received his legatine ! 
 authority from Eome, with full acquiescence of the King 
 and Archbishop Warham, in the intention of cleansing 
 the Augean stable of the ecclesiastical courts. Perhaps 
 we may take his application of monastic property to 
 educational purposes in Oxford and Ipswich as a step in 
 the same direction. But he was too much of an inter- 
 national politician, too intent on his own far-reaching 
 schemes of ambition, to bend to the homelier task of 
 reforming abuses which had become inveterate in the 
 Church. On the other hand, Henry, iu the latter part 
 of his reign, was quite content with the confiscation of 
 the monastic estates and the establishment of his own 
 supremacy. In all the controversies which I have on a 
 former occasion indicated as critical, he took the Catholic 
 side. There are four documents, published during his 
 reign, which set forth, with a clearness that left nothing 
 to be desired, what his subjects were to believe : the Ten 
 Articles of 1536 ; the " Institution of a Christian Man," 
 or Bishops' Book, of the same year ; the Six Articles of 
 1539; and "The necessary Doctrine and Erudition for 
 any Christian Man," or King's Book, of 1544. And the 
 colour of all these is decisively Catholic. The Six Arti- 
 cles, "the whip with six strings," as the Protestants called 
 it, laid down as necessary matters of belief and practice 
 the Ecal Presence, communion in one kind, the celibacy of 
 
310 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 the priesthood, the obligation of vows, the lawfulness of 
 private masses, and the expediency of auricular confession. 
 This was the doctrinal bond within which the nascent 
 Protestantism of England groaned, until the accession of 
 Edward gave it liberty of expansion. The same fact 
 comes out in relation to certain friendly overtures which, 
 for political reasons, Henry made to the Protestants of 
 Germany. In 1538 and 1539 a German embassy was in 
 England, conferring with Cranmer and other divines as 
 to the possibility of a common basis of faith. But it was 
 of no avail. The Germans stood by the Confession of 
 Augsburg, between which and the doctrine of the " Insti- 
 tution of a Christian Man" there could be no reconcilia- 
 tion. England was still Catholic. 
 
 The reign of Edward VI. opened another era. The old 
 learning all at once gave place to the new. The pent-up 
 stream of Protestant doctrine and feeling burst its bounds 
 and carried all before it. Communications were opened 
 with the Eeformed churches of the Continent, and 
 Cranmer even entertained the dream of a federated 
 Protestantism. The year of Edward's accession was that 
 of the Battle of Miihlberg, and the consequent impo- 
 sition upon Protestant Germany of the semi-Catholic 
 regime known as the Interim, disposed many theologians 
 of name to betake themselves to a country where the 
 hope of reformation stood so high. Bucer and Fagius 
 were invited from Strasburg to teach at Cambridge: 
 Peter Martyr, Dryander, Tremellio, were active at Oxford: 
 John a Lasco established in the city of London a Pres- 
 byterian community, rigid in doctrine, well organized 
 in discipline: Calvin wrote long letters of advice and 
 exhortation to the Protector Somerset, and after his fall, 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 311 
 
 to the King. The refugees, the colour of whose theology 
 was more Calvinistic than Lutheran, were Cranmer's 
 trusted friends and counsellors : many of them lived with 
 him at Lambeth, sitting at his table and sharing his 
 secretest thoughts. And it was while this foreign influ- 
 ence the influence, be it remembered, of trained dog- 
 matic theologians was at its height, that the English 
 Prayer-book was shaped and the foundation laid of the 
 Thirty-nine Articles. 
 
 At the same time, in order that we may not lay too 
 much stress on these circumstances, we must take some 
 pains to understand a fact which more than any other 
 differentiates the English Keformation I mean the con- 
 tinuity of the Anglican Church. There is no point at 
 which it can be said, here the old Church ends, here the 
 new begins. Are you inclined to take the Act of Supre- 
 macy as such a point ? I have already shown that Henry's 
 assumption of headship was but the last decisive act of a 
 struggle which had been going on for almost five centu- 
 ries. The retention of the Episcopate by the English 
 Eeformers at once helped to preserve this continuity and 
 marked it in the distinctest way. I speak here as an 
 historian, not as a theologian, and I have nothing to do 
 with that doctrine of apostolical succession which many 
 Churchmen hold, though the Articles do not teach and 
 the Prayer-book only implies it. But it is an obvious 
 historical fact that Parker was the successor of Augustine, 
 just as clearly as Lanfranc and Becket. Warham, Cran- 
 mer, Pole, Parker there is no break in the line, though 
 the first and third are claimed as Catholic, the second 
 and fourth as Protestant. The succession, from the spi- 
 ritual point of view, was most carefully provided for when 
 
312 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Parker was consecrated : not even the most ignorant 
 controversialist now believes in the Nag's-Head fable. 
 The canons of the pre-Eeformation Church, the statutes 
 of the Plantagenets, are binding upon the Church of 
 England to-day, except where they have been formally 
 repealed. There has been no break, unless by what 
 we may call private circumstances, in the devolution of 
 Church property. The Church may be Protestant now, 
 as it undoubtedly was Catholic once ; but it is impossible 
 to fix the point at which the transition was legally and 
 publicly made. 
 
 A great force has been exerted in the same direction 
 by the principles on which the Service-book was compiled. 
 Something had been done in Henry's reign to provide 
 the people with a form of worship in their own tongue ; 
 the Litany had been translated, a Scripture lesson every 
 Sunday and holy-day ordered to be read in English. But 
 when, on the accession of Edward, Cranmer set about the 
 task of providing an English Prayer-book, it was to the 
 ancient ritual of the country that he turned for his mate- 
 rials. The mediaeval custom had not been uniform : there 
 were many "Uses," as they were called: the Use of 
 Bangor, the Use of Lincoln, the Use of York. But in 
 the eleventh century, a great ritual reformer, Osmund, 
 Bishop of Salisbury, had so improved the Use of Sarum 
 as to have secured for it a preference over all others. 
 And the Use of Sarum is the basis of the Prayer-book. 
 The Breviary, its eight daily services compressed into 
 two, furnished the order of Matins and Evensong ; the 
 Missal, with certain necessary alterations, of the Com- 
 munion Service. Some guidance was afTorded to the 
 compilers by the Breviary of Cardinal Quignon, a bold 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 313 
 
 attempt at reformation made, not without Papal sanction, 
 in 1536, but superseded by the labours of the Council of 
 Trent. On the other hand, in the very stronghold of 
 the Catholic party in the Church are to be found traces 
 of Protestant influence. Cranmer and his colleagues 
 made considerable use of a work called the " Consulta- 
 tion" of Hermann von Wied, 1 that Elector Archbishop 
 
 1 The copy of this book used by Cranmer is still preserved in the 
 Library of Chichester Cathedral. Dean Hook (Lives of the Arch- 
 bishops, N. S. II. 289) gives its full title as follows : Nostra Hermanni 
 ex gratia Dei Archiepiscopi Coloniensis et Principis Electoris &c. sim- 
 plex ac pia deliberatio, qua ratione Christiana et in verbo Dei fun- 
 data Reformatio Doctrinse, administrationis divinorum Sacramentorum, 
 Cseremoniarum, totiusque curse animarum et aliorum ministeriorum 
 ecclesiasticorum, apud eos qui nostras Pastorali curse commendati sunt, 
 tantisper instituenda sit, donee Dominus dederit constitui meliorem 
 vel per liberam et Christianam Synodum, sive Generalem, sive JNatio- 
 nalem vel per ordines Imperii Nationis Germanicse, in Spiritu Sancto con- 
 gregates. Bonnse, ex officina Laurentii, Typographi, anno MDXXXV. 
 This was translated into English under the title, " A simple and reli- 
 gious consultation of us, Hermann, by the Grace of God," &c, and 
 two editions were published, one in 1547, another in 1548. In 
 Melancthon's letters (Corp. Ref. V.), the reader will find several 
 which refer to the composition of this book. All the important facts 
 of the case, however, are mentioned in the following extract from a 
 letter to Casper Cruciger, written from Bonn on the 23rd of May, 1543 
 (Corp. Ref. V. 113) : "Scripsi vobis antea, Episcopum secuturum esse 
 formam Noribergensem, eratque ante meum adventum institutus liber 
 ad exemplum Noribergense scribendus. Retinuit pleraque Osiandri 
 Bucerus, quosdam articulos auxit, ut est copiosus. Mihi cum omnia 
 religissem attribuit articulos irepl rptcov vTroo-Tao-euv, de creatione, de 
 peccato originis, de justitia fidei et operum, de Ecclesia, de pcenitentia. 
 In his consumpsi tempus hactenus, et legi de cerimoniis baptismi et 
 ccense domini, quae ipse composuit." If, as is most probable, the 
 "Consultation" was used in the compilation of the Articles also, this 
 enumeration of Melancthon's contributions to it has a special interest. 
 As Cranmer's wife was Osiander's niece, may not the fact that the 
 " Kirchenordnung" of Nurnberg was largely the work of that Reformer, 
 
314 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 of Cologne who all but succeeded in Protestantizing his 
 diocese. This book contained, with other matter, a 
 directory of public worship, which, as it was the work 
 of Melancthon and Bucer, was distinctly framed upon a 
 Lutheran model. In Edward VI.'s reign, however, events 
 marched quickly. The set of the party of movement was 
 away from ancient methods of belief and devotion. The 
 doctrinal Protestants naturally thought that the new 
 book retained too much of the Catholic leaven. The 
 influence of the foreign refugees made itself felt : the 
 opinion of Bucer and Peter Martyr, formally asked, was 
 in favour of a still further departure from Catholic 
 standards. The result was the Prayer-book of 1552, 
 commonly known as the second of Edward VI. But 
 this marks the highest flood-tide of Protestant feeling. 
 The changes made in the Elizabethan Prayer-book of 
 1559 were intended to conciliate Anglo-Catholics; and 
 the revision of 1662 worked, as far as it went, in the 
 same direction. 1 
 
 have something to do with the Archbishop's use of Hermann von 
 Wied's " Consultation," which was framed upon its model ? 
 
 1 It is impossible to give the evidence for this statement within the 
 compass of a note ; but we may select as a fair illustration the words 
 of administration in the Communion Service. The first Prayer-book 
 of Edward VI. has, " The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was 
 given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life." For 
 this, the second substitutes, " Take and eat this, in remembrance that 
 Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart, by faith with 
 thanksgiving." Between these two formulas there is a great theological 
 gulf, which the Prayer-book of Elizabeth ineffectually endeavoured to 
 bridge over by combining the two into one, without alteration of either. 
 But it is noticeable that the rubric which Edward VI. had added to 
 the Communion Service, by his own authority, after the publication 
 of the second Prayer-book, declaring that in the kneeling posture of 
 the communicant " no adoration was done or ought to be done to any 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 315 
 
 The history of the Articles runs parallel with that 
 of the Prayer-book. The formation of both practically 
 belongs to the reign of Edward ; while both underwent 
 a revision, by which no essential feature was altered, in 
 that of Elizabeth. But while the materials of the Prayer- 
 book were quarried in the mines of English mediEeval 
 piety, those of the Articles were largely derived from 
 foreign sources. That the Thirty -nine Articles contain 
 many points of likeness to the Confession of Augsburg, 
 no one who is familiar with both can doubt : not only are 
 the verbal resemblances many and striking, but the two 
 evidently belong to the same class of document. The 
 actual link of connection between them has recently been 
 discovered in a copy of the Thirteen Articles drawn up 
 by Cranmer when the German Embassy visited England 
 in 1538 and 1539. Then it was impossible to come to 
 any terms, and the Six Articles of 1539 sufficiently tell 
 us why. In 1553, things were in a very different posi- 
 tion. Protestantism, though not of the Lutheran type, 
 was in the ascendant in England. Had a second attempt 
 been made to treat with Wittenberg, it might have been 
 the Saxon Eef ormers who would have held off. And by 
 this time, too, Cranmer had given up his idea of a fede- 
 rated Protestantism, and was content to frame a national 
 Confession for the use of his own Church. In 1553, 
 therefore, were promulgated the Forty -two Articles, 
 which, ten years later revised and reduced in number to 
 Thirty-nine, were formally adopted by Queen and Church, 
 
 real or essential presence there being of Christ's natural flesh and 
 blood," was expunged under Elizabeth. Card well : The Two Books of 
 Common Prayer of Edward VI. compared, pp. 303 308 ; A History 
 of Conferences on the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 34, 35. 
 
316 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 and have ever since been subscribed by all clerics. The 
 Confession as a whole resembles all similar documents, in 
 bearing plain traces of contemporary controversies in 
 which it was thought necessary to speak with decisive 
 voice : of the suppressed Articles, seven in number, four 
 referred to heresies of the Anabaptist type, which seem 
 to have abated in virulence in the ten years intervening 
 between the first and second form of the document. 1 And 
 it is an additional proof of the foreign origin of the 
 Articles, that much of the new matter added in 1563 
 was taken from the Confession of Wurtemberg, a docu- 
 ment presented to the Council of Trent in 1551, which 
 is only the Confession of Augsburg in a slightly different 
 form. 2 
 
 The years of reaction under Mary may be dismissed 
 with brief mention. It is true that they had a serious 
 influence upon the temper of the nation. If it was a 
 
 1 Setting aside minor changes, some of which were, however, doc- 
 trinally important, seven Articles were omitted from the forty-two, and 
 four added. The seven omitted were the tenth, "Of grace;" the six- 
 teenth, "Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost;" the nineteenth, "All 
 men are bound to keep the moral commandments of the law ;" the 
 thirty-ninth, " The resurrection of the dead is not yet brought to pass;" 
 the fortieth, "The souls of them that depart this life do neither die with 
 the bodies nor sleep idly;" the forty-first, " Heretics called Millenarii;" 
 and the forty-second, "All men shall not be saved at the length." The 
 Articles added were the fifth of the present enumeration, " Of the Holy 
 Ghost;" the twelfth, "Of good works;" the twenty-ninth, "Of the 
 wicked who do not eat the Body of Christ in the use of the Lord's 
 Supper;" and the thirtieth, "Of both kinds." Hardwick : History of 
 the Articles of Keligion, Appendix, III. p. 275 et seq. 
 
 2 Hardwick, p. 127, note. The theologian chiefly answerable for the 
 Confession of Wurtemberg was Brenz, whose Lutheran orthodoxy was 
 unimpeachable. 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 317 
 
 significant tiling that Mary's well-known Catholicism 
 was no bar to her almost unanimous and even enthusiastic 
 acceptance by the people, it was equally significant that 
 the measures of her Spanish and Papal advisers wore 
 English loyalty threadbare. The result was that Eliza- 
 beth ascended the throne much more in the character of 
 a Protestant champion than her own convictions and 
 inclinations would have dictated. She was indeed the 
 daughter of Ann Boleyn, whom by this time Protestants 
 were beginning to regard as a martyr of the faith ; but 
 she was also the child of Henry VIII., and the heiress 
 of his imperious will. Soon, however, she found herself 
 Protestant almost in her own despite. The Papacy, in 
 the first pride of successful reaction, offered her only the 
 alternative of submission or excommunication, and she 
 did not for a moment hesitate to choose the latter. Then 
 commenced that long and close alliance between Catho- 
 licism and domestic treason which is so differently judged 
 as it is approached from the religious or the political side. 
 These seminary priests, who in every various disguise 
 come to England, moving secretly about from manor-house 
 to manor-house, celebrating the rites of the Church, con- 
 firming the wavering, consoling the dying, winning back 
 the lapsed to the fold, too well acquainted with Eliza- 
 beth's prisons, and often finding their way to her scaffolds 
 what are they but the intrepid missionaries, the self- 
 devoted heroes, of a proscribed faith ? On the other hand, 
 the Queen is excommunicate, an eviLwoman, with whom 
 it is not necessary to keep faith, to depose whom would 
 be the triumph of the Church, whose death, however 
 compassed, its occasion : how easy to weave plots under 
 the cloak of religious intercourse, and to make the unity 
 
318 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 of the faith a conspiracy of rebellion ! The next heir to 
 the throne, Mary of Scotland, was a Catholic, and, as long 
 as she lived, a perpetual centre of domestic and European 
 intrigue : plot succeeded plot, in which the traitorous 
 subtlety was all Catholic the keenness of discovery, the 
 watchfulness of defence, all Protestant. Then, too, the 
 shadow of Spanish supremacy began to cast itself broadly 
 over Europe: the unequal struggle with Holland was still 
 prolonged : it was known that Philip's dearest wish was 
 to recover to his empire and the Church the island king- 
 dom which had once unwillingly accepted his rule. It 
 was thus the instinct of self-defence which placed Eliza- 
 beth at the head of the Protestant interest in Europe : 
 she sent Philip Sidney to die at Zutphen : her sailor- 
 buccaneers, whether there were peace at home or not, 
 bit and tore at everything Spanish upon the southern 
 main: till at last, in 1588, Philip gathered up all his 
 naval strength and hurled the Armada at our shores. 
 Afflavit Deus, et dissipati sunt The valour of England 
 did much; the storms of heaven the rest. Mary of 
 Scotland had gone to her death the year before, and her 
 son had been trained to hate his mother's faith. There 
 could be no question any more of the fixed Protestantism 
 of the English people. 
 
 It might seem, at first sight, as if the period of Refor- 
 mation in England ceased at the beginning of Elizabeth's 
 reign. The Prayer-book as then settled is, notwith- 
 standing the revision of 1662, substantially the same as 
 that which is used now. The Articles of 1563 have since 
 undergone no alterations and are still binding. The 
 peculiar churchmanship of Parker, who believed in the 
 continuity of the Church of England, who maintained 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 319 
 
 the right of a national communion to reform itself, who 
 clung to historical and antiquarian precedents, who held 
 little intercourse with foreign Protestants and distrusted 
 what he called "Germanical natures," is a type of church- 
 manship much in vogue just now. But, in truth, the 
 Eeformation in England was a case of arrested develop- 
 ment, and Elizabeth's settlement, a compromise which 
 came too soon. The popular movement, that which 
 inspired the enthusiasm of preachers and the constancy 
 of martyrs, had always been eagerly Protestant, de- 
 manding doctrinal as well as disciplinary reform, adopting 
 in earlier days the Lutheran, afterwards the Calvinistic 
 type of belief, and not sparing of dislike and contempt 
 of Catholic usage and worship. The men who belonged 
 to this party had no sympathy with the reluctance of 
 others in high places to break away from old precedents : 
 to them, the continuity of the Church was a matter of 
 indifference: what some called compliance with decent 
 custom, they flatly qualified as idolatry : they asked that 
 the new truth which God had given should be enthusi- 
 astically accepted and carried to its full issue in worship 
 and practice. These were the theologians who in Edward's 
 reign had been in closest intercourse with the Eeformers 
 of the Continent, and who, when Mary succeeded, know- 
 ing that they were compromised beyond recall, fled over 
 seas till the storm should abate. They found refuge 
 chiefly in Switzerland and the cities of the Ehineland 
 which were under Swiss religious influence, and, after 
 five years' exile, came back more Calvinistic than they 
 went, more enamoured of Presbyterian discipline, more 
 eager to continue the work of Eeformation interrupted 
 by the death of Edward. To these Marian exiles the 
 
320 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Elizabethan settlement was a deep discouragement. They 
 submitted with but an ill grace to ceremonies which they 
 looked upon as relics of Popery, and an episcopal rule 
 which they did not think scriptural, and applied them- 
 selves to the task of changing from within a church the 
 legal foundations of which they were unable to undermine. 
 Nothing can show so conclusively that the Anglican 
 churchmanship of Parker and his associates was more 
 the theory of a few learned men in high places than the 
 serious conviction of the nation, as the gradual gathering 
 of Puritan strength, and still more the growing prevalence 
 of Calvinistic theology, during the long reign of Elizabeth. 
 Notwithstanding the Queen's well-known Catholic pre- 
 ferences, and her determination to stand by the settlement 
 of religion which she had made notwithstanding the 
 establishment of the Court of High Commission, the very 
 purpose of which was to enforce uniformity, and which 
 was sufficiently harsh and arbitrary in its methods 
 Puritanism spread in every diocese. In 1577, Grindal, 
 Parker's successor in the Primacy, refused to suppress 
 the " Prophesy ings," or meetings for religious conference, 
 which were the chief means of disseminating Puritan 
 opinions, and was in consequence sequestrated from his 
 see. Whitgift, who followed him, had no scruples as to 
 putting down sectaries; but, on the other hand, it was 
 he who devised the Nine Lambeth Articles of 1595, in 
 which the five points of Calvinism were laid down with 
 uncompromising rigidity. It is true that they were 
 never imposed upon the English Church; but what a 
 strange drawing together of Canterbury and Geneva was 
 this! While Whitgift was still Archbishop, James I. 
 succeeded Elizabeth. The Puritans, knowing his Pres- 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 321 
 
 byterian education, fondly thought that their hour was 
 come, and met him on his way from Edinburgh with 
 what is known as the Millenary Petition, asking for the 
 abolition of the usages against which they had so long 
 protested. But the Hampton Court Conference showed 
 that the King had learned to know Presbyterianism only 
 to hate it ; and the ecclesiastical situation remained un- 
 changed, except that a foolish and obstinate pedant sat 
 in the seat of a woman who, if often wilful, loved her 
 people and received their love in return. Still Calvinism 
 was in the ascendant. James himself sent representatives 
 to the Synod of Dordt, who approved the rigidly Calvin- 
 istic confession which it enacted against Arminian heresy. 
 Abbot, who was Primate from 1611 to 1633, though he 
 used the powers of the Court of High Commission against 
 the Puritans, was in doctrinal sympathy with them, and 
 contended less for Catholic theory and usage than for the 
 general maintenance of authority. It was with Bishop 
 Andrewes, whom many men had wished to see in the 
 Primacy in Abbot's place, and with Laud, who actually 
 succeeded Abbot, that the reaction began. They were 
 Anglicans of a higher type than even Parker, men whom 
 modern Anglo- Catholics revere, the one as a saint, the 
 other as a martyr. Accusations of personal unfaithful- 
 ness to the Church of England were freely made against 
 Laud, and his ecclesiastical principles were attacked as 
 logically leading to Eome. But the fairer criticism 
 of modern times has decided that at least the former 
 charge was unfounded, and that Laud faithfully kept 
 that via media in which so many pious feet have of late 
 years learned to walk. In him there was a reversion to 
 the churchmanship of a time when foreign influence had 
 
322 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 not yet made itself decisively felt on the English Kefor- 
 mation, and Puritanism was not ; a churchmanship 
 which learned its doctrine from the "Institution of a 
 Christian Man," and drew its devotion from the Use of 
 Sarum, and for the enforcement of uniformity, returned 
 to the methods of the Tudors. For the moment, the 
 reaction came too late : Laud died upon the scaffold ; 
 the Westminster Confession took the legal place of the 
 Articles, the Directory, of the Prayer-book; till, after 
 but an instant's partial prevalence, both were swept away 
 by triumphant Independency. But such a victory bore 
 in itself the seeds of defeat; and when 1661 came, the 
 demands of the Presbyterians at the Savoy Conference 
 were almost contemptuously rejected ; the Act of Uni- 
 formity brought organized Dissent to the birth ; and the 
 Caroline Bishops trod in the footsteps, not of Whitgift 
 or of Abbot, but of Laud. 
 
 I am not concerned to vindicate either the charac- 
 ter or the aims of Puritanism; it is sufficient to have 
 affiliated it on the true stock of the Eeformation. 
 Now, after two centuries and a half, historical students 
 whose judgment is not disturbed by the fascination of 
 old controversies in new forms, are beginning to discern 
 that the roots of all that is noble in English life to-day 
 go down to Eoundhead and Cavalier alike, and that 
 piety and learning were not the monopoly of either 
 Churchman or Puritan. Let George Herbert the Angli- 
 can, Colonel Hutchinson the Independent, Lord Falkland 
 the Latitudinarian, stand side by side as the best that 
 that troubled time could produce, and let each of us 
 leave it to the force of natural attraction to adjust the 
 order of their precedence. One word only I would say 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 323 
 
 as to the charge of pettiness in controversy often brought 
 against the Puritan party. What they perpetually asked 
 from Elizabeth and her Bishops, what they begged of 
 James I. at the Hampton Court Conference, what they 
 urged upon the triumphant Church of the Eestoration, 
 touched the same points : the kneeling posture at the 
 Lord's Supper, the sign of the cross in baptism, the use 
 of the surplice, the bowing at the name of Jesus, the 
 reading of apocryphal lessons. All external things, it 
 will be said ; things indifferent to a man of robust con- 
 science who can look below the surface into the essence 
 of controversies; certainly not matters upon which to 
 divide a church and rend a nation in twain. Nor am 
 I prepared to deny that in the course of the hundred 
 years during which these ceremonies were in dispute, 
 they assumed the nature of shibboleths, became standards 
 of bitter contention rather than matters of reasonable 
 debate, and were eagerly defended or assailed by many 
 who had no real conception of their significance. But a 
 glance at the list which I have given sufficiently shows 
 that these ceremonies had to the Puritan a very definite 
 symbolic meaning. They stood for the old Church, for 
 its authority over Scripture, for its doctrine of the Keal 
 Presence, for its theory of priests and sacraments. Looked 
 at in this light, the external conformity which was asked 
 of the Puritans involved a transition from the Protestant 
 to the Catholic side of the Eeformation. It meant the 
 substitution of the authority of the Church for the autho- 
 rity of Scripture and Conscience. 
 
 From what has been said, it will be plain that from 
 the first, two distinct elements have been present in the 
 English Church, sometimes struggling for the mastery, 
 
324 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 sometimes living peacefully side by side, and that it is 
 contrary to historical fact for either to assert itself in 
 such a way as to exclude the other. Whether they can 
 be brought into logical accord, is a question with which 
 I do not presume to meddle. Evangelicals interpret, in 
 a way satisfactory to themselves, the Ordinal and the 
 Baptismal Service ; while John Henry Newman, follow- 
 ing in Tract 90 the steps of Sancta Clara, has sought to 
 give the Articles a Catholic sense. I am only adopting 
 the theological nomenclature of the day, and at the same 
 time conforming to historical fact, when I call these ele- 
 ments Catholic and Protestant. It is the peculiarity of 
 the Church of England that she is both. Apply to her 
 the test which I laid down in a former Lecture, the belief 
 in sacramental religion and the possession of a sacerdotal 
 order, and she is Catholic. She has priests who in virtue 
 of episcopal ordination exercise the mysterious power of 
 forgiving sins, and sacraments which only duly ordained 
 priests can administer. Yet in the Articles we find a 
 confession of faith in closest relation with the Confes- 
 sion of Augsburg, and which in contents and in history 
 alike takes its place among the symbolic documents of 
 the Eeformation. On one side we have the national 
 character of the movement, the theoretical continuity of 
 the Church of England, the uninterrupted episcopal suc- 
 cession, the Prayer-book drawn from mediaeval sources, 
 the Catholic preferences of Henry and Elizabeth, the 
 Anglican churchmanship of Parker: on the other, the 
 light kindled from Wittenberg, the popular revolt against 
 Catholic superstition and abuse, the doctrinal Protestant- 
 ism of the Universities, the influence of Cranmer's foreign 
 advisers, the Calvinistic zeal of the Marian exiles, the 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 325 
 
 enthusiasm of a newly acquired faith, which was careless 
 of old usage, and did not fear to contemplate revolution. 
 These were the two forces which Elizabeth sought to 
 compel to live together on terms prescribed by the 
 Prayer-book of 1559 and the Articles of 1563. How 
 premature the compromise was, the history of every 
 subsequent century sufficiently shows. The growth of 
 Puritanism, the reaction under Andrewes and Laud, the 
 triumph of Presby terianism in the Westminster Assembly 
 of Divines, and the usurpation of power by the Inde- 
 pendents of the army, were only the first stages of the 
 struggle. The Eestoration re-established the Church on 
 a footing which Laud would have heartily approved, and 
 Puritanism could re-appear only in the form of persecuted 
 Dissent. On the other hand, the Eevolution settlement 
 involved the High-church secession of the Non- jurors ; 
 while the Evangelical revival of almost a century later 
 called forth, as its first strength began to wane, the 
 Oxford movement, and that Anglo-Catholic fervour which 
 has so greatly raised the present tone of Church doctrine 
 and ritual. All this constitutes an historical phenomenon 
 quite different from that presented by any of the Ee- 
 formed Churches of the Continent. The development of 
 Lutheranism, the development of Calvinism, have been 
 simple and homogeneous. It is possible to speak of the 
 Lutheran Church of Germany, of the Calvinistic Church 
 of Scotland, in terms that shall be applicable to either as 
 a whole. But only within narrow limits can we apply 
 descriptive epithets to the Church of England, which 
 will not be angrily repudiated by one of her two opposed 
 yet equally characteristic parties. 
 
 I cannot speak in terms too strong of the efficacy of the 
 
326 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Prayer-book as a connecting link between the mediaeval 
 Church and the Church of to-day. It would not be true 
 to say that all parties in the Church are equally attached 
 to it ; but its hold even upon those worshippers who are 
 least in accord with its doctrinal implications is enor- 
 mous ; and recent events seem to show that the tenderest 
 measure of revision is only a distant possibility. I 
 have often heard churchmen confess that it supplies the 
 only form in which they can happily worship ; while 
 those who have not been nurtured upon it freely admit 
 the charm of its grave piety, its chastened ardour, the 
 solemn harmony of its periods, the completeness of its 
 adaptation to the daily needs of devotion. If we admit 
 the propriety of making creeds in any case a constituent 
 of worship, it is well that the Prayer-book should recite 
 no national or local confession, but the symbols of the 
 ancient Church. But it certainly has not been possible 
 to draw from the fountains of mediaeval devotion, without 
 at the same time adopting to some extent a mediaeval 
 theology. Nothing short of complete remodelling could 
 have made the Use of Sarum speak the language of 
 Luther or of Calvin. The function of the priest is not 
 that of the minister, and words descriptive of the one 
 fail in applicability to the other. Luther formulates the 
 Protestant principle when, in words which I have already 
 quoted, he declares that whoever is qualified to administer 
 the sacraments, becomes so in virtue of the congregation's 
 choice, and when deposed is but as other men. With 
 this, the idea of the priest, who receives an indelible 
 priesthood at the hands of a Bishop, and to whom is 
 committed the very power of Christ in the forgiveness 
 of sins, cannot by any device of logic or rhetoric be 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 327 
 
 reconciled. On the other hand, mnch pains have been 
 bestowed to prove that the Articles are not Calvinistic. 
 I do not now allude to Newman's attempt to put a 
 Catholic meaning upon them : that was a logical tour de 
 force which convinced only those who were waiting to 
 be convinced. But men who desire to dissociate as far 
 as possible the English from the German and the Swiss 
 Reformations, have advanced the theory that the Articles, 
 especially the seventeenth, are really Augustinian, and 
 that their doctrinal origin is to be sought rather in the 
 fifth century than in the sixteenth. In so far as this is 
 a debate of names and epithets, I shall not try to settle 
 it. It should not be forgotten that Augustine, Luther, 
 Calvin, whatever their minor differences, were all doctors 
 in the same school of theology, and that the Eeformers 
 exulted in sitting at the feet of the great African Father. 
 I have already shown that, in regard to the characteristic 
 points of what is called the Calvinistic scheme, Calvin 
 differed from Luther chiefly in the relentless logical pre- 
 cision with which he had worked them out and co-ordi- 
 nated them into a system. We may be thankful that 
 the seventeenth Article is less minutely rigid in its tone, 
 less cruelly inclusive in its scope, than it would have 
 been if Calvin had dictated it. But nothing, it seems to 
 me, can be doctrinally or historically plainer than that 
 the theology of the Thirty-nine Articles is the theology 
 of the Confession of Augsburg. What that was, and 
 what possibilities of development lay within it, is plainly 
 indicated by the Nine Lambeth Articles approved by 
 Archbishop Whitgift. Happy was it for the Church of 
 England that she was content to abide by the settlement 
 of 1563 ! 
 
328 IX. THE REFORMATION IX ENGLAND. 
 
 It would, however, be much, less than just to assume 
 that the convinced and logical adherents of these two 
 schools of thought together make up the Church of 
 England, and have alone given it its characteristic colour. 
 From various causes, the obligation of its formularies has 
 lain lightly on the shoulders of many of its most loyal 
 children. Its national character, which, if denied by the 
 collector of contemporary statistics, no fair student of 
 history will question, and the obvious compromise in- 
 volved in the settlement of Elizabeth, have justified some 
 thoughtful men in taking up a position intermediate 
 between the extremes of Catholic and Protestant theory. 
 They have looked upon the Prayer-book as a manual of 
 devotion which they were bound to use, but upon which 
 they might put their own meaning. They have regarded 
 the Articles as Articles of peace, or as terms of compre- 
 hension, or as settlements of contemporary controversies, 
 rather than as a Confession of Faith, every clause of 
 which was separately and collectively binding upon the 
 conscience of the signatory. With a large class of cler- 
 gymen, the neglect of systematic theological study, till 
 lately almost characteristic of their order, has tended in 
 the same direction : they have lived and worked in their 
 parishes, performing, as is the wont of the English parish 
 priest, many secular and social duties with admirable 
 efficiency, preaching ethical sermons, and not troubling 
 themselves with schools of thought. The Arminian re- 
 action against the severity of the Calvinistic scheme had 
 a wide influence in England, though it came too late to 
 leave its mark on any of the formularies of the Church : 
 if on the one hand there have been many excellent cler- 
 gymen who have never dreamed of realizing the sacer- 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 329 
 
 dotal powers bestowed upon them at their ordination, 
 there have been as many who would be puzzled to recon- 
 cile their views of human nature and their theory of 
 salvation with the seventeenth Article. Always there 
 has been a distinct Latitudinarian party in the Church, 
 though all Latitudinarianism has not arisen from the 
 same source or manifested itself in the same way : men 
 like Hales of Eton, or "Whichcote and Smith of Cambridge, 
 or the beloved disciple whose loss is yet fresh, Arthur 
 Stanley, the natural bent of whose. minds was towards a 
 wide comprehension, and the reduction of the essentials 
 of religion to the fewest, and the subordination of the 
 dogmatic element in it to the ethical and the spiritual ; 
 or philosophizing theologians, like Cudworth and Henry 
 More the Platonist, and, in a later time, Butler and Paley ; 
 or modern Broad-churchmen, who claim that the Articles 
 interpose no obstacle in the way of the freest investiga- 
 tion of the character and claims of Scripture, and who 
 seek a reconciliation between ancient faith and modern 
 science. But when we turn from the masters of schools 
 to their disciples, we find that there is an essential differ- 
 ence between schools within a church and sects without 
 it. In the latter, diversities of faith always tend to 
 become emphatic: their respective adherents stand to 
 one another in an habitual attitude of opposition, and 
 belief grows to be onesided in proportion as it is firmly 
 held. But schools of thought are to some extent the 
 arbitrary creation of the critic ; they melt into one ano- 
 ther by imperceptible gradations : there are men who 
 without conscious inconsistency claim to belong to all 
 schools, and men who do not think themselves unfaithful 
 to truth in adhering to none. And the Church of England 
 
330 IX. THE EEFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 has always held, especially in the ranks of its laity, a 
 large number of excellent Christians who have at once 
 kept aloof from parties, and have exercised a moderating 
 influence upon them. They have been content with a 
 form of worship which came down to them from their 
 forefathers, and with which their own religious affections 
 were inextricably intertwined. They have as much 
 liberty as they desire, and as much order as they need. 
 They see that the system of the Church has grown up 
 with the institutions of the country, and think it well 
 fitted to satisfy the wants of the people. If we are at all 
 able to speak of the Church of England as a whole, it is 
 largely because of the existence in it of men like these. 
 
 The presence in the Church of England of a Catholic 
 and a Protestant school, makes it difficult to define its 
 position in regard to the authority of Scripture. If, on 
 the one hand, there are theologians who adopt the dictum 
 of Chillingworth, "The Bible, and the Bible only, the 
 religion of Protestants," who, with the eighth Article, 
 base the authority of the creeds on the fact that they 
 may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, and with the twentieth, subordinate the " authority" 
 of the Church "in controversies of faith" to the final 
 arbitrament of " God's word written" there are certainly 
 others who look upon the Bible as rather the witness 
 and guarantee of the teaching of the Church than as the 
 original source of doctrine, and lay a very real stress on 
 the decisions of the first four Councils. There can be 
 no doubt that the Church of England has always been 
 eager, beyond other Protestant churches, in the study 
 of Patristic theology. She has consulted the mind of 
 antiquity. She has set Cyprian beside Augustine, and 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 331 
 
 Athanasius beside Jerome. The necessity of defending 
 her episcopal constitution has sent her back to the ante- 
 Nicene Fathers, and given her a personal interest in the 
 problem of the Ignatian letters. In like manner, the 
 scientific study and emendation of the New Testament 
 text was early begun and has been zealously carried on 
 in England. The first of the great MSS. of the New 
 Testament to be carefully collated and printed were the 
 Alexandrine (A), which in 1628 was sent to Charles I. 
 by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar ; and 
 that which Beza gave to the University of Cambridge 
 (D). Bryan Walton's Polyglot, published in 1657, Mill's 
 New Testament of 1707, the materials gathered by Bent- 
 ley for his projected edition, lie at the basis of modern 
 New Testament criticism, while Griesbach was enabled 
 to accomplish his epoch-making work by pecuniary help 
 from England. Of later labours in the same field, I will 
 only say that the great edition of the New Testament 
 which has lately been issued from Cambridge, shows that 
 English scholarship need not fear even German rivalry 
 in this most important branch of theological investigation. 
 But the peculiarity of Anglican religion nowhere shows 
 itself more characteristically than in its neglect of dog- 
 matic theology. It has contributed almost nothing to 
 the development of that Protestant scholasticism which 
 was the subject of my last Lecture. When I have men- 
 tioned " Pearson on the Creed," I have said all. The 
 very fact that the chief dogmatic book of the Church of 
 England is based upon the Apostles' Creed, and not upon 
 a series of Loci Communes capable of indefinite subdivi- 
 sion and multiplication, is full of meaning. For such 
 " bodies of divinity" as our language possesses, we must 
 
332 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 go back to the days of triumphant Puritanism. The 
 Church of England has abundantly defended her own 
 theological position, has endeavoured to find a philoso- 
 phical basis for religion, has contended more or less 
 successfully with Deism, has produced many famous 
 preachers and some few mystics ; but she has nothing to 
 set beside the mighty volumes of Gerhard or of Turretine. 
 It is well for her that she has been content with the 
 simplicity of her own formularies : had she made the 
 deliberate attempt to enlarge and draw out the compro- 
 mise of Elizabeth into a compact logical system, she 
 would certainly have lost in comprehensiveness all that 
 she might have gained in doctrinal coherence. 
 
 So founded and animated by such a spirit, the Church 
 of England has always held, and still holds, a middle and 
 a mediating place in Christendom. This is curiously 
 illustrated by the character of a small class of men over 
 whom she has exercised an attraction. I mention only 
 in passing, Marc Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of 
 Spalato, for he was a man of doubtful character, who, 
 after holding an English benefice, returned to the Church 
 of Eome to die in her prisons. But there was Saravia, 
 the friend and neighbour of Eichard Hooker : there was 
 Isaac Casaubon, who found that here he could reconcile 
 with his sense of the abuses of the Papacy the reverence 
 for antiquity natural to so great a scholar: there was 
 Pierre Le Courayer, the friend of Atterbury, who, before 
 he left France or the Catholic Church, wrote a defence 
 of the validity of English orders : there was Grabe, the 
 learned editor of the Septuagint, who quitted the Lutheran 
 with the intention of joining the Eoman Church, but 
 finally found in England what he conceived to be the 
 
IX* THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 333 
 
 union of sound doctrine with apostolical order. 1 The 
 list is perhaps not a long one, but the kind of name of 
 which it is composed is significant. Nor has the idea of 
 a re-union of Christendom, to be effected on the lines of 
 her own constitution, ever been long absent from the 
 mind of the English Church. Archbishop Wake, at the 
 beginning of the last century, with this view actually 
 opened communications unhappily fruitless both with 
 the Gallican party of the French Church, and with leading 
 Protestant theologians in Germany and Switzerland. 2 In 
 our own time the Evangelical Alliance, the establishment 
 of the Bishopric of Jerusalem in conjunction with Prussia, 
 the Society for the Ee-union of Christendom, the efforts at 
 friendly intercourse with the Greek Church, the sympathy 
 of churchmen of almost all parties with the old Catholics, 
 are evidences of the same spirit. The difficulties in the 
 way of any practical result are immense, probably insu- 
 perable; but the persistence of the desire is a strong 
 testimony to the fact that the Church of England, taken 
 as a whole, is both Protestant and Catholic or neither. 
 I have regarded the English Eeformation as having 
 come to its close in the year 1662, when the Act of Uni- 
 
 1 It is singular to note that of these Casaubon and Le Courayer are 
 buried in Westminster Abbey, while Grabe has a monument there. 
 We may add to the list given in the text the names of Gerhard Johann 
 and Isaac Voss, father and son two well-known and very learned 
 theologians of the seventeenth century. The elder Voss (d. 1649) was 
 recommended by Laud to Charles I., from whom he received a Canonry 
 of Canterbury, with permission to reside abroad : the younger was 
 during the latter part of his life Canon of Windsor, where he died in 
 1689. 
 
 2 For some account of this movement and subsequent ones of the 
 same kind, see Abbey and Overton, "The English Church in the 
 Eighteenth Century," Vol. I. p. 352 et seq. 
 
334 IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 formity at once settled the Church of England on a basis 
 which has not since been disturbed, and necessitated 
 the separate existence of Dissent. To enter upon the 
 subsequent history of the Dissenting churches would 
 therefore both transcend the limits of my subject and 
 introduce us to a fresh field of discussion, not only 
 wide, but demanding very minute treatment. What 
 can and must be said of Dissent in the general may be 
 compressed into comparatively little space. The multi- 
 plication of sects is a phenomenon almost peculiar to 
 English and American religion, and may, I think, be 
 traced to the influence of free political institutions. 
 Nations which have charge of their own business, and 
 have conquered the right of unfettered discussion, cannot 
 be compelled into a mechanical uniformity in religion. 
 The same spirit which made the Lords and Commons of 
 England pass the Act of Provisors under the Plantage-' 
 nets, dictated the abandonment of their benefices by the^ 
 Ejected Ministers of 1662, and has since kept in inde- 
 pendent existence the numerous sects into which Non- 
 conformity has developed. Some Dissenting churches 
 represent a principle, theological, ecclesiastical, ritual; 
 others are the result of attempts to feed a spiritually- 
 neglected people; others again, it may be, little more 
 than the children of dissatisfaction and revolt. I am 
 not here to state, much less to estimate, the grounds on 
 which each bases its Nonconformity : all I have to note 
 is, how large a part of the nation's religious life flows in 
 these channels. The pure mysticism of the early Friends, 
 the steady devotion to liberty, civil and religious, of the 
 English Presbyterians, the insistance upon personal piety 
 of the Independents and the Baptists, the zeal for souls 
 
IX. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 335 
 
 of every various sect of Methodist, the ethical view of 
 religion so strongly urged by modern Unitarians, are all 
 elements which have helped to give compass and richness 
 to the religious life of England. Both the quality of 
 piety has been enhanced and its quantity increased by 
 the existence of Nonconformity. At the same time, it is 
 the necessary tendency of a sect to exaggerate the im- 
 portance of its own constituent principle and, to the 
 neglect of others which may be of equal weight, to push 
 it to an extreme ; at once to over- value orthodoxy, and 
 to give orthodoxy a narrow interpretation. And the 
 reaction of Dissent upon the Church has been far from 
 wholly favourable. The consciousness Of rivalry has 
 lessened its comprehensiveness and chilled its generosity. 
 Churchmen have lavishly sent out beyond seas the sym- 
 pathy which they have denied to fellow-christians at 
 home. The fear of being thought to yield to Noncon- 
 formist pressure has stiffened the immobility of doctrine 
 and practice natural to an ancient church. Had a policy 
 of comprehension been frankly adopted in 1662, or when 
 the opportunity came again in 1689, I am convinced that 
 the tone of English theology to-day would have been far 
 more accordant than it is with the best knowledge and 
 the characteristic spirit of the age. Sed Dis aliter visum: 
 and we can only look to the new Eeformation to restore 
 the unity which was shattered by the old. 
 
Lecture X. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 The theology of the Eeformation rests upon the as- 
 sumption that the Bible is a whole, consistent in all its 
 parts, dogmatically authoritative, and containing, either 
 explicitly or implicitly, a minutely elaborate system of 
 revealed truth. I have now to show the effect produced 
 upon this assumption, and the doctrinal results which 
 rest upon it, by the growth of the critical spirit in Europe 
 during the last three hundred years. This effect is of 
 two kinds. First, the Bible itself has been subjected to 
 a process of literary and historical criticism which has 
 made it henceforth impossible to use it as the Eeformers 
 did, and to draw from it the same kind of doctrinal infer- 
 ence. And next, the conjoint influence of philosophical 
 speculation and the successful study of nature, has been 
 to establish new canons of credibility and to undermine 
 the authority of the record, even in cases where its wit- 
 ness cannot be disputed. The method, in one instance, 
 is literary; in the other, philosophical: one puts the 
 documents in a new light, the other criticises their con- 
 tents. Possibly this division of the subject may be more 
 logical than real ; nor can I pretend that my treatment 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 337 
 
 will answer to it with, minute accuracy. What we have 
 to deal with is the changed spirit of the age, which tries 
 truth by new tests, and finds incredible what men once 
 never thought of questioning. Secular movements of 
 the human mind are brought about only by many inde- 
 pendent yet related forces subtly acting and interacting. 
 
 I shall speak to-day of the growth of literary and his- 
 torical criticism in Europe, and of the change which it 
 has wrought in our conception of the Bible. 
 
 The Humanists and the Eeformers soon began to part 
 company. For some students of classical antiquity, the 
 purely religious interests which prevailed at Wittenberg 
 had little attraction : other and graver scholars not only 
 had no sympathy with Luther's characteristic doctrine, 
 but thought the atmosphere of the elder church more 
 favourable to the intellectual freedom which was the 
 breath of their life. We have seen the choice which 
 Erasmus deliberately made. Eeuchlin, who had given 
 Melancthon to Wittenberg, withdrew his friendship from 
 him when he saw his devotion to the cause of Eeform. 1 
 Mutianus Eufus became a more orthodox Catholic as 
 he grew older. Crotus Eubianus, the chief author, if 
 recent conjecture be correct, of the " Letters of the 
 Obscure Men," went back to Eome in his old age. When 
 Willibald Pirkheimer died, he was cordially at one with 
 neither communion. On the other hand, it was not 
 
 1 Eeuchlin, who was Melancthon's great uncle, revoked in his last 
 years the legacy of his very valuable library which he had intended 
 for him, and begged that he would write to him no more. That the 
 alienation was complete, we may infer from the fact that in the nume- 
 rous letters which Melancthon wrote in 1522, he nowhere alludes to 
 Reuchlin's death. L. Geiger : Johann Reuchlin, p. 466. 
 
 Z 
 
338 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 unnatural that the men who, as they believed, had redis- 
 covered the gospel and restored the Bible to the Church, 
 should not rate very highly the study of the classics in 
 and for themselves. To them, the cultivation of Greek 
 and Latin letters had had its complete work in making 
 possible a correct interpretation of Scripture. Luther, 
 in rebelling against the schoolmen, had also rebelled 
 against their great master, Aristotle : to him, the gospel 
 was the one true philosophy, and all truth not contained 
 in the Bible of only secondary importance. As years 
 went on, he became more and more absorbed in theology : 
 he even went so far as to say, that when once the Bible 
 was in all men's hands, there would be an end of human 
 writing of books : God's Word would be enough. 1 
 
 Still, when Erasmus says more than once, with quite 
 sufficient bitterness, that " wherever Lutheranism reigns, 
 there good letters perish," 2 it is to be noticed that 
 he excepts Luther and Melancthon from the general 
 censure. Luther was all his life a zealous promoter 
 of education. He held that the establishment of schools 
 was the duty of every city and village, and desired 
 to divert in that direction part of the revenues of the 
 Church. He was so far in advance of his age as to 
 advocate the foundation of girls' schools. The whole 
 of his active life was spent as a teacher in a university, 
 
 1 Kostlin : M. Luther, I. 600. 
 
 2 Ep. to Pirkheimer, 1528, Opp. III. 1139 B. Conf. Ep. to Reuchlin, 
 1520, III. 590 B. Epistola ad Fratres Germanise inferioris, X. 1598 A. 
 Goethe seems to have been of the same opinion as Erasmus when he 
 says : 
 
 Franzthum drangt in diesen verworrenen Tagen, wie ehmals 
 Lutherthum es gethan, ruhige Bildung zuruck. 
 Vier Jahreszeiten, No. 63. 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 339 
 
 of which he was the animating and guiding spirit. At 
 the same time, he looked upon classical learning as sub- 
 ordinate to theology, and as valuable only for theological 
 purposes. When, in 1523, Eoban Hess writes to him 
 expressing his fear "lest we Germans should become 
 more barbarous than ever we were, by reason of the 
 decline of letters brought about by our theology," 1 his 
 answer, though frankly admitting the necessity of literary 
 culture, shows that he has always an outlook towards 
 theological interests. A little later we find him eager 
 to divert Melancthon from the teaching of Greek, which 
 he contemptuously calls " a childish lecture," to the 
 exposition of the Scriptures. 2 But I do* not think it 
 is possible to quote from his works or letters passages 
 which tend to the serious disparagement of classical 
 culture. And Melancthon was distinctly a humanist. 
 He came to Wittenberg to teach Greek, and would 
 willingly, but for the prevailing influence of Luther, 
 have gone on teaching Greek all his life. By his per- 
 severing labour in annotating classics and compiling 
 school books, he earned the title of Prceceptor Germanice. 
 His bosom friend and biographer, Joachim Camerarius, 
 was the most conspicuous figure among the generation 
 of German humanists who succeeded Erasmus. But 
 even the influence of Melancthon could not prevent 
 
 1 Briefe, ed. De Wette, II. 313, to Eoban Hess, March 29, 1523. 
 " Cseterum timores isti vestri te nihil moveant, ubi timetis, fore, ut 
 barbariores fiamus Germani, quam unquam fuerimus casu literarum per 
 
 theologiam nostram Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia 
 
 prorsus stare non posse sinceram theologiam, si cut hactenus ruentibus 
 et jacentibus Uteris miserrime et cecidit et jacuit." 
 
 2 Ibid. II. 491, to the Elector Frederick, March 23, 1524. 
 
 z2 
 
340 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 the new religious teaching from throwing the old learn- 
 ing into the shade. That it did so, we need not go to 
 the complaints of the humanists themselves to prove : 
 the evidence lies plentifully scattered through Me- 
 lancthon's own letters. In 1522, he speaks of the 
 signal folly of those " who at the present day think 
 that piety consists only in the contempt of all good 
 letters, of all ancient erudition." 1 He implores Spalatin 
 to have an especial care of the literary studies of the 
 University, complaining that the students are rather 
 overwhelmed than instructed by the mass of theological 
 lectures. 2 He bewails to Eoban Hess the decline of lite- 
 rature, adding, "Those, believe me, who profess their 
 dislike of profane letters have no better opinion of theo- 
 logy, for this is only the excuse which they put forward 
 for their laziness." 3 He writes to Baumgartner, a senator 
 of Nurnberg, that unless he and men like him defend 
 and foster letters, a Scythian barbarism or something 
 worse must settle upon Germany. 4 In face of this evi- 
 dence and much more of the same kind, we can easily 
 believe Erasmus when he says that it was easier to find 
 professors than students to attend their lectures; 5 that 
 
 1 Corp. Eef. I. 594. Ep. Eberhardo a Than, 1522. "Nam qui 
 sacras literas sine aliarum artium atque literarum adminiculo tent-ant, 
 na3 illi sine pennis volaturi sibi videntur. Stultissime autem omnium 
 sentiunt, qui hodie nihil esse pietatem, nisi contemptum omnium 
 bonarum literarum omnis priscse eruditionis arbitrantur." 
 
 2 Ibid, to Spalatin, July 1522, March 1523, I. 575, 604, 607. 
 
 3 Ibid. I. 613, to Eoban Hess, April 1523. Conf. to Spalatin, Dec. 
 1524, I. 695 : to Gottfried Hittorp, Feb. 1525, I. 726. 
 
 4 Ibid. I. 1001, to Jerome Baumgartner, Sept. 1528. 
 
 5 Erasmi Ep. ad Fratres Germanise inferioris, Opp. X. 1618 D, E. 
 "Scripsi alicubi, ubicunque regnat Lutheranismus, ibi frigere litterarum 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 341 
 
 the booksellers declared that before Lutheranism came 
 up they could sell three thousand volumes in less time 
 than six hundred afterwards ; that at Strasburg and else- 
 where there were those who thought that the only thing 
 a theologian needed to learn was Hebrew. No doubt 
 the old humanist grew bitter in his last days, as he 
 watched the triumphant progress of the movement from 
 which he had deliberately turned aside. But it is plain 
 that, in spite of Melancthon, there was a tendency to go 
 back to the spirit of a time at which it was considered a 
 perilous thing for a Christian to read heathen books. 1 
 
 But the tide of reviving interest in classical culture, 
 which had been slowly gathering strength, for a century 
 and a half, was far too mighty to be even temporarily 
 arrested by any defection of the Eeformers. While they 
 
 studium. Si hoc non erat verum, cur Lutherus tain sollicite coactus 
 est homines ad litterarum amorein revocare? Cur idem coactus est 
 facere Melancthon, qui non dissimulabat esse verum quod dico 1 Quam 
 floreat Academia Wittenhergensis, nescio. Si quid est illic bonae lit- 
 teraturae, Melancthoni debetur. Quid fiat in pagis, nescio. Certe nuper 
 cceperunt aliquot civitates conducere Professores, sed opus erit ut et 
 auditores conducantur. Tarn ardet studiorum amor ! Non excutio 
 nunc, quo id consilio fiat. Conferat Academiam Wittenbergensem cum 
 Lovaniensi aut Parisiensi, quanquam et hse nonnihil detrimenti sentiunt 
 ex Lutheranismo. Typographi narrant se ante hoc evangelium citius 
 distrahere solitos tria voluminum millia, quam nunc distrahant sexcenta, 
 vel hoc arguit quam floreant studia litterarum. Quid autem isti fere 
 docent nisi linguas 1 Sed proferant nobis vel tres, qui in Lutheranismo 
 feliciter in litteris progressi sunt." The letter from which the above 
 extract is taken was published in August, 1530. It is one of the 
 documents of a controversy in which Erasmus became involved with 
 the Protestant divines of Strasburg. Conf. Letter to Melancthon, 
 Dec. 1524, Opp. III. 832 D. 
 
 1 I may refer here to a declamation written by Melancthon in 1557, 
 in which he bewails in the strongest terms the decline of science and 
 letters. Corp. Ref. XII. 240 et seq. 
 
342 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 were occupied in internecine quarrels and the building 
 up of rival systems of dogmatic theology, the work of 
 recovering the mind of antiquity went steadily on. It 
 was a longer and a more laborious task than from our 
 present standpoint of culture we are easily able to con- 
 ceive ; and the men who accomplished it are not to be 
 measured by the worth of their visible contributions to 
 literature. When the convent libraries of east and west 
 had been ransacked, and every fragment of ancient lite- 
 rature consigned to the safe keeping of the printing-press, 
 the work was only begun. Texts had to be emended, 
 grammars to be slowly compiled, the materials of dic- 
 tionaries collected with almost infinite toil. The whole 
 mass of learned tradition, on the basis of which a scholar 
 now begins his work, had to be painfully brought toge- 
 ther. When, by the labours of several generations, the 
 philological part of the task was accomplished with tole- 
 rable completeness when all educated men could read 
 the classical authors in the original, and Greek and Latin 
 were written by scholars with facility and even elegance 
 there remained the work of reproducing the life of 
 the ancients ; of understanding their law, their worship, 
 their military systems, their amusements ; of re- writing 
 their history, and reducing their chronology to order. 
 And this was a toil which lasted through the eighteenth 
 century, if indeed it can be said to be even yet at an 
 end. Italy soon gave up her place in the van of classical 
 culture. Her scholarship became mere phrase-monger- 
 ing and Ciceronianism. Not what a man had to say, 
 but how he said it, was the all-important thing ; while 
 platitude was no offence at all, solecism was a mortal sin. 
 I have already spoken of the lack of moral fibre in the 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 343 
 
 Italian scholars of the age of the despots : when Borne 
 became serious under the influence of the Counter Eefor- 
 mation, humanists were warned off debateable ground, 
 and bidden to employ their pens in her service, if at all. 1 
 The study of Greek fell into disfavour ; and when Jesuit 
 influence came to predominate in schools and colleges, 
 those admirable educators had practical ends of their 
 own, which they cared for more than the progress of 
 philology. So the literary hegemony passed to France 
 and to Holland. Budseus, Turnebus, Casaubon, Salmasius, 
 are the glories of French scholarship. If the Scaligers 
 boasted an Italian descent, the elder lived and wrote in 
 France; the younger and greater, who was Huguenot 
 to the heart, taught in Leiden. It would be difficult 
 to enumerate the many profound scholars who toiled 
 in the Universities of Holland to complete the long task 
 the nature of which I have endeavoured to indicate. 
 Their labours lie concealed in the grammars and dic- 
 tionaries which to-day smooth the path of classical 
 culture to our children ; in the annotations which eluci- 
 date every difficult passage and explain every obscure 
 allusion ; in that knowledge of ancient life which is part 
 of the intellectual air we breathe. The result was at 
 
 1 For illustration of this statement, see the life of the great French 
 scholar, M. A. Muret, by Charles De Job (Paris, 1881). Muret, or 
 Muretus, as he is more commonly called, spent the last half of his life 
 as Professor in the University of Rome, finally joining the Society of 
 Jesus. He found it a hard service. On one occasion he was forbidden 
 to make Plato the subject of his lectures j on another he was ordered to 
 substitute Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline for the Politics of Aristotle. 
 At the same time, he did not hesitate, at the request of Gregory XIII., 
 to celebrate, in the most flowing phrases of his Ciceronian Latinity, 
 the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
 
344 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 once to restore that living connection with the mind of 
 antiquity which Christian Europe deliberately abandoned 
 in the sixth century, and to accumulate the materials 
 upon which the higher and more constructive criticism 
 of a later age has worked. 
 
 To narrate, even in the briefest summary, the history 
 of that higher criticism, would be manifestly impossible 
 in this place. But I may be allowed to say a word of 
 each of three epoch-making books, which will sufficiently 
 indicate the direction which the current of educated 
 European thought was taking from the end of the seven- 
 teenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The 
 first of these is Bichard Bentley 's immortal "Dissertation 
 on the Epistles of Phalaris," which was published in 
 1699. Sir William Temple, ignorantly meddling in the 
 foolish controversy as to the respective literary merits of 
 ancients and moderns, had asserted that the Epistles of 
 Phalaris, a Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century B.C., 
 were not only the earliest in date, but the best ever 
 written. An edition of the letters published upon this 
 by the Hon. Charles Boyle, drew from Bentley, then 
 young and comparatively unknown, a decisive opinion 
 that they were a worthless forgery. All Christchurch, 
 of which college Boyle was a member, rose in arms to 
 defend him ; and Bentley, in the opinion of contemporary 
 critics, was completely crushed by the answer which, 
 though published in Boyle's name, was really the pro- 
 duction of a confederacy of scholars, of whom Atterbury 
 was the chief. And it is to be noticed, as a gauge of the 
 general state of learning in England, that even when 
 Bentley in his " Dissertation " had overwhelmed his 
 opponents in such a flood of impetuous learning as no 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 345 
 
 other European scholar could have poured forth, public 
 opinion was still on the side of Boyle. But the moral of 
 the controversy one that sank slowly but effectually into 
 the minds of the learned was, that the authorship of 
 ancient books cannot be decided by the traditional titles 
 which they bear, but must be determined, at least nega- 
 tively, by a careful examination of their contents. The 
 second book I have to mention is Friedrich August Wolf's 
 " Prolegomena to Homer," published in 1795. In it 
 was put forward the hypothesis that the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey were not, as was supposed, the work of one 
 supreme poet, but each a cycle of heroic ballads, handed 
 down by oral tradition from an age when writing was 
 not yet known, and reduced to external unity by an 
 anonymous editor. Nothing could be more shocking to 
 literary orthodoxy than this theory, yet it gradually made 
 its way, and is now, in one form or other, generally 
 adopted. Its result has been the acceptance, on wider 
 than Homeric ground, of the principle, that an ancient 
 book, which comes down to modern times as a whole 
 under the name of a single author, may possibly be com- 
 posed of many different documents of various age and 
 origin, and that it is for criticism to decide, upon internal 
 evidence, whether its unity is real or only apparent. The 
 third book is Niebuhr's " History of Borne," the first 
 volume of which was given to the world in 1811. Let 
 the great critical historian speak in his own words. In 
 the Preface to that memorable work, he says : x 
 
 " The history of Rome was treated, during the first two centu- 
 ries after the revival of letters, with the same prostration of the 
 
 1 Niebuhr : History of Rome, transl. Hare and Thirl wall, Preface, 
 
 P . i. 
 
346 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 understanding and judgment to the written letter, and with the 
 same fearfulness of going beyond it, which prevailed in all the 
 other branches of knowledge. If any one had pretended to in- 
 quire into the credibility of the ancient writers and the value 
 of their testimony, an outcry would have been raised against 
 such atrocious presumption. The object aimed at was, in spite 
 of everything like internal evidence, to combine what they related. 
 At the utmost, one authority was made, in some one particular 
 instance, to give way to another, and this was done as mildly as 
 possible, and without leading to any further results." 
 
 But at the touch of the Ithuriel spear of Mebuhr's cri- 
 ticism, the basis of that stately edifice of Koman history 
 which Livy had erected crumbled into dust, and Eegal 
 Eome, from being a tract of human story peopled by 
 living men whose motives we could analyze and whose 
 actions we could narrate, became a shadowy realm of 
 legend, in which only the imagination of the historian 
 could reconstruct the beginnings of law and order. 
 Thenceforth, all primaeval history was looked at with 
 fresh eyes. Its only sure facts were discerned to be 
 such as could be vouched for by the testimony of con- 
 temporaneous structures and surviving institutions. It 
 was seen what large contributions had been made to its 
 written record by national self -consciousness and family 
 pride, expressing themselves in legend and poetry. The 
 earliest historians of the beginnings of humanity were 
 henceforth regarded as being, for all practical purposes, 
 as distant from the events which they pretend to narrate 
 as we ourselves are, and much less able to distinguish 
 the false from the true. 
 
 From what I have already said, it will be plain that it 
 is not possible in this connection to speak of literary and 
 historical criticism as things apart. To determine the 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 347 
 
 genuineness and trustworthiness of documents, is often 
 to impugn or establish the credibility of the facts which 
 they record. And literary and historical criticism blend 
 into one when the task to be accomplished is the deci- 
 pherment of inscriptions, and the pushing forward of 
 knowledge into a region beyond the range of formal 
 historical record. The first great step in this direction 
 was made when, at the end of the last century, the dis- 
 covery of the Eosetta stone gave Young and Champollion 
 a clue to the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The 
 result of their researches, followed up by long subsequent 
 toil in the same field by other labourers, has been no 
 less than the unveiling to modern eyes of a national life, 
 stretching back to an antiquity which would once have 
 been considered incredible, and yet known to us in its 
 minutest details. The decipherment of the monuments 
 has been followed by the reading of many papyri, won- 
 derfully preserved in the dry air of Egypt ; and if the 
 result has been to show that Herodotus was more accurate 
 and Manetho less boastful than was once believed, the 
 history of the Nile valley has been enriched by many 
 particulars unrecorded by either. In a word, Egypt is 
 no longer the mere vague synonym for the mysterious 
 and the profound, which it was not only in ancient but 
 in mediaeval times, the terra incognita where every wild 
 theory could find an anchorage, but has taken its definite 
 place in the history of civilization and the development 
 of religious thought. A similar result has attended the 
 decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, begun by 
 Grotefend, and Burnouf, and Lassen, and continued by 
 a host of successful followers. The primaeval history of 
 the great empires which pressed upon Palestine from the 
 
348 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 north and east, as did Egypt from the south-west, has 
 been unrolled before our eyes. In turn, Assyria, Baby- 
 lonia, Persia, have become known to us in the same way, 
 and almost as minutely, as Egypt. Monument answers 
 to monument ; clay tablet to papyrus. But this second 
 great triumph of decipherment added more unexpected 
 elements to our knowledge of antiquity than the first. 
 Behind the Assyrian, now known to be a Semite, stands 
 the Accadian, a Turanian, who spoke an agglutinative 
 language, but who had a distinctive civilization, and who 
 handed down to the tribes which supplanted him arts 
 and sciences which descend from a world as yet unknown. 
 And it is one of the most startling as well as the most 
 recent results of archaeological and philological research, 
 that, as the faded characters of a palimpsest re-appear 
 under the cautious manipulation of the chemist, an empire 
 which the world had all but forgotten has once more 
 emerged into view. The Old Testament presents to us 
 the Hittites as a Canaanitish people, often coupled with 
 the Amorites, and maintaining an habitual attitude of hos- 
 tility to Israel but that is all. Now they are revealed 
 as forming a powerful state, between the Euphrates and 
 the Orontes, having their capital at Carchemish, and with 
 a wide-spread influence in Asia Minor, which has left 
 traces in the history of art and religious ideas. From 
 the apologetic point of view these discoveries are impor- 
 tant, as they tend to confirm or to correct the Biblical 
 narrative. But to the philosophical historian they have 
 a much higher value. They restore Israel to his true 
 place and proportion in the ancient world. We see now, 
 for the first time, the forces' of civilization which were 
 at work about the Hebrews while they were still a half- 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 349 
 
 migratory tribe of Canaan, as well as the tremendous 
 political pressure which in later years made the kingdom 
 of David the sport of rival empires. 
 
 Contemporaneous with this gradual decipherment of 
 ancient records, aiding and aided by it, has been the 
 growth of the new science of comparative philology. It 
 had its birth in the recognition of the true place of San- 
 skrit among the languages of the world. The existence 
 of Sanskrit, which as the literary dialect of India can 
 never be said to have been a dead language, had been 
 long known to missionaries, and to some extent to philo- 
 logists ; but it was not till the last years of the eighteenth 
 century that the labours of Sir William Jones and his 
 colleagues of the Eoyal Asiatic Society began to display 
 it in its true relations, nor till 1808 that Friedrich Schle- 
 gel, who possessed the vivid imagination which at certain 
 turning-points of thought is the critic's best endowment, 
 decisively pointed out its importance for the classification 
 of language. I will not tell the familiar tale again, nor 
 how the labours, first of Anquetil du Perron and then of 
 Eask and Burnouf, restored the Zend to the catalogue of 
 known tongues, and made Zerdusht once more a living 
 prophet. But the result of thus establishing comparative 
 philology on a basis the safety of which has been demon- 
 strated by constantly fresh discovery, was, in virtue of 
 the ethnological deductions surely drawn from it, first to 
 extend our knowledge of primaeval history far beyond 
 the period of even the rudest monumental record, and 
 next, to reduce to order a whole realm of facts which 
 had hitherto received only conjectural interpretation. 
 The separation of the Aryan peoples means also the 
 segregation of the Semites, and the placing of Hebrew 
 
350 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 philology for the first time on a scientific foundation. 
 I need hardly point out that in view of the sure outlook 
 which we now have into that far distant past when the 
 common ancestors of all Aryan peoples dwelt under the 
 shadow of the Himalayas, already speaking a language 
 which cannot be connected with any Semitic dialect in 
 face of the fact that a large part of the population of the 
 world expresses its thought in agglutinative tongues, 
 which almost seem to be framed upon a different theory 
 of speech from our own it is impossible any longer 
 to dream dreams of Hebrew as the language of Para- 
 dise, and to trace back the disruption of human speech 
 to the arrogance of the Tower of Babel. Indeed, 
 it is much more than a question of invalidating the 
 historical truth of this or that Old Testament story : 
 we look back over an infinitely wider prospect, and 
 the map of primaeval humanity is other than it was. 
 But the procedure of comparative philology has made 
 another and perhaps a more important contribution to the 
 higher criticism than is involved in anything I have yet 
 said. One of its achievements has been to reveal the 
 secret of the C ^eek mythology. These gods and heroes, 
 these divine beings haunting the secret recesses of moun- 
 tain and wood, these strange stories, so full of naive 
 beauty, so empty of ethical meaning, about which the 
 classical imagination disported itself, whose spell a seri- 
 ously moral Christianity has often striven to shake off, 
 are an open riddle now. Tracked to their source in 
 Yedic religion, they stand confessed as nature myths, 
 and their frank immorality is no more than the result 
 of the expression of cosmic facts in terms of humanity. 
 And it is thus to comparative philology that criticism 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 351 
 
 owes the formation and clear definition of the idea of 
 myth. Now at last the conception stands distinctly ont 
 by the side of that of legend, and can never again be 
 confounded with it. No doubt, like all new intellectual 
 instruments, the mythical theory has been too largely 
 used, and has suffered from over-lavish application. But 
 it answers to a real tendency of the human mind, espe- 
 cially in its earlier stages of development, and must 
 henceforth take its place as a recognized factor of pri- 
 maeval history. 
 
 One general result of this long series of investigations 
 has been the gradual growth of an art which, as distin- 
 guished from the mere formation and emendation of texts, 
 has been called the higher criticism. It deals with the 
 age and authorship of books : it decides whether a writ- 
 ing is an organic whole, or made up of fragments more 
 or less cleverly combined : it attempts to go behind the 
 letter, and to determine the writer's secret bent or con- 
 scious purpose. As applied to history, it sifts testimony 
 before accepting it : it collects the witness of chance 
 admissions, unconscious discrepancies : it questions rites, 
 institutions, even language itself, in the ho* 3 of discover- 
 ing the secrets which lie beneath the surface : it traces 
 legend to its origin in long-descended custom or genea- 
 logical pride, and compels myth to yield up the thought 
 which has bodied itself in story. When it inspects the 
 history of religious thought, it judges in accordance with 
 the principle of continuity : it distinguishes between an 
 earlier and a later in the intellectual order : and it first 
 accomplishes its purpose when it succeeds in tracing a 
 sure line of development. Indeed, its method may almost 
 be summed up in one word as the historical: it rejects all 
 
352 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 a priori views and reasonings : its endeavour is to take facts 
 as they are, to understand their origin, and to trace their 
 mutual relation and interdependence. I have called this 
 higher criticism an art rather than a science, not only 
 because its principles and rules do not readily lend them- 
 selves to precise statement, but because the success of its 
 processes largely depends upon the skill and tact of the 
 critic. Possibly its negative are more definite than its 
 positive achievements. It is less difficult to say by whom 
 an ancient book cannot have been written than to name 
 its actual author. To prove that Paul is not the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews is an easy thing ; not so 
 to decide between the conflicting claims of Apollos and 
 Barnabas, and one knows not how many more. Criticism 
 may pronounce a book to be made up of many fragments, 
 of various date and origin, and yet fail to pick each 
 separate stone out of the mosaic, and to say authorita- 
 tively where it came from. In the criticism of the Pen- 
 tateuch, Elohist and Jehovist and Deuteronomist stand for 
 facts, and not for fancies, though Ewald divide the text 
 among them in one way, and Kuenen in another. It is 
 the fashion in some quarters to deride the higher criticism 
 as the mere product of individual caprice, to exaggerate 
 the discrepancies of its results, and to imagine that they 
 can be got rid of, like positive and negative quantities in 
 an equation, by setting one against the other. But it is 
 a mistake to suppose that this process, however far it may 
 be carried, necessarily makes for the traditional view of 
 things, which stands or falls by itself, and must meet its 
 own difficulties. And criticism is making its sure way, 
 from destruction to construction, from negative to posi- 
 tive results. Difficulties which the sharp sight of the 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 353 
 
 eighteenth century detected, but which it could only 
 solve by more or less ingenious guess-work, are rapidly 
 receiving answers which, once fully understood, are felt 
 to be final. Criticism now knows what legend is when 
 it sees it. It can distinguish myth from either tradition 
 or history. It can decide with adequate certainty deli- 
 cate questions of authorship and genuineness and date. 
 And the fresh triumphs which it is every day winning 
 in the most obscure regions of primseval history make 
 its claim to be heard on Biblical ground also, impossible 
 to resist. 
 
 I have thus traced the growth of the critical spirit, in 
 order that it may be quite clear that we are dealing with 
 a general development of human thought, and not merely 
 with a flux and reflux of the theological tide. There 
 cannot well be a greater contrast than between the pro- 
 gress of truth within and beyond the reach of what are 
 conceived to be religious interests. No sober scholar 
 now questions the results of criticism as applied to Greek 
 literature or Eoman history ; while, on the other hand, 
 the battle still fiercely rages round positions which were 
 held by the Eeformers, yet which for a century past 
 have been attacked by overwhelming and ever-accumu- 
 lating forces. A finality is claimed for old views of the 
 Bible, which in the case of any other literature would 
 be laughed out of court ; and the strangest devices, per- 
 petually set up and perpetually abandoned, are used to 
 blunt the edge of criticism and put the Scriptures in a 
 place apart. And it is therefore expedient to show that 
 these debates as to the literary constitution of the Bible 
 do not belong to the class of theological logomachies 
 which each generation is at liberty to renew with the old 
 
 2 a 
 
354 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 weapons and upon the old ground, but are an incident of 
 the universal march of the human mind, which occupies 
 new territory every day, and never abandons what it has 
 once occupied. At first, and for some time, Biblical criti- 
 cism was cultivated more by Catholic than by Protestant 
 divines. It was the interest of the former to undermine 
 the authority of Scripture for the benefit of the Church, 
 while the latter were far too well satisfied with the foun- 
 dation on which they built to pry too narrowly into its 
 security. Besides, Protestants had other work to do. 
 Their critical battle-field with Catholicism lay much 
 more in the dark ages than in the first Christian centu- 
 ries. The Centuriators of Magdeburg, Blondel, Scaliger, 
 Daill, convinced the world that the writings attributed 
 to Dionysius the Areopagite were spurious, and exposed 
 the forgery of the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. In a work 
 on "The Eight Use of the Fathers," in which he was 
 sarcastically said to have proved that they were of no 
 use at all, Daille' again dealt a heavy blow at patristic 
 theology. But in the mean time the beginnings of 
 Biblical criticism, which, each in a different way, Luther 
 and Carlstadt had made, were neglected. Within the 
 orthodox churches of the Eeform, Scripture was indeed 
 studied, but only for dogmatic purposes. 
 
 The first impulse came from the outside, from Catholic 
 divines, from Arminian heretics, from unbelieving phi- 
 losophers. Hobbes 1 remarked that the name, " the Five 
 Books of Moses," was no proof that Moses was their 
 author, and went on to adduce some of the most obvious 
 reasons why he could not have written a large part of 
 
 1 Leviathan, III. c. xxxiii. 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 355 
 
 them. Spinoza interweaves with, his Tractatus Theologico- 
 Politicus a whole body of acute negative criticism, not 
 only showing by internal evidence that Moses could not 
 have written the Pentateuch in its present shape, but 
 throughout the whole Bible detecting literary facts at 
 variance with traditional statements of date and author- 
 ship. Eichard Simon, a priest of the Oratory, in his 
 " Critical History of the Old Testament," published in 
 1678, again gave reasons against the Mosaic authorship 
 of the Pentateuch, a decision in which the Arminian 
 Le Clerc, on some other grounds opposed to Simon, 
 heartily concurred. But it was Astruc, a Catholic phy- 
 sician of Paris, who, in a work published in 1753, struck 
 the key-note of subsequent debate. He believed that 
 Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but he thought he could 
 distinguish and disengage the materials that he had 
 used. There was a document, he said, in which God 
 was always called Elohim, another in which he was 
 always called Jehovah, and these were manifestly by 
 different authors. The theory, in the shape in which 
 Astruc proprounded it, was crude, and so far untenable ; 
 but it was eagerly caught up and modified by Semler, 
 Eichhorn, Michaelis, and by the beginning of the present 
 century had become a commonplace of criticism. Mean- 
 while, the study of the New Testament had been running 
 a parallel course. The literary problem presented by the 
 likenesses and differences of the Synoptical Gospels was 
 the first to attract attention. The great Arminian, Hugo 
 Grotius, in his " Annotations on the New Testament," 
 laid it down that Mark's Gospel was an abridgment of 
 Matthew's, and that Luke had used the other two. Simon, 
 whose labours were not confined to the Old Testament, 
 
 2 a2 
 
356 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 came to the conclusion that the first Gospel, as we have 
 it, could not be the original work of Matthew, and revived 
 the recollection of the Antilegomena of the ancient Church 
 the Apocalypse, the letter to the Hebrews, some of the 
 Catholic Epistles. Le Clerc thought that the Synoptists 
 had all used the same documentary materials. Semler 
 postponed the formation of the Canon to the end of the 
 second century, and, in anticipation of the later Tubingen 
 school, referred it to the influence of that Catholicism in 
 which Jewish and Pauline Christianity found their recon- 
 ciliation. But the very title of a treatise by Lessing, 
 which was published in 1784, three years after his death, 
 shows how far men had then wandered from the thought 
 of the Eef ormation : "A New Hypothesis as to the 
 Evangelists, considered as merely Human Writers of 
 History." Nothing could more plainly indicate the 
 breach made by literary criticism in the conception of 
 the New Testament as an infallible record and authorita- 
 tive compendium of doctrine. 
 
 I must pause here for a moment to notice a peculiar 
 and very powerful influence exercised upon Biblical cri- 
 ticism by two great men whose active lives fall in the 
 second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing and 
 Herder. It would be easy to draw out points of contrast 
 between them : in literary preference, Lessing belonged 
 to the classical, Herder to the romantic school : the 
 former would as little have written the " Spirit of Hebrew 
 Poetry" as the latter the " Laokoon." Lessing exulted 
 in the freedom of a man of letters, the fewness of whose 
 wants left him at liberty to criticise all systems and to 
 pay an undivided allegiance to truth : Herder fretted 
 all his life long under the restraints of his clerical pro- 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 357 
 
 fession, and leaves behind him the vague impression of 
 an unfinished life, and profound truths not rounded off 
 into system. But both were humanists, in the widest 
 sense of the word, before they were theologians. Lea- 
 sing' s characteristic idea is the divine education of the 
 human race; Herder's greatest book, his " Contributions 
 to a Philosophy of Human History." Both concurred in 
 taking theology off the narrow Biblical ground to which 
 the post-Eeformation divines had confined it, and making 
 it an affair of universal history and the natural capacities 
 of man. What pregnancy was there in Lessing's con- 
 ception of the Old Testament as the religious school- 
 book adapted to the childhood of humanity ! Nor, when 
 he hinted that it was possible to regard the New Testa- 
 ment in a similar light, and darkly prophesied an eternal 
 Gospel yet to be revealed, was he far from that thought 
 of an universal faith which has been suggested to later 
 times by comparative theology. He restored tradition to 
 its true place in Christian history by the remark, that at 
 the very time when primitive faith was brightest and 
 purest, the New Testament did not yet exist : he threw 
 down the wall which had hitherto separated the Jewish 
 and Christian dispensation from the religious history of 
 the world, by pointing out the root of all true religion in 
 the heart of man. Perhaps Herder's characteristic effi- 
 cacy of a similar kind lay in his intense appreciation of 
 the human element in the Bible : not so much that he 
 looked at it with an aesthetic eye, acknowledging its 
 sublimity and praising its pathos, as that he heard in 
 it the heart's cry of humanity towards God, and saw 
 how it exhibited religion as closely interwoven with 
 every other faculty and capacity of man. After these 
 
358 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 men had written, it was hard for Biblical criticism to go 
 back to the dry dissection of texts, the discussion of 
 merely literary controversies. Theology, without ceasing 
 to be divine, had become fully human. The Bible is 
 only one chapter, though the most important, in the 
 religious history of the race. As much as God's speech 
 to man, it is man's answer to God. If it breathes now 
 the accent of Divine command, it thrills and trembles as 
 often with the aspirations and despairs of humanity. 
 
 The inquiries and speculations indicated in what I 
 have already said have been pursued with untiring 
 energy during the eighty years of the present century. 
 As critic has succeeded critic as Kuenen has seemed to 
 correct and supersede Ewald, and may probably be cor- 
 rected and superseded in his turn as the mythical 
 theory of Strauss and the tendenz-theory of Baur have 
 been proposed and rejected as the key which would 
 unlock all mysteries as no account of the mutual rela- 
 tions of the Synoptical Gospels can be said to be gene- 
 rally accepted as the age and authorship of the Fourth 
 are still matters of warm debate it might appear at first 
 sight as if nothing had been accomplished, and the sole 
 result of criticism had been to throw our notions of the 
 Bible into hopeless confusion. Even if it were so, its 
 negative efficacy would be complete and undeniable. 
 Where positive conclusions cannot be reached, it is better 
 to rest in clear denials than in delusive affirmations. We 
 are at all events nearer the truth when we look at the 
 Pentateuch as made up of many fragments, put together 
 we know not when or by whom, than when we confi- 
 dently place it as the work of Moses at the beginning of 
 Hebrew history. Which is the truer and therefore the 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 359 
 
 more fruitful conception, the Book of Psalms as wholly 
 or in large part the production of David, or as a collec- 
 tion of sacred lyrics, in which the whole spiritual life 
 of Israel, in all his troubles and anguishes and varying 
 moods of faith, is mirrored and expressed ? So, in regard 
 to the Gospels, even if we were unable to replace our 
 negative by positive conclusions about them, we should 
 still have got rid of the idea, so little accordant with 
 fact, of the four independent witnesses, whose testimony 
 it is necessary, in the interests of evangelical truth, to 
 harmonize by every fair and unfair device of interpreta- 
 tion. The critics, whose principle it is to trace a line of 
 continuity iD human thought, to detect a. natural line of 
 development in human affairs, know very well that the 
 traditional view of the Scriptures is precisely that which 
 is most fruitful in difficulties. No new theory of Hebrew 
 history can be so puzzling as that which places the Levi- 
 tical legislation at the beginning of long ages, the records 
 of which show almost no trace of its existence and observ- 
 ance. What can be more difficult to suppose than that 
 the teaching of Christ waited for the interpretation that 
 was to make it plain till Paul came Paul, who had 
 never known him in the flesh, and who carefully ab- 
 stained from intercourse with those who had ? 
 
 But nothing is less true than the allegation that no 
 results have been attained which can justly be called 
 positive. In the first place, the Biblical history has been 
 brought into due relation with the general development 
 of humanity. We are no longer invited to contemplate 
 the beginnings of the race in the Garden of Eden six 
 thousand years ago, or to connect the peopling of the 
 globe with the dispersion of the family of Noah. Long 
 
360 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 before the date fixed by the old cosmogony for the crea- 
 tion of the world, we discern the existence of ancient 
 empires, settled civilizations, substantial progress in the 
 arts of life. We can trace the connection of the nomad 
 tribe, which, though numerically so insignificant, was 
 reserved for so great a destiny, with neighbours more 
 powerful and more civilized than itself, who were also 
 its kinsmen by blood. Its story is no longer the story 
 of mankind : its cosmogony, however poetically sublime, 
 is only one of many similar guesses into the origin of 
 things: the myths and legends into which its history 
 runs up, have their near analogues in those read off from 
 Babylonian bricks. Its genealogies require to be trans- 
 lated into tribal history, and even so tell us no more than 
 the vague traditions of national relationship preserved 
 among a people whose outlook upon the world was 
 narrow. There is a strange contrast, which every year's 
 investigation makes stranger, between Israel's conception 
 of his own material grandeur and his real place in the 
 world : he thinks, in common with all ancient peoples, 
 that he stands next to the beginning of things and can 
 command its secret : he is in reality but an insignificant 
 tribe, prisoned in a corner of Asia, pressed upon by tribes 
 as insignificant as himself, once, and only once, emerging 
 into a position of second-rate political importance, and 
 counting for nothing in the shock of Mesopotamian and 
 Egyptian empires. Yet in another way all this only brings 
 into a more vivid light the grandeur of Israel's vocation, 
 the strangeness of his fate. While ancient India, Assyria, 
 Persia, Egypt, are almost forgotten, except by the scholars 
 who painfully decipher the records of their life, Israel 
 lives in human memory side by side with Greece and 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 361 
 
 with Eome. He was powerless to resist the conquerors 
 of the world ; but he has avenged conquest by imposing 
 upon them his religious ideas. He shares with Greece 
 the distinction of being the teacher of mankind. 
 
 In like manner, criticism has re-read the Hebrew his- 
 tory, making the thread which binds it together not one 
 of conscious prophecy looking forward to its fulfilment, 
 but a natural intellectual and religious development, 
 which in the far reach of its scope and the order of its 
 sequence is divine without being miraculous. To attain 
 this result, it was necessary to abandon all traditional 
 accounts of the authorship of books, and to seek the 
 secret in the unconscious revelations of the documents 
 themselves. But in comparison with the historical 
 inferences which this method yields, literary questions 
 shrink into insignificance. That the Pentateuch is a 
 composite book, which assumed its present shape when 
 the independent political history of Israel was at an 
 end that the Book of Chronicles was written in the 
 interest of the priestly caste that the apparent unity of 
 Isaiah's prophecy hides at least a dual authorship that 
 the books ascribed to Solomon are of different origin and 
 much later date that the prophecy of Daniel must be 
 postponed to an era which is late enough to change pre- 
 diction into history are all important results of research 
 in regard to which most competent critics agree. But 
 the question of questions in the criticism of the Old 
 Testament is this : Are we to place the Law at the 
 beginning of national history, or at the end, when a 
 restored but broken Israel begins a new life in a corner 
 of the Persian empire ? Was Israel sternly monotheistic 
 from the day of his escape from Egypt, or did Jehovah 
 
362 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 slowly grow from a tribal God, worshipped under strange 
 names and with half -idolatrous rites, into " the righteous 
 Lord who loveth righteousness," before whom "all the 
 Gods of the nations are idols" ? Was prophecy a revolt 
 against a priesthood already corrupt and a law fallen 
 into disuse, or itself the first dawn of a pure faith and a 
 noble religious life ? Can we, except in fragments of 
 legislation still preserved in the Pentateuch, trace the 
 Law further back than its sudden production from the 
 temple archives in the days of Josiah? And must we 
 not descend to the time of Ezra for the epoch when, 
 the voice of prophecy being silent, and almost its very 
 remembrance faded out of the people's hearts, the legal 
 conception of religion laid a stiffening grasp upon Israel 
 which it never again relaxed ? It is manifestly not for 
 me to indicate, even in the briefest way, the evidence for 
 this complete reversal of what once passed for Hebrew 
 history; it is enough to say, that while every step in 
 the reasoning can be sufficiently justified, the result of 
 the whole is for the first time to present a reading of the 
 record which conforms to a natural process of develop- 
 ment. Now we see how Israel grew into what he was. 
 We understand his perils, his temptations, his backslid- 
 ings. He re-enters the field of ordinary history, and 
 from a puppet of the Divine purposes becomes human 
 once more. 
 
 Criticism has had a much less difficult, a much less 
 destructive work to do on the New Testament ; but the 
 result has been the same the conversion of a divine 
 oracle into a human record. We do not now assume the 
 New Testament as the beginning of the history of Chris- 
 tianity : we watch it gradually become what it is, in a 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 363 
 
 Church which was itself growing and gathering strength 
 through a period of at least a century and a half. There 
 is a time when only the Apocalypse and some Epistles of 
 Paul's are in Christian hands : then come " Memoirs of 
 the Apostles," which disengage themselves into separate 
 Gospels, extant and lost : there is a fourth Gospel, which 
 bears plain traces of a later date, and Hellenic, perhaps 
 Alexandrian influence: the defining line of the Canon 
 shifts, including and excluding doubtful books, until at 
 last from the long and changeful process emerges the 
 New Testament that we have, yet at a time when the 
 Church is already far on her way towards recognition by 
 the empire. When the literary history of the New Testa- 
 ment is thus set forth in all its details, when the different 
 influences under which its separate books were written 
 are drawn out, when it is plain that it was at one time 
 possible that the Shepherd of Hermas might have found 
 a place in the Canon and the Apocalypse have been shut 
 out, how can it be any longer regarded as "one entire 
 and perfect chrysolite" reflecting the unchangeable and 
 infallible mind of God ? We have to recognize the fun- 
 damental distinction between the words of Christ himself 
 and the varying interpretation put upon them by apos- 
 tles. We must separate the Palestinian tradition of his 
 teaching preserved in the Synoptics from that which had 
 passed through the strongly refracting medium of the 
 powerful mind to which we owe the Fourth Gospel. We 
 may learn from Strauss that the causes which produce 
 myth and legend had not been wholly inoperative in 
 shaping the evangelical history. We must set Paul and 
 his gospel apart, as an efficient factor of the earliest 
 Christianity. We must note the existence of other forms 
 
364 X. GROWTH or THE critical spirit. 
 
 of apostolical interpretation of Christ, which were neither 
 Paul's nor capable of reconciliation with his. "We may- 
 see in the Apocalypse an outbreak of fiery Hebrew zeal, 
 goaded to vision by the cruelties of Nero, and find in 
 the Pastoral Epistles the traces of a Church slowly 
 organizing itself years after Paul has vanished in the 
 darkness. We may discern, if we will, with Baur, the 
 conflict between Paul and the Twelve, between Judaism 
 and Universalism, in the Apostolic Church, until at last 
 both were reconciled in a Catholicism in the shadow of 
 which the influence of the Apostle to the Gentiles paled, 
 till it was revived by Augustine. But if all these things 
 are so, what becomes of the one, minute, dogmatic faith 
 which all the books of the New Testament are alleged to 
 teach with accordant voice ? Must we not substitute for 
 this theory the conception of a Teacher, greater than any 
 or all of his disciples, whose words have come down to 
 us in records which rest upon a still earlier tradition, 
 and whom apostles have interpreted, each as he could, 
 each in accordance with the limitations of his own lesser 
 soul? This New Testament, in which every word, no 
 matter by whom written or when, is of equal inspiration 
 and equal authority still more, this New Testament of 
 Luther's, in which Paul interprets Christ, and the true 
 gospel is not the word of the Master but the comment 
 of the servant may be a literary miracle, but it is hardly 
 the New Testament whose component parts we can dis- 
 tinguish, and whose history we can trace. 
 
 There are two elements of Hebrew history which have 
 been relied upon to give it a quite peculiar character, 
 as to each of which criticism has a word to say, miracle 
 and prophecy. The first shows the special interposition 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 365 
 
 of God in this particular line of human development; 
 the second binds together all parts of the dispensation 
 into an indissoluble whole. Of miracle, I shall have 
 more to say in connection with another part of my subject: 
 the lesson which criticism teaches in regard to it is, that 
 the allegation of marvels is not confined to the Jewish 
 history ; that they form part of the furniture, so to speak, 
 of all religion in a particular stage of development ; that, 
 given a certain habit of thought, a certain urgency of 
 spiritual crisis, miracle is as sure to make its appearance 
 as hysterical excitement to accompany emotional fana- 
 ticism, Cybelic or Bacchic, Catholic or Evangelical. It 
 is much more a form of popular belief than of conscious 
 imposture : it is the people's way of acknowledging the 
 presence of God, as the devout man of science recognizes 
 Him in inexorable law and unbroken order. So, again, 
 the controversy as to prophecy has gradually changed its 
 ground. It was once a question as to the fulfilment of 
 prediction : the doubt now is, whether predictions were 
 ever uttered. The prophet is no longer the mouthpiece 
 of divine vaticination as to the future : when Israel, who, 
 like every other ancient people, believed in prediction, 
 burned to know the mind of the Lord or to compel the 
 secret of what should be, it was not to the prophet that 
 he turned, but to the diviners, to the priests, to Urim and 
 Thummim, to the lot. The prophet is the teacher of 
 spiritual religion, the servant of Jehovah, who calls back 
 the people to their rightful allegiance, the rebuker of 
 sin in high places and low. He is profoundly persuaded 
 of the necessary connection of national prosperity with 
 national righteousness, and he does not hesitate to pro- 
 mise good things to a people that serve the Lord. He 
 
366 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 is the preacher of the ideal ; and the ideal lies always in 
 the future. The darker, the more hopeless, is Israel's 
 present fate, the clearer is the prophet's conviction that 
 a deliverer must come, who, by lifting the people to a 
 higher plane of faith and obedience, will end their misery 
 too. Mingled with this, especially in the later Isaiah, is 
 an ardent prevision of the part which Israel is destined 
 to play in the religious education of the world. But all 
 this is so far from answering to the ordinary idea of pre- 
 diction, consciously uttered, accurately fulfilled, capable 
 of being used as an evidence of Divine interposition, as to 
 belong to quite another order of thought. 
 
 The re-reading of Hebrew history which the higher 
 criticism thus compels, enormously increases the literary 
 and human interest of the Bible. It is true that the 
 mechanical ties and braces of type and antitype, predic- 
 tion and fulfilment, covenant of law and covenant of 
 grace, fall to pieces at its touch ; but they are more than 
 replaced by the living unity which it enables us to trace 
 through every successive age of Biblical development. 
 While the human element in Scripture and the history 
 which it records is thus brought into more vivid relief, 
 the divine remains, though possibly no longer clothed in 
 the forms with which the uncritical mind of the Eefor- 
 mation was familiar. The more decisively Israel finds 
 his place in ordinary history, the more singular that 
 place is discerned to be. Whatever criticism may have 
 to say as to the composition of the Gospels, it cannot 
 touch the charm of the Christ, or weaken the force of his 
 sweet reasonableness, or derogate from the victory of his 
 faith. And it is only when the words and incidents of 
 the Old Testament are released from the artificial neces- 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 367 
 
 sity of proving this or answering to that when, instead 
 of being fitted into their places as parts of a theological 
 system, they are allowed freedom of movement and the 
 grace of self-manifestation that we see the Hebrew 
 literature as it is, and for the first time fully appreciate 
 its marvellous religious depth and variety. These dim 
 patriarchal times, whose story the piety of a later age 
 tells with such an exquisite simplicity, so tender a grace : 
 the first struggles of the people escaping from Egypt for 
 a place in the world, and some fixed law, some stable 
 order : the slow advance of Israel to the conception, not 
 only of a single Euler, but of a moral government of the 
 world : the deep conviction of the prophets that the sal- 
 vation of the nation lay in allegiance to a righteous God, 
 and the persuasions, the complaints, the rebukes, the 
 warnings, the encouragements, which they addressed to a 
 people stiffnecked and only half convinced : the growth 
 of the legal and sacerdotal conception of religion, which 
 at last substituted the Eabbi for the Prophet, and enabled 
 the Scribe and the Pharisee to sit in Moses' seat : all 
 prepare the way for the splendid outburst of the pro- 
 phetic spirit which Israel was no longer able to compre- 
 hend, though it was welcomed by the world. But along 
 the line of this development, once more discerned in 
 its natural order, what free play of human emotion and 
 passion, what interfusion of God's life with man's, what 
 depth of reverent awe, what dizzy flights of aspiration, 
 what stern faithfulness to duty, what restoring agonies 
 of repentance ! These things, disengaged now from the 
 theological trammels which confined and disguised them, 
 show themselves in their real force and beauty. This 
 poor Semitic tribe, but one degree removed from the 
 
368 X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 
 
 Bedouin of the desert, no longer regarded as the mecha- 
 nical mouthpiece of Omnipotence, is revealed in its native 
 grandeur. We have religion, not now embodied in a 
 dogmatic system, but interwoven with human life, un- 
 ravelling its perplexities, inspiring its strength, sancti- 
 fying its sorrows, at once the law of its development 
 and the goal of its endeavour. 
 
 The theology of the Eeformation begins and ends with 
 the Bible. It disowns tradition, and accepts the testi- 
 mony of the Fathers only in so far as it accords with its 
 own interpretation of Scripture. But I have, finally, to 
 point out to you that the New Testament, as included 
 within the hard and fast line of the Canon, cannot be 
 placed at the fountain-head of Christian development and 
 treated as the sole source of sound doctrine. "We have 
 seen that it grew up side by side with the Church of at 
 least the first century and a half. It is true that the 
 same forces to some extent moulded both ; but, on the 
 one hand, many things conspire to prove that the New 
 Testament contains, not a complete record of the influ- 
 ences which were at work, but only such a selection 
 from them as the literary and religious sense of the third 
 century judged worthy of preservation ; while, on the 
 other, nothing can be plainer than that the literary activ- 
 ity of Paul gave him a larger place in the Canon than 
 in the contemporary Church. There was, first, a Church 
 without a New Testament ; next, a Church with a New 
 Testament in process of compilation, and existing in dif- 
 ferent forms in different hands. What are we to say, 
 then, of the relation to the New Testament of that Creed 
 of Nicsea in which in the year 325 the Church for the 
 first time formulated its faith? Can its doctrine be 
 
X. GROWTH OF THE CRITICAL SPIRIT. 369 
 
 extracted from Scripture by fair process of literal interpre- 
 tation ? Can we say, as a matter of history, that Scripture 
 was the sole source from which it was derived ? Can its 
 doctrine be shown to have been universally held through- 
 out the second and third centuries, and to have been 
 definitely drawn out in the fourth, only for the condem- 
 nation of Arian heresy ? I may seem to be here treading 
 upon delicate ground ; but I should be untrue to myself 
 and the theory which I am advocating, if I did not say 
 that I regard it as a clear result of criticism that the 
 history of Christian doctrine during the first ages is one 
 of gradual development, affected by the impact of forces 
 which were Greek as well as Jewish. I do not inquire 
 whether that development involves an approach to or a 
 retrogression from the truth: I only affirm that conti- 
 nuity is an active principle at all periods of the history 
 of religious thought, and that it is contrary to the plainest 
 evidence of fact to seek for finality even in the New 
 Testament. There was more of Plato, more of Philo, in 
 the Eeformers' creed than they knew, though the germs 
 which attained so luxuriant a growth in Patristic theo- 
 logy may have passed in the first instance through a 
 New Testament medium. Human thought is but a single 
 great sea, though with many sheltered bays and land- 
 locked inlets : it rises and falls with a universal tide, 
 and none of its waters can be completely or long severed 
 from the rest. 
 
 2b 
 
Lecture XI. 
 THE 
 
 J DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 
 
 Throughout the last Lecture I confined myself strictly 
 to the ground of Biblical criticism. I showed how a 
 more accurate appreciation of the character of ancient 
 literature, joined to a gradually accumulating knowledge 
 of antiquity, compelled us to look at the books of the 
 Bible in a fresh light ; to re-read their testimony, and to 
 substitute another principle of unity for that which had 
 been supposed to bind them together. But although the 
 first object of literary criticism, regarded as a method of 
 investigating truth, is to ascertain the original form and 
 true character of books, and to collect their direct or 
 incidental testimony to facts, a second and more radical 
 process of judgment is often involved in this; and even 
 when the record is plainest and most authentic, it may 
 be necessary, while still remaining on purely literary 
 ground, to form an estimate of its credibility. ]Now, 
 however, I have to speak of intellectual forces which 
 have been at work since the Eeformation, the character- 
 istic of which is to approach the Bible and religion gene- 
 
XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD. 371 
 
 rally with a priori criteria of credibility, and to claim an 
 absolute right of judging or moulding conceptions which 
 are undoubtedly Biblical. The result of the higher cri- 
 ticism, as a whole, is to declare that the history, the 
 structure, the religious constitution of the Bible, unfit 
 it to stand in the relation to human faith in which the 
 Eeformers placed it. But the tendencies of thought 
 which are now to occupy us take up an independent 
 attitude of criticism to Biblical statements and ideas; 
 and while they altogether reject some, demand that 
 others shall be modified, as a condition of being recog- 
 nized as certain constituents of knowledge. These may 
 be classed under two heads, philosophical and scientific : 
 the one being the result of modern ways of thinking, the 
 other of a knowledge of nature which has become a per- 
 manent possession of the race. Here, again, I must call 
 attention to the fact that these forces mutually act and 
 re-act, and that the distinction between them cannot 
 always be observed. 
 
 One important result of the Eeformation was the dis- 
 solution of that union between philosophy and theology 
 which had been effected by the Schoolmen. Up to the 
 sixteenth century, there had been, with trifling excep- 
 tions and those brand-marked as heretical but one 
 philosophy, as there was but one theology. I do not 
 mean that the Schoolmen were speculatively agreed 
 among themselves ; that there were not Nominalists and 
 Bealists, Scotists and Thomists ; but that opposition be- 
 tween philosophy and theology was a thing undreamed 
 of. The Church might look upon one form of speculation 
 as being more favourable to her claims than another, 
 but all speculators declared themselves the supporters of 
 
 2b2 
 
372 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 orthodox doctrine and the Church's obedient servants. 
 There were indeed subtle forms of philosophical as of 
 theological heresy beneath the surface. Arabian thinkers, 
 of whom Averrhoes may be taken as the representative, 
 had drunk strange draughts at the same fountain-head 
 of Greek thought as that at which the Schoolmen had 
 quenched their thirst; but as a rule philosophy was 
 orthodox, and orthodoxy willing to be thrown into phi- 
 losophical form. But the great re-awakening of European 
 thought, of which the Eeformation was one result, com- 
 pletely changed all this. Luther's rebellion was almost 
 as much against the Schoolmen and Aristotle as against 
 the Pope ; and although his followers,, as I have tried to 
 show, fell easily under the yoke of a scholasticism which 
 was identical in spirit, though not in form, with the old, 
 the impulse given to independent speculation was strong 
 and lasting. From that time to this, theology and phi- 
 losophy have pursued each its own way : rival powers, 
 often conscious of secret hostility, often seeking recon- 
 ciliation, but always, from the very fact of the separa- 
 tion, engaged in reciprocal criticism. Philosophy, laying 
 claim to universal intellectual jurisdiction, has sometimes 
 been willing to allow religion, upon certain fixed con- 
 ditions, a subordinate and limited place : religion has 
 anxiously gone about to find for herself a sure philoso- 
 phical basis : while, again, each has flouted the other, 
 each has claimed an undivided supremacy. The time of 
 complete and permanent reconciliation may come yet ; 
 but there are few signs of its approach, and the joint 
 history of philosophy and theology during the last three 
 centuries is one of independent life and often sundered 
 interests. 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 373 
 
 When we try to get behind these general statements, 
 we are met by the difficulty that modern European phi- 
 losophy can show no development in the direction of 
 fixed and widely-accepted results of speculation. The 
 continuity of thought is indeed not difficult to be traced : 
 Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, 
 Hegel between any one of these great thinkers and the 
 next in succession, the critic may discern not merely the 
 logical but often the actual link. Can we say as much, 
 now that a considerable part of educated Germany has 
 made the transition to Schopenhauer and to Hartmann ? 
 So in our own country we can establish a line of succes- 
 sion from Locke to Hume, from Hume to Spencer, with 
 many deviations of more or less importance, by the road 
 but who can say in what direction the development tends, 
 or to what obvious goal it makes its way ? Much more 
 it seems to an outside critic that the motion of philosophy 
 is rather in an orbit round a centre than in a direct line 
 towards a mark: old problems continually recur: not 
 even the solutions of them are always new : the pen- 
 dulum swings between opposite poles of thought : a sen- 
 sational philosophy now obtains, and now an intuitional : 
 a nation is idealist in one generation and sceptical in the 
 next. But whether there be any advance on the part of 
 philosophy towards absolute truth, or in what direction 
 that advance is being made, are not questions which we 
 have to answer now. What we are concerned with is the 
 relation of philosophy to theology. And here I fail to 
 trace such a parallel course between the philosophy and 
 the Christianity of the post-Beformation centuries, as 
 would indicate a progressive influence of one upon the 
 other. Minds naturally inclined to religion have justi- 
 
374 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 fied their adhesion to it on every kind of philosophical 
 principle. And, on the other hand, men in whom the 
 religious sense is only rudimentary, and who have rarely 
 felt the touch of divine awe upon their souls, never find 
 any difficulty in persuading themselves that true philo- 
 sophy leaves no place for faith. 
 
 If this were all, it would seem unnecessary to pursue 
 this part of the subject farther. But that it is not so, 
 will appear from the consideration that philosophy is not 
 only an attempt to comprehend all knowledge in an 
 intellectual unity, throughout which the same laws are 
 valid and every subordinate part falls into its proper 
 place, but also a method, an organon, which prescribes 
 modes of investigation and declares laws of thought. 
 And the work of philosophy, regarded in the latter light, 
 has made a sensible approach to completion, which is 
 recognized by all thoughtful men. Europe, since the 
 time when Descartes first applied himself to the solu- 
 tion of the philosophical problem, has made enormous 
 progress in the art of thinking. Nor do I now chiefly 
 allude to the publication of certain great books on 
 method, or the investigations which have been made 
 into the principles of logic : here, as elsewhere, practice 
 has to a large extent preceded theory. The problem of 
 walking has been solved by walking, not by anatomical 
 and mechanical disquisition ; and when the historian of 
 human thought is disposed to put Bacon at the head of 
 the development of modern science, he should remember 
 that, of the men who have actually made the discoveries 
 and thought out the laws, not one in a hundred has ever 
 read a line of his works. Philosophy and science, work- 
 ing now separately, now together, have painfully beaten 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 375 
 
 out a method for themselves, which success has con- 
 firmed, which failure has helped to correct; and the 
 result is, the formation of habits of thought, the laying 
 down of canons of investigation, which are, if I may so 
 speak, in the intellectual air, which are the common 
 inheritance of inquirers, to which it is no signal merit 
 to conform, but which it is absurd and disgraceful to 
 neglect. To place a general reliance on the faculties of 
 the human mind, to suffer, if possible, no unverified 
 assumptions, to bring the most ancient and most widely 
 accepted principles to the test of facts, to lay a broad basis 
 of observation for every induction, to test what seems 
 to be fresh truth by crucial experiment, to expect uni- 
 formity in the action of natural forces, are all rules which 
 cannot now be formulated without a sound of common- 
 place. But those who are best able to contrast the work- 
 ing of the modern with that of the mediaeval mind, will 
 also know best how large a part of the fresh ground 
 which humanity has won for itself since the Eeformation, 
 is covered by these homely maxims of common sense. 
 
 Philosophy has thus succeeded in bringing about, to 
 a large extent, a unification of method in the pursuit 
 of truth. Is theological truth to be considered as a 
 thing sui generis, and to be distinguished from every 
 other kind of intellectual possession which the mind 
 conceives itself entitled to call its own? Must it be 
 regarded as given, not attained, and, when given, to be 
 received without question and held exempt from criti- 
 cism ? Possibly the answer to these questions is, as I 
 have already indicated, more properly to be sought on 
 the ground of fact than of theory. Can any revelation 
 be produced which does not require for its acceptance the 
 
376 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 active exercise of human faculties, and in its structure 
 imperatively invite criticism? Still, as these matters 
 have been persistently argued in a purely a priori fashion, 
 two things may be noticed : first, that the highest claims 
 of divine authority have been made and defended by an 
 appeal to that very reason which it is their object to put 
 out of court ; and next, that the numerous attempts to 
 frame systems of religious evidence are really a settle- 
 ment of the matter in dispute in favour of philosophy. 
 When Lardner compiles proofs of the credibility of the 
 gospel history, when Samuel Clarke constructs a priori 
 demonstrations of the Christian verities, when Butler 
 attempts to show that the course and constitution of 
 nature present difficulties of the same kind as the scheme 
 of revelation, when Paley infers the existence of God 
 from the marks of design in creation, when Theodore 
 Parker hears the voice of God in the conscience and sees 
 the Divine lineaments mirrored in the soul they are all, 
 consciously or unconsciously, testifying to their belief 
 that religious, must be sought by the same methods and 
 tried by the same tests as other truth. The case of reli- 
 gious truth may indeed have elements peculiar to itself, 
 as mathematics and morals, belonging to different depart- 
 ments of human thought, have each their own criteria, 
 which differ in kind while they agree in principle. But 
 no truth can be quite passively received. Even faith 
 requires an antecedent mental process by which it feels 
 itself justified. 
 
 Undoubtedly, therefore, the influence of philosophy 
 has been steadily exerted in the direction of rationalism. 
 I use this much decried word, in what is at once its ety- 
 mological and its best sense, as meaning the application 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 377 
 
 to religious data of such criteria as human faculties 
 supply. There is indeed another and a bastard rational- 
 ism which has greatly prevailed, though not often in 
 very close connection with earnest philosophical thinking; 
 which, taking as its test common sense, or the ordinary 
 cause of things, or the light of nature, has rejected 
 as unworthy of belief all religious phenomena which 
 seemed to cut athwart or to transcend them. It is unfortu- 
 nately not possible to change an established nomenclature; 
 else, it seems to me, we should gain in clearness of per- 
 ception by calling this particular manifestation by the 
 name of naturalism. We might then be able to bring 
 together in one category, as allied facts, the criticism 
 of the English Deists, the crude and uncompromising 
 disbelief of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, and the 
 attempt of Paulus to explain away the supernatural 
 element in the Gospels. But philosophical rationalism, 
 as I understand it, is a nobler and a wider principle 
 than any of these. It admits whatever is involved in 
 the pre-eminence of the infinite Object of religious 
 thought over the finite powers by which it is sought 
 to be apprehended, and expects an element of mystery, 
 a region of inconceivableness. On the other hand, it 
 does not limit the cognitive powers of man to the reason, 
 either logical or practical, or to any faculty which deals 
 only with ideas that can be clearly apprehended and 
 facts that can be wholly grasped ; but allows a real value 
 to the straining of the imaginative intellect after the 
 Infinite and the Absolute; the aspiration of the soul 
 towards the eternal, the indwelling, the all-energizing 
 Life ; the revelation in the conscience of an ideal holiness. 
 In other words, against the overwhelming mass of Divine 
 
378 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 Being it sets the totality of human nature, and expects 
 that, if there be a God, He is one who will approach 
 man on every side and touch him at every point. This 
 rationalism, therefore, is so far from being antithetical to 
 revelation, as positively to look for it ; in the sense, that 
 is, not of a theological system reduced to form and order, 
 and enshrined in a book subject to time and chance, but 
 of a constant intercourse between God and the soul; 
 gleams of insight, quickenings of conscience, inner tides 
 of inspiration, all sweetening and strengthening graces, 
 which interfuse the human with the Divine, and are in 
 themselves the one sufficient proof of God. But at the 
 same time it keeps the citadel of human individuality. 
 A man can believe only that which has approved itself 
 to him by some inward process, the efficacy of which he 
 recognizes. Before he can even surrender his reason to 
 authority, there must be some antecedent examination of 
 its claims. And, on the other hand, to be thrilled by a 
 sudden sense of the charm of Christ, and so to offer him 
 the heart's allegiance, is as truly a rational process as to 
 read every word of Paley's Evidences, and to surrender 
 belief to the cogency of the reasoning. 
 
 There is one form in which the rational criterion is 
 applied which deserves special mention. Men still dis- 
 pute about the origin of moral ideas and analyze the 
 secret of obligation, but they do not differ as to the ideas 
 themselves. It is indeed a characteristic of the peculiar 
 scepticism of the day, that almost in proportion as it 
 loses hold of religious convictions, it clings to the supreme 
 obligation of the moral law ; while not only is there a 
 general agreement as to the contents of morality, but 
 such change as takes place in this respect is in the direc- 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 379 
 
 tion of admitted progress. As the race rises, so does its 
 conception of duty ; and with its conception of duty, its 
 thought of God. Man cannot permanently worship that 
 which is lower than his highest, inferior to his best. 
 The character of the Deity reflects the moral status of 
 the worshipper : cruel men believe in cruel divinities : 
 to the licentious, not even the courts of heaven are pure. 
 And therefore when, as constantly happens, old forms of 
 belief survive into a better time and claim the authority 
 of prescription, their accordance with the highest moral- 
 ity becomes a test which not only may, but must, be 
 applied to them. No evidence of authority can stand for 
 a moment against an awakened conscience. What a man 
 once clearly sees to be cruel, or revengeful, or unjust, he 
 cannot ascribe to God. There are, I know, innumerable 
 moral and intellectual subtleties in which he may take 
 refuge, in the hope of avoiding the antithesis which will 
 show itself only in one light. But this force of doctrinal 
 decay is _ always at work, and its efficacy is in proportion 
 to the clearness of men's moral perceptions, and the 
 degree in which they disengage themselves as an absolute 
 law. It produces theories of atonement which avoid the 
 naked substitution of the innocent for the guilty. It 
 draws pictures of future retribution in which the omni- 
 potent love of God is not baffled by the impenitent misery 
 of an eternal hell. 
 
 I have spoken of one kind of bastard rationalism; 
 there is another. "Whatever theologians, even of the 
 extreme Catholic type, may say, the application of reason 
 to religion lies in the nature of things : the only question 
 is as to the method and the degree. The vast folios of 
 the Fathers, the elaborate disquisitions of the Schoolmen, 
 
380 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 the massive and, minute systems of the Protestant dog- 
 matists, are all essentially rationalistic. There is no 
 mystery which they do not attempt to analyze, no reli- 
 gious fact too obscure to be made the subject of an 
 inference, no divine reality too sublime to be woven into 
 a system. If we may judge from the immemorial prac- 
 tice of Christendom, rationalism is the appropriate method 
 of building up vast and complicated edifices of belief: it 
 is out of place only when applied to the digging of 
 foundations. Employ reason as much as you will in 
 drawing inferences and establishing conclusions, but for 
 the sake of all that is holy never use it to examine an 
 assumption or to test a premiss ! And it is curious and 
 instructive to note how some of the last deliverances of 
 philosophy tend to the acknowledgment of mystery in 
 religion, and discourage the application of human facul- 
 ties to matters that are essentially above them, and limit 
 the province of formal logic to ideas that can be wholly 
 grasped, and bid men speak of divine realities "with 
 bated breath and whispered humbleness." In a sense 
 that is only too true, philosophy declares God to be the 
 Unknown and the Unknowable. We cannot shut up the 
 Divine Infinitude in a syllogism. When we make God's 
 attributes a link in a chain of reasoning, our argument 
 runs up into contradictions. All we can do is to catch a 
 glimpse of His Being and Perfectness, now on this side, 
 now on that ; and our attempts to combine them into a 
 whole end in a dazzling confusion, like that which strikes 
 us when we look at the sun, an excess of light that is 
 almost darkness. It matters little whether reason be 
 critical or only expository : there are some things which 
 are too great for it, and confound it. 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 381 
 
 I turn now to the second half of my subject. The 
 re-awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries was, as I have already stated, general : it left 
 no department of intellectual activity untouched : litera- 
 ture, religion, philosophy, natural science, each in suc- 
 cession felt its influence. But it followed from the fact 
 that the so-called ages of faith had passed in one long sleep 
 of indifference to the exact study of nature, that science 
 woke to life only when men had for some time been busy 
 in the regions of literary culture and philosophical specu- 
 lation. The Moors of Spain had, strange to say, proved 
 themselves the heirs of Hellenic science : astronomy and 
 geometry, favourite studies of the Greeks, they had pur- 
 sued further than their masters: they had invented the 
 numerals which make arithmetic easy : they had laid the 
 foundations of algebra, and made discoveries which are 
 still recorded in the nomenclature of chemistry. But I 
 cannot see that this manifestation of intellect holds any 
 natural place in the history of European development : 
 it was Eastern in its origin, its triumphs were recorded 
 in the obscurity of an Eastern tongue ; and although we 
 cannot altogether refuse it an influence upon Christian 
 thought, its chief interest is perhaps that which belongs 
 to a brilliant blossoming which has borne but little fruit. 
 These Moors did good work for science, but it has had 
 to be almost all done again: the martial and bigoted 
 Christianity which subdued them was too ignorant to 
 appropriate the results of their labours. 1 And Luther 
 
 1 Conf. Whewell : History of the Inductive Sciences, I. 259. "At 
 any rate, when these sciences (Mechanics, Hydrostatics, &c.) again 
 became progressive, Europe had to start where Europe had stopped. 
 There is no Arabian name which any one has thought of interposing 
 
382 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 belonged to a generation which lived but in the first 
 grey dawn of modern science. The world had just been 
 widened by the three great voyages : Columbus had dis- 
 covered America (1492), Yasco de Gama had doubled the 
 Cape (1498), Magellan had united their discoveries into 
 one by circumnavigating the earth (1522). Mark these 
 dates : the Confession of Augsburg belongs to 1530 : 
 theology was already putting on the form of finality 
 when natural science was but feeling, with the almost 
 aimless fingers of an infant, after the truth. I gravely 
 doubt whether Luther at all realized the meaning of 
 what was going on around him : I look upon him as too 
 much absorbed in the changeful fortunes of the Eeform, 
 and in his own personal struggles and temptations, to 
 note the attempts that were being made to read the uni- 
 verse with a scientific eye. 1 But it is a characteristic 
 fact that Melancthon was a firm believer in astrology, a 
 
 between Archimedes the ancient and Stevinus and Galileo the mo- 
 derns." 
 
 1 Luther seems to have stood absolutely outside the conception of 
 natural law. In three sermons on Angels which are to be found in his 
 Works, ed. Walch, X. 1233 et seq., he represents man as the object of 
 a perpetual contention between good and bad angels, to whose differing 
 disposition and opposed efforts are to be ascribed all the circumstances 
 of his fate. " Wenn er (der Teufel) nun die Seele also gefasset hat, 
 so greifet er nach dem Leibe auch : da schickt er Pestilenz, Hunger, 
 Kummer, Krieg, Mord, &c. Den Jammer richtet der Teufel alle an. 
 Dass nun einer ein Bern bricht, der andere ersauft, der dritte einen 
 Mord thut : wer richtet solches alles an? Memand denn der Teufel." 
 X. 1236. And again : "Also, sind die guten Engel stets um und bey 
 uns, dass sie uns helfen, dass wir bey der Wahrheit bleiben, unser Leib 
 und Leben, Weib, Kind, und was wir haben, vor dem Teufel behalten 
 mogen. Dass nun die ganze Welt nicht lichterlohe brennet, dass 
 nicht alle Stadte und Flecken auf einem Haufen liegen, ist alles der 
 lieben Engel Werk und Thun." X. 1241. 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 383 
 
 caster of horoscopes, a watcher of starry omens, and that 
 both he and Lnther put faith in strange monsters and 
 portentous appearances, quaintly interpreting them of the 
 fate of Popes and Monarchs. 1 Still there is one epoch- 
 making discovery in science which belongs to the age of 
 the Eeformation. In 1543, three years, that is, before 
 Luther's death, Copernicus published his work, De Revo- 
 lutionibus Orbium Ccelestium. Astronomy, the oldest of 
 the natural sciences, thus, though in an imperfect way, 
 put on the form which it has ever since retained. But 
 many years were still to elapse, and many bitter battles 
 
 1 In 1523, Luther and Melancthon jointly published a pamphlet 
 (Walch, XIX. 2403), illustrated with strange pictures, in exposition of 
 a multiform monster called the " Papstesel," which it was asserted had 
 been found dead in the Tiber in 1496, and of a monstrous calf, the 
 " Mb'nchkalb," which had been born near Freiburg in Meissen. They 
 seem to have given unsuspecting credence to these stories, and to have 
 expounded the alleged physical peculiarities of these monsters as indi- 
 cations of the will of God in regard to the Papacy. It is worth while 
 to note that these and similar follies of superstition were not approved 
 by all their contemporaries. George Wizel, who went back from 
 Lutheranism to the Church, though always striving to maintain a 
 mediating position, says, in a passage quoted by Dollinger, Eeformation, 
 I. 118 : "Dass es in Schlesien stark blitzt, ist denn dass ein Mirakel? 
 Der Nordwind tragt Dacher ab, eilt denn desswegen der Herr von 
 Himmel herab zum Gerichte 1 Man hat feurige Kohlen gesehen, die 
 Erde hat gebebt, der Dormer gekracht, die Blitze geleuchtet, eine sehr 
 dichte Wolke hat eine Stadt uberschattet, aber geschieht denn das 
 selten in der Welt? .... Oh ihr kostlichen Ausleger !" Nicholas 
 Ellenbog, a Benedictine monk, wrote a "Vituli monachilis Lutheri 
 confutatio pro monasticse vitse defensione," in which he makes the very 
 sensible remark : " Monstra, Naturfehler, Geschbpfe, die gegen den 
 gewohnliehen Lauf des Lebens mit etwas JNaturwidrigem behaftet 
 erzeugt worden, seien uberhaupt nicht im Stande fur die Zukunft 
 etwas vorherzusagen." Quoted by Janssen, " Geschichte des Deutsohen 
 Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters," II. 283. 
 
384 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 to be fought, before it could compel a general assent to 
 its conclusions. 
 
 We live in so full a sunlight of natural knowledge, as 
 often, I think, to fail to realize how modern a thing it is, 
 and how completely the whole framework of our dogma- 
 tic theology was built up before natural science was born. 
 Let me lay before you a few dates, which, if they do not 
 too much try your patience, will coalesce into the proof 
 of a very striking fact. It was in 1609 that Galileo 
 invented the telescope, which he used in the following 
 year for the discovery of Jupiter's moons: in 1616 that 
 he was condemned by the Inquisition for asserting the 
 motion of the earth. Kepler's three laws were pub- 
 lished by him, the first two in 1609, the third in 1617 : 
 in 1686, Newton laid his Principia before the Eoyal 
 Society. Since tEat turning-point in the history of men's 
 knowledge of the universe, enormous progress has been 
 made: mechanics, optics, mathematics, have put new 
 and continually more powerful instruments into the hands 
 of the astronomer, who now includes in the scope of his 
 science ages so long as to defy the imagination to realize 
 them, spaces so vast as to be described only by elaborate 
 devices of calculation. As astronomy obtained its priority 
 over other sciences from its connection with the primitive 
 art of navigation, so anatomy took precedence from the 
 necessities of medicine. Yesalius, the plates of whose 
 book, De Humani Corporis fabricd, are still among the 
 most beautiful of their kind, was Charles Y.'s physician. 
 He was on the right track, for he dissected tho human 
 body and reported only what he saw : but it was not till 
 1628 that Harvey publicly announced his capital disco- 
 very of the circulation of the blood. Men, however, had 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 385 
 
 long worked at both these sciences, beating out their great 
 principles in a way which the brilliant performance of 
 our own days tempts us to think clumsy and slow, before 
 some of those branches of knowledge which now attract 
 the largest attention had been cultivated at all. It was 
 in the latter half of the eighteenth century that modern 
 chemistry took its origin in the researches of Cavendish, 
 Priestley and Lavoisier into the composition of air and 
 water; but the Atomic theory, on which all its calculations 
 are made, was the work of a philosopher whose reverend 
 old age I well remember ; while its last achievement, the 
 Spectrum Analysis, which defines the physical constitu- 
 tion of sun and stars, is a triumph of yesterday. Again, 
 a little more than a hundred years ago, geology, 
 destined to succeed to astronomy as the science hated by 
 theologians, was slowly struggling to the birth, though 
 the principle of uniformity which now dominates it was 
 formulated by Sir Charles Lyell only a few years ago, 
 while the demonstration of the antiquity of man upon 
 the earth is of later date still. The first great name in 
 systematic botany is that of Linnaeus, whose works 
 appeared between 1731 and 1753, while the introduction 
 of a natural classification is due to the elder and younger 
 Jussieu, who belong to the latter half of the same century. 
 Electricity and magnetism, sciences which at the present 
 moment promise everything to" Iheir successful cultivators, 
 may be traced back to the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century; but the great names and great discoveries 
 which illustrate them are all recent. And it is cha- 
 racteristic of the latest scientific activity, that sciences 
 seem more and more to run into one another and coalesce; 
 that one law is seen to prevail through many regions of 
 
 2c 
 
386 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 thought ; that forces are discerned to be interchangeable 
 and guessed to be ultimately identical. The theory that 
 heat is only a mode of motion has been proved by the 
 actual determination of its mechanical equivalent: me- 
 chanical force is every day converted into electricity, 
 and electricity into light, or mechanical force again. So 
 in regard to the sciences of life, extending on one side 
 into the secret processes which physiology aims to track, 
 on the other to what were once conceived as the merely 
 formal classifications of natural history all are now 
 combined into a majestic unity by the theory of evolu- 
 tion. But Cuvier's is almost the first great name in the 
 annals of comparative anatomy ; and the " Origin of 
 Species," the Principia of our age, was not published 
 till 1859. 
 
 During the whole of this period, a change, at first 
 slow but afterwards rapid, has been taking place in men's 
 conceptions of the universe. For the most part it has 
 matured itself in entire independence of theological ideas. 
 It is true that at some points of the frontier between 
 religion and science skirmishes have been continually 
 going on : first astronomy, then geology, bore the brunt 
 of theological opposition : a post of honour which, until 
 theologians saw, or thought they saw, that they could 
 turn it to their own purposes, has last of all been occu- 
 pied by the theory of evolution. But this guerilla 
 warfare has attracted more attention than it deserved. 
 The main forces on either side have not been engaged, 
 nor has it been waged about the key of the position. 
 Men of science have calmly pursued the path of investi- 
 gation, leaving religion to accommodate itself as it best 
 could to the results of their search : divines, in the most 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 387 
 
 remarkable way, have repeated the old formulas, enforc- 
 ing the ancient view of the universe and God's relation 
 to it, as if science did not exist. The controversy as to 
 whether it was possible to reconcile the first chapter of 
 Genesis with the facts of geology, no one has greatly 
 cared about ; one explanation of the discrepancy has 
 succeeded another; but the religious people were not 
 in their hearts convinced that the facts of geology were 
 facts, while the scientific people were too certain of them 
 to care to look at the matter in another light. The 
 real difficulty is, that the scenery in the midst of which 
 the drama of religion is played if I may use such a 
 metaphor has been wholly changed. We live in a 
 widened world. The horizons of time and space are 
 indefinitely enlarged. Throughout the whole of the 
 universe, which thus opens upon us in inconceivable 
 vastness and complexity, obtain one law, one order. 
 When we take the Bible, the religious ideas of the Jews, 
 the Pauline exposition of the Gospel, the millennial 
 expectations of the early Church, out of the narrow 
 and half-known world of Augustine or of Luther, and 
 transport them into this fresh universe, will they fill 
 the same place, can we look upon them in the same 
 light ? Will the systems of doctrine which have been 
 elaborated from these materials tally any longer with the 
 world of ascertained fact? And if these questions be 
 answered, as they must be, in the negative, we are next 
 compelled to ask, Can we reconcile old faith with new 
 fact by dropping certain constituents of it, as merely 
 local and temporary ? Or is it unhappily necessary to 
 recommence the labour of faith, and to demand from 
 history, from philosophy, from nature, the religion which 
 
 2 c2 
 
388 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 we can no longer inherit from simpler and less self- 
 conscious ages ? 
 
 In thus endeavouring to define the situation, I am 
 conscious of having transcended the proper limits of my 
 subject. I have not to say yea or nay to this crucial 
 question, but only to point out, with such clearness and 
 completeness as I can, the extent of the divergence 
 between the doctrine of the Eeformation and the science 
 of to-day. And, first, let me indicate how much of a 
 theological kind is involved in the change from the geo- 
 centric to the heliocentric system, and the remarkable 
 developments which have since taken place in stellar 
 astronomy. I will not trouble you with the repetition 
 of quite familiar facts : the difficulty is not to apprehend 
 them with the mind, but to give life and meaning to 
 them by the imagination. They all tend one way : to 
 enlarge the universe and to lessen man. This earth, 
 from being the centre of created things, with its sun to 
 rule by day, its moon and stars to rule by night, has 
 dwindled to the tiniest atom of star-dust, a mere lumi- 
 nous point in a milky-way of worlds. "We find ourselves, 
 even within the limits of our own narrow system, in 
 presence of secular changes which look forward and back 
 over almost inconceivable areas of time. From day to 
 day we watch, with such precision as an existence which 
 is by comparison but momentary permits, a universe in 
 perpetual process of development and decay : nebulas 
 slowly coalescing into suns, suns slowly " paling their 
 ineffectual fires." But the whole scale is so vast as to 
 convict all cosmogonies of childish presumption, and to 
 take from us any clear conception of end or beginning. 
 It seems to me that the attempt to conceive God becomes 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 389 
 
 more trying to the imagination in proportion as the uni- 
 verse widens, than which He is wider, as the grandeur 
 grows, than which He must be grander. We are, com- 
 paratively speaking, almost on a level with the tribal 
 Jehovah who brought the Hebrews out of Egypt: we 
 are still not hopelessly below the God who hung with 
 shining lamps the solid firmament that stretches above 
 the earth : but how shall we rise to the thought of Him 
 who is the Lord of innumerable worlds, the Euler of the 
 boundless spaces, the Master of the eternal years ? I 
 may be told here that moral and material greatness are 
 incommensurable quantities ; that the moral law affected 
 Kant with as much wonder and admiration as the starry 
 order ; and that the possession of a spiritual nature, how- 
 ever insignificant his physical frame, makes man free of 
 the spiritual universe. True ; but is this pin-point of 
 earth the only spot of the universe upon which reasonable 
 life exists, on which it is possible to praise and to pray, 
 to sin and to aspire ? From the very nature of the case, 
 this question can never receive categorical reply ; but I 
 confess that it seems to me a quite inconceivable thing, 
 upon any hypothesis, theistic or atheistic, that only a 
 millionth part of the universe should be instinct with 
 the fire of reason, and all the rest mere cold, dead matter. 
 Did, then, God, and such a God as the all of things 
 proves He must be, die for us ? I say it with the deepest 
 respect for the religious feelings of others, but I cannot 
 but think that the whole system of atonement of which 
 Anselm is the author, shrivels into inanity amid the light, 
 the space, the silence of the stellar worlds. 
 
 To call in our speculation to narrower limits, I have 
 already remarked that the various attempts to reconcile 
 
390 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 the cosmogony of the first chapters of Genesis with the 
 ascertained facts of geology are of no real interest. They 
 vary from year to year, and are satisfactory to few bnt 
 their own inventors. On the one hand, the geologist 
 observes that his own science affords the standard in 
 conformity with which the Biblical narrative is sought 
 to be interpreted ; on the other, the literary critic claims 
 the controversy as his own, and traces up the legend to 
 a Chaldean or Accadian antiquity with which Moses had 
 indisputably nothing to do. But the date at which man 
 appeared upon the earth is a matter for purely scientific 
 determination, and it can be fixed, at all events nega- 
 tively, in a way for which the poor six thousand years of 
 Biblical chronology altogether fail to provide. We are 
 carried, as I have already shown, far back into a civilized 
 antiquity by the newly-deciphered records of Egypt and 
 Babylonia. The certain inferences which may be drawn 
 from the history and structure of language reveal to us a 
 period beyond written record, at which the ancestors of 
 almost all the peoples of modern Europe lived in Northern 
 India, already in possession of the arts of settled life. 
 At this point geology takes up the story, introducing u& 
 to the tribes who lived in Irish crannoges, who built the 
 Swiss lake dwellings, the refuse of whose food is heaped 
 up in the kitchenmiddens of the Baltic until we make 
 our slow way backward to the men who chipped the flint 
 instruments of the valleys of the Somme and the Ouse, 
 at a time when England was not yet an island, and the 
 rhinoceros and the elephant roamed over her plains and 
 left their bones in her caves. And though now in a 
 world strangely different in outward aspect from that in 
 which we live, we are still on distinctly human ground. 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 391 
 
 Man, in full possession of his characteristic faculties, is 
 fighting the battle of his race against nature. It is in 
 virtue of brains that he is surviving. He uses tools, he 
 builds, he cultivates. And if the pathetic record of the 
 burial cave of Aurignac 1 may be trusted, he has already- 
 some dim outlook towards a life to come. 
 
 There is, however, one scientific principle of the greatest 
 importance which underlies and justifies the projection 
 of the reason and imagination over vast areas of space 
 and time. It is trust in the uniformity and universality 
 of law. A law of nature once established, we assume, 
 until cause be shown to the contrary, that it is valid in 
 the most distant star as on the earth's surface, a million 
 years ago as now. And this is not so much an abstract 
 principle as a practical confidence, slowly built up out of 
 long experience of investigation. We can go back to a 
 time when even among inquirers into nature a certain 
 expectation of miracle prevailed, such as now exists in full 
 force among the pilgrims to Lourdes or La Salette. But 
 little by little, as more rigorous methods of research were 
 adopted and accumulating scientific experience became 
 more accurate, this expectation faded, and a quite con- 
 trary one took its place. Whatever record there might 
 be of miracle in past times or in other circumstances, 
 the investigator encountered none under his own scalpel 
 or in the field of his own microscope, until at last it grew 
 to be a silent assumption, underlying his whole method, 
 that none would be encountered. It would be difficult 
 to say into what force of universal cogency this has 
 developed under the stimulus of the scientific activity of 
 
 1 Lyell : Antiquity of Man, p. 193. 
 
392 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 the last century. The invariability of law is the very 
 atmosphere which the investigator breathes. He places 
 a daily reliance upon it, and is not disappointed. It 
 is the tacit condition on which he makes all his predic- 
 tions, and for whatever other reason they fail, it is never 
 for this. Philosophically speaking, believers in God can- 
 not prove the impossibility of miracle : He can always, 
 by an arbitrary exercise of will, interfere with the ope- 
 ration of His own laws. But every day adds to the 
 already overwhelming accumulation of evidence that He 
 never does. The controversy may still be conducted on 
 a priori ground, so far as it is conducted at all, but a 
 body of habitual opinion is being formed which takes no 
 heed of it. The God of a scientific world must be con- 
 ceived of as one who is absolutely faithful to His own 
 methods, and who permits those methods to be scrutinized 
 by men. 
 
 A new element has been introduced into the contro- 
 versy between old modes of belief and new scientific 
 ideas by the doctrine of evolution, which, first formulated 
 in Darwin's " Origin of Species" twenty-four years ago, 
 has so rapidly gained acceptance. The whole cycle of 
 ideas put forward in that celebrated book were presented 
 at first as one of those hypotheses in which the scientific 
 imagination seeks to anticipate the results of minute 
 inquiry, and which investigation may either confirm or 
 modify or reject. But with quite unexampled rapidity 
 the idea of evolution has established itself, not only in 
 biology, but in almost every other department of human 
 thought. What was a few years ago a daring supposition 
 in one branch of investigation, has risen to the dignity 
 of a general method : it is a doctrine of slow and minute 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 393 
 
 changes, each brought about by natural forces, each sur- 
 viving and perpetuating itself in proportion as it is adapted 
 to the environment of the organism in which it takes 
 place. In biology, we call it the struggle for existence 
 and the survival of the fittest: in geology, it reveals 
 itself as the theory which abolishes cataclysms in favour 
 of the constant operation of ordinary forces through long 
 periods of time : in history, it seeks to explain change 
 and growth, by tracing each successive state to its origin 
 in that which preceded it : in morals, it educes the con- 
 science of a civilized age from the gregarious instincts 
 of savage men, or the apes from which they grew. 
 Whether, itself developed into a world philosophy, the 
 theory of evolution will account for everything, as its 
 devotees claim for it, may be gravely doubted : to trace 
 man back from the ape to the ascidian, from the ascidian 
 to I know not what more primitive germ to discern the 
 potentiality of all this various world in the original fire- 
 cloud is still much more a brilliant escapade of the 
 imagination than a sober feat of reason. The geologist, 
 the biologist, the physicist, cannot yet agree upon the 
 number of millions of years required for such an evolu- 
 tionary process ; nor are the philosophical difficulties in 
 the way by any means wholly overcome. But the fact 
 remains, that if evolution will not account for everything, 
 it indisputably explains much ; that it can never again 
 be left out of their reckoning, not only by biologists, but 
 by historians, by moralists, by theologians ; and that at 
 almost every point it has opened up new questions as to 
 God's relation to the world, and man's place in it, which 
 imperatively ask reply. 
 
 For if the idea of evolution is to be accepted, we have 
 
394 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 done with that of special creation. No doubt the former is 
 much more conceivable than the latter, and therefore fits 
 more easily into a scientific statement : while, again, it 
 is obvious that what is really involved is not the abolition 
 of Divine action upon matter, but a change in the method 
 of its operation. No form in which the doctrine of evo- 
 lution can be put dispenses with a primum mobile : there 
 must be some force at work to produce the infinitesimal 
 variations on which so much depends, and some general 
 law by which the conjoint survival of the fittest tends in 
 a given direction. Why but for this should ape rise out 
 of ascidian, and man out of ape, the living all of things, 
 lifting itself, as it were, to a higher level, tending to 
 some unseen goal ? But the conception of Divine action 
 reconcilable with this process must be one of two : either 
 God is the great Mechanician who, having started the 
 complex contrivance, leaves it to work out its end accord- 
 ing to pre-arranged and unchangeable law, or He is the 
 Immanent Life, the All-energizing Force, sustaining, 
 vivifying, developing all things in accordance with the 
 necessities of His own nature. Each of these suppo- 
 sitions will serve to reconcile evolution with theism, 
 though neither, I fear, will fit in with ordinary notions 
 of providence and piety. And it is curious to note how 
 in connection with the new doctrine have come up again 
 the old difficulties as to the origin of evil and the preva- 
 lence of pain in the world. This struggle for existence, 
 in which life and the possibilities of life are so prodigally 
 wasted : this charnel-house of nature, in which the vari- 
 ous tribes of animate things, preying on one another, 
 slay and are slain continually : this upward progress, 
 the wheels of whose car of Juggernauth pass over the 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 395 
 
 bodies of countless innocent victims have taken pos- 
 session of the imaginations of men, and questions long 
 silent are again asked as to their reconcilability with 
 the omnipotence and perfect goodness of God. It is not 
 for me now to indicate even in the briefest way a possible 
 line of answer. I have only to note the existence of 
 currents of thought against which accepted theological 
 ideas will have to defend themselves or to suffer modifi- 
 cation. 
 
 Closely connected with the idea of evolution is the 
 doctrine of heredity. Every generation is implicitly 
 contained in all those which have preceded it. Did we 
 know them accurately, we might predict it Our descent 
 and our environment of these two factors we are com- 
 posed, and they account for all that is in us. This is 
 an extreme statement of the case, and one which I am 
 myself by no means disposed to adopt ; but it represents 
 a tone of thought which is rapidly gathering strength 
 and receiving wider application. On the ground of 
 observed fact, not on that of metaphysical reasoning, it 
 is becoming harder to find a place for free-will in the 
 constitution of man ; while, even if its existence be still 
 contended for, the area of its action must be indefinitely 
 lessened. And so the doctrine of evolution involves a 
 kind of natural Augustinianism. What the old divines 
 called predestination, re-appears as a net of natural neces- 
 sities, closing round the will on every side and preventing 
 its free action. Our fate has been largely settled for us, 
 if not in the eternal counsels before time was, yet by 
 the generations which have gone before, and the circum- 
 stances in which we find ourselves. We thought that 
 we were men wielding the divine prerogative of will J 
 
396 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 but on this theory we are only physical phenomena, as 
 calculable as any other ; the subject of statistics, the 
 material of averages. The problem of humanity is only a 
 little more complicated and difficult than that of meteor- 
 ology: patience, accumulated observation, a fresh cal- 
 culus, will yet solve both. 
 
 In one particular, the theory of evolution lays hold of 
 certain undisputed facts of human character which are the 
 natural basis of theological doctrine, and gives them a 
 quite new interpretation. "Whence this strange inter- 
 mingling of evil with good in man? Whence these 
 brutal passions, this selfish indifference to suffering, this 
 cool malignity of purpose, which are the dark threads of 
 the chequered web of life ? Whence this evil that we 
 would not, rising up within us to overcome the good that 
 we would ? Christian theology has accounted for these 
 things on the theory of a fall from a primaeval state of 
 innocence, the result of which has been the transmission 
 of a vitiated nature from the first father to all his children. 
 The historical foundation of this doctrine has been de- 
 stroyed by the recognition of the mythical character of 
 the narrative in Genesis ; but certain facts still remain 
 the existence of the passions and tendencies, and their 
 hereditary transmission in accumulating or diminishing 
 strength which every theory of human nature must take 
 into account. What if for a fall, evolution substitutes a 
 rise of man ? What if the evil which is in us, and some- 
 times masters us, be the brute which is slowly dying out 
 of our nature ? These are secular changes, always gradual 
 in their operation, accelerated now, and now retarded by 
 various causes, within and outside of us. But it would 
 at once fall in with the general scope of evolution, and 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 397 
 
 answer to facts which neither religion nor philosophy can 
 affect to ignore, to suppose that some survival of the 
 fittest was taking place upon moral ground also; that 
 the passions natural to a powerful animal were giving 
 place to the affections, and passing under the control 
 characteristic of civilized man ; that we were losing the 
 scars, outgrowing the mutilations, which we received in 
 the long, hard struggle with nature ; that new capacities 
 were coming into play, a larger aim opening out before 
 us ; and that the traces we yet retain of that lower com- 
 panionship out of which we have emerged, are themselves 
 the guarantee of the upper air and the ampler life which 
 remain for us in the future. 
 
 But a question of questions, which will have to be 
 answered if religion is to come to terms with the idea of 
 evolution, is as to the area to which that idea and others 
 cognate with it legitimately apply. The theory has had 
 its origin in the study of physical nature: it is the 
 contribution which the scientific research of our day, 
 gathering up its light into one focus, makes to general 
 philosophy. On the one side, the tendency of thought 
 fostered by Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises has been 
 to expect nature to reveal the secret of God; on the 
 other, the men of natural science, flushed with the delight 
 of this brilliant generalization, have demanded that it 
 shall be rigorously applied in every department of human 
 thought. Everywhere, they say, we are in the grip of 
 law : there is nothing in our life which is not accounted 
 for by our inheritance and our environment: if God 
 exists, He neither can nor will break in sunder the bonds 
 of fate which tie us down : we cannot feel the touch of 
 His hand upon our personal life, and the best that is left 
 
398 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 
 
 to us is the faith that somehow and in a general way, in 
 which we too shall have our share, " good will be the 
 final goal of ill." And the only escape from this spiritual 
 imprisonment lies in keeping open a region of free and 
 intimate intercourse between God and the human soul. 
 There is the less difficulty in this, as the existence of 
 such a region, the reality of such an intercourse, are 
 precisely the message which religious men in all ages 
 bring, out of the depths of their own experience, to 
 those who have less insight than themselves. This they 
 announce as "the fountain-light of all their day, the 
 master-light of all their seeing," and not their light only, 
 but their strength and their consolation. And as this 
 experience involves a series of facts as real and as little 
 to be pushed aside as the embryonic changes and the 
 aborted organs which are rightly regarded as so full of 
 meaning, Eeligion yet retains the right of reserving to 
 herself a space in which spirit may meet with spirit, on 
 the one side in impulse and support, on the other in 
 aspiration and self-surrender. Perhaps we have been 
 too hasty in expecting to see the character of a perfect 
 God reflected in the mirror of a material world. We 
 ought to have recollected that only soul answers to soul. 
 But I should commit a grave error if I left upon your 
 minds the impression that the result of modern scientific 
 inquiry was only to put new difficulties in the way of 
 religion. I do not know that many of the ideas of which 
 I have spoken are harder to deal with religiously than 
 others whose place they are taking : all that my argu- 
 ment is designed to show is, that they cannot be dealt 
 with in precisely the same way, and therefore necessitate 
 some modification of theological conceptions. On the 
 
AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. 399 
 
 other hand, there are results of research which seem to 
 me to assist a religious conception of the universe. From 
 one point of view, the general effect of the newest science 
 may be described as simplification. Chemistry reads us 
 a list of some sixty-six primitive substances out of which 
 everything is built up, and may yet, as new instruments 
 for compelling the secrets of nature are devised, add to 
 the number. At the same time, she is also beginning to 
 guess, with that instinctive apprehension of the truth 
 which often precedes discovery, that all these may be but 
 one and the same primitive stuff variously compounded, 
 and that when we have said matter we have said all. So, 
 in like manner, one of the chief triumphs of the newest 
 time is the convertibility of force ; and it is a permissible 
 speculation, to which many facts point, that one force, in 
 different forms, moves and sustains the universe. But 
 what is matter? This dull, dead stuff of the world, 
 which makes its impression upon every sense, which was 
 once taken as the quite comprehensible antithesis of in- 
 comprehensible spirit, turns out to be the most fathomless 
 of mysteries, the abyss which transcendental physicists 
 explore, finding always a deeper depth below. Idealists 
 argue, with a plausibility not easy to refute, that it does 
 not exist at all : materialists refine its coarser character- 
 istics away, till it exhibits itself as one phase of a reality 
 which on the other side is known as spirit. But can the 
 distinction between force and matter be kept up, or must 
 not even this simple duality be resolved into a unity 
 which is simpler still? We may say, with Boscovich, 
 that what we call atoms are only centres at which forces 
 manifest themselves; and the more we think out the 
 conception into its details, the more will it appear that 
 
400 XI. DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD. 
 
 the hypothesis of matter is superfluous, aud its existence 
 difficult to prove. But if, thus resolving our knowledge 
 into its simplest elements, we find ourselves surrounded 
 by an impenetrable mystery, and in presence of a single 
 all-energizing force, what shall prevent us from uttering 
 the name of God, the Incomprehensible, the One ? The 
 transition from force to person, from law to will, is one 
 for which, I know only too well, science builds no bridge; 
 but the wings of Faith are not yet clipped, and she flies 
 lightly over the abyss. 
 
Lecture XII. 
 
 CONCLUSION, 
 
 My task is now drawing to a close : all that I have 
 yet to do is to re-state the general drift of my argument, 
 and to give it what application I can to existing facts. 
 My thesis is briefly this. The Eeformation was the 
 manifestation upon religious ground of that great re- ) 
 awakening of intellectual life in Europe which in its < 
 first phase we call the Eevival of Letters. In Italy, 
 where that re-awakening began, it confined itself almost 
 exclusively to literature and to art : it was in France, in 
 England, in Switzerland, and especially in Germany, that 
 it touched and transformed religion. There were reasons 
 enough for this. One result of the services which Chris- 
 tianity had rendered to civilization, when the fabric of 
 the Eoman empire broke up under the incursions of the 
 barbarians, was, that life throughout the middle ages 
 was organized upon an ecclesiastical model ; that litera- 
 ture, art, philosophy, education, were all in the hands 
 and bound to the service of the Church. But, in addi- 
 tion to this, the practical abuses of the Papal system 
 were many and confessed. The most shameful license 
 was a matter of every-day occurrence among the clergy. 
 
 2d 
 
402 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 Popes competed with secular potentates in unscrupulous 
 worldliness, and surpassed them in infamy. The mal- 
 administration of the sacramental system had sapped the 
 foundations of public and private morality. The exactions 
 of the Italian hierarchy at once drained the Northern 
 nations dry, and undermined their allegiance to Eome. 
 The cry for reform was universal : it had been demanded 
 by churchmen, urged on by princes, made the theme of 
 bitter satire and biting pasquinade, attempted by general 
 councils, temporarily effected by monastic orders. But 
 the wound, however staunched in part and for a time, 
 always broke out afresh, and at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century was a running sore which threatened 
 the entire corruption of the Church. What Luther, 
 Zwingli, Calvin did, we know: I have pointed out the 
 peculiar efficacy of the means they used to break up the 
 mediaeval system, and have described that which they 
 established in its place. Indirectly, the separation from 
 the Latin Church of the communions which they founded 
 led to the amendment of its worst practical abuses : with 
 Paul IV. began a new line of Popes, austere, devout, 
 zealous, almost fanatic ; and the Council of Trent marks 
 the first stage of the Counter Eeformation. 
 
 But Luther had been a monk, and was always a theo- 
 logian ; while the Eevival of Letters was essentially an 
 upheaval of the lay mind. I have insisted upon the 
 distinction between the Italian and the German human- 
 ists : the one, throwing themselves with frank sympathy 
 into the naturalness of classical life and thought; the 
 other, never shaking off the moral restraints of religion, 
 and anxious to bind the new learning to the service of 
 Christianity. But when the Italian revival had spent 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 403 
 
 itself in the production of scholars, who could express 
 the emptiest platitudes in the most Ciceronian Latinity, 
 the movement of thought, of which it was the fountain- 
 head, took a new direction and spread itself out over a 
 wider field. Men of a profound and laborious erudition 
 completed the task of reconquering the mind of antiquity. 
 The scientific study of nature, and the speculations of a 
 philosophy which was careless of ecclesiastical restraint, 
 divided between them the keenest intellects of Europe. 
 The result is, that in everydepartment of knowledge signal 
 victories have been won.VPhilosophy, whatever the paucity 
 of its positive results, has improved and developed the art 
 of thinking. '/We look out upon a widened universe with 
 more accurate eyes. Our knowledge of antiquity has been 
 indefinitely increased. An art of criticism has grown up 
 which enables us to use with confidence the materials 
 bequeathed to us by primitive tradition and ancient 
 learning. Nor does this triumphant progress of science 
 as yet show any signs of arrest or retardation. The last 
 three hundred years are distinguished from all that went 
 before, in the fact that the increase of knowledge which 
 they have brought with them is such as is not subject 
 to reversal. Except in the sense in which complete is 
 opposed to partial truth, there is no fear lest the twen- 
 tieth century should contradict the nineteenth. It is 
 impossible to conceive of our present achievements being 
 neglected and forgotten, as Greek literature and science 
 were neglected and forgotten in the middle ages. Our 
 children will not have to go back and try for a fresh 
 method, as Descartes and Spinoza had to break with the 
 philosophical traditions of the Schoolmen. 
 
 But, in the mean time, what has been the history of 
 
 2d2 
 
404 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 theology? While scholarship was still tentative, when' 
 the beginnings of natural science were hardly made, 
 before philosophy had taken its first fresh flight, when 
 antiquity was yet wholly misunderstood, the belief of 
 the Eeformation was crystallized into creeds which are 
 still held to be binding on the great Protestant Churches. 
 Nor was this all: in Germany, in Switzerland, in Holland, 
 these creeds themselves became the nucleus of vast and 
 elaborate systems of theology, which in spirit, in method, 
 in all but name, were a revived scholasticism. But since 
 then, how much has happened ! The science of Biblical 
 criticism has been born, and has grown to a vigorous 
 maturity ; a correct text of the New Testament has been 
 formed ; a more accurate philology has put us into fresh 
 relations to the original languages of Scripture ; the 
 Biblical history has been re-read. The general results 
 of research have pressed upon theology with modifying 
 effect ; the history of man upon earth can no longer be 
 compressed within the limits of scriptural chronology ; 
 Israel's place in the world is not what he was himself 
 wont to think it; the patriarchal stories fall into the 
 general category of primaeval history, and undergo the 
 same dissolvent analysis. The miracles which are so 
 closely interwoven with the sacred story, look strange and 
 out of place in a world where law is universal and invari- 
 able. The conception of nature, which is the inspiration of 
 recent research, and seems to hold all the promise of the 
 future, demands, if it is to be brought into conformity 
 with religion, some modification of the traditional con- 
 ception of nature's God. In brief, we are now called 
 upon to make the ancient affirmations of the Churches, 
 in an age when the evidence on which they were based 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 405 
 
 has either changed or must be estimated by other canons 
 of judgment. We cannot read the Bible, or interpret 
 history, or look out upon nature, as the Eeformers did. 
 If we are to accept their creeds at all, it must be either 
 by boldly putting our own meaning upon their phrases, 
 or by resolutely shutting our eyes to the best knowledge 
 of our time. 
 
 There is a sense in which the issue between progress 
 and stagnation in theology may be said to be decided 
 by the Eeformation itself. For it was a revolt against 
 finality, and it would be strange if finality were to be its ! 
 result. If, as I have tried to prove, it was the first effect ' 
 of the intellectual movement which is still, in full opera- 
 tion, why should it withdraw itself from its influence 
 in its latest and most important stage ? I cannot help 
 thinking that Luther, could he live now, would breathe 
 the common air of the intellectual world, and answer to 
 its inspiration as he did to that of his own time. About 
 the greatest minds there is an ever fresh receptiveness : 
 they stand close to the sources of truth, and desire no 
 better than to drink and be satisfied : it is a second and 
 weaker generation, accustomed j'urare in verba magistri, 
 who subject facts to creeds, and will not permit even God 
 to contradict His own servants. I know of course how 
 this argument is sought to be evaded : the Eeformation, 
 it may be said, though in appearance a forward, was 
 really a backward step : it was a recurrence, past an 
 intercalated period of corruption, to primitive purity of 
 belief and a standard which is independent of intellectual 
 progress. But this, after all, only begs the question. 
 If it was admissible for Luther to examine the inter- 
 pretation put by the Catholic Church upon the Bible and 
 
406 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 Christian antiquity, it is equally admissible for us to 
 examine Luther's. We are but following his example 
 in testing religious ideas by the surest knowledge of our 
 own day. What if it turns out that his work was only 
 half done, and could be no more than half done with the 
 materials at his command ? What if the Bible shows by 
 its history and structure that it is unfit to occupy that 
 seat of authority from which, in its favour, he displaced 
 the Church ? The truth is, that one Eef ormation always 
 carries in it the seed of another. There are two elements 
 in religion, the permanent and the transient, the divine 
 and the human a duality which rests upon the fact that 
 what is given by God can only be partially apprehended 
 by man. And it is necessary, in order that the perma- 
 nent should shine out in its pure and simple splendour, 
 that the transient should gradually drop away. 
 
 These facts and arguments, I submit, establish the 
 necessity of a new Eeformation of religion. In what way 
 are they met by those who deny that necessity ? With- 
 out some attempted reply to this question, my exposition 
 would be incomplete. 
 
 The Eoman Catholic Church goes behind the Eeforma- 
 tion, which she regards as a futile and criminal rebellion 
 against her authority. She claims to be the sole depo- 
 sitary of religious truth, which she has not only received 
 from the past at the hands of a practically infallible 
 tradition, but which she has the power and the right to 
 develope into fresh complexity and symmetry. At first 
 sight, then, it would seem that her system is not touched 
 by the intellectual forces which corrode the theology of 
 the Eeformation. And yet, if the Bible is to be carried 
 on the shoulders of the Church, instead of standing on its 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 407 
 
 own feet, the Church must be held responsible for the 
 use which is made of it and the inferences which are 
 drawn from it. To a certain extent, however, the literary 
 difficulties involved in the structure of the Bible are thus 
 evaded, and the Catholic replies to the assertion that the 
 Scriptures are not fitted to be a dogmatic authority, that 
 he does not want them to be, but looks for the exercise 
 of that function to the Church. But even so, the anta- 
 gonism between the ancient and the modern spirit not 
 only remains, but is made more bitter. It is not now a 
 religious system born at the re-awakening of the human 
 mind which is opposed to historical criticism, to new 
 speculation, to modern science, but one which was the 
 product of the middle ages, and bears upon it the stamp 
 of their childish ignorance, their gross superstition. It 
 is true that in some respects Eome has modified her atti- 
 tude of iron rigidity towards new knowledge. She has 
 found out that the heliocentric theory of our system is 
 consistent with orthodox belief. Father Sacchi and his 
 Bom an observatory are a curious comment upon Galileo's 
 dealings with the Inquisition. There are other natural 
 sciences which may be pursued, at least in their lower 
 branches, without injury to the faith ; while as to history, 
 Eome is always skilful in narrating and interpreting it 
 in her own way. But whatever real or apparent conces- 
 sions the principle of ecclesiastical authority may make, 
 it remains fundamentally at war with science. Here too 
 is a claim to absolute and final authority which is daily 
 establishing itself in men's minds, and which once recog- 
 nized can never be abandoned. From a proved fact, 
 from an established law, there is no appeal. Against 
 them can be pleaded no force of tradition, no claim of 
 
408 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 authority. For a time the gravity of the issue may be 
 conceded or evaded, but it must come out clear at last. 
 The infallible Church on one side, the forces of science 
 and reason on the other these are in the last resort 
 irreconcilable. If I may adapt to a new use the imagery 
 of the Apocalypse, there must be at last an intellectual 
 battle of Armageddon, in which either the Church or 
 science will win a decisive victory. 
 
 I have been accustomed to think that the Eoman 
 Catholic Church is the only communion familiarly known 
 to us which puts the principle of authority into a logical 
 shape. It excludes as far as possible the opposing prin- 
 ciple of reason, it openly bases the authority of the Bible 
 on its own, it declares that it possesses a living power of 
 determining dogma, and has not scrupled to exercise it. 
 With the position of the Church of England, which, if 
 we are to accept the joint witness of its Articles and its 
 actual historical development, seeks to blend into one the 
 authority of the Church and the authority of Scripture, 
 I am not directly concerned. So far as the faith of that 
 Church rests upon ecclesiastical authority, it can make 
 no concessions to science, and must ultimately come into 
 conflict with it ; so far as it rests upon Scripture, it is 
 open to the difficulties which are suggested by the lite- 
 rary structure of the Bible. I venture to think that there 
 are only three intelligible and those not equally intel- 
 ligible positions which it is possible to take up in regard 
 to the reception of religious truth. We may accept it at 
 the hands of a Church of whose infallible authority we 
 have previously convinced ourselves. We may deduce it 
 from Scripture, by a process of interpretation which we 
 believe to be divinely ordained to lead devoutly inquiring 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 409 
 
 minds into the truth. We may apply the faculties of 
 the mind and conscience to all sources of information 
 scripture, history, nature, our own constitution examin- 
 ing, sifting, comparing, in obedience to the canons of 
 scientific search. I believe that the third method is 
 implicitly contained in the other two, and that we are 
 therefore logically brought back to it as alone conclusive. 
 But whether this is so or not, the seat of authority is not 
 double but single. It must reside either in the Church, 
 or in the Bible, or in Eeason. You cannot ^plead the 
 first two of these conjointly against the third, j * 
 
 In any case, however, the position of the Church of 
 England must be that of ancient faith against new 
 thought. It recites in its services the three Creeds. 
 Its Liturgy draws a large part of its inspiration from 
 mediseval forms of devotion. The Articles are founded 
 upon the Confession of Augsburg. Nothing in its for- 
 mularies, except a prayer published now and then for a 
 special occasion, is more modern than the Caroline settle- 
 ment. Something has been dropped from the Prayer- 
 book since 1662, but nothing added to it. And it is not 
 too much to say, that however clergy and laity have been 
 affected by modern science and speculation, the set of 
 opinion in the Church is strongly against any change in 
 the formularies. There is, I believe, a Society for the 
 Eevision of the Prayer-book, but it conciliates little sup- 
 port and makes no progress. The outcry a few years ago 
 against the use of the Athanasian Creed appeared to be 
 both loud and deep, but the agitation for its disuse bore 
 little fruit. Not only is the Prayer-book firmly rooted 
 in the affections of churchmen so firmly rooted as not 
 merely to have become the indispensable expression of 
 
410 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 their religious emotions, but to have been almost identi- 
 fied with those emotions themselves but the men who 
 would reform it fear the beginnings of change, lest it 
 should take a direction the very opposite to their wishes. 
 Am I speaking too strongly, when I say that churchmen 
 would almost as soon consent to a project for revising 
 the Bible as the Prayer-book ? Both, it may be said, 
 are facts of religious and literary history which have 
 come down to us from an antiquity nearer or more 
 remote ; and what we have to do, if we find them out of 
 accord with present conviction, is not to change but to 
 interpret them. But the pressure is not the same in the 
 two cases. Few men are called upon to frame a theory 
 which will unite the whole of the Bible into accord with 
 itself and their own personal convictions, while, on the 
 other hand, the hunger of the soul is always able to choose 
 from its varied pastures abundant and fitting food. But 
 the Prayer-book prescribes the form of daily worship, and 
 any serious and devout spirit must come to some kind of 
 intellectual reconciliation with its thoughts and phrases. 
 And I suppose that this is what many laymen and some 
 clergymen, who are touched by the spirit of the newer 
 time, habitually do. They pour the new wine into the old 
 bottles, without waiting or greatly caring for any specific 
 result. They have many ways of satisfying themselves 
 ways which I shall not pause to criticise that whatever 
 evils may attend this course, do not outweigh its benefits. 
 I do not imagine that if they had the opportunity of 
 compiling the Prayer-book or enacting the Articles over 
 again, they would make them what they are ; and if so, 
 I am justified in inferring that they look forward to a 
 time at which the forms of belief and worship will receive 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 411 
 
 some accommodation to the necessities of modern know- 
 ledge. But they take no steps towards that end, and in 
 the mean time they put a meaning upon the formularies 
 satisfactory to themselves, considering that they have 
 done all that is necessary if in public and private expla- 
 nation they make their position clear to others. 
 
 I am here much more to state facts than to argue 
 about policies ; and I forbear to criticise the Broad-church 
 theory. Nor do I at all question the intellectual integrity 
 of those who thus take up a position in which I could 
 not myself stand, and with which I only imperfectly 
 sympathize. While, on the one hand, it is a maxim of 
 ecclesiastical law that lex orandi est lex credendi, and that 
 a man must be held bound by the doctrinal implications 
 of the prayers which he uses, I am ready to admit, on 
 the other, that a fixed form of prayer must always be 
 more or less in the nature of a compromise; that the 
 congregation has its rights as well as the officiating 
 minister; and still more, that in dealing with religion, 
 and especially with an historical religion, perfect scien- 
 tific accuracy of phrase is practically impossible. Even 
 when the process of change in religious conviction is 
 most rapidly and surely going on, it is fatal to emotion 
 to break with the past too abruptly, too completely. 
 Religion belongs to the conservative side of our nature ; 
 we pray best in familiar words; we are moved by old 
 associations ; the feeling of community counts for much : 
 no generous or tender soul could renounce without a 
 pang the fellowship of a great Church in full activity 
 of beneficence, much less sever itself from the petitions 
 and aspirations which were once upon the lips of the 
 Church that is at rest. Then, there is the feeling that 
 
412 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 God is only another name for the Ineffable and the In- 
 comprehensible ; that all our words to Him and about 
 Him do but painfully and clumsily hover around the 
 truth without ever settling upon it ; and that there must 
 be a certain poetic warmth and width of phrase in regard 
 to realities which transcend all scientific apprehension. 
 But while we give these considerations all the weight 
 that belongs to them, they surely, in face of the facts on 
 which I rely, form an argument for gradual and cautious 
 change, rather than for no change at all. If it be not 
 possible for religion to march side by side with science 
 with equal step, accepting every sure addition to know- 
 ledge as soon as it is made, and at once translating it 
 into the language of faith and aspiration, it is no reason 
 why she should lag three centuries behind her comrade, 
 and utterly refuse to try to lessen the interval. And 
 even were the policy of simple interpretation defensible 
 on other grounds, the experience of the last quarter of a 
 century, it seems to me, practically condemns it. Elo- 
 quent expositions of freedom and progress come and go, 
 but the formularies remain. In every cathedral and 
 church throughout the land they are repeated from day 
 to day, enforcing their authority more firmly on men's 
 minds, exercising their ancient and various charm, gather- 
 ing round themselves fresh associations to blend with the 
 old, identifying themselves more and more with the emo- 
 tions and affections which they express. These ingenious 
 explanations, which aim to show that in some mysterious 
 way the authors of the Creeds, the framers of the Articles, 
 the writers of the Prayers, anticipated the difficulties 
 and wants of centuries as remote as ours, are but as the 
 waves which now quietly lap, now angrily beat against 
 
XII. conclusion. 413 
 
 the steadfast crag, with no other result than that of 
 proving its magnificent immovability. We have had a 
 school of liberal theology in the Church of England more 
 than once, and notably in our own times. With what 
 result? Many noble books have been written: many 
 devoted and successful labourers have toiled in her vine- 
 yard : she has been kept faithful in her allegiance to the 
 sanctities of daily life. But it is also true that the breach 
 between the clergy and the most actively intelligent of 
 the laity has grown wider, that many sweet and strong 
 souls have declined or abandoned her service, and that 
 her formularies remain in all essential points what the 
 Eeformers made them. 
 
 But outside as well as within the Church of England 
 there is a great body of Evangelical opinion which is wont 
 to regard itself as in an especial way affiliated upon the 
 theology of the Eeformation. It is all directly or indi- 
 rectly of Genevese origin, being either a Calvinism with 
 its sharp edges rubbed off, or that milder form of faith 
 which Arminius developed in the school of Beza. The 
 Evangelicism of Dissent also has its written standards, 
 though not such as are used in worship : the creeds, like 
 an abridged Westminster Confession, which form the doc- 
 trinal clauses of Independent and Baptist trust-deeds, and, 
 in one well-known case, the Sermons published by John 
 Wesley. But it is curious for the student of dogmatic 
 theology to note how far short these statements of doc- 
 trine fall of the amplitude, the minuteness, the preci- 
 sion of the old confessions ; how distinctions which once 
 divided the Protestant world into hostile camps are now 
 passed over as unessential; how the word Evangelical 
 is made to cover more than one church and theories of 
 
414 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 Christianity which were once thought radically divergent. 
 As you may suppose, I am far from lamenting this 
 change: not only is it well that kindly sympathy and 
 sincere co-operation among Christians should be inde- 
 pendent of minute agreement, but theology, in my view, 
 becomes saner in proportion as it recognizes the fact that 
 its outlines cannot always be sharp, nor its distinctions 
 precisely stated. But it is just the Evangelical faith 
 which has shown itself least receptive of the influence of 
 the newer time. It is true to the spirit of the Eeforma- 
 tion in this, that it relies upon the letter of Scripture, 
 interpreting what it thinks to be the gospel after the 
 manner of Paul, and compelling all other Biblical voices 
 into harmony with that. So, not unnaturally, it will not 
 listen to the re-reading of the Old and New Testament 
 which the higher criticism asks for. To tell the whole 
 plain truth, it is not greatly in sympathy with learning, 
 or science, or speculation of any kind : to all of them it 
 opposes the simple gospel : it glories in the antithesis 
 between faith that is spiritual and knowledge that is 
 carnal. It is not indeed altogether uninfluenced by the 
 spirit of the age, though it withdraws itself from it as 
 much as it can, reading its own literature, absorbed in 
 its own labours, content with its own life ; but it yields 
 nothing to new knowledge that it can by any artifice 
 withhold, and when forced to give ground, gives it only 
 slowly and grudgingly. It denies the validity of disco- 
 veries till long after all the rest of the world has been 
 convinced ; it exaggerates the differences of scientific 
 men, making them an excuse for being altogether deaf 
 to the voice of science ; it reads history after a fashion of 
 its own, and Scripture as if criticism did not exist. I 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 415 
 
 do not know what comfort men of this school can have 
 in the future; for they must see that they are driven 
 back more and more upon the allegiance of the less edu- 
 cated part of society, and that forces are quickly gather- 
 ing strength which must at last carry their fortress by 
 storm. Perhaps they think, as Luther did, that theirs 
 are the last days, and that the world's victorious unbelief 
 will prove the prevailing invitation to the irresistible 
 self-manifestation of the Lord, and the final triumph in 
 which they will have their part. 
 
 One important question as to these various manifesta- 
 tions of religious belief, touches the conception of Chris- 
 tianity which underlies them. In contradistinction to 
 the Catholic idea of a development of doctrine, conducted 
 and watched over by a Church divinely guided, the Pro- 
 testant theory is, that Christianity is purest at its source, 
 and that that source is the New Testament. Few Pro- 
 testants, however, are bold enough to follow this notion 
 to its legitimate issue ; to acknowledge that in the New 
 Testament itself the process of interpreting Christ has 
 already begun ; and to set apart, as of superior authority, 
 the words of the Master himself, in their pregnant and 
 piercing simplicity, from the philosophical speculations 
 of one apostle and the sacrificial theories of another. 
 But, granting for the moment that it is possible to speak 
 of primitive Christianity as of a defined body of doctrine, 
 whether directly derivable from Scripture or gradually 
 reduced to form and proportion by the Church, in what 
 relation are we to conceive it to stand to the advancing 
 knowledge, the accumulating experience, the ripening 
 speculation of man ? Is theology to grow with his 
 growth, and to strengthen with his strength ? Is it to 
 
416 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 advance step by step with the other sciences, acting upon 
 them and receiving their modifying impact, or does it 
 remain the one changeless thing in a world of intellectual 
 change ? Or, to put it in another way, is it a voice from 
 heaven, which once heard is obligatory for ever, above 
 doubt, subject to no question, or is it the cry of man to 
 the Eternal, with which the answer of God is subtly 
 mingled ? There can be no doubt as to the reply which 
 we shall give to these questions, when once we have 
 taken the Hebrew history out of the category of the 
 miraculous, and learned to interpret the Bible as we 
 would any other book. So far as the Scripture record 
 goes, it is a story of religious progress, chequered indeed 
 and interrupted, but always steadily tending towards its 
 goal. The Jehovah whom the tribes ruled by the Judges 
 worshipped with half -pagan rites, was on a lower level 
 than the God and Father of Jesus Christ. The morality 
 of the Gospel is an unspeakable advance upon the reta- 
 liatory jurisprudence of Leviticus. There is a wide 
 interval between the sensuous splendour of the Temple 
 ceremonies and the worship of a Spirit "in spirit and in 
 truth." Why should we suppose that the great designs 
 of God for the religious education of the world came 
 abruptly to a conclusion with the close of the New Tes- 
 tament canon ? I do not know that any long roll of years 
 can add spiritual depth to such a word as " the pure in 
 heart shall see God," or give a more compelling obliga- 
 tion to the Golden Eule ; but as the moral experience of 
 mankind grows larger, and new experiments are tried in 
 personal and social duty, these universal principles receive 
 fresh and unexpected application, which surely find their 
 way, if I may so speak, into man's thought of God. 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 417 
 
 I have tried in a former Lecture to show how science 
 has widened the world, and so has given breadth and 
 depth and many-sidedness to our conception of its Divine 
 Euler. And if, as I must needs believe on penalty of 
 losing all hold on religion, an assured fact, in whatever 
 department of knowledge, is a word of God not less 
 authoritative than that which was placed of old on the 
 lips of prophet or apostle, it might be permitted to a 
 Newton, as he tracks the law which bids the apple fall 
 from the tree and sustains the planet in its course to a 
 Darwin, as he reveals the hidden tie which binds all 
 animate things together and almost makes them a single 
 organism to announce his discovery with, the ancient 
 "Thus saith the Lord." We are accustomed though 
 not, I think, in our worthiest moments to lament that 
 miracle is dead, that prophecy is silent: let us rather 
 rejoice that we too live in an age of revelation, when in 
 the sublimest majesty of self -manifestation God is laying 
 bare His ways to the reverent scrutiny of man. 
 
 In all that I have said hitherto, I have taken for 
 granted that the facts of religion are facts, and may be 
 recognized as such by human faculties. It is true that 
 I think that theology has been far too minute and precise ; 
 that it has attempted to define and distinguish when the 
 only word upon its lips should have been an Altitudo; 
 that it has placed mysteries whose abyss no logic can 
 sound, details of faith which no research can verify, on 
 the same footing as the great truths, the cardinal prin- 
 ciples, which alone feed the religious life. But I mean 
 by religious facts something external to human emotions 
 and aspirations ; that which is indeed their object, and 
 without which they could not long sustain themselves in 
 
 2 E 
 
418 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 life. Yet there are thinkers, whether few or many I 
 hardly know, who, setting a real value on religion as the 
 supreme agent in the softening, the sweetening, the ele- 
 vating of human life, imagine that it can permanently 
 exist without theology, and that so long as the charac- 
 teristically religious emotions and affections are felt, it 
 does not matter whether they have any intellectual basis 
 or no. Ideals, they think, are just as good for all prac- 
 tical purposes as facts ; the abstract conception of a perfect 
 Being as operative as the conviction of a living God; 
 and the charm of the Christ what it is, were the Gospels 
 no more than the most consummate of religious fictions. 
 And so no dogmas are worth anything ; for the simplest 
 statement of theological principle is tainted by the same 
 presumption and unreality as the minutest definition i of 
 the communicatio idiomatum. I need not say how this 
 theory of religion is fatal to the very idea of theology. 
 It not only degrades it from the rank of a science, but 
 takes it out of the category of things that may be known. 
 Its history becomes a mere record of human folly and 
 presumption, of wasted toil, foolish strivings, baffled 
 aspirations. And if its past be thus melancholy, it can 
 look forward to no future. It is not so much that its 
 subject-matter is unsearchable, as that it has none. 
 Human nature will continue to strain towards its ideal, 
 learning gradually, we must suppose, to rely on other 
 helps, to lean on other supports, than those which are 
 afforded by a belief in divine realities ; and in the mean 
 time, as all dogmas are equally worthless, a wise man 
 will accommodate himself to the prejudices of his age, 
 and worship as his neighbours worship. 
 
 That, under such circumstances, men should worship at 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 419 
 
 all, is perhaps sufficient testimony to the reality of that 
 religious emotion which seeks to justify itself so strangely. 
 And I am disposed to explain this state of mind by the 
 fact that it is a survival of religion after the death of 
 theology. Men, whom an imperious intellectual neces- 
 sity drives from outpost after outpost of faith, may yet 
 be unwilling to lose their hold of affections which they 
 know to be elevating, of associations which touch the 
 secretest fibre of their hearts, of aspirations which they 
 need as a counterbalance to the coarseness and common- 
 ness of the world. But I am bound to believe else 
 were my long labour wholly vain that they are funda- 
 mentally in error, and that they mistake the impulse of 
 old forces, which once moved them too powerfully to be 
 ever wholly extinct, for a living manifestation of energy, 
 which they can transmit to their children, and which 
 will stir generations to come. I am far from depreciating 
 the efficacy of some of those moral ideals, which are not 
 religious either in their origin or their sanction, and 
 which, under present circumstances of belief, may be 
 expected to move and mould men more powerfully than 
 ever before. But I do not think that their method of 
 operation is the same as that of the religious ideals which 
 most of us believe to be realized in fact, and it can serve 
 no good purpose to confound them. I do not understand 
 how men continue to pray, unless they are convinced 
 that there is a listening ear. It seems to me that there 
 is all the difference in the world between a Christ who 
 actually walked the earth in the consummate beauty of 
 holiness, and one who owes the strength and symmetry 
 of his character to vivid ethical imagination and subtle 
 literary skill. The last may still charm and raise and 
 
 2e2 
 
420 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 refine those who study him ; but the first makes mankind 
 richer, opens out new possibilities to human nature, 
 effectually calls upon all who love him to come up into 
 the mount of God. So, too, the mathematician may 
 "wake long nights and live laborious days" for his 
 science, which may screen him from all grosser tempta- 
 tions, and teach him the method of an innocent life : the 
 nnbelieving philanthropist, consumed by the enthusiasm 
 of humanity, may wholly give his life to others, and in 
 so doing learn the secret of self-forgetfulness. But even 
 this, though a fine, is not the same thing as to feel the 
 awful touch of God upon the soul ; to obey a holier will, 
 to lean upon a steadier strength than our own ; to bind 
 ourselves to the service of a living righteousness ; and to 
 find in trust of a personal lovingkindness the inspiration 
 of courage and patience. The strain towards an unreal- 
 ized ideal still allows man to think himself the highest 
 and best thing that he knows : obedience to the Living 
 God subdues him into humility and chastens him to self- 
 distrust. 
 
 With those who affirm that religion is an emotion of 
 the childhood of humanity which its maturer years have 
 outgrown, I do not feel myself in this place called upon 
 to argue. They are, in this country at least, very few 
 in number, and not accustomed to maintain their position 
 with a very rigid consistency. By an extension of the 
 meaning of the word religion, which at this moment I 
 neither approve nor blame, but which makes it include 
 all the ideal and unselfish elements of life, it is not diffi- 
 cult to show that they are all religious in their own way 
 and in conformity with their own convictions. But there 
 is the less need thus to play with words which have an 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 421 
 
 old and well-defined meaning, that I imagine I see a 
 distinct and wide-spread desire on the part of philoso- 
 phical and scientific thinkers, who have decisively broken 
 with old forms of faith, to work their way back again to 
 some standpoint of practical religion. It may not be to 
 Christianity, as that word is commonly understood : even 
 its simplest and least dogmatic forms may seem to them 
 to state more of divine realities than can be fully proved : 
 but it is to religion that their return is being made, to 
 the recognition of something that is supersensual and 
 divine, to the acknowledgment of a righteous order in 
 the world, and the dependence of human nature for its 
 best impulses upon an Infinite Holiness. . And it is not 
 only in the interests of these men, but in those of religion 
 itself, that I plead for a bolder policy on the part of the 
 churches, and ask for a revision of formularies, a relax- 
 ation of bonds. Scientific men have been educated, by 
 the whole method and experience of their lives, into 
 careful observation and accurate statement of facts. They 
 want proof for all that they are to believe : they are 
 accustomed to distinguish between hypothesis and reason- 
 able certainty. They do not understand the principle 
 of accommodation, of taking words in non-natural senses, 
 of looking to the historical derivation of formularies rather 
 than to their plain meaning. It is not their practice to 
 make solemn and precise statements of belief, and then 
 to explain them away. Possibly they are too exacting 
 in their demands upon theology and theologians: they 
 forget that the same methods of discovering and testing 
 truth are not applicable in all departments of human 
 thought : they do not sufficiently take into account the 
 necessarily infinite character of religious realities, or 
 
422 XII. CONCLUSION 
 
 recognize the fact that when logic has done all it can, 
 there are yet place and work for faith and aspiration. 
 But when all needful allowances have been made on 
 either side, much remains to be done in assimilating the 
 methods and results of theology with those of other sci- 
 ences, if the men of whom I have spoken are to be recon- 
 ciled with religion. Can theology, then, afford to be at 
 variance with the keenest wits, the most judicial intel- 
 lects of the day ? Or is it of any use to bid them, in the 
 old imperious fashion, submit their reason to the divine 
 authority alleged to be embodied in Church or Bible ? 
 In that intellectual activity which is their very life, they 
 live by reason, and must stand or fall by it. 
 
 And it must be recollected that scientific culture is 
 rapidly extending. The number of educated men, whose 
 chief intellectual training and interest lie in the study of 
 natural science, increases every day. Such men, having 
 little to do with literature except as a mental recreation, 
 are apt to exhibit at once the strength and the weakness 
 of the scientific intellect : its love of accuracy, its demand 
 for strict reasoning, its passion for definite results, and 
 at the same time its disbelief in other methods of ascer- 
 taining truth than those which it has itself found effectual. 
 But whether this state of things be favourable to religion 
 or not, it is a fact and must be reckoned with. On the 
 other hand, it is no longer possible for theology to shut 
 itself up in the cell of its own peculiar erudition, and to 
 claim implicit credence for whatever oracles it chooses 
 to utter. It finds its assumptions rudely questioned, its 
 authorities carefully sifted. A dogmatic utterance of 
 Augustine's, a rhetorical phrase of Jerome's, no longer 
 weighs heavily on the mind of Christendom. Even were 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 423 
 
 such, a thing possible as a consensus of the Fathers upon 
 any particular point of doctrine, criticism would at once 
 reply by an investigation into the grounds of patristic 
 authority. Ecclesiastical history, as now written, is 
 inexorable in pointing out the mistakes of Eeformers, 
 the assumptions of Schoolmen, the inconsistencies of 
 Fathers, the contradictions of Councils, the unfounded 
 pretensions of Churches. Criticism asks of creeds, by 
 whom they were enacted; of dogmatic systems, upon 
 what foundation they repose ; of the authority of Scrip- 
 ture, by what arguments it can be justified ; and does 
 not always receive an answer which it is willing to 
 accept. Theology, in a word, has had. to come down 
 from the calm and lofty eminence of the temple, where 
 she was wont to receive the unquestioning homage of 
 her votaries, to mingle with men in their common haunts 
 and daily avocations, to defend her own claims, and to 
 rely for reverence on her intrinsic worth. That she can 
 victoriously stand this test, I thoroughly believe : but 
 it must be on condition that she frankly submits to it ; 
 that she is ready to abandon all untenable assumptions ; 
 that she throws off every needless dogmatic burthen ; 
 that she is simply faithful to the truths of which she is 
 profoundly convinced. But the test is, year by year, 
 being applied on a wider scale and with added stringency, 
 and it is useless to try to evade it by retiring to the 
 solitary heights of authority. 
 
 I must honestly confess that I see no evidence that 
 Christ ever intended to teach any dogmatic system of 
 theology at all. Separating, as I must do, between his 
 own words and the interpretations put upon them by 
 Apostle and Evangelist, I find in the Synoptical Gospels 
 
424 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 the earliest and most trustworthy tradition of his teach- 
 ing. And, if this is so, it must be admitted that these 
 documents on other grounds the most valuable literary- 
 possession of the human race are singularly ill-fitted 
 for dogmatic purposes. They are a very incomplete 
 record of what the Master actually said. Brief as they 
 are, that incompleteness is increased by many repetitions. 
 "We cannot say that they submit theology or even reli- 
 gion to any systematic treatment. They are full of deep 
 spiritual sayings, pregnant ethical precepts; but even 
 these do not stand in logical connection, and are not 
 rounded off into a whole. The only impression of Christ's 
 method which we can derive from them is, that he inten- 
 tionally adapted his instructions to the individual, almost 
 to the occasional necessities of those who heard them, 
 sowing his truth broadcast, and leaving the harvest to 
 the good husbandry of God. It may have been other- 
 wise : he may have formed a school and elaborated a 
 system ; but, if he did, the record fails to tell the tale, 
 and we must look for his secret, not in the open page of 
 the Gospels, but in the esoteric tradition of the Church. 
 It is only when we consider the interpretations put upon 
 Christ by lower and lesser minds than his, that we come 
 upon the first traces of a system. That profound and 
 penetrating religious genius to whom we owe the Fourth 
 Gospel, wove Christianity into the web of a world philo- 
 sophy, and strove to reconcile the simplicity of Hebrew 
 monotheism with the breadth of Hellenic speculation. 
 Paul, whose keen perception had grasped the fact, which 
 was hidden from some at least of the Twelve, that the 
 Gospel was not to add a new distinction to Judaism, but 
 to become the religious life of humanity, found himself 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 425 
 
 under the necessity of at once offering it to the Gentile 
 and vindicating it to the Jew, and so tried to think out 
 for himself an intelligible and a logical position. I need 
 not say that, even while I place these two great men on 
 a lower level of spiritual insight than their Master and 
 they would have been the last to claim for themselves 
 that position of equality with him to which the doctrine 
 of the infallible inspiration of the New Testament has 
 practically elevated them I acknowledge most fully the 
 unspeakable obligation under which the Church of all 
 ages lies to them. But not even in their writings will 
 you find any system of religious thought which can com- 
 pare in complexity and symmetry with those to which 
 the Eeformation gave birth, or such as are now considered 
 to be the indispensable basis of church fellowship. In 
 the Fourth Gospel are the germs of that doctrine of the 
 Deity of Christ which the first three centuries developed 
 into the statements of the Nicene, three centuries more 
 into those of the Athanasian Creed. In the Pauline 
 letters is the outline of that doctrine of Atonement which 
 the early Church passed by almost in silence, but which, 
 revived by Augustine, by Anselm, by Luther, has since, 
 in one form or other, met with almost universal accept- 
 ance. These developments may have been in the mind 
 of Christ and lie implicitly in his words. But I confess 
 I can see no proof of it ; and when I look at what alone 
 we can suppose to have been the method of his intel- 
 lectual training, and the attitude in which he consistently 
 stood to Hebrew religious life, I must think it improbable 
 as well as unproved. 
 
 I do not of course mean to assert that because the 
 teaching of Christ, as we have it in its earliest records, 
 
426 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 embraces no dogmatic system, it is on that account not 
 full of great and fruitful theological truths. Such a truth, 
 the most fundamental, perhaps the most original of all, 
 is the Fatherhood of God, and the relations of trust, love, 
 obedience, awe, in which His human children stand to 
 Him. A correlative truth is the Brotherhood of Man, a 
 fraternity which transcends all differences of country, 
 colour, speech. A third is the Kingdom of God, the 
 perfect society in which the new life poured into the 
 individual heart was meant to issue. A fourth is the 
 Future Stale, connected with this by the bond of those 
 ethical principles which must be conceived of as tying 
 all human life together. But it is remarkable how Christ 
 is content with the simplest statement of these truths. 
 He does not seek to develope them into what metaphy- 
 sical theologians would now declare to be their necessary 
 consequences; he does not attempt to bring them into 
 logical co-ordination. In regard to the nature of God, 
 he seems to me to stand on the plain ground of his 
 ancestral monotheism. In regard to God's lovingkind- 
 ness, equity, forbearance, forgiveness, omniscience, he is 
 emphatic in statement, vivid in illustration; but of a 
 philosophical doctrine of Divine attributes there is no 
 trace. So, too, he is content to leave the future life 
 under the veil of parable : he gives no encouragement to 
 the theological scene-painters, who daub with their rude 
 and staring colours the solemn chambers of human des- 
 tiny. And it is even more to be noticed that he seems 
 to consider these few and simple truths sufficient, not 
 only for the instruction, but for the purification, the ele- 
 vation, the impulse of human life. It is from them that 
 his appeals derive all their winning charm ; his warnings, 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 427 
 
 all their awful significance. They are the food of his 
 own religious life, and he considers them adequate to 
 feed the religious life of others. It is not that, like a 
 consummate artist, he is able in the strength and ver- 
 satility of genius to produce the greatest effects with the 
 simplest means, but that in the region of practical reli- 
 gion the simplest means are alone necessary and alone 
 efficacious. There are no more solemn and moving truths 
 than those of which I have spoken. When others of a 
 more derivative and complex kind seem to sway the 
 hearts of men, it is only in the hidden energy of these. 
 
 It will at once be objected that there is very little in 
 what I have said to differentiate Christianity from other 
 religions, and that, if it is to have a characteristic quality 
 of its own, it must be described in terms less vague. 
 But I, for one, consider it no discredit to Christianity 
 that, thus reduced to its simplest elements, it comes very 
 near to what some have called Absolute Eeligion ; the 
 quintessence, that is, of all that the wisest minds have 
 thought, all that the tenderest hearts have felt, all that 
 the keenest consciences have recognized as binding. Nor 
 am I concerned to discuss the originality of Christ or 
 the novelty of Christianity : the more these are magni- 
 fied, the harder is it to find a place in the providential 
 order for Hebrew faith and Hellenic wisdom. But, indeed, 
 what Christ brought into the world was not so much new 
 truth as fresh life not so much ethical principles and 
 precepts unknown before, as an enlarged capacity of 
 moral obedience and growth. To discuss the secret of 
 this spiritual life would lead me too far into thorny theo- 
 logical by-paths : I am content to rest in the fact. It is 
 this which raises Christ above the level of the teacher, 
 
428 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 and gives him his claim to be called, however you may 
 define the word, the Saviour of the world. It is this 
 which justifies the contention of Evangelical divines of 
 every school, that we go to him not to learn the outlines 
 of a system, moral or theological, but to be inspired, 
 moved, changed, saved. One of those deep sayings which 
 seem to me to show that the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 had access to a genuine fund of Christian tradition, which 
 but for him would have perished, is, "I am come that 
 they may have life, and may have it abundantly." And 
 this I accept as an authoritative description of Christ's 
 mission. But if it is so accepted, I must go on to point 
 out that the possession of life must be taken as the proof 
 of contact and communion with Christ ; that the qualifi- 
 cations for standing in the line of Christian affiliation 
 are not intellectual, but moral and spiritual ; and that it 
 ought to be impossible to deny the name of Christian to 
 any who acknowledge Christ as their Master, and can 
 show any genuine likeness to him. This test might 
 unchurch some loudly professing believers ; it would 
 admit many heretics to the fold; but it would at last 
 gather in from diverse communions the pure, the self- 
 forgetting and the brave, and would make Christianity 
 as wide a thing as Christendom. 
 
 I know that in thus pleading for the simplification of 
 doctrine, for the enlargement of terms of communion, for 
 the reconciliation of theology with new knowledge, I 
 have never left the critical ground. We have looked at 
 religion from the outside as a datum of history, a subject 
 of speculation a thing which it lies with ourselves to 
 accept or reject according as it satisfies the tests by 
 which our intellectual nature compels us to try it. And 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 429 
 
 from one point of view it is and must be this. "With the 
 best will in the world, we cannot believe what is intrin- 
 sically incredible to ns. Some tour de force of logic is 
 necessary before we can abandon ourselves to the autho- 
 rity of a church, however complete may be our submission 
 afterwards. But there is another attitude to religious 
 truth which is not the critical, though we may call in 
 the critical judgment to justify it when the first storm 
 of enthusiasm which compelled us to assume it has spent 
 its force. Sometimes, under happy stress of circumstance, 
 we do not choose a religion, but religion chooses us. 
 In this higher order of things, Christ's was the natural 
 procedure : his apostles did not, after long hesitation and 
 much questioning, attach themselves to him; but he 
 chose them, he called them, he took possession of them, 
 and they obeyed. They were carried away by a force 
 generated beyond the bounds of their own nature ; their 
 enthusiasm was the motion of a God within. Changes 
 of theological opinion are, I know, produced by intellec- 
 tual causes and run an intellectual course ; but when no 
 religious impulses intervene, they are rarer than is com- 
 monly supposed, and all spiritual upliftings and trans- 
 formations conform to the law of which I have spoken. 
 And so I venture to think that to restore Christianity to 
 the place which it has lost and is more and more losing 
 in the hearts of thoughtful and educated men, still more 
 to give back to it its old victorious energy in dealing 
 with the sinful and the wretched, what is chiefly needed 
 is a prophet of this latter day who, in the keenness and 
 directness of his religious insight, will speak at once a 
 piercing and a reconciling word. Such an one will be 
 deeply penetrated with the scientific spirit, rejoicing in 
 
430 XII. CONCLUSION. 
 
 the interpretation of nature as an unveiling of God, and 
 desiring only the plain truth of history that he may trace 
 in it the working of the Divine Hand. But he will be 
 too full of the awe of direct vision to lose himself in the 
 arid wastes of criticism, or to be led astray by the pedan- 
 tries of scientific investigation. I dare venture to predict 
 that, like every other true prophet, the future will fill his 
 eye and heart too completely to suffer him to be a bond- 
 slave of the past: present revelations always overbear 
 old theologies, and no living church ever supplies the 
 model of the New Jerusalem. I have no fear lest he should 
 fall out of the ranks of Christ's soldiers ; for I do not 
 believe that religion has anything to offer to man that 
 the Gospel does not hold, and I notice that what is strong 
 and inspiring in newer systems is Christian in essence, 
 if not always in name. I know that when he speaks 
 men will crowd to hear him, and lay their hearts and 
 lives in his hands ; for the religious instincts of humanity 
 are ineradicable, and even if they sometimes sleep, wake 
 always to life and energy again. And though his clear 
 and penetrating accents may not fall upon our living 
 ears, and we can do nothing to direct the operation of 
 the Spirit of God, which, like the wind, " bloweth where 
 it listeth," yet it belongs to us of this generation to make 
 straight the way of his coming, by living and working 
 in the light of our best knowledge and most intimate 
 convictions. Intellectual difficulties we can to some 
 extent reconcile : hindrances to church fellowship we 
 can remove : we can go back to the simplicity of primi- 
 tive piety : we can acknowledge the oneness of the reli- 
 gious life. So, as age follows age, and each pours fresh 
 wealth into the treasury of human knowledge as men 
 
XII. CONCLUSION. 431 
 
 accumulate a riper experience, solving ever more per- 
 fectly the problems of life and entering upon wider 
 possibilities Christianity too will receive a fuller deve- 
 lopment, and mankind, with the acknowledgment of 
 mystery and the cry of imperfection always upon its 
 lips, will penetrate more and more deeply into the glory 
 and the wonder of God. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbot, Archbishop, 321, 322. 
 
 Adrian VI., 93, 97, 106. 
 
 iEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, vid. 
 Pius II. 
 
 Agricola, Johann, 287. 
 
 Agricola, Rudolf, 31, 46, 47, 141. 
 
 Albigenses, the, 8. 
 
 Albrecht, Duke of Austria, 48. 
 
 Albrecht of Brandenburg, Elector 
 Archbishop of Mainz, 48, 68, 
 69 n. 
 
 Aleander, 79. 
 
 Alexander III., 25, 308. 
 
 Alexander IV., 17 n. 
 
 Alexander V., 9. 
 
 Alexander VL, 32, 141. 
 
 Althammer, 215. 
 
 Altorf, Socinianism at, 274 n. 
 
 Alva, 96, 100, 110, 243, 261. 
 
 Amaury de Bene, 26 n. 
 
 Amsdorf, 288. 
 
 Andrewes, Bishop, 321, 325. 
 
 Anquetil du Perron, 349. 
 
 Anne of Bohemia, 28. 
 
 Anselm, 277, 307. 
 
 Apology of Confession of Augs- 
 burg, 283, 289, 290. 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 8. 
 
 Archimedes, 382 n. 
 
 Argyropulos, 53. 
 
 Ariosto, 43. 
 
 Arminius, 297, 413. 
 
 Articles, the Forty-two, 315, 316 n 
 
 Articles, the Nine (of Lambeth), 
 
 320, 327. 
 Articles, the Six, 244, 304, 309, 
 
 315. 
 Articles, the Ten, 309. 
 Articles, the Thirteen, 315. 
 Articles, the Thirty-nine, 244, 300, 
 
 315, 316, 316 n., 318, 324, 325, 
 327, 328. 
 
 Astruc, 355. 
 
 Atterbury, Bishop, 332, 344. 
 Augsburg, Confession of, 122, 122 
 n., 267, 282, 289, 290, 310, 315, 
 
 316, 325, 327, 382, 409. 
 Augsburg, Diet of, 74, 87, 89, 104, 
 
 108. 
 Averrhoes, 372. 
 
 Bacon, 374. 
 
 Bainham, 306. 
 
 Barnes, 306. 
 
 Basel, Council of, 13, 43. 
 
 Basel, University of, 48. 
 
 Baumgartner, 340. 
 
 Baur, F. C, 358, 364. 
 
 Bebel, 49. 
 
 Becket, Archbishop, 307,308, 311. 
 
 Beghards, 20, 21. 
 
 Beguines, 20, 21. 
 
 F 
 
434 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Behem, Hans, 29 n. 
 
 Belgic Confession, 301. 
 
 Bembo, Cardinal, 41 n. 
 
 Benedict, St., 7. 
 
 Benedict XIII. , 9. 
 
 Benedictines, 7. 
 
 Bentley, Kichard, 331, 344. 
 
 Bernard, St., 7. 
 
 Bessarion, Cardinal, 31. 
 
 Beza, 251, 297, 331, 413. 
 
 Biandrata, 269, 275 n. 
 
 Bilney, 306. 
 
 Blasphemy, 173, 178. 
 
 Blondel, 354. 
 
 Boccaccio, 5, 39, 43. 
 
 Bohemian Reformation, 28. 
 
 Boiardo, 43. 
 
 Boleyn, Ann, 303, 317. 
 
 Bonaventura, 8. 
 
 Bora, Catharine von, 85, 142. 
 
 Boscovich, 399. 
 
 Bourbon, Constable of, 107. 
 
 Boyle, Hon. C, 344. 
 
 Brandt, Sebastian, 49. 
 
 Brenz, 138 n., 167, 174, 316. 
 
 Brethren of the Free Spirit, 19, 
 
 26 n. 
 Brethren of the Common Life, 21, 
 
 46. 
 Bucer, 101, 139, 176, 283, 310, 
 
 313 n., 314. 
 Budceus, 343. 
 Bugenhagen, 93, 166. 
 Bullinger, 242, 271. 
 Burnouf, 347, 349. 
 Busche, H. v. d., 51. 
 Butler, Bishop, 329, 376. 
 
 Cajetan, Cardinal, 83. 
 Calixt, George, 291. 
 Calov, Abr., 291, 292. 
 Calvin, on the authority of Scrip- 
 ture, 122. On the interpretation 
 
 of Scripture, 125. Sacramental 
 theory, 139. Calvin and Serve- 
 tus, 1 80. A generation younger 
 than Zwingli and Luther, 227. 
 Relation to Zwingli and his theo- 
 logy, 228. Belongs to a later 
 stage of the Reformation than 
 Luther and Zwingli, 242. Direc- 
 tor of the French Reformation, 
 244. Adviser of Edward VI., 
 244. Geneva a fortress of the 
 Reform, 245. His prevailing 
 influence there, 246. His theory 
 of the Church, 246. Ecclesias- 
 tical discipline, 248. As set up 
 in Geneva, 249. Its effects, 251. 
 Calvin's theory of persecution, 
 253. Gruet, 253. Servetus, 254. 
 Calvin's letter to the Protector 
 Somerset, 254. Differences be- 
 tween Calvinistic and Lutheran 
 theology, 255. Its leading idea 
 the absolute supremacy of God, 
 256. Its relation to morals, 257. 
 Theory of Scripture l 258 i _Calvin 
 a more consistent scripturalist 
 than Luther, 258. Calvinism the 
 last word of orthodox Protestant- 
 ism, 260. Rejects symbolism, 
 260. On the side of popular 
 politics, 261. Calvin's "Insti- 
 tution," 293. Editions, 293. 
 Contents, 294. Character, 295. 
 
 Calvin, other references, 37, 264, 
 269, 271, 278, 299, 305, 310, 
 326, 327, 402. 
 
 Camerarius, Joach., 93, 339. 
 
 Campanus, 125, 173. 
 
 Capito, 195, 206. 
 
 Capnio, vid. Reuchlin. 
 
 Carlstadt, 71 n., 84, 137, 141, 165, 
 169, 186, 190, 192, 198, 354. 
 
 Casaubon, Isaac, 332, 333 n., 343. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 435 
 
 Cavendish, 385. 
 
 Caxton, William, 28. 
 
 Celtes, Conrad, 45 n., 49, 51. 
 
 Champollion, 347. 
 
 Charles I, 331, 333 n. 
 
 Charles IV. of Bohemia, 28. 
 
 Charles V., allegorical play at Augs- 
 burg, 74. His descent, 93. Elect- 
 ed Emperor, 93. His territories, 
 93. His scheme of universal 
 dominion, 95. A Fleming, 96. 
 His character, 96. His minis- 
 ters, 96. Did not understand 
 Luther, 97. No sympathy with 
 Protestantism, 97. The centre 
 of his policy Burgundian, 98. 
 Dynastic selfishness, 98. In- 
 tended to put down Protestant- 
 ism, 99. His interview with 
 the Protestant Princes before 
 the Diet at Augsburg, 104. Sea- 
 sons why he did not crush Pro- 
 testantism at once, 108. Battle 
 of Muhlberg, 109. The Interim, 
 109. Charles' flight before Mau- 
 rice, 110. Treaty of Passau, 110. 
 Charles' retirement at Juste, 95, 
 111. 
 
 Charles V., other references, 243, 
 384. 
 
 Charles VII. of France, 14. 
 
 Charles the Bold, 94, 232. 
 
 Chaucer, 5. 
 
 Chieregati, 79. 
 
 Chigi, Agost., 106 n. 
 
 Chillingworth, 275. 
 
 "Christian Man, the Institution 
 of a," 309. 
 
 " Christian Man, the Doctrine and 
 Erudition of a," 309. 
 
 Clarke, S., 376. 
 
 Clement VII., 32, 85, 93, 107. 
 
 Cobham, Lord, 28. 
 
 9 
 
 Cochlaeus, 287. 
 
 Colet, Dean, 225, 302. 
 
 Cologne, University of, 44, 44 n. 
 
 Colonna, Cardinal, vid. Martin V. 
 
 Columbus, 382. 
 
 Communicatio idiomatum, 256, 
 284, 285, 296. 
 
 Conclusion, 401. Recapitulation 
 of the argument, 401. The re- 
 vival of letters a movement of 
 the lay mind, 402. Progress 
 of philosophy and science, 403. 
 Concurrent history of theology, 
 404. Reformation itself decides 
 between progress and stagnation 
 in theology, 405. Attitude of 
 the Catholic Church, 406. Of 
 the Church of England, 408. 
 Its aversion to change, 409. A 
 liturgy always a compromise, 
 411. The power of the formu- 
 laries, 412. The practical issue 
 of the Broad Church, 413. 
 The Evangelical school, 413. 
 Is Christianity susceptible of 
 change and growth 1 415. The 
 revelation of science, 417. Can 
 religious ideals replace religious 
 facts? 418. A return of scien- 
 tific thinkers towards religion, 
 421. Theology universally cri- 
 ticised, 422. Christ did not 
 intend to teach any dogmatic 
 system, 423. Systems of later 
 origin, 424. The great truths 
 of Christianity, 426. Christ 
 brought fresh life into the world, 
 427. New conditions of church 
 communion, 428. The prophet 
 of the latter day, 429. 
 
 Confessio Tetrapolitana, 175, 282. 
 
 Constantine, Donation of, 4. 
 
 Constanz, Council of, 1, 10, 13, 43. 
 v 9 
 
436 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Copernicus, 383. 
 
 Corpora dodrince, 289, 290. 
 
 Corvinus, Matthias, 94 n. 
 
 Cossa, Balthazar, vid. John XXIIt. 
 
 Courayer, P. le, 332, 333 n. 
 
 Cowper, William, 257. 
 
 Cranmer, Archbishop, 182, 244, 
 305, 306, 310, 311, 312, 313, 
 313 n., 315, 324. 
 
 Crell, 274. 
 
 Critical Spirit, the Growth of 
 the, 336. Its double effect, 336. 
 Humanists and Reformers part 
 company, 337. Luther's view, 
 338. Melancthon's, 339. Eras- 
 mus's, 340. Revived interest in 
 classical culture, 341. The task 
 of the humanists, 342. Latter 
 stage of the Italian revival, 342. 
 Leadership passes to France and 
 Holland, 343. Three epoch- 
 making books, 344. Bentley's 
 Phalaris, 344. Wolfs Prolego- 
 mena to Homer, 345. Niebuhr's 
 Rome^ 345. New view of pri- 
 maeval history, 346. Decipher- 
 ment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, 
 347. Of the cuneiform inscrip- 
 tions, 347. Re-discovery of the 
 Hittite empire, 348. New science 
 of comparative philology, 349. 
 Its ethnological application, 350. 
 Secret of the Greek mythology 
 revealed, 350. The higher cri- 
 ticism, 351. Its negative more 
 remarkable than its positive 
 achievements, 352. A general 
 development of human thought, 
 
 353. Biblical criticism at first 
 more cultivated by Catholic than 
 Protestant divines, 354. Hobbes, 
 
 354. Spinoza, 355. Simon, Le 
 Clerc, Astruc, 355. Grotius on 
 
 the Synoptical Gospels* 355. 
 Lessing and Herder, 356. Clear 
 negative conclusions of criticism, 
 358. Connection of Biblical with 
 general history, 359. Contrast 
 between Israel's conception of 
 himself and his real position, 
 
 360. Hebrew history re-read, 
 
 361. Criticism applied to the 
 New Testament, 362. Its results 
 upon the Reformation theory, 
 364. Miracle in Hebrew history, 
 364. Prophecy, 365. Literary 
 and human interest of the Bible 
 increased, 366, Development of 
 Christian doctrine in the three 
 first centuries, 368. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 257, 261. 
 Crotus Rubianus, 63, 63 n., 337. 
 Cruciger, Caspar, 195, 313 n. 
 Cudworth, 329. 
 Cunningham, Dr., 297. 
 Cuvier, 386. 
 Cyril Lucar, 331. 
 
 Daille, 354. 
 
 Dalberg, Joh. v., 46. 
 
 Dante, 39, 43. 
 
 Darwin, 392. 
 
 Davalos, 96. 
 
 David, Franz, 275 n. 
 
 Denck, Joh., 125, 173, 204 et seq., 
 268. 
 
 Descartes, 373, 374, 403. 
 
 Development op Philosophical 
 Method and Scientific Inves- 
 tigation, 370. Union of phi- 
 losophy and theology effected by 
 the Schoolmen now dissolved, 
 371. Their independent course 
 since the Reformation, 372. No 
 philosophical development in the 
 direction of fixed results, 373. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 437 
 
 Improvement of the art of think- 
 ing, 374. Is theological truth 
 different from all other? 375. 
 Philosophical treatment of reli- 
 gion, 376. Influence of philo- 
 sophy in the direction of ratio- 
 nalism, 376. A bastard rational- 
 ism, 377. What philosophical 
 rationalism is, 377. The rational 
 criterion in an ethical form, 378. 
 Orthodox and systematizing ra- 
 tionalism, 379. Ee-awakening 
 of science, 381. The Moors of 
 Spain, 381. Three great voyages, 
 382. Melancthon's astrology, 
 382. His and Luther's belief in 
 portents, 383. Copernicus, 383. 
 Newness of modern science, 384. 
 Astronomy, 384. Anatomy, 384. 
 Chemistry, 385. Geology, bo- 
 tany, electricity and magnetism, 
 385. Theory of evolution, 386. 
 Change in man's way of looking 
 at the universe, 386. From geo- 
 centric to heliocentric system, 
 388. Its results, 388. Anti- 
 quity of man, 390. Uniformity 
 of law, 391. Miracle, 391. The 
 " Origin of Species," 392. Evo- 
 lution a general scientific method, 
 393. Evolution and theism, 394. 
 Origin of evil and prevalence of 
 pain, 394. Doctrine of heredity, 
 
 395. A fall or a rise of man 1 
 
 396. Is evolution of universal 
 application ? 397. Assistance 
 given to religion by new scien- 
 tific thought, 398. Mystery of 
 matter, 399. Unification of 
 force, 399. Leads to the con- 
 ception of the one God, 400. 
 
 Diether, Elector Archbishop of 
 Mainz, 48. 
 
 Dietrich, Veit, 87. 
 Dionysius the Areopagite, 354. 
 Dolcino, Fra, 18. 
 Dominicans, the, 8. 
 Dominis, M. A. de, 332. 
 Dordt, Synod of, 228, 297, 321. 
 Dringenberg, L., 46, 47, 48. 
 Dryander, 310. 
 Duns Scotus, 8, 9. 
 Durer, A., 49, 215. 
 
 Eberbach, G., vid. Petrejus. 
 
 Eberhard, Duke of Wiirtemberg, 
 48, 54. 
 
 Eck, Joh., 29, 50, 51, 287. 
 
 Eckhart, 19, 2 K 
 
 Edward VI., 226, 244, 304, 310, 
 312, 314, 314 n, 315, 319. 
 
 Eichhom, 355. 
 
 Eitelwolf vom Stein, 48. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 244, 304, 315, 
 317,318,319,320,323,325,326. 
 
 Ellenbog, N., 383 n. 
 
 Emser, 119. 
 
 England, the Reformation in, 
 300. Its peculiarity, 300. Due 
 to the same causes as German 
 and Swiss Reformations, 301. 
 Wiclif, 301. Erasmus and the 
 new learning, 302. English Re- 
 form as much political as reli- 
 gious, 303. Depends largely 
 upon character of Princes, 304. 
 Produces no great heroes of 
 faith, 305. W. Tyndale, 305. 
 Cranmer, 305. Recantations, 
 
 306. Spoliation of the monas- 
 teries, 306. Royal supremacy, 
 
 307. Its assertion the last stage 
 of a long process, 308. Wolsey 
 and disciplinary reform, 309. 
 Henry VIII.'s Catholic position, 
 309. Alliance with German 
 
438 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Protestantism impossible, 310. 
 Protestantism of Edward VI., 
 310. Continuity of the Angli- 
 can Church, 311. Mediaeval 
 origin of the Prayer-book, 312. 
 Quignon's Breviary, 312. Her- 
 mann von Wied's Consultation, 
 313. Revisions of the Prayer- 
 book, 314. Elizabeth's Prayer- 
 hook, 314 n. The Thirty-nine 
 Articles, 315. Changes from 
 the forty-two Articles, 316. Re- 
 action under Mary, 316. Eli- 
 zabeth's forced Protestantism, 
 317. Armada, 318. Settlement 
 under Elizabeth, 318. Discon- 
 tent of the Marian exiles, 319. 
 Growth of Puritanism, 320. 
 Hampton Court Conference, 321. 
 Reaction under Laud and An- 
 drewes, 321. Struggle with Pu- 
 ritanism and final victory of the 
 Church, 322. Alleged pettiness 
 of Puritanism, 323. Church of 
 England both Protestant and 
 Catholic, 324. The Prayer-book a 
 link with the mediaeval Church, 
 326. The Articles Augustinian, 
 if not Calvinist, 327. A middle 
 party in the Church, 328. Lati- 
 tudinarians, 329. Position of 
 the Church towards Scripture, 
 
 330. Its love of Patristic theo- 
 logy, 330. Attention to criti- 
 cism of the New Testament, 331. 
 Neglect of dogmatic theology, 
 
 331. Holds a middle place in 
 Christendom, 332. Attempts at 
 re-union of Christendom, 333, 
 Characteristics of English Dis- 
 sent, 333. 
 
 "Epistolae Clarorum Virorum," 59, 
 59 n. 
 
 " Epistolse Illustrium Virorum," 
 
 59 n. 
 
 "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum," 
 
 60 et seq. 
 
 Erasmus republishes Valla's notes 
 on the New Testament, 39, 66. 
 Date of his birth, 43. Taught 
 by A. Hegius, 47. Attitude to . 
 Church corruptions, 51. An eye 
 of Germany, 53. On the Epp. 
 Obsc. Vir., 61. The literary 
 chief of Europe, 64. Circulation 
 of his works, 64. Colloquies 
 condemned, 64 n. His services 
 to scientific theology, 65. Edi- 
 tions of the New Testament, 65. 
 Paraphrases, 66. Ordered to be 
 set up in every English parish 
 church, 66. Editions of the Fa- 
 thers, 66. Not wholly in accord 
 with the Reuchlinists, 67. Tries 
 to prevent Froben from printing 
 Luther's works, 68. "Apotheosis 
 of Reuchlin," 68. His answer to 
 the Elector Frederick, 69. His 
 timidity, 70. His belief in cul- ^ 
 ture, 70. His theological opi- 
 nions not Lutheran, 71. TheV 
 " Encheiridion," 71. Luther's 
 criticismsonhim,71n.,72n.,149. * 
 " De Libero Arbitrio," 72. " De 
 amabili Ecclesiae Concordia," 
 72 n. Estimate of his place in ^ 
 the Reformation, 72. On the 
 literal interpretation of Scrip- 
 ture, 119, 120. Annotations on 
 the New Testament, 150. His 
 doctrinal hardihood, 151. His 
 rationalism, 152. Erasmus in 
 England, 302. His opinion on 
 the damage done to literary cul- 
 ture by the Reformation, 337, 
 338, 340. 
 
IXDEX. 
 
 439 
 
 Erasmus, other references, 5, 67, 
 
 74, 91. 
 Erfurt, University of, 44, 44 n., 46, 
 
 58, 63 n. 
 Eugenius IV., 13. 
 Evangelical revival, the, 325. 
 "Everlasting Gospel," the, 17. 
 Ewald, 352, 358. 
 
 Fagius. 310. 
 Falck, Jac, 180. 
 Falkland, Lord, 275, 322. 
 Ferdinand of Austria, 95, 96, 98, 
 
 104,213. 
 Ferrara, Council of, 13. 
 Fichte, 373. 
 Ficino, 38. 
 Filelfo, 38, 142. 
 Fisher, Bishop, 306. 
 Flacius Illyricus, 288. 
 Florence, Council of, 13. 
 Formula of Concord, 285. 
 Francis I., 73 n., 89, 95, 107, 108, 
 
 294. 
 Franciscans, 8, 9. 
 Franciscans, Spiritual, 9. 
 Franck, Seb., 204, 206, 215 etseq., 
 
 268, 280. 
 Frankenhausen, Battle of, 199. 
 1 Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, University 
 
 of, 48. 
 Fratres Poloni, 274, 281. 
 Fratricelli, the, 17. 
 Frecht, M., 216. 
 Frederick the Wise, Elector of 
 
 Saxony, 48, 69, 83, 91, 100, 
 
 101 et seq. 
 Frederick III., Emperor, 14, 44, 45. 
 Freiburg, University of, 48. 
 Friends of God, 1 9. 
 Froben, 66, 68, 83. 
 
 Galileo, 382 n., 384, 407. 
 Garrett, 306. 
 
 Gattinara, 96. 
 
 Gentile, 269. 
 
 George, Duke of Saxony, 79, 176, 
 
 303. 
 George, Margrave of Brandenburg, 
 
 104. 
 Gerard Sagarelli, 18. 
 Gerhard (Franciscan), 18 n. 
 Gerhard, Joh., 290. 299, 332. 
 Gerson, 10, 11, 12, 13. 
 Goch, John of, 30, 31. 
 Goethe, 65, 338 n. 
 Grabe, 332, 333 n. 
 Granvella, 96. 
 Gregory XII., 9. 
 Gregory XIII., 343 n. 
 Greifswalde, University of, 48. 
 Griesbach, 331. 
 Grindal, Archbishop, 320. 
 Grocyn, 302. 
 Groot, Gerhard, 21. 
 Grotefend, 347. 
 Grotius, 355. 
 Gruet, 253. 
 Guises, the, 243. 
 Gutenberg, 43. 
 
 Hales of Eton, 275, 329. 
 Hallam, Bishop, 11, 12. 
 Hampton Court Conference, 321, 
 
 323. 
 Hartmann, 373. 
 Harvey, 384. 
 
 Hausmann, Nicholas, 167. 
 Hegel, 373. 
 
 Hegius, Alex., 46, 47, 60. 
 Heidegger, 297. 
 Heidelberg, University of, 44, 44 
 
 n., 46, 48. 
 Helvetic Confession, 301. 
 Hemerken, Thomas (vid. Thomas 
 
 a Kempis), 22 n. 
 Henry I, 307. 
 
440 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Henry II, 307, 308. 
 
 Henry VI., 14. 
 
 Henry VII., 302. 
 
 Henry VIIL, 89, 244, 304, 306, 
 
 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 317, 
 
 324. 
 Herbert, George, 322. 
 Herder, 356, 357. 
 Hermann, Elector of Cologne, 109, 
 
 313, 313 n. 
 Hermolaus Barbaras, 53. 
 Hess, Eoban, 50, 63 n., 339, 340. 
 Hetzer, L., 125, 206, 209 n., 210 
 
 n., 268. 
 Hobbes, 354. 
 
 "Homines intelligentise," 19 n. 
 Hoagstraten, Jac, 57, 58 n., 60, 
 
 62 n. 
 Hooker, Eichard, 248, 332. 
 Hooper, Bishop, 306. 
 Hubmaier, Balthasar, 193, 195. 
 Hume, David, 373. 
 Huss, John, 10, 28, 29, 29 n., 30, 
 
 133, 270. 
 Hutchinson, Col., 322. 
 Hutten, Ulrich v., republishes 
 
 Valla on the Donation of Con- 
 
 stantine, 39 n. Knight errant 
 
 of the Revival, 51. Induces 
 
 Sickingen to take Reucblin's 
 
 part, 58. His character, 62. 
 
 How far the author of the Epp. 
 
 Obsc. Vir., 62, 63, 63 n. Other 
 
 references, 81, 199. 
 
 "Imitation of Christ," 16, 22. 
 Ingolstadt, University of, 48. 
 Innocent III, 4, 7, 308. 
 Innocent IV., 17 n. 
 Innocent VIIL, 32. 
 Interim, the, 109, 243, 310. 
 Isidore, decretals of, 4, 354. 
 Italian religion, 41. 
 
 Jager, Johann, vid. Crotus Rubi- 
 
 anus. 
 James I., 261, 320, 321, 323. 
 Jerome of Prague, 11. 
 Joachim, Abbot, 18, 28. 
 Joachim of Brandenburg, 153. 
 Joanna of Spain, 94. 
 John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 
 
 101, 102, 109. 
 John, King of England, 308. 
 John of Leiden, 193. 
 John of Parma, 18 n. 
 John the Steadfast, Elector of 
 
 Saxony, 89, 101, 176, 177. 
 John XXIL, 19. 
 JohnXXIIL, 5, 10, 11. 
 Jones, Sir W., 349. 
 Julius II., 32, 36, 93, 106. 
 Jussieu, 385. 
 Justus, Jonas, 166. 
 
 Kant, 373, 389. 
 
 Kempis, Thomas a, 21, 22, 22 n., 
 
 46, 47. 
 Kepler, 292, 384, 
 Kessler, Johann, 206. 
 Knox, John, 86, 243, 244, 257, 
 
 305. 
 Krauth, Heintz, 196, 197. 
 Kuenen, 352, 358. 
 
 Lanfranc, 311. 
 
 Lange, Johann, 73 n. 
 
 Lange, Rudolf, 46, 47. 
 
 Lardner, 376. 
 
 La Rochelle, Confession of, 228, 
 
 296. 
 Lasco, John a, 182, 310. 
 Lassen, 347. 
 Latimer, Bishop, 306. 
 Laud, Archbishop, 321, 322, 325, 
 
 333 n. 
 Lavoisier, 385. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 441 
 
 Le Clerc, 298, 355, 356. 
 
 Lefevre d'Etaples, 225. 
 
 Leibnitz, 373. 
 
 Leipzig, University of, 44. 
 
 Leo Jud., 242. 
 
 Leo X., 32, 36, 55, 58 n., 65 n., 
 68, 74, 93, 106. 
 
 Lessing, 356, 357. 
 
 Liber, Antonius, 46, 47. 
 
 Linacre, 302. 
 
 Linnaeus, 385. 
 
 Locke, 373. 
 
 Louis XL of France, 14, 94. 
 
 Louvain, University of, 58. 
 
 Lucius III., 25. 
 
 Luther, strong speech on Papal 
 abuses, 5. Opinion of Tlieologia 
 Germanica, 23. A Hussite with- 
 out knowing it, 30. Indepen- 
 dence of his German precursors, 
 32. Opinion of the Epp. Obsc. 
 Vir., 61. Criticisms of Erasmus, 
 71 n., 72 n. Appeals to a 
 Council, 78. His character, 
 
 80. A popular leader, 80. 
 The grounds of his popularity, 
 
 81. Activity not political, 81. 
 Eagerness of his nature, 82. 
 Early and great popularity, 83. 
 The centre figure of the Refor- 
 mation, 84. Self-confidence, 84. 
 Roughness of speech, 85. His 
 domestic character, 85. His 
 courage, 86. His prayerfulness, 
 86. His dark hours, 88. Position 
 in the University of Wittenberg, 
 91. Makes no impression upon 
 Charles V. at Worms, 97. Con- 
 tinues to believe in the Emperor, 
 97. Devotion to his Princes, 
 101. Substitutes authority of 
 the Bible for that of the Church, 
 116. Discovers a Latin Bible 
 
 at Erfurt, 117, conf. 117 n. 
 Finds that pcenitentia is not 
 penance, but repentance, 118. 
 His method of Biblical inter- 
 pretation, 118. Scripture to be 
 interpreted literally, 118. Strong 
 assertion of the authority of 
 Scripture, 121. Does not attempt 
 to prove it, 121. Scripture easy 
 to be interpreted, 124. Yet the 
 results of interpretation very 
 different, 125. Conception of 
 the Bible as an organic whole, 
 126. Scripture to be inter- 
 preted by the gospel, not gospel 
 by the Scriptures, 127. Doc- 
 trine of justification by faith 
 alone, 128. False accusation of 
 Antinomianism against Luther, 
 1 30. Justification involves com- 
 plete change of character, 131. 
 Double meaning of glaube, 131. 
 Luther's idea of justification be- 
 comes more purely intellectual, 
 132. Efficacy of this doctrine 
 as against the Catholic system, 
 132. Doctrine of the priesthood 
 of the believer, 133. This the 
 centre-point of the opposition to 
 Catholicism, 134. Luther's sacra- 
 mental theory, 135. Baptism, 
 137. The Eucharist, 137. In- 
 sists upon taking the words of 
 institution literally, 138, 139 n. 
 Eucharistic doctrine the rock 
 on which the Reformation was 
 wrecked, 139. His revolt 
 against ethical theories of the 
 Middle Ages, 142. His mar- 
 riage, 142. Its moral conse- 
 quences, 144. Puts reason be- 
 side Scripture, 153. After 
 abandonment of that position, 
 
442 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 153. Reasons for reaction, 154. 
 Opinions on reason, 154. Viru- 
 lent abuse of reason, 156. Ra- 
 tionalistic opinions on matters 
 Biblical, 157. On prophecy and 
 miracles, 159. Discrepancies in 
 Scripture, 160. Opposition be- 
 tween reason and faith, 161. 
 Incredibility of orthodox doc- 
 trine, 162. The constant strug- 
 gle in his mind, 163. Safety 
 only in clinging to Scripture, 
 164. Diabolic visitations, 165. 
 "Anfechtungen,"166. Luther's 
 own account of them, 167. 
 Their explanation, 168. Luther 
 on Christian liberty, 170. On 
 temporal authority and the obe- 
 dience due to it, 171. Practical 
 unfaithfulness to these princi- 
 ples, 172. Distinction set up 
 between heresy and blasphemy, 
 1 73. Between the temporal and 
 the spiritual half of life, 173. 
 Luther at the Marburg Confer- 
 ence, 174. Political action of 
 the Reformers limited by dog- 
 matic agreement, 175. Luther 
 and the Princes, 176. On re- 
 ligious liberty, 178. Against 
 capital punishment of heretics, 
 179. Conduct to the Zwickau 
 prophets, 191. On the stead- 
 fastness of the Anabaptists, 195. 
 Tempted to make the Reforma- 
 tion political, 199. Relation to 
 the Peasants' War, 200. Change 
 which comes over him, 200. 
 Relation to Schwenkfeld, 213. 
 The centre -point of European 
 Reform, 225. Rebellion against 
 scholasticism, 264. Luther's dis- 
 like of the word Trinity, 267. 
 
 His relation to classical culture, 
 337, 338, 339. To scientific 
 knowledge, 381, 382, 382 n., 
 383, 383 n. 
 
 Luther, other references, 37, 74, 
 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 
 232, 235, 236, 239, 240, 241, 
 242, 243, 245, 248, 258, 259, 
 260, 273, 278, 280, 282, 283, 
 284, 286, 288, 295, 299, 301, 
 303, 304, 305, 326, 327, 354, 
 364, 372, 387, 402, 405, 406, 
 415. 
 
 Lupfen, Count von, 201. 
 
 Lyell, Sir C, 385. 
 
 Lyra, Nicholas de, 55, 55 n. 
 
 Magdeburg Centuriators, 354. 
 
 Magellan, 382. 
 
 Mainz, University of, 48, 58. 
 
 Mantz, Felix, 179. 
 
 Marburg, Articles of, 282. 
 
 Marburg, Conference of, 84, 103, 
 138, 174. 
 
 Marburg, University of, 93. 
 
 Margaret, Duchess, 243. 
 
 Marozia, 32. 
 
 Martin V., 13. 
 
 Marvel, A., 275. 
 
 Mary of Burgundy, 94. 
 
 Mary, Queen of Scots, 243, 318. 
 
 Mary Tudor, 304, 308, 316, 317, 
 319. 
 
 Maurice of Saxony, 109, 110. 
 
 Maximilian, Emperor, 32, 56, 94, 
 101. 
 
 Medici, Catharine de, 107, 243. 
 
 Medici, Cosmo de, 272. 
 
 Medici, Lorenzo de, 38, 41. 
 
 Melancthon on Reuchlin's Hebrew 
 learning, 53, 55. Holds Luther's 
 pen, 84. Distress at Weimar, 86, 
 87. His character, 88. His in- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 443 
 
 tellectualyioldingness,89. Want 
 of authority, 89. Eeally a hu- 
 manist, 90. His misery in later 
 life, 91. Faith in Charles V., 
 97. Obedient to princes, 101. 
 On the authority of Scripture, 
 121. Idea of a consensus of 
 theological opinion, 125. What 
 he thought of Erasmus, 149, 152. 
 At the Conference of Marburg, 
 174. On religious liberty, 177. 
 On capital punishment of here- 
 tics, 180. Letter to Calvin on 
 Servetus, 181. Opinions on the 
 subject, 181 n. Conduct of the 
 Zwickau prophets, 190. The 
 Auabaptists of Jena, 195 et seq. 
 Eelation to Schwenkfeld, 213. 
 To Franck, 213, 217. Change 
 of position as to the Trinity, 
 268. Author of the Confession 
 of Augsburg, 282. Of the Apo- 
 logy,283. Of "Loci Communes," 
 286. Luther's praise of the "Loci 
 Communes," 286. Editions, 287. 
 Controversies after Luther's 
 death, 288. " Corpus Doctrinse 
 Philippicum," 289. His share 
 in Hermann's Consultation, 313 
 n., 314. His relation to classi- 
 cal culture, 337, 338, 339, 340, 
 341, 341 n. To scientific know- 
 ledge, 382, 383 n. 
 
 Melancthon, other references, 245, 
 248, 254, 264, 271, 273, 284, 
 290, 295, 296, 298, 304. 
 
 Meyer, Gerald, 236. 
 
 Michael Angelo, 116 n. 
 
 Michaelis, 355. 
 
 Mill, editor of New Testament, 
 331. 
 
 Milton, 261. 
 
 Mirandola, Pico della, 55. 
 
 Mochau, Anna, 142. 
 
 Mohr, Hans, 178. 
 
 Moller, Jobst, 196, 197, 198. 
 
 Moral effects of the Eeformation, 
 
 145 n. 
 More, Henry, 329. 
 More, Sir Thomas, 61, 302, 306. 
 Morton, the Eegent, 86. 
 Miihlberg, Battle of, 109,243, 310. 
 Minister, Anabaptist kingdom of, 
 
 203. 
 Miinzer, Th., 85, 186, 189, 190, 
 
 198, 199. 
 Muretus, 343. 
 Musa, Anton ius, 195. 
 Mutianus Eufus, 50, 51, 53, 63 n., 
 
 145 n., 337.' 
 Myconius, F., 92. 
 Myconius, Os., 242. 
 
 Newman, J. H., 324, 327. 
 Newton, Sir I., 292, 384. 
 Nicholas of Basel, 20. 
 Nicholas V., 14, 38, 39 n. 
 Niebuhr, 345, 346. 
 "Noble Lesson," the, 24. 
 Non-jurors, the, 325. 
 Niimberg, Diet of, 79. 
 Niirnberg Gymnasium, 93. 
 
 Ochino, 269. 
 
 Ockham, William of, 8. 
 
 (Ecolampadius,143, 204, 205, 207, 
 
 227, 242. 
 " Ortlieber," the, 26 n. 
 Ortuinus Gratius, 60. 
 Osiander, 205, 288, 313 n. 
 Osmund, Bishop, 312. 
 Ostorodt, 274. 
 Oxford movement, the, 325. 
 
 Paley, 329, 376, 378, 397. 
 Pandulf, 308. 
 
444 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Paris, University of, 58. 
 
 Parker, Archbishop, 311, 312, 
 318, 320, 321, 324. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 376. 
 
 Passau, Convention of, 110, 243. 
 
 Paul III., 93, 107, 244. 
 
 Paul IV., 244, 309, 402. 
 
 Paulus, 377. 
 
 Pearson, Bishop, 331. 
 
 Peasants' War, 199. 
 
 Peissker, Hans, 196. 
 
 Pellicanus, Conrad, 53 n. 
 
 Pescara, 96. 
 
 Peter Martyr, 310, 314. 
 
 Peto, William, 309. 
 
 Petrarch, 5, 37, 39, 43. 
 
 Petrejus, 63 n. 
 
 Peutinger, C, 49. 
 
 Peutingeriana, Tabula, 49 n. 
 
 Pfefferkorn, 54 n., 56, 57, 61. 
 
 Pflug, Julius, 72 n. 
 
 Philip II., 98, 243, 296, 318. 
 
 Philip of Hesse, 84, 93, 103, 104, 
 109, 138, 174. 
 
 Philip, son of Emperor Maximi- 
 lian, 94. 
 
 Pirkheimer, W., 49, 145 n., 205, 
 215, 337. 
 
 Pisa, Council of, 9. 
 
 Pius II, 13, 44, 45. 
 
 Pius IV., 244. 
 
 Poggio Bracciolini, 38, 43. 
 
 Poland, religion in, 270. 
 
 Pole, Cardinal, 309, 311. 
 
 Politian, 38, 49. 
 
 Pontano, 38. 
 
 Poor Men of Lyons, 24, 141. 
 
 Prague, University of, 44, 44 n. 
 
 Priestley, 273, 385. 
 
 Principles, the, of the Refor- 
 mation, 112. Catholicism ob- 
 jective, Protestantism subjec- 
 tive, 112. Two great Churches 
 
 described, 113. The method 
 of the Catholic Church, 114. 
 Luther's attack upon it, 116. 
 Substitutes authority of the 
 Bible for that of the Church, 
 116. His method of literal 
 interpretation, 118. The four 
 senses of Scripture, 119. Eras- 
 mus on allegorical interpreta- 
 tion, 120. Reformers do not 
 think of proving the authority 
 of Scripture, 121. Calvin's 
 theory, 122. Every believer to 
 interpret Scripture for himself, 
 124. Yet how were differences 
 to be reconciled? 125. The 
 Bible an organic whole, 126. 
 The Gospel in the Old Testa- 
 ment, 127. Presence of the 
 Gospel a test of the value of 
 Scripture books, 127. Justifi- 
 cation by faith alone, 128. The 
 belief and practice to which it 
 was opposed, 129. Luther's 
 ethical preaching, 130. Intel- 
 lectual and moral meanings of 
 the word faith, 131. Glaube, 
 131. Luther's conception of 
 faith becomes intellectual, 132. 
 The priesthood of the Christian 
 believer, 133. This the centre- 
 point of opposition to the Catho- 
 lic system, 135. Sacraments, 
 135. Illogicalness of Luther's 
 theory, 137. His insistance on 
 the Real Presence, 138. His 
 obstinacy at Marburg, 138. The 
 Reformation a reaction against 
 mediaeval ethics, 140. Marriage 
 of priests, 142. Luther's mar- 
 riage and domestic character, 
 143. 
 Procopius, 29. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 445 
 
 Protest of 1529, 102. 
 Pulci, 43. 
 
 Puritans, vid. Reformation in En- 
 gland. 
 
 Quignon, Cardinal, 312. 
 
 Racovian Catechism, 281 n. 
 
 Racow, Academy of, 273. 
 
 Rask, 349. 
 
 Reform before the Reformation, 
 1. Statement of objects of the 
 course, 1. Oneness of the Me- 
 diaeval Church, 3. Dissatisfac- 
 tion with its practical working, 
 4. Efforts of the Church to 
 reform itself, 6. The Catholic 
 efforts, 6. Monastic orders, 6, 7. 
 Outbreak of anti-sacerdotalism, 
 7. Mendicant orders, 8. The 
 Spiritual Franciscans, 9. Coun- 
 cil of Pisa, 9. OfConstanz, 10. 
 Gerson's treatise on reform, 11. 
 Council of Basel, 13. Of Fer- 
 rara and Florence, 13. Failure 
 of this method of reform, 14. 
 The Mystic efforts, 14. Charac- 
 teristics of Mysticism, 1 4. Mys- 
 tics in all churches, 1 6. Different 
 developments of Mysticism, 17. 
 The Fratricelli, 17. Brethren of 
 the Free Spirit, 1 9. Eckhart, 1 9. 
 "Homines intelligentise," 19 n. 
 Nicholas of Basel, Tauler, The.o- 
 logia Germanica, 20. Beghards 
 and Beguines, 20. Ruysbroeck, 
 21. Brethren of the Common 
 Life, 21. a Kempis and the 
 " Imitation of Christ," 22. Lu- 
 ther on the Theologia Germanica, 
 23. Biblical efforts, 23. Wal- 
 denses, 24. Double origin, 24. 
 Their principles, 24. Wide dif- 
 
 fusion, 25. Born out of due 
 season, 26. Wiclif, 26. A Bibli- 
 cal and anti-sacerdotal reformer, 
 27. Why his movement failed, 
 27. His influence revived in 
 Bohemia, 28. John Huss, 28. 
 Luther at the Leipzig disputa- 
 tion with Eck, 29. A Hussite 
 without knowing it, 30. The 
 German Reformers before the 
 Reformation, 30. John of Goch, 
 30. John Wessel, 31. John of 
 Wesel, 31. Luther's indepen- 
 dence of them, 32. The evils of 
 the Church still grew, 32. Moral 
 infamy of the Popes, 32. Scho- 
 lastic theology, 33. The intel- 
 lectual revival of Europe the 
 cause of Luther's success, 34. 
 Reformation in its External 
 Aspects, the, 76. Large part 
 of Germany in the hands of the 
 Church, 76. Demand for a 
 German Council, 77. Catholic 
 demand for reform, 78. Council 
 of Trent, 79. Luther a popular 
 leader, 80. The reasons of 
 his influence, 81. His activity 
 purely religious, 81. His in- 
 tense nature, 82. Strong per- 
 sonal influence and quick fame, 
 83. His self-confidence, 84. 
 His violence of speech, 85. His 
 home at Wittenberg, 85. His 
 religious insight, 86. His 
 prayerful n ess, 86. His trials 
 and temptations, 88. Me- 
 lancthon, 88. His character, 89. 
 A humanist, 90. The Univer- 
 sity of Wittenberg, 91. Luther's 
 and Melancthon's influence on 
 it, 92. The centre of German 
 Protestantism, 93. Charles V., 
 
446 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 93. His birth and inheritance, 
 
 94. His policy, 95. His charac- 
 ter, 96. No sympathy with Pro- 
 testantism, 97. Charles' policy 
 Burgundian, 98. Influence of 
 the constitution of the empire 
 on the fortunes of the Refor- 
 mation, 99. The three Saxon 
 Electors, 101. Philip of Hesse, 
 103. The Popes of the Refor- 
 mation, 104. Belonged to the 
 same class as the Italian despots, 
 
 105. Julius II., 106. Leo X., 
 
 106. Adrian VI., 106. Clement 
 VII., 107. Paul III., 107. The 
 progress of events, 108. The 
 war breaks out, 109. Battle of 
 MiLhlberg, 109. Maurice changes 
 sides again, 110. Convention 
 of Passau, 110. Abdication of 
 Charles V., 111. 
 
 Reformation, the, in relation 
 to Reason and Liberty, 146. 
 Reformation a triumph of the 
 scientific spirit and an assertion 
 of human liberty, 148. Theo- 
 logical rationalism of Erasmus, 
 149. Luther at Worms relies 
 upon Scripture and reason, 153. 
 Reaction under the influence of 
 Anabaptism, 154. Passages in 
 praise of reason, 154. In dis- 
 paragement, 156. His rational- 
 izing view of Scripture, 157. 
 Criticism of its matter as well 
 as of its form, 159. Scriptural 
 truth opposed to reason, 161. 
 Reason to be strangled, 163. 
 Luther's Anfechtungen, 165. His 
 belief in the devil, 165. His 
 troubles of mind, 167. Arise 
 out of his inner struggle between 
 faith and reason, 168. The Re- 
 
 formation asserts the rights of 
 conscience, 170. Luther on 
 liberty of conscience, 171. Im- 
 perfect application of these prin- 
 ciples, 172. Conference of Mar- 
 burg, 174. Differences at the 
 Diet of Augsburg and after- 
 wards, 175. Intolerance in- 
 volved in the practical transi- 
 tion from a Catholic to a Pro- 
 testant Church, 176. The Saxon 
 Visitation, 177. Blasphemy, 
 1 78. Luther's behaviour to here- 
 tics, 178. Zwingli's, 179. Me- 
 lancthon's, 180. Calvin's, 180. 
 Things are worse in the next 
 generation, 181. Persecution 
 of a Lasco and his fugitives from 
 England, 182. 
 
 Reformed churches, vid. Reforma- 
 tion in Switzerland. 
 
 Reinecke Fuchs, 49. 
 
 Rene, Duchess of Ferrara, 259. 
 
 Revival, the, of Letters in Italy 
 and Germany, 35. The age 
 of the Renaissance, 35. The 
 method of the revival, 36. Its 
 inspiration classical, 38. Style 
 all-important among the human- 
 ists, 39. Valla, 40. Prevalent 
 immorality, 40. Classical tra- 
 vesty of Christian names and 
 facts, 40. Peculiarity of Italian 
 religion, 41. Italy too familiar 
 with religion as it existed, 42. 
 And gains by it, 42. Human- 
 ists of the first generation only 
 learning the lessons of antiquity, 
 
 42. Second age of the revival 
 creative, 43. Invention of print- 
 ing, 43. Germany behind Italy 
 in classical culture, 43. Poggio, 
 
 43. ^Eneas Sylvius, 43. The 
 
INDEX. 
 
 447 
 
 older Universities of Germany, 
 44. Poverty of instruction given 
 in them, 44. a Kempis and his 
 pupils, 46. Agricola, 46. Drin- 
 genberg, 46. Hegius, 46. New 
 universities in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, 48. Distribution of cul- 
 ture all over Germany, 48, 49, 
 50. Knights errant of the re- 
 vival, 51. Humanists did not 
 agree in theological opinion, 51. 
 Opposition between humanists 
 and poets, 52. Eeuchlin and 
 the theologians of Cologne, 52. 
 Reuchlin's birth and education, 
 
 53. A lawyer and a statesman, 
 
 54. His devotion to Hebrew 
 studies, 55. Pfefferkorn and 
 his errand, 56. Reuchlin's an- 
 swer, 56. Controversy with the 
 Dominicans of Cologne, 57. 
 Case heard at Mainz, 57. Appeal 
 to Rome, 57. Continued con- 
 troversy, 58. The Reuchlinists, 
 59. "ClarorumVirorumEpisto- 
 ke,"59. "Epistolse Obscurorum 
 Yirorum," 60. Prodigious effect, 
 61. Erasmus' opinion, 61. Lu- 
 ther's, 61. Who was their au- 
 thor? 62. Ulrich v. Hutten, 62. 
 Crotus Rubianus, 63. Erasmus 
 the greatest name of the German 
 revival, 63. His enormous re- 
 putation, 64. Deserts in respect 
 of scientific theology, 65. His 
 Greek New Testament, 65. His 
 Paraphrases, 66. Editions of 
 the Fathers, 66. One of the 
 religious humanists, 67. Yet 
 does not act with the Reuchlin- 
 ists, 67. Disavows Reuchlin in 
 his letters, 68. " Apotheosis of 
 Reuchlin," 68, 68 n. Interview 
 
 with Frederick the Wise, 69. 
 His theory of a Reformation 
 produced by culture, 70. Dis- 
 like of Luther's theology, 71. 
 The Jerome of the Reformation, 
 71. Is involved in controversy 
 with Luther, 72. His merits 
 and defects, 72, 73. Play in 
 dumb show performed before 
 Charles V., 73. 
 
 Reuchlin, 31, 43, 52, 62 n., 74, 
 90, 141, 337, 337 n. 
 
 Reyman, H., 180. 
 
 Richard II., 28. 
 
 Robert of Citeaux, 7. 
 
 Rostock, University of, 44. 
 
 Rovere, Franc' della, vid. Sixtus 
 IV. 
 
 Ruarus, 274. 
 
 Ruysbroeck, 21. 
 
 Sacchi, 407. 
 
 Sachs, Hans, 215. 
 
 Salmasius, 343. 
 
 Sancta Clara, 324. 
 
 San Marco, Ant. di, 106. 
 
 Sannazaro, 38. 
 
 Saravia, 332. 
 
 Sarzana, Thomas of, vid. Nicholas V. 
 
 Sattler, M., 195. 
 
 Savonarola, 41. 
 
 Savoy Conference, 322. 
 
 Scaligers, the, 343, 354. 
 
 Schelling, 373. 
 
 Schism, Papal, 9. 
 
 Schlegel, F., 349. 
 
 Schmalkalden, Assembly of, 175, 
 213. 
 
 Schmalkalden, Articles of, 283. 
 
 Scholasticism, Protestant, 262. 
 Catholic scholasticism, 262. Lu- 
 ther's rebellion against it, 264. 
 Formation of a Protestant coun- 
 
448 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 terpart, 264. Assumptions con- 
 tained in Protestant use of the 
 Eible, 265. Three Protestant 
 systems of theology, 266. Limits 
 of Protestant dogmatic diver- 
 gence from Rome, 267. Re- 
 formers on the Trinity, 267. 
 Melancthon's Loci, 268. South- 
 ern rationalists, 269. Find re- 
 fuge in Poland, 270. Socinian 
 church there established, 270. 
 Lselius Socinus, 271. Faustus 
 Socinus, 272. His character, 
 273. The Polish Unitarian 
 church, 273. Unitarians ex- 
 pelled from Poland, 274. Soci- 
 nianism at Altorf, 274 n. Uni- 
 tarians in Transylvania, 275. 
 Reproach of Socinianism, 275. 
 Its intellectual hardihood, 276. 
 Its theological system, 277. Ac- 
 cepts the authority of Scripture, 
 278. At the opposite pole of 
 thought from mysticism, 280. 
 The Unitarian name, 281 n. 
 Dogmatic development of Lu- 
 theranism, 282. Articles of 
 Marburg, 282. Of Schwabach, 
 282. Confession of Augsburg, 
 282. Confessio Tetrapolitana, 
 
 282. Articles of Schmalkalden, 
 
 283. Concord of Wittenberg, 
 283. The communicatio idio- 
 matum, 284. Its development, 
 285. The Formula of Concord, 
 285. Melancthon's Loci, 286. 
 Periods of its development, 287. 
 Lutheran controversies, 288. 
 Polemical rage, 288. Corpora 
 doctrines, 289. Formula Con- 
 cordice, 290. Gerhard's Loci 
 Theologici, 290. Calov's Sys- 
 tema, 291. Results of the dog- 
 
 matic passion, 292. Calvin's 
 "Institution," 293. Its contents, 
 294. Its character, 295. Supra- 
 lapsarian controversy, 296. The 
 Calvinistic systematizers of the 
 seventeenth century, 297. Con- 
 clusion, 298. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 373. 
 
 Schwabach, Articles of, 282. 
 
 Schwabach, Assembly of, 175. 
 
 Schwenkfeld, Casp., 204, 212. 
 
 Schwenkfeldian church, 212 n. 
 
 Sects, the, of the Reformation, 
 184. The Biblically orthodox 
 phase of the movement that 
 which prevails, 184. Other 
 phases, 185. The sects of the 
 Reformation usually thought to 
 be its reproach, 186. Influence 
 of German mysticism on Luther, 
 187. The mysticism of the 
 Reformation assumes the Ana- 
 baptist form, 189. Anabaptist 
 principle of the continuity of 
 Revelation, 189. The prophets 
 of Zwickau, 190. Anabaptist 
 view T s of Scripture, 191. Their 
 literal interpretation of it, 192. 
 Spread of Anabaptism, 193. Its 
 individual character, 193. Per- 
 secution and steadfastness, 194. 
 Melancthon's Narratio de Ana- 
 baptistis, 195. Connection of 
 Anabaptism with revolutionary 
 politics, 198. The Peasants' 
 War, 199. Luther's changing 
 attitude to it, 200. Religious 
 colour of the Peasants' demands, 
 201. Anabaptist kingdom of 
 Minister, 203. Antinomianism, 
 
 203. Three representative men, 
 
 204. Joh. Denck, 204. His 
 life, 205. Character, 206. Cha- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 449 
 
 racteristic opinions, 207. Caspar 
 Schwenkfeld, 212. His life, 
 213. Peculiarity of his mysti- 
 cism, 214. Sen. Franck, 215. 
 His literary activity, 216. Cha- 
 racter as an historian, 217. His 
 theological opinions, 218. His 
 conception of nature, 220. No 
 Anabaptist, 221. Was he a 
 Pantheist? 223. Relation of 
 these men to future thought, 
 223. 
 
 Selnecker, 287 n. 
 
 Semler, 355, 356. 
 
 Servetus, 125, 180, 253, 254, 268, 
 269, 276. 
 
 " Ship of Fools," the, 49. 
 
 Sickingen, F. v., 58 n., 81, 199. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 318. 
 
 Sigismund, Emperor, 10, 11, 13. 
 
 Simon, R., 355. 
 
 Sixtus IV., 31, 32. 
 
 Smith, of Cambridge, 329. 
 
 Socini, the, 125, 269, 271, 271 n. 
 
 Socinus, Faustus, 265, 271, 272, 
 273, 276, 277, 278, 279. 
 
 Socinus, Lselius, 271. 
 
 Somerset, the Protector, 244, 254, 
 310. 
 
 Soner, E., 274 n. 
 
 Spalatin, G., 30, 69, 101, 286, 340. 
 
 Speier, Diet of, 102. 
 
 Spencer, H., 373. 
 
 Spener, 292. 
 
 Spiegelberg, M. v., 46. 
 
 Spinoza, 298, 355, 373, 403. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, 329. 
 
 Staupitz, Joh., 30, 83, 91. 
 
 Stephen Harding, 7. 
 
 Stevinus, 382 n. 
 
 Storch, Nich., 190, 192. 
 
 Strauss, D. F., 52, 358, 363. 
 
 Supralapsarian controversy, 296. 
 
 Switzerland, the Reformation 
 in, 225. Lutheran and Re- 
 formed churches, 225. Luther 
 at first the chief figure of the 
 Reformation, 225. Calvinism 
 the missionary Protestantism, 
 
 226. Zwingli and Calvin, 
 
 227. Zwingli's doctrine Luther- 
 anism with a difference, 229. 
 Independent of Luther, 229. 
 No mysticism in him, 230. 
 Zwingli a humanist, 231. His 
 sphere less Switzerland than the 
 Rhineland, 232. Influence on 
 him of Republican institutions, 
 232. His political purposes, 234. 
 Similar influence of politics on 
 ecclesiastical institutions, 235. 
 Ethical character of Zwinglian 
 religion, 236. Theory of Church 
 and State, 237. Authority of 
 Scripture, 239. Zwingli more 
 Biblical than Pauline, 240. Does 
 Zwingli rationalize 1 ? 241. His 
 character and disposition, 242. 
 Calvin belongs to a later stage 
 of the Reform, 243. The only 
 great Reformer who is interna- 
 tional, 244. Geneva, 245. His 
 theory of church authority, 246. 
 Church discipline, 248. Rela- 
 tion of Church and State in 
 Geneva in this respect, 249. 
 Geneva under Calvin, 250. Did 
 his rule succeed or fail? 251. 
 Calvin's defence of persecution, 
 253. Case of Gruet, 253. Of 
 Servetus, 254. Calvin's letter 
 to the Protector Somerset, 254. 
 Differences between Calvinistic 
 and Lutheran type of theology, 
 255. Idea of supremacy of God 
 runs through it, 256. Moral 
 
 G 
 
450 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 effects of this kind of religion, 
 257. Calvin more completely 
 Biblical than Luther, 258. Cal- 
 vinism the last word of the or- 
 thodox Protestant Reformation, 
 258. 
 
 Tauler, Joh. 19, 21, 280. 
 
 Temple, Sir W., 344. 
 
 Tertiaries, Franciscan, 20. 
 
 Tetzel, 5. 
 
 Thamer, Theobald, 220 n. 
 
 Theodora, 32. 
 
 "Theologia Germanica," 16, 23, 
 
 280. 
 Thurius, Paulus, 293 n. 
 Titian, 96. 
 Tremellio, 310. 
 Trent, Council of, 79, 97, 109, 
 
 111, 402. 
 Trier, University of, 48. 
 Trithemius, 49, 51. 
 Tubingen, University of, 48. 
 Turlupins, 20 n. 
 Turretine, 297, 299, 332. 
 Tyler, Wat, 27. 
 Tyndale, W., 261, 305. 
 
 Unitarian church of Poland, 270. 
 Of Transylvania, 274, 275. 
 
 Valla, Lorenzo, 39, 39 n., 40. 
 
 Van Mastricht, 297. 
 
 Vasco de Gama, 382. 
 
 Vaudois, the, 24. 
 
 Vesalius, 384. 
 
 Vida, 41 n. 
 
 Vienna, University of, 44, 44 n. 
 
 Visitation of the Saxon churches, 
 
 177. 
 Voltaire, 65, 377. 
 Voss, G. J., 333 n. 
 Voss, Is., 333 n. 
 
 Wake, Archbishop, 333. 
 Waldenses, the, 7, 24, 25, 25 n., 
 
 133. 
 Waldo, Peter, 24. 
 Walter de Mapes, 25 n. 
 Walton, Bryan, 331. 
 Warbam, Archbishop, 302, 309, 
 
 311. 
 Weller, Hier., 168 n. 
 Wesel, John of, 30, 31. 
 Wesley, John, 24, 257, 413. 
 Wessel, John, 5, 31, 32, 55. 
 Westminster Confession, 228, 322, 
 
 413. 
 Whichcote, 329. 
 Whitgift, Archbishop, 320, 327. 
 Wiclif, John, 26, 27, 133, 141, 
 
 301, 303. 
 William, Duke of Bavaria, 194. 
 William of Nassau, 257, 296. 
 William Rufus, 307. 
 Wimpheling, Jacob, 48, 51. 
 " Winkeler," the, 25 n. 
 Witsius, 297. 
 
 Wittenberg, Concord of, 283. 
 Wittenberg, University of, 48, 91, 
 
 92, 93, 225, 337. 
 Wizel, G., 145 n., 383 n. 
 Woidowski, 274 n. 
 Wolf, F. A., 345. 
 Wollzogen, 274. 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 68, 308, 309. 
 Worms, Diet of, 79, 96. 
 Worms, Edict of, 79, 80, 108. 
 Wurtemberg, Confession of, 316. 
 Wyttenbach, Th., 231. 
 
 Ximenes, Cardinal, 97. 
 
 Young, Dr., 347. 
 
 Zasius, U"., 49. 
 Ziska, 29. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 451 
 
 Zwickau prophets, 169, 186, 189, 
 190, 191, 198. 
 
 Zwingli on indulgences, 5. Theory 
 of sacraments, 136. At the 
 Conference of Marburg, 174. 
 On capital punishment of here- 
 tics, 179, 194. Early preaching 
 at Einsiedeln, 225. His birth, 
 227. Scene of his activity Ger- 
 man, 227, 232. Death at Cap- 
 pel, 227. Calvin's relation to 
 him, 228. Independence of 
 Luther, 229. No mystic, 230. 
 A humanist, 231. Classical stu- 
 dies, 231. Philosophical studies, 
 232. Political aims, 232. Social 
 ideal of religion, 234. Con- 
 nection of Swiss Bepublican- 
 
 ism with Presbyterianism, 235. 
 Ethical spirit of Zwinglian reli- 
 gion, 236. Theory of Church 
 and State, 237. Connection of 
 this theory with persecution, 
 238. With church discipline, 
 
 238. Beginnings of Genevan 
 discipline in Zurich, 239. Zwin- 
 gli acknowledges authority of 
 Scripture, 239. Distinction be- 
 tween his position and Luther's, 
 
 239. His scheme of Scripture 
 instruction, 240. Common sense 
 in Zwinglianism, 241. Per- 
 sonal character of Zwingli, 242. 
 
 Zwingli, other references, 23, 305, 
 402. 
 
 UNIVERSITY] 
 
 Errata. 
 
 P. 42, line 6, for "help" read "pelf." 
 
 P. 60, line 19, for " proposed" read " propose." 
 
 P. 81, line 13, for "natural" read "national." 
 
 P. 166, line 6, for "apparations" read "apparitions." 
 
 P. 181, note, for "declaration" read "declamation." 
 
 P. 252, note, for " convents" read " converts." 
 
 C. Green A Sol), i'nntcrs, 178, Strand. 
 
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