CHAPTER XIII

THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES

SECTION 1. TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE

Because religion has in the past protested its own intolerance the most loudly, it is commonly regarded as the field of persecution par excellence. This is so far from being the case that it is just in the field of religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work in the vineyard had been forcibly hauled thither, whereas the other son, admitting his willingness to go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by going bare-foot and long-haired than by proclaiming novel religious views; he would be in vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result, and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the other, respect for each other's rights.

[Sidenote: Intolerance, Catholics]

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost all religions and almost all statesmen were then equally intolerant when they had the power to be so. The Catholic church, with that superb consistency that no new light can alter, has {642} always asserted that the opinion that everyone should have freedom of conscience [Sidenote: Freedom of conscience] was "madness flowing from the most foul fountain of indifference." [1] Augustine believed that the church should "compel men to enter in" to the kingdom, by force. Aquinas argued that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have heard the truth a sin, and that "heretics deserve not only to be excommunicated but to be put to death." One of Luther's propositions condemned by the bull Exsurge Domine was that it is against the will of the Holy Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote: "Who ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to slaughter heretics who were nothing else than heretics?" the proposition was condemned, by the Sorbonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of God and of man. The power of the pope to depose and punish heretical princes was asserted in the bull of February 15, 1559.

The theory of the Catholic church was put into instant practice; the duty of persecution was carried out by the Holy Office, of which Lord Acton, though himself a Catholic, has said:[2]

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed or assented, as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. . . . It is the principal thing with which the papacy is identified and by which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination.

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not the judgment of the church. A prelate of the papal {643} household published in 1895, the following words in the Annales ecclesiastici:[3]

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberalism that bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little reasons to defend the Inquisition! Let no one speak of the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the church needed excuses. O blessed flames of those pyres by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and eternal damnation! O noble and venerable memory of Torquemada!

[Sidenote: Protestants]

So much for the Catholics. If any one still harbors the traditional prejudice that the early Protestants were more liberal, he must be undeceived. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, [Sidenote: Luther] confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did.

In his first period Luther expressed the theory of toleration as well as anyone can. He wrote: "The pope is no judge of matters pertaining to God's Word and the faith, but a Christian must examine and judge them himself, as he must live and die by thorn." Again he said: "Heresy can never be prevented by force. . . . Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be cut with iron nor burnt with fire nor drowned in water." And yet again, "Faith is free. What could a heresy trial do? No more than make people agree by mouth or in writing; it could not compel the heart. For true is the proverb: 'Thoughts are free of taxes.'" Even {644} when the Anabaptists began to preach doctrines that he thoroughly disliked, Luther at first advised the government to leave them unmolested to teach and believe what they liked, "be it gospel or lies."

But alas for the inconsistency of human nature! When Luther's party ripened into success, he saw things quite differently. The first impulse came from the civil magistrate, whom the theologians at first endured, then justified and finally urged on. All persons save priests were forbidden [Sidenote: February 26, 1527] by the Elector John of Saxony to preach or baptize, a measure aimed at the Anabaptists. In the same year, under this law, twelve men and one woman were put to death, and such executions were repeated several times in the following years, e.g. in 1530, 1532 and 1538. In the year 1529 came the terrible imperial law, passed by an alliance of Catholics and Lutherans at the Diet of Spires, condemning all Anabaptists to death, and interpreted to cover cases of simple heresy in which no breath of sedition mingled. A regular inquisition was set up in Saxony, with Melanchthon on the bench, and under it many persons were punished, some with death, some with life imprisonment, and some with exile.

While Luther took no active part in these proceedings, and on several occasions gave the opinion that exile was the only proper punishment, he also, at other times, justified persecution on the ground that he was suppressing not heresy but blasphemy. As he interpreted blasphemy, in a work published about 1530, it included the papal mass, the denial of the divinity of Christ or of any other "manifest article of the faith, clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout Christendom." The government should also, in his opinion, put to death those who preached sedition, anarchy or the abolition of private property.

[Sidenote: Melanchthon]

Melanchthon was far more active in the pursuit of {645} heretics than was his older friend. He reckoned the denial of infant baptism, or of original sin, and the opinion that the eucharistic bread did not contain the real body and blood of Christ, as blasphemy properly punishable by death. He blamed Brenz for his tolerance, asking why we should pity heretics more than does God, who sends them to eternal torment? Brenz was convinced by this argument and became a persecutor himself.

[Sidenote: Bucer and Capito]

The Strassburgers, who tried to take a position intermediate between Lutherans and Zwinglians, were as intolerant as any one else. They put to death a man for saying that Christ was a mere man and a false prophet, and then defended this act in a long manifesto asking whether all religious customs of antiquity, such as the violation of women, be tolerated, and, if not, why they should draw the line at those who aimed not at the physical dishonor, but at the eternal damnation, of their wives and daughters?

[Sidenote: Zwingli]

The Swiss also punished for heresy. Felix Manz was put to death by drowning, [Sidenote: January 5, 1527] the method of punishment chosen as a practical satire on his doctrine of baptism of adults by immersion. At the same time George Blaurock was cruelly beaten and banished under threat of death. [Sidenote: September 9, 1527] Zurich, Berne and St. Gall published a joint edict condemning Anabaptists to death, and under this law two Anabaptists were sentenced in 1528 and two more in 1532.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

In judicially murdering Servetus the Genevans were absolutely consistent with Calvin's theory. In the preface to the Institutes he admitted the right of the government to put heretics to death and only argued that Protestants were not heretics. Grounding himself on the law of Moses, he said that the death decreed by God to idolatry in the Old Testament was a universal law binding on Christians. He thought that {646} Christians should hate the enemies of God as much as did David, and when Renée of Ferrara suggested that that law might have been abrogated by the new dispensation, Calvin retorted that any such gloss on a plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin went further, and when Castellio argued that heretics should not be punished with death, Calvin said that those who defended heretics in this manner were equally culpable and should be equally punished.

Given the premises of the theologians, their arguments were unanswerable. Of late the opinion has prevailed that his faith cannot be wrong whose life is in the right. But then it was believed that the creed was the all-important thing; that God would send to hell those who entertained wrong notions of his scheme of salvation. "We utterly abhor," says the Scots' Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those that affirm that men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion so ever they have professed."

[Sidenote: Tolerance]

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ventured to protest in the name of their master. In general, the persecuted sects, Anabaptists and Unitarians, were firmly for tolerance, by which their own position would have been improved. [Sidenote: Erasmus] Erasmus was thoroughly tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise specially devoted to the subject, uttered many obiter dicta in favor of mercy and wrote many letters to the great ones of the earth interceding for the oppressed. His broad sympathies, his classical tastes, his horror of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not have permitted him to resort to the coarse arms of rack and stake even against infidels and Turks.

The noblest plea for tolerance from the Christian standpoint was that written by Sebastian Castellio [Sidenote: Castellio] as a protest against the execution of Servetus. He {647} collects all the authorities ancient and modern, the latter including Luther and Erasmus and even some words, inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by Calvin himself. "The more one knows of the truth the less one is inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely observes, and yet, "there is no sect which does not condemn all others and wish to reign alone. Thence come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments, burnings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture and torment that is plied every day because of some opinions not pleasing to the government, or even because of things unknown." But Christians burn not only infidels but even each other, for the heretic calls on the name of Christ as he perishes in agony.

Who would not think that Christ were Moloch, or some such god, if he wished that men be immolated to him and burnt alive? . . . Imagine that Christ, the judge of all, were present and himself pronounced sentence and lit the fire,--who would not take Christ for Satan? For what else would Satan do than burn those who call on the name of Christ? O Christ, creator of the world, dost thou see such things? And hast thou become so totally different from what thou wast, so cruel and contrary to thyself? When thou wast on earth, there was no one gentler or more compassionate or more patient of injuries.

Calvin called upon his henchmen Beza to answer this "blasphemy" of one that must surely be "the chosen vessel of Satan." Beza replied to Castellio that God had given the sword to the magistrate not to be borne in vain and that it was better to have even a cruel tyrant than to allow everyone to do as he pleased. Those who forbid the punishment of heresy are, in Beza's opinion, despisers of God's Word and might as well say that even parricides should not be chastized.

Two authors quoted in favor of tolerance more than {648} they deserve to be are Sir Thomas More [Sidenote: More] and Montaigne. In Utopia, indeed, there was no persecution, save of the fanatic who wished to persecute others. But even in Utopia censure of the government by a private individual was punishable by death. And, twelve years after the publication of the Utopia, More came to argue "that the burning of heretics is lawful and well done," and he did it himself accordingly. The reason he gave, in his Dialogue, was that heretics also persecute, and that it would put the Catholics at an unfair disadvantage to allow heresy to wax unhindered until it grew great enough to crush them. There is something in this argument. It is like that today used against disarmament, that any nation which started it would put itself at the mercy of its rivals.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

The spirit of Montaigne was thoroughly tolerant, because he was always able to see both sides of everything; one might even say that he was negatively suggestible, and always saw the "other" side of an opinion better than he saw his own side of it. He never came out strongly for toleration, but he made two extremely sage remarks about it. The first was that it was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put men to death for their sake. The second was thus phrased, in the old English translation: "It might be urged that to give factions the bridle to uphold their opinion, is by that facility and ease, the ready way to mollify and release them; and to blunt the edge, which is sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty."

Had the course of history been decided by weight of argument, persecution would have been fastened on the world forever, for the consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience. But just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital question by argument, so the course of races and of civilizations is decided by factors lying deeper than {649} the logic of publicists can reach. Modern toleration developed from two very different sources; by one of which the whole point of view of the race has changed, and by the other of which a truce between warring factions, at first imposed as bitter necessity, has developed, because of its proved value, into a permanent peace.

[Sidenote: Renaissance]

The first cause of modern tolerance is the growing rationalism of which the seeds were sown by the Renaissance. The generation before Luther saw an almost unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian ethics; Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the soul; More could frame a Utopia of deists, and Machiavelli could treat religion as an instrument in the hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this liberty was admirable; but it was really narrow and "academic" in the worst sense of the word. The scholars who vindicated for themselves the right to say and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and in university halls, never dreamed that the people had the same rights. Even Erasmus was always urging Luther not to communicate imprudent truths to the vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so vexed that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted or boiled" for it. Erasmus's good friend Ammonius jocosely complained that heretics were so plentiful in England in 1511 before the Reformation had been heard of, that the demand for faggots to burn them was enhancing the price of fire-wood. Indeed, in this enlightened era of the Renaissance, what porridge was handed to the common people? What was free, except dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal and persecuted everywhere else? What tolerance was extended to the Hussites? What mercy was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola?

{650} [Sidenote: Reformation]

Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has been said of the intolerance of the Reformers, the second cause that extended modern freedom of conscience from the privileged few to the masses, was the Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few years, all the glorious culture of the Renaissance with a dark mist of fanaticism, it nevertheless proved, contrary to its own purpose, one of the two parents of liberty. What neither the common ground of the Christians in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of God, nor their enlightenment by the Spirit, could produce, was finally wrung from their mutual and bitter hatreds. Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark and noisome soil, that of religious liberty sprouting from religious war has been the fairest.

The steps were gradual. First, after the long deadlock of Lutheran and Catholic, came to be worked out the principle of the toleration of the two churches, [Sidenote: 1555] embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The Compact of Warsaw [Sidenote: 1573] granted absolute religious liberty to the nobles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with slaughter in the name of the faith, took a longer step in the direction of toleration in the Union of Utrecht. [Sidenote: 1579] The government of Elizabeth, acting from prudential motives only, created and maintained an extra-legal tolerance of Catholics, again and again refusing to molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The papists even hoped to obtain legal recognition when Francis Bacon proposed to tolerate all Christians except those who refused to fight a foreign enemy. France found herself in a like position, [Sidenote: 1592] and solved it by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians for each other blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, [Sidenote: 1598] but after that lesson persecution on a large scale was at an end. Indeed, before its end, wide religious {651} liberty had been granted in some of the American colonies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland.

[1] Gregory XVI, Encyclical, Mirari vos, 1832.

[2] Letters to Mary Gladstone, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p. 298 f.

[3] C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums, 3, 1911, p. 390.

SECTION 2. WITCHCRAFT

Some analogy to the wave of persecution and confessional war that swept over Europe at this time can be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were examples of those manias to which mankind is periodically subject. They run over the face of the earth like epidemics or as a great fire consumes a city. Beginning in a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to trace, the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maximum fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it were, dies away, often quite suddenly. Such manias were the Children's Crusade and the zeal of the flagellants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the panics that repeatedly visit our markets. To the same category belong the religious and superstitious delusions of the sixteenth century.

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to trace than their causes. Certainly, reason does nothing to control them. In almost every case there are a few sane men to point out, with perfect rationality, the nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all cases their words fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, imprisoned, sometimes put to death for their pains, whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame of current passion is listened to, rewarded and followed.

[Sidenote: Ancient magic]

The original stuff from which the mania was wrought is a savage survival. Hebrew and Roman law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the survival of magic, still called in Italy, "the old religion," and new superstitions added to it. Something of the ancient enchantment still lies upon the {652} fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one sometimes comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Willows[1] and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling in the rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the calm of pools is so complete that it seems as if, according to Luther's words, the throwing of a stone into the water would raise a tempest. But on moonlit, windy, Walpurgis Night, witches audibly ride by, hooted at by the owls, and vast spectres dance in the cloud-banks beyond the Brocken.

[Sidenote: The witch]

The witch has become a typical figure: she was usually a simple, old woman living in a lonely cottage with a black cat, gathering herbs by the light of the moon. But she was not always an ancient beldam; some witches were known as the purest and fairest maidens of the village; some were ladies in high station; some were men. A ground for suspicion was sometimes furnished by the fact that certain charletans playing upon the credulity of the ignorant, professed to be able by sorcery to find money, "to provoke persons to love," or to consume the body and goods of a client's enemy. Black magic was occasionally resorted to to get rid {653} of personal or political enemies. More often a wise woman would be sought for her skill in herbs and her very success in making cures would sometimes be her undoing.

[Sidenote: The devil]

If the witch was a domestic article in Europe, the devil was an imported luxury from Asia. Like Aeneas and many another foreign conqueror, when he came to rule the land he married its princess--in this case Hulda the pristine goddess of love and beauty--and adopted many of the native customs. It is difficult for us to imagine what a personage the devil was in the age of the Reformation. Like all geniuses he had a large capacity for work and paid great attention to detail. Frequently he took the form of a cat or a black dog with horns to frighten children by "skipping to and fro and sitting upon the top of a nettle"; again he would obligingly hold a review of evil spirits for the satisfaction of Benvenuto Cellini's curiosity. He was at the bottom of all the earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars of the century, and also, if we may trust their mutual recriminations, he was the special patron of the pope on the one hand and of Calvin on the other. Luther often talked with him, though in doing so the sweat poured from his brow and his heart almost stopped beating. Luther admitted that the devil always got the best of an argument and could only be banished by some unprintably nasty epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satellites often took the form of men or women and under the name of incubi and succubi had sexual intercourse with mortals. One of the most abominable features of the witch craze was that during its height hundreds of children of four or five years old confessed to being the devil's paramours.

So great was the power of Satan that, in the common belief, many persons bartered their souls to him {654} in return for supernatural gifts in this life. To compensate them for the loss of their salvation, these persons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite to their neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, causing sickness to man and animals, making children cry themselves to death before baptism, rendering marriages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms to blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to compel love.

[Sidenote: Witches' Sabbath]

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the celebration of blasphemous and obscene rites in an assembly known as the Witches' Sabbath. To enable themselves to ride to the meeting-place on broomsticks, the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a toad to it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of an infant, the powdered bones of a hanged man and certain herbs. The meeting then indulged in a parody of the mass, for, so the grave doctors taught, as Christ had his sacraments the devil had his "unsacraments" or "execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the form of a goat, dog, cat or ape and received the homage of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony. After a banquet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches followed.

All this superstition smouldered along in the embers of folk tales for centuries until it was blown into a devastating blaze by the breath of theologians who started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given by Innocence VIII in his bull Summis desiderantes. [Sidenote: December 5, 1484] The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that many persons in Germany had had intercourse with demons and had by incantations hindered the birth of children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave authority to Henry Institoris and James Sprenger to correct, incarcerate, punish and fine such persons, calling in, if need be, the aid of the secular arm. These {655} gentlemen acquitted themselves with unsurpassed zeal. Not content with trying and punishing people brought before them, they put forth The Witches' Hammer, [Sidenote: Malleus Maleficarum, 1487] called by Lea the most portentous monument of superstition ever produced. In the next two centuries it was printed twenty-nine times. The University of Cologne at once decided that to doubt the reality of witchcraft was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand, having all it could do with Jews and heretics, treated witchcraft as a diabolical delusion.

[Sidenote: Inquisition]

Though most men, including those whom we consider the choice and master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and More, firmly believed in the objective reality of witchcraft, they were not obsessed by the subject, as were their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found for the intensification of the fanaticism. The first was the use of torture by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: Torture] The crime was of such a nature that it could hardly be proved save by confession, and this, in general, could be extracted only by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to note that in England where the spirit of the law was averse to torture, no progress in witch-hunting took place until a substitute for the rack had been found, first in pricking the body of the witch with pins to find the anaesthetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in depriving her of sleep.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and the bibliolatry of Protestantism. The religious debate heated the spiritual atmosphere and turned men's thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continually harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the demoniacs of the New Testament, weighed heavily upon the shepherds of the people and upon their flocks. Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored not a doubt. The first use he made of the ban was to {656} excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an idiotic child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recommended the authorities to drown it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in private talk and in public sermons, he recommended that witches should be put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties. As a matter of fact, four witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540.

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of their master. In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-four women were burned or quartered for the crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps the occasion of a new English law against witchcraft. Richard Baxter wrote on the Certainty of a World of Spirits. At a much later time the bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John Wesley's remark that giving up witchcraft meant giving up the Bible.

[Sidenote: The madness]

After the mania reached its height in the closing years of the century, anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry, or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician, baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that witchcraft was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any contrariety met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he or she immediately thought of the black art, and considered the most likely person for denunciation. This would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if she had a tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad luck to you!" on some previous occasion. She would then be hauled before the court, promised liberty if she confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of Satan or to be sure that she was not hiding a charm {657} about her person. Torture in some form was then applied, and a ghastly list it was, pricking with needles under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow spurted out, wrenching of the head with knotted cords, toasting the feet before a fire, suspending the victim by the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop until the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work would be kept up until the poor woman either died under the torture, or confessed, when she was sentenced without mercy, usually to be burned, sometimes to lesser punishments.

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, once accused, escaped. John Bodin, a man otherwise enlightened and learned, earned himself the not unjust name of "Satan's attorney-general" by urging that strict proof could not be demanded by the very nature of these cases and that no suspected person should ever be released unless the malice of her accusers was plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, for each witch denounced accomplices until almost the whole population of certain districts was suspected. So frequently did they accuse their judges or their sovereign of having assisted at the witches' sabbath, that this came to be discounted as a regular trick of the devil.

Persecution raged in some places, chiefly in Germany, like a visitation of pestilence or war. Those who tried to stop it fell victims to their own courage, and, unless they recanted, languished for years in prison, or were executed as possessed by devils themselves. At Trèves the persecution was encouraged by the cupidity of the magistrates who profited by confiscation of the property of those sentenced. At Bonn schoolboys of nine or ten, fair young maidens, many priests and scores of good women were done to death.

[Sidenote: Numbers executed]

No figures have been compiled for the total number {658} of victims of this insanity. In England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more than well started on its career, 125 persons are known to have been tried for witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for the crime. In Venice the Inquisition punished 199 persons for sorcery during the sixteenth century. In the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia, in 1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Würzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Trèves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by the tens of thousands.

Throughout the century there were not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson wrote in his School of Abuse: [Sidenote: 1578] "Do not imitate those foolish patients, who, having sought all means of recovery and are never the nearer, run into witchcraft." Leonardo da Vinci called belief in necromancy the most foolish of all human delusions.

As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at its height, the more honor must go to the few who wrote ex professo against it. The first of these, of any note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer. [Sidenote: Weyer] In his book De praestigiis daemonum [Sidenote: 1563] he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded, {659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations. Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant of Satan.

[Sidenote: Scott]

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superstition was Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft, wherein the lewd dealings of Witches and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils. [Sidenote: 1584] Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on a priorigrounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by order of James I.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art of rebutting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless Bodin's abominable Demonology that called forth his celebrated essay on witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit. The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his knowledge of the world, is easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the mental passions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light." And what do the stories amount to?

How much more natural and more likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours should pass from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain away or break down the truth of the report in some way not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own presence and in a particular place to make me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession. I saw both proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my conscience I should rather have appointed them hellebore than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime.

Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we cannot get an explanation--and any explanation is more probable than magic--it is safe to disbelieve: "Fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the vulgar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows and such other bugbears and chimaeras." For Montaigne the evil spell upon the mind of the race had been broken; alas! that it took so long for other men to throw it off!

[1] Erikönig.

SECTION 3. EDUCATION

[Sidenote: Education]

From the most terrible superstition let us turn to the noblest, most inspiring and most important work of {662} humanity. With each generation the process of handing on to posterity the full heritage of the race has become longer and more complex.

[Sidenote: Schools]

It was, therefore, upon a very definite and highly developed course of instruction that the contemporary of Erasmus entered. There were a few great endowed schools, like Eton and Winchester and Deventer, in which the small boy might begin to learn his "grammar"--Latin, of course. Some of the buildings at Winchester and Eton are the same now as they were then, the quite beautiful chapel and dormitories of red brick at Eton, for example. Each of these two English schools had, at this time, less than 150 pupils, and but two masters, but the great Dutch school, Deventer, under the renowned tuition of Hegius, boasted 2200 scholars, divided into eight forms. Many an old woodcut shows us the pupils gathered around the master as thick as flies, sitting cross-legged on the floor, some intent on their books and others playing pranks, while there seldom fails to be one undergoing the chastisement so highly recommended by Solomon. These great schools did not suffice for all would-be scholars. In many villages there was some poor priest or master who would teach the boys what he knew and prepare them thus for higher things. In some places there were tiny school-houses, much like those now seen in rural America. Such an one, renovated, may be still visited at Mansfeld, and its quaint inscription read over the door, to the effect that a good school is like the wooden horse of Troy. When the boys left home they lived more as they do now at college, being given a good deal of freedom out of hours. The poorer scholars used their free times to beg, for as many were supported in this way then as now are given scholarships and other charitable aids in our universities.

[Sidenote: Flogging]

Though there were a good many exceptions, most of {663} the teachers were brutes. The profession was despised as a menial one and indeed, even so, many a gentleman took more care in the selection of grooms and gamekeepers than he did in choosing the men with whom to entrust his children. Of many of the tutors the manners and morals were alike outrageous. They used filthy language to the boys, whipped them cruelly and habitually drank too much. They made the examinations, says one unfortunate pupil of such a master, like a trial for murder. The monitor employed to spy on the boys was known by the significant name of "the wolf." Public opinion then approved of harsh methods. Nicholas Udall, the talented head-master of Eton, was warmly commended for being "the best flogging teacher in England"--until he was removed for his immorality.

[Sidenote: Latin]

The principal study--after the rudiments of reading and writing the mother tongue were learned--was Latin. As, at the opening of the century, there were usually not enough books to go around, the pedagogue would dictate declensions and conjugations, with appropriate exercises, to his pupils. The books used were such as Donatus on the Parts of Speech, a poem called the Facetus by John of Garland, intended to give moral, theological and grammatical information all in one, and selecting as the proper vehicle rhymed couplets. Other manuals were the Floretus, a sort of abstruse catechism, the Cornutus, a treatise on synonyms, and a dictionary in which the words were arranged not alphabetically but according to their supposed etymology--thus hirundo (swallow) from aer (air). One had to know the meaning of the word before one searched for it! The grammars were written in a barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can any man now readily understand the following definition of "pronoun," taken from a book intended {664} for beginners, published in 1499? "Pronomen . . . significat substantiam seu entitatem sub modo conceptus intrinseco permanentis seu habitus et quietis sub determinatae apprehensionis formalitate."

That with all these handicaps boys learned Latin at all, and some boys learned it extremely well, must be attributed to the amount of time spent on the subject. For years it was practically all that was studied--for the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic reduced itself to this--and they not only read a great deal but wrote and spoke Latin. Finally, it became as easy and fluent to them as their own tongue. Many instances that sound like infant prodigies are known to us; boys who spoke Latin at seven and wrote eloquent orations in it at fourteen, were not uncommon. It is true that the average boy spoke then rather a translation of his own language into Latin than the best idiom of Rome. The following ludicrous specimens of conversation, throwing light on the manners as well as on the linguistic attainments of the students, were overheard in the University of Paris: "Capis me pro uno alio"; "Quando ego veni de ludendo, ego bibi unum magnum vitrum totum plenum de vino, sine deponendo nasum de vitro"; "In prandendo non facit nisi lichare suos digitos."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

Though there was no radical reform in education during the century between Erasmus and Shakespeare, two strong tendencies may be discerned at work, one looking towards a milder method, the other towards the extension of elementary instruction to large classes hitherto left illiterate. The Reformation, which was rather poor in original thought, was at any rate a tremendous vulgarizer of the current culture. It was a popular movement in that it passed around to the people the ideas that had hitherto been the possession of the few. Its first effect, indeed, together with that of {665} the tumults that accompanied it, was for the moment unfavorable to all sorts of learning. Not only wars and rebellions frightened the youth from school, but men arose, both in England and Germany, who taught that if God had vouchsafed his secrets to babes and sucklings, ignorance must be better than wisdom and that it was therefore folly to be learned.

[Sidenote: Luther]

Luther not only turned the tide, but started it flowing in that great wave that has finally given civilized lands free and compulsory education for all. In a Letter to the Aldermen and Cities of Germany on the Erection and Maintenance of Christian Schools [Sidenote: 1524] he urged strongly the advantages of learning. "Good schools [he maintained] are the tree from which grow all good conduct in life, and if they decay great blindness must follow in religion and in all useful arts. . . . Therefore, all wise rulers have thought schools a great light in civil life." Even the heathen had seen that their children should be instructed in all liberal arts and sciences both to fit them for war and government and to give them personal culture. Luther several times suggested that "the civil authorities ought to compel people to send their children to school. If the government can compel men to bear spear and arquebus, to man ramparts and perform other martial duties, how much more has it the right to compel them to send their children to school?" Repeatedly he urged upon the many princes and burgomasters with whom he corresponded the duty of providing schools in every town and village. A portion of the ecclesiastical revenues confiscated by the German states was in fact applied to this end. Many other new schools were founded by princes and were known as "Fürstenschulen" or gymnasia.

[Sidenote: England]

The same course was run in England. Colet's foundation of St. Paul's School in London, [Sidenote: 1510] for 153 boys, has perhaps won an undue fame, for it was {666} backward in method and not important in any special way, but it is a sign that people at that time were turning their thoughts to the education of the young. When Edward VI mounted the throne the dissolution of the chantries had a very bad effect, for their funds had commonly supported scholars. A few years previously Henry VIII had ordered "every of you that be parsons, vicars, curates and also chantry priests and stipendiaries to . . . teach and bring up in learning the best you can all such children of your parishioners as shall come to you, or at least teach them to read English." Edward VI revived this law in ordering chantry priests to "exercise themselves in teaching youth to read and write," and he also urged people to contribute to the maintenance of primary schools in each parish. He also endowed certain grammar schools with the revenues of the chantries.

In Scotland the Book of Discipline advocated compulsory education, children of the well-to-do at their parents' expense, poor children at that of the church.

[Sidenote: Jesuit colleges]

In Catholic countries, too, there was a passion for founding new schools. Especially to be mentioned are the Jesuit "colleges," "of which," Bacon confesses, "I must say, Talis cum sis utinam noster esses." How well frequented they were is shown by the following figures. The Jesuit school at Vienna had, in 1558, 500 pupils, in Cologne, about the same time, 517, in Trèves 500, in Mayence 400, in Spires 453, in Munich 300. The method of the Jesuits became famous for its combined gentleness and art. They developed consummate skill in allowing their pupils as much of history, science and philosophy as they could imbibe without jeoparding their faith. From this point of view their instruction was an inoculation against free thought. But it must be allowed that their teaching of the {667} classics was excellent. They followed the humanists' methods, but they adapted them to the purpose of the church.

[Sidenote: The classics]

All this flood of new scholars had little that was new to study. Neither Reformers nor humanists had any searching or thorough revision to propose; all that they asked was that the old be taught better: the humanities more humanely. Erasmus wrote much on education, and, following him Vives and Budé and Melanchthon and Sir Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham; their programs, covering the whole period from the cradle to the highest degree, seem thorough, but what does it all amount to, in the end, but Latin and Greek? Possibly a little arithmetic and geometry and even astronomy were admitted, but all was supposed to be imbibed as a by-product of literature, history from Livy, for example, and natural science from Pliny. Indeed, it often seems as if the knowledge of things was valued chiefly for the sake of literary comprehension and allusion.

The educational reformers differed little from one another save in such details as the best authors to read. Colet preferred Christian authors, such as Lactantius, Prudentius and Baptista Mantuan. Erasmus thought it well to begin with the verses of Dionysius Cato, and to proceed through the standard authors of Greece and Rome. For the sake of making instruction easy and pleasant he wrote his Colloquies--in many respects his chef d' oeuvre if not the best Latin produced by anyone during the century. In this justly famous work, which was adopted and used by all parties immediately, he conveyed a considerable amount of liberal religious and moral instruction with enough wit to make it palatable. Luther, on Melanchthon's advice, notwithstanding his hatred for the author, urged the use of the {668} Colloquies in Protestant schools, [Sidenote: 1548] and they were likewise among the books permitted by the Imperial mandate issued at Louvain.

The method of learning language was for the instructor to interpret a passage to the class which they were expected to be able to translate the next day. Ascham recommended that, when the child had written a translation he should, after a suitable interval, be required to retranslate his own English into Latin. Writing, particularly of letters, was taught. The real advance over the medieval curriculum was in the teaching of Greek--to which the exceptionally ambitious school at Geneva added, after 1538, Hebrew. Save for this and the banishment of scholastic barbarism, there was no attempt to bring in the new sciences and arts. For nearly four hundred years the curriculum of Erasmus has remained the foundation of our education. Only in our own times are Latin and Greek giving way, as the staples of mental training, to modern languages and science. In those days modern languages were picked up, as Milton was later to recommend that they should be, not as part of the regular course, but "in some leisure hour," like music or dancing. Notwithstanding such exceptions as Edward VI and Elizabeth, who spoke French and Italian, there were comparatively few scholars who knew any living tongue save their own.

[Sidenote: University life]

When the youth went to the university he found little change in either his manner of life or in his studies. A number of boys matriculated at the age of thirteen or fourteen; on the other hand there was a sprinkling of mature students. The extreme youth of many scholars made it natural that they should be under somewhat stricter discipline than is now the case. Even in the early history of Harvard it is recorded that the president once "flogged four bachelors" for {669} being out too late at night. At colleges like Montaigu, if one may believe Erasmus, the path of learning was indeed thorny. What between the wretched diet, the filth, the cold, the crowding, "the short-winged hawks" that the students combed from their hair or shook from their shirts, it is no wonder that many of them fell ill. Gaming, fighting, drinking and wenching were common.

[Sidenote: Mode of government]

Nominally, the university was then under the entire control of the faculty, who elected one of themselves "rector" (president) for a single year, who appointed their own members and who had complete charge of studies and discipline, save that the students occasionally asserted their ancient rights. In fact, the corporation was pretty well under the thumb of the government, which compelled elections and dismissals when it saw fit, and occasionally appointed commissions to visit and reform the faculties.

[Sidenote: of instruction]

Instruction was still carried on by the old method of lectures and debates. These latter were sometimes on important questions of the day, theological or political, but were often, also, nothing but displays of ingenuity. There was a great lack of laboratories, a need that just began to be felt at the end of the century when Bacon wrote: "Unto the deep, fruitful and operative study of many sciences, specially natural philosophy and physics, books be not only the instrumentals." Bacon's further complaint that, "among so many great foundations of colleges in Europe, I find it strange that they are all dedicated to professions, and none left free to arts and sciences at large," is an early hint of the need of the endowment of research. The degrees in liberal arts, B.A. and M.A., were then more strictly than now licences either to teach or to pursue higher professional studies in divinity, law, or medicine. Fees for graduation {670} were heavy; in France a B.A. cost $24, an M.D. $690 and a D.D. $780.

[Sidenote: New universities]

Germany then held the primacy that she has ever since had in Europe both in the number of her universities and in the aggregate of her students. The new universities founded by the Protestants were: Marburg 1527, Königsberg 1544, Jena 1548 and again 1558, Helmstadt 1575, Altdorf 1578, Paderborn 1584. In addition to these the Catholics founded four or five new universities, though not important ones. They concentrated their efforts on the endeavor to found new "colleges" at the old institutions.

[Sidenote: Numbers]

In general the universities lost during the first years of the Reformation, but more than made up their numbers by the middle of the century. Wittenberg had 245 matriculations in 1521; in 1526 the matriculations had fallen to 175, but by 1550, notwithstanding the recent Schmalkaldic War, the total numbers had risen to 2000, and this number was well maintained throughout the century.

Erfurt, remaining Catholic in a Protestant region, declined more rapidly and permanently. In the year 1520-21 there were 311 matriculations, in the following year 120, in the next year 72, and five years later only 14. Between 1521 to 1530 the number of students fell at Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder from 73 to 32. Rostock, however, recovered after a reorganization in 1532. The number of students at Greifswald declined so that no lectures were given during the period 1527-39, after which it again began to pick up. Königsberg, starting with 314 students later fell off. Cologne declined in numbers, and so did Mayence until the Jesuits founded their college in 1561, which, by 1568, had 500 pupils recognized as members of the university. Vienna, also, having sunk to the number of 12 students in 1532, kept at a {671} very low ebb until 1554, when the effects of the Jesuit revival were felt. Whereas, during the fifteen years 1508-22 there were 6485 matriculations at Leipzig, during the next fifteen years there were only 1935. By the end of the century, however, Leipzig had again become, under Protestant leadership, a large institution.

[Sidenote: British universities]

Two new universities were founded in the British Isles during the century, Edinburgh in 1582 and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1591. In England a number of colleges were added to those already existing at Oxford and Cambridge, namely Christ Church (first known, after its founder, Wolsey, as Cardinal's College, then as King's College), Brasenose, and Corpus Christi at Oxford and St. John's, Magdalen, and Trinity at Cambridge. Notwithstanding these new foundations the number of students sank. During the years 1542-8, only 191 degrees of B.A. were given at Cambridge and only 172 at Oxford. Ascham is authority for the statement that things were still worse under Mary, when "the wild boar of the wood" either "cut up by the root or trod down to the ground" the institutions of learning. The revenues of the universities reached their low-water mark about 1547, when the total income of Oxford from land was reckoned at L5 and that of Cambridge at L50, per annum. Under Elizabeth, the universities rose in numbers, while better Latin and Greek were taught. It was at this time that a college education became fashionable for young gentlemen instead of being exclusively patronized by "learned clerks." The foundation of the College of Physicians in London deserves to be mentioned. [Sidenote: 1528]

A university was founded at Zurich under the influence of Zwingli. Geneva's University opened in 1559 with Beza as rector. Connected with it was a preparatory school of seven forms, with a rigidly prescribed {672} course in the classics. When the boy was admitted to the university proper by examination, he took what he chose; there was not even a division into classes. The courses offered to him included Greek, Hebrew, theology, dialectic, rhetoric, physics and mathematics.

[Sidenote: French universities]

The foundation of the Collège de France by Francis I represented an attempt to bring new life and vigor into learning by a free association of learned men. It was planned to emancipate science from the tutelage of theology. Erasmus was invited but, on his refusal to accept, Budé was given the leading position. Chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and Latin were founded by the king in 1530. Other institutions of learning founded in France were Rheims 1547, Douai 1562, Besançon[1] 1564, none of them now in existence. Paris continued to be the largest university in the world, with an average number of students of about 6000.

Louvain, in the Netherlands, had 3000 students in 1500 and 1521; in 1550 the number rose to 5000. It was divided into colleges on the plan still found in England. Each college had a president, three professors and twelve fellows, entertained gratis, in addition to a larger number of paying scholars. The most popular classes often reached the number of 300. The foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's friend Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its name indicates, to give instruction in Greek and Hebrew as well as in the Latin classics. A blight fell upon the noble institution during the wars of religion. Under the supervision of Alva it founded professorships of catechetics and substituted the decrees of the Council of Trent for the Decretumof Gratian in the law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused by the Religious War and starved by the Lenten diet of Spanish Catholicism, it gradually decayed, while its {673} place was taken in the eyes of Europe by the Protestant University of Leyden. [Sidenote: 1575] A second Protestant foundation, Franeker, [Sidenote: 1585] for a time flourished, but finally withered away.

Spanish universities were crowded with new numbers. The maximum student body was reached by Salamanca in 1584 with 6778 men, while Alcalá passed in zenith in 1547 with the respectable enrollment of 1949. The foundation of no less than nine new universities in Spain bears witness to the interest of the Iberian Peninsula in education.

Four new universities opened their doors in Italy during the year 1540-1565. The Sapienza at Rome, in addition to these, was revived temporarily by Leo X in 1513, and, after a relapse to the dormant state, again awoke to its full power under Paul III, when chairs of Greek and Hebrew were established.

[Sidenote: Contribution to progress]

The services of all these universities cannot be computed on any statistical method. Notwithstanding all their faults, their dogmatic narrowness and their academic arrogance, they contributed more to progress than any other institutions. Each academy became the center of scientific research and of intellectual life. Their influence was enormous. How much did it mean to that age to see its contending hosts marshalled under two professors, Luther and Adrian VI! And how many other leaders taught in universities:--Erasmus, Melanchthon, Reuchlin, Lefèvre, to mention only a few. Pontiffs and kings sought for support in academic pronouncements, nor could they always force the doctors to give the decision they wished. In fact, each university stood like an Acropolis in the republic of letters, at once a temple and a fortress for those who loved truth and ensued it.

[1] Besançon was then an Imperial Free City.

{674}

SECTION 4. ART

[Sidenote: Art the expression of an ideal]

The significant thing about art, for the historian as for the average man, is the ideal it expresses. The artist and critic may find more to interest him in the development of technique, how this painter dealt with perspective and that one with "tactile values," how the Florentines excelled in drawing and the Venetians in color. But for us, not being professionals, the content of the art is more important than its form. For, after all, the glorious cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the marvellous paintings of the Renaissance were not mere iridescent bubbles blown by or for children with nothing better to do. They were the embodiments of ideas; as the people thought in their hearts so they projected themselves into the objects they created.

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many others who would be greatest in any other time, were contemporaries of Luther. They had a gospel to preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it was the glad tidings of the kingdom of this world: the splendor, the loveliness, the wonder and the nobility of human life. When, with young eyes, they looked out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not the vale of tears that they had been told; they found it a rapture. They saw the naked body not vile but beautiful.

[Sidenote: Leonardo, 1452-1519]

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of wonder, but not of naïve admiration of things seen. To him the miracle of the world was in the mystery of knowledge,--and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner reality of things; he spent years drawing the internal organs of the body, and other years making plans for engineers.

When he painted, there was but one thing that fascinated him: the soul. To lay bare the mind as he had dissected the brain; to take man or woman at some self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of personality, all this was his passion, and in all this he excelled as no one had ever done, before or since. His battle picture is not some gorgeous and romantic cavalry charge, but a confused melée of horses snorting with terror, of men wild with the lust of battle or with hatred or with fear. His portraits are either caricatures or prophecies: they lay bare some trait unsuspected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is not his portrait of himself a wizard? Does not his Medusa chill us with the horror of death? Is not Beatrice d'Este already doomed to waste away, when he paints her?

[Sidenote: The Last Supper]

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times before him, now as a eucharistic sacrament, now as a monastic meal, now as a gathering of friends. What did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. Jesus has just said, "One of you will betray me," and his divine head has sunk upon his breast with calm, immortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick with sorrow; Peter would be fiercely at the traitor's throat; Thomas darts forward, doubting, to ask, "Lord, is it I?" Every face expresses deep and different reaction. There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords of his neck standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort not to betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, lowers on his visage as plainly as a thunder cloud on a sultry afternoon.

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an enigmatic smile that he had seen somewhere, perhaps in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of some {676} woman he had known as a boy. His first paintings were of laughing women, and the same smile is on the lips of John the Baptist and Dionysus and Leda and the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Müntz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great critics, like Reinach, have asserted that Mona Lisa [Sidenote: Mona Lisa] is only subtle as any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to regard it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And what means the smile? In a word, sex,--not on the physical side so studied and glorified by other painters, but in its psychological aspect. For once Leonardo has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire,--the passion, the lust, the trembling and the shame. There is something frightening about Leda caught with the swan, about the effeminate Dionysus and John the Baptist's mouth "folded for a kiss of irresistible pleasure." If the stories then told about the children of Alexander VI and about Margaret of Navarre and Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was their sister.

Everything he touched acquires the same psychological penetration. His Adoration of the Magi is not an effort to delight the eye, but is a study, almost a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are brought before the miraculous Babe, and their reactions, of wonder, of amazement, of devotion, of love, of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference, are perfectly recorded.

{677} [Sidenote: The Venetians]

After the cool and stormy spring of art came the warm and gentle summer. Life became so full, so beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men sought for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. Venice, seated like a lovely, wanton queen, on her throne of sparkling waters, drew to her bosom all the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of vestment with which to array her body sumptuously; her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels and palaces and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in her great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto! Life is no longer a wonder to them but a banquet; the malady of thought, the trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in what they offer. They dye their canvasses in such blaze of color and light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit of landscape an enchanted garden, every action an ecstasy, every man a hero and every woman a paragon of voluptuous beauty.

The portrait is one of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study. Titian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought rather to please and flatter than to analyse. [Sidenote: Titian, c. 1490-1576] But withal there is often a truth to nature that make many {678} of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their revelation of character. Titian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand, what a profusion of strong and noble men and women gaze at us from the canvases of that time. They are a study of infinite variety and of surpassing charm.

The secularization of art proceeded even to the length of affecting religious painting. Susanna and Magdalen and St. Barbara and St. Sebastian are no longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless clothes; they become maidens and youths of marvellous beauty. Even the Virgin and Christ were drawn from the handsomest models obtainable and were richly clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its consummation in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

[Sidenote: Raphael, 1483-1520]

It is one of those useful coincidences that seem almost symbolic that Raphael and Luther were born in the same year, for they were both the products of the same process--the decay of Catholicism. When, for long ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may form a bed of coal, ready to be dug up and turned into power, or it may make a field luxuriant in grain and fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval religion the miner's son of Mansfeld extracted enough energy to turn half Europe upside down; from the same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most exquisite {679} blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change the metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Raphael the rainbow of the same storm.

[Sidenote: Religious art]

The chief work of both of them was to make religion understanded of the people; to adapt it to the needs of the time. When faith fails a man may either abandon the old religion for another, or he may stop thinking about dogma altogether and find solace in the mystical-aesthetic aspect of his cult. This second alternative was worked to its limit by Raphael. He was not concerned with the true but with the beautiful. By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures have religious subjects. The whole Bible--which Luther translated into the vernacular--was by him translated into the yet clearer language of sense. Even now most people conceive biblical characters in the forms of this greatest of illustrators. Delicacy, pathos, spirituality, idyllic loveliness--everything but realism or tragedy--are stamped on all his canvases. "Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine Madonna, "whose eyes are deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even." The simple mind, unsophisticated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship a Raphael when he will but revel in a Titian. Strangely touched by the magic of this passionate lover both of the church and of mortal women, the average man of that day, or of this, found, and will find, glad tidings for his heart in the very color of Mary's robe. "Whoever would know how Christ transfigured and made divine should be painted, must look," says Vasari, on Raphael's canvases.

The church and the papacy found an ally in Raphael, {680} whose pencil illustrated so many triumphs of the popes and so many mysteries of religion. In his Disputa (so-called) he made the secret of transubstantiation visible. In his great cartoon of Leo I turning back Attila he gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parnassus and School of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy for the people. Indeed, it is from them that he has reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of art pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallowness and of insincerity, the people love him more than any other artist has been loved. It is for them that he worked, and on every labor one might read as it were his motto, "I will not offend even one of these little ones."

If Raphael's art was safe in his own hands there can be little doubt that it hastened the decadence of painting [Sidenote: Decadence of religious art] in the hands of his followers. His favorite pupil, Giulio Romano, caught every trick of the master and, like the devil citing Scripture, painted pictures to delight the eye so licentious that they cannot now be exhibited. Andrea del Sarto sentimentalized the Virgin, turning tenderness to bathos. Correggio, the most gifted of them all, could do nothing so well as depict sensual love. His pictures are hymns to Venus, and his women, saints and sinners alike, are houris of an erotic paradise. Has the ecstasy of amorous passion amounting almost to mystical transport ever been better suggested than in the marvellous light and shade of his Jupiter and Io? These and many other contemporary artists had on their lips but one song, a paean in praise of life, the pomps and glories of this goodly world and the delights and beauties of the body.

But to all men, save those loved by the gods, there comes some moment, perhaps in the very heyday of success and joy and love, when a sudden ruin falls upon the world. The death of one loved more than self, {681} disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure of the so cherished cause--all these and many more are the gates by which tragedy is born. And the beauty of tragedy is above all other beauty because only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of the human spirit assert its full majesty. In Shakespeare and Michelangelo it is not the torture that pleases us, but the triumph over circumstance.

[Sidenote: Michelangelo, 1475-1564]

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can emerge victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is perfected. He was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He would paint no portraits--or but one or two--because no living person came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he attain calm,--in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them, including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.

But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand to is fairly convulsed with passion. Leda embraces the swan at the supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict. Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches, when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with a riot of strength and "terribilità."

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest scope in illustrating the idea of predestination that obsessed the Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the whole emphasis upon the damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the rex tremendae majestatis, a Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders. A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow. So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.

But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour. Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Dürer and Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein [Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty. His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest qualities of two rare natures.

[Sidenote: Albert Dürer, 1471-1528]

Dürer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type, but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522 the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Dürer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion to the home of the people at large. Dürer and his compeers were enabled to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life, wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Dürer's illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented exactly as they are described? Dürer neither strove for nor attained anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.

But Dürer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote: 1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these, The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his Handbook of the Christian Knight had imagined just such a scene, and so deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people's mind that later generations interpreted Dürer's knight as a picture of Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.

In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study, {685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds but, withal, the soul still yearned for more. The vanity of knowledge is expressed as nowhere else in Dürer's Melancholia, one of the world's greatest pictures. Surrounded by scientific instruments,--the compass, the book, the balance, the hammer, the arithmetical square, the hour-glass, the bell--sits a woman with wings too small to raise her heavy body. Far in the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of the Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits the little bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disordered fancy of an overwrought mind.

[Sidenote: The Grotesque]

Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance is the love of the grewsome. In Dürer it took the harmless form of a fondness for monstrosities,--rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the emotions of their contemporaries by painting long series known as the Dance of Death, in which some man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the emperor, the soldier, the peasant, the bride, is represented as being haled from life by a grinning skeleton.

Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now drawn into the service of the intense party struggles of the Reformation. To depict the pope or Luther or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew them with claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's tails, drinking and blaspheming. Even kings were caricatured,--doubly significant fact!

[Sidenote: Architecture]

As painting and sculpture attained so high a level of maturity in the sixteenth century, one might suppose that architecture would do the same. In truth, {686} however, architecture rather declined. Very often, if not always, each special art-form goes through a cycle of youth, perfection, and decay, that remind one strongly of the life of a man. The birth of an art is due often to some technical invention, the full possibilities of which are only gradually developed. But after the newly opened fields have been exhausted the epigoni can do little but recombine, often in fantastic ways, the old elements; public taste turns from them and demands something new.

[Sidenote: Churches]

So the supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral as seen at Pisa or Florence or Perugia or Rheims or Cologne, was never equalled in the sixteenth century. As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take St. Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously unequal in execution. With characteristic pride and self-confidence Pope Julius II to make room for it tore down the old church, and other ancient monuments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve centuries. Even by his contemporaries the architect, Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante! He made a plan, which was started; then he died. In his place were appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, together or in turn, and towers were added after the close of the sixteenth century. The result is the hugest building in the world, and almost the worst proportioned. After all, there is something appropriate in the fact that, just as the pretensions of the popes expanded and their powers decreased, so their churches should become vaster and yet less impressive. St. Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was but a brutum fulmen in the end!

The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge date from these years, but these portions are grafted on to an older style that really determined them. The greatest glory of English university architecture, the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, was finished in the first years of the century. The noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass windows will be remembered by all who have seen them.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastic architecture]

After the Reformation ecclesiastical architecture followed two diverse styles; the Protestants cultivated excessive plainness, the Catholics excessive ornament. The iconoclasts had no sense for beauty, and thought, as Luther put it, that faith was likely to be neglected by those who set a high value on external form. Moreover the Protestant services necessitated a modification of the medieval cathedral style. What they wanted was a lecture hall with pews; the old columns and transepts and the roomy floor made way for a more practical form.

The Catholics, on the other hand, by a natural reaction, lavished decoration on their churches as never before. Every column was made ornate, every excuse was taken for adding some extraneous embellishment; the walls were crowded with pictures and statues and carving to delight, or at least to arrest, the eye. But it happened that the noble taste of the earlier and simpler age failed; amid all possible devices to give effect, quiet grandeur was wanting.

[Sidenote: Castles]

What the people of that secular generation really built with enthusiasm and success were their own {688} dwellings. What are the castles of Chambord and Blois and the Louvre and Hampton Court and Heidelberg but houses of play and pleasure such as only a child could dream of? King and cardinal and noble vied in making tower and gable, gallery and court as of a fairy palace; banqueting hall and secret chamber where they and their playmates could revel to their heart's content and leave their initials carved as thickly as boys carve them on an old school desk. And how richly they filled them! A host of new arts sprang up to minister to the needs of these palace-dwellers: our museums are still filled with the glass and enamel, the vases and porcelain, the tapestry and furniture and jewelry that belonged to Francis and Catharine de' Medici and Leo X and Elizabeth. How perfect was the art of many of these articles of daily use can only be appreciated by studying at first hand the salt-cellars of Cellini, or the gold and silver and crystal goblets made by his compeers. Examine the clocks, of which the one at Strassburg is an example; the detail of workmanship is infinite; even the striking apparatus and the dials showing planetary motions are far beyond our own means, or perhaps our taste. When Peter Henlein invented the watch, using as the mainspring a coiled feather, he may not have made chronometers as exact as those turned out nowadays, but the "Nuremberg eggs"--so called from their place of origin and their shape, not a disk, but a sphere--were marvels of chasing and incrustation and jewelry.

[Sidenote: Love of beauty]

The love of the beautiful was universal. The city of that time, less commodious, sanitary, and populous than it is today, was certainly fairer to the eye. Enough of old Nuremberg and Chester and Siena and Perugia and many other towns remains to assure us that the red-tiled houses, the overhanging storeys, the high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented a {689} far more pleasing appearance than do our lines of smoky factories and drab dwellings.

[Sidenote: Music]

The men so greedy of all delicate sights and pleasant, would fain also stuff their ears with sweet sounds. And so they did, within the limitations of a still undeveloped technique. They had organs, lutes, viols, lyres, harps, citherns, horns, and a kind of primitive piano known as the clavichord or the clavicembalo. Many of these instruments were exquisitely rich and delicate in tone, but they lacked the range and volume and variety of our music. Almost all melodies were slow, solemn, plaintive; the tune of Luther's hymn gives a good idea of the style then prevalent. When we read that the churches adopted the airs of popular songs, so that hymns were sung to ale-house jigs and catches from the street, we must remember that the said jigs and love-songs were at least as sober and staid as are many of the tunes now expressly written for our hymns. The composers of the time, especially Palestrina [Sidenote: Palestrina, 1526-94] and Orlando Lasso, [Sidenote: Lasso, c. 1530-1594] did wonders within the limits then possible to introduce richness and variety into song.

[Sidenote: Art and religion]

Art was already on the decline when it came into conflict with the religious revivals of the time. The causes of the decadence are not hard to understand. The generation of giants, born in the latter half of the fifteenth century, seemed to exhaust the possibilities of artistic expression in painting and sculpture, or at least to exhaust the current ideas so expressible. Guido Reni and the Caracci could do nothing but imitate and recombine.

And then came the battle of Protestant and Catholic to turn men's minds into other channels than that of beauty. Even when the Reformation was not consciously opposed to art, it shoved it aside as a distraction from the real business of life. Thus it has come {690} about in Protestant lands that the public regards art as either a "business" or an "education." Luther himself loved music above all things and did much to popularize it,--while Erasmus shuddered at the psalm-singing he heard from Protestant congregations! Of painting the Reformer spoke with admiration, but so rarely! What could art be in the life of a man who was fighting for his soul's salvation? Calvin saw more clearly the dangers to the soul from the seductions of this world's transitory charm. Images he thought idolatrous in churches and he said outright: "It would be a ridiculous and inept imitation of the papists to fancy that we render God more worthy service in ornamenting our temples and in employing organs and toys of that sort. While the people are thus distracted by external things the worship of God is profaned." So it was that the Puritans chased all blandishments not only from church but from life, and art came to be looked upon as a bit immoral.

[Sidenote: Counter-Reformation]

But the little finger of the reforming pope was thicker than the Puritan's loins; where Calvin had chastised with whips Sixtus V chastised with scorpions. Adrian VI, the first Catholic Reformer after Luther, could not away with "those idols of the heathen," the ancient statues. Clement VII for a moment restored the old régime of art and licentiousness together, having Perino del Vaga paint his bathroom with scenes from the life of Venus in the manner of Giulio Romano. But the Council of Trent made severe regulations against nude pictures, in pursuance of which Daniel da Volterra was appointed to paint breeches on all the naked figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and on similar paintings. Sixtus V, who could hardly endure the Laocoon and Apollo Belvidere, was bent on destroying the monuments of heathendom. The ruin was complete when to her cruel hate the church added {691} her yet more cruel love. Along came the Jesuits offering, like pedlars, instead of the good old article a substitute guaranteed by them to be "just as good," and a great deal cheaper. Painting was sentimentalized and "moralized" under their tuition; architecture adopted the baroque style, gaudy and insincere. The church was stuffed with gewgaws and tinsel; marble was replaced by painted plaster and saintliness by sickliness.

SECTION 5. BOOKS

[Sidenote: Numbers of books published]

The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. There were then in Germany alone about 100,000 works printed, or reprinted. If each edition amounted to 1000--a fair average, for if many editions were smaller, some were much larger--that would mean that about a million volumes were offered to the German public each year throughout the century. There is no doubt that the religious controversy had a great deal to do with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a political campaign now has on the circulation of the newspaper. The following figures show how rapidly the number of books published in Germany increased during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, in 1519 260, in 1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, and 1524 990.

Many of these books were short, controversial tracts; some others were intended as purveyors of news pure and simple. Some of these broadsides were devoted to a single event, as the Neue Zeitung: Die Schlacht des türkischen Kaisers, [Sidenote: 1526] others had several items of interest, including letters from distant parts. Occasionally a mere lampoon would appear under the title of Neue Zeitung, corresponding to our funny papers. But these substitutes for modern journals were both rare and irregular; the world then got along with much {692} less information about current events than it now enjoys. Nor was there anything like our weekly and monthly magazines.

The new age was impatient of medieval literature. The schoolmen, never widely read, were widely mocked. The humanists, too, fell into deep disgrace, charged with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They still wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, bemoaning their hard lot and deploring the coarseness of an unappreciative time. Their real fault was that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy, and the people, who could read for themselves, no longer were imposed on by pretensions to esoteric learning and a Ciceronian style.

Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer suited the taste of the new generation. A certain class continued to read Amadis of Gaul or La Morte d'Arthur furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that they would no longer do. The Puritan found them immoral; the man of the world thought them ridiculous. Ascham asserts that "the whole pleasure" of La Morte d'Arthur, "standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry." The century was hardly out when Cervantes published his famous and deadly satire on the knight errant.

[Sidenote: Poetry]

But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was transmuted into the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another generation, and {693} Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman, allegorized the whole in such fashion that while the conscience was soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral virtues or vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss. And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the principal virtues!

Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were mostly of "love, whose month is always May." Each songster poured forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets" gave his "private friends" something to think about as well as something to enjoy.

[Sidenote: Wit]

If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of her terrible power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio, were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule; a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of blackmailing to his wit.

[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]

But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too contemptuously called him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as multitudinous as the ocean billows, and as wholesome as the sunshine. He laughed not because he scorned life but because he loved it; he did not "warm both hands" before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot be said that he took a "slice of life" as his subject, for this would imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he reached out, in the fashion of his time, and pulled with both hands from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life that he could grasp. "You never saw a man," he said of himself, "who would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my friends and all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in love with everything that the mere repetition of common names delighted him. It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite was like Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel, whose lust for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.

[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]

And the people were no longer content to leave the glory of life to their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be preserved like game for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons, for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to make love.

[Sidenote: Plays]

For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama. From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of the audience.

Somewhat akin to these pieces in spirit were the {696} Shrovetide Farces written in Germany by the simple Nuremberger who describes himself in the verses, literally translatable:

Hans Sachs is a shoe- Maker and poet, too.

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rough fun of these artless scenes than in the apothegms and sound advice in which they abounded.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the Sixteenth Century]

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To all, the exile in the far country, the riotous living with harlots and the feeding on husks with swine, meant the life of this world with its pomps and vanities, its lusts and sinful desires that become as mast to the soul. The return to the father is the return to God's love here below and to everlasting felicity above. To those who can believe it, it is the most beautiful story in the world.

[Sidenote: Faust]

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know everything, to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world.

{697} The first printed Faust-book (1587) passed for three centuries as a Protestant production, but the discovery of an older and quite different form of the legend in 1897 changed the whole literary problem. It has been asserted now that the Faust of this unknown author is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor at Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with Helena recalls the Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in early Christian literature Simon Magus is the antithesis of Peter. Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of God; their adventures are somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose.

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as the Prodigal or Pantagruel. To live to the full; to know all science and all mysteries, to drain to the dregs the cup crowned with the wine of the pleasure and the pride of life: this was worth more than heaven! The full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for human experience was not brought out until Goethe took it up; but it is implied both in the German Faust-books and in Marlowe's play.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the Sixteenth Century]

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do justice to the age of the Reformation. We are now at the end of the period inaugurated by Columbus and Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place that it then did, nor does the difference between Catholic and Protestant any longer seem the most important thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the state, both of which started on their paths of conquest then, are now attacked.

Again, the application of any statistical method makes the former ages seem to shrink in comparison {698} with the present. In population and wealth, in war and in science we are immeasurably larger than our ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than had Henry VIII, and many a college boy knows more astronomy than did Kepler. But if we judge the greatness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets dreamed and by what its strong men accomplished, the importance of the sixteenth century can be appreciated.

[Sidenote: An age of aspiration]

It was an "experiencing" age. It loved sensation with the greediness of childhood; it intoxicated itself with Rabelais and Titian, with the gold of Peru and with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was a daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for spiritual liberty, or they gave their lives with Magellan to compass the earth or with Bruno to span the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed with Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ-like, or with More of the place where they should be just; or with Michelangelo it pondered the meaning of sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. And of this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, was born the world's supreme poet with an eye to see the deepest and a tongue to tell the most of the human heart. Truly such a generation was not a poor, nor a backward one. Rather it was great in what it achieved, sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in ripe wisdom and in heroic deeds; full of light and of beauty and of life!

{699}

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be classified in a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our present purpose it will be convenient to classify them, according to their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most, historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When different philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and Darwinians began to assert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS. (SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based on the analogy of Scripture. God, it was thought, had chosen a peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance, particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a {700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs. God's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation"]

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies par éminence, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he incorporated it in the title of his greatest German pamphlet. The other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive away the foggy mists of superstition and to restore the purity of the primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply ad libitum quotations showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to the impertinent but more assiduous activity of the devil. It is interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes. Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such as Münzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary, natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the "first push and assault" given by the ungodly humanists. Burnet followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many documents he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf, was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student for the documents it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced, prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, written without that odious defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions. Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth, but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors. Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged, as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original sin and his latitudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed was written on the Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion. Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou passes over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his History of Italy mentions Luther merely to show how the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini [Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther, carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party. The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantôme says that he leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther won over a good many of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin Du Bellay found the cause of the English schism in Henry's divorce and the small respect the pope had for his majesty. Davila, de Mézeray and Daniel, writing the history of the French civil wars, treated the Huguenots merely as a political party. So they were, but they were something more. Even Hugo Grotius could not sound the deeper causes of the Dutch revolt and of the religious revolution.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

The first of all the histories of the German Reformation {705} was also, for at least two centuries, the best. Though surpassed in some particulars by others, Sleidan united more of the qualities of a great historian than anyone else who wrote extensively on church history in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: fairness, accuracy, learning, skill in presentation. In words that recall Ranke's motto he declared that, though a Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth simply "rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing religious affairs," he continues, "I was not able to omit politics, for, as I said before, they almost always interact, and in our age least of all can they be separated." Withal, he regards the Reformation as a great victory for God's word, and Luther as a notable champion of the true religion. In plain, straightforward narrative, without much philosophic reflection, he sets forth,--none better,--the diplomatic and theological side of the movement without probing its causes or inquiring into the popular support on which all the rest was based.

[Sidenote: Sarpi]

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration than Sleidan compassed is found in the writings of Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the Tridentine Council," as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose book could only be published on Protestant soil, this historian admired by Macaulay as the best of modern times and denounced by Acton as fit for Newgate prison, has furnished students with one of the most curious of psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion of his learning and accuracy, which have recently been severely attacked and perhaps discredited, let us ask what was his attitude in regard to his subject? It is difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explanation of his attacks on the creed in which he believed and of his favorable presentation of the acts of the {706} heretics he must have anathematized, is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of their own church; one may also find in Döllinger a parallel to him. Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant anticipation of the modern economic school of historical thought is found in the Oceana of Harrington, who suggested that the causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social. When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and noble into the hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed the ancient balance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more dangerous enemy.

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

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and to point out instructive analogies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed. The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican because of the circumstances in which each arose. The suppression of church festivals in Protestant countries he thought due to the greater need and zest for labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by saying that their unadorned cult naturally aroused a less warm attachment than the sensuous ritual of Romanism.

[Sidenote: Voltaire]

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. None other has made history so nearly universal as did he, peering into every side of life and into every corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, no fact was admitted to be inexplicable by natural laws. It is true that he was not very learned and that he had strong prejudices against what he called "the most infamous superstition that ever brutalized man." But with it all he brought more freedom and life into the story of mankind than had any of his predecessors.

For his history of the Reformation he was dependent on Bossuet, Sarpi, and a few other general works; there is no evidence that he perused any of the sources. But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. {708} Beginning with an enthusiastic account of the greatness of the Renaissance, its discoveries, its opulence, its roll of mighty names, he proceeds to compare the Reformation with the two contemporaneous religious revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the other in Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one else had even thought of looking to comparative religion [Sidenote: Comparative religion] for light. In tracing the course of events he is more conventional, finding rather small causes for large effects. The whole thing started, he assures us, in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the spoils of indulgence-sales, "and this little squabble of monks in a corner of Saxony, produced more than a hundred years of discord, fury, and misfortune for thirty nations." "England separated from the pope because King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted because of the painful impression produced by the Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in Voltaire's opinion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal to the passions of the mob. The dogmas of the Reformers are considered no whit more rational than those of their opponents, save that Zwingli is praised for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for Christianity. Of course he erred," wittily comments our author, "but how humane it is to err thus!" The influence of Montesquieu is found in the following early economic interpretation in the Philosophic Dictionary:

There are some nations whose religion is the result of neither climate nor government. What cause detached North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences . . . were sold too dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion.

[Sidenote: Scotch historians]

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote: Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity." Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone to superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther for his violence, but praised him--and here speaks the middle-class advocate of law and order--for his firm stand against the peasants in their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the spell of the supernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical establishments, with which he begins his account of the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and passions of the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delusion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore incumbent on the civil power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to {710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted "those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his great history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their merit [i.e. of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers." They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did {711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism." Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing] apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German Protestant could then be.

{713}

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

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic Döllinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution]

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

[Sidenote: Condorcet]

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was Condorcet in his noble essay on The Advance of the Human Spirit, written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he, punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring political enfranchisement, banded together against the {714} revolt. He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to political science and that it purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced as the subject for a prize competition, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general philosophical enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to think and judge freely and independently of all ideas and opinions, which until then Europe had received or been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason and to call things by their right names. It was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the limits of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite, to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Staël]

All this is reflected in Mme. de Staël's enthusiastic appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and brain.

[Sidenote: Heine]

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature, Heine points out that the place taken in France by belles lettres is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet, [Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His History of France is like the biography of some loved and worshipped genius; he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question, "What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us, were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude. Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armadawon a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard, once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent Speeches to the German Nation, called the Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its "perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once national and liberal. In his Pictures from the German Past, largely painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on "Deutschtum" and "Bürgertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F. Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to sink into the background, and that of other influences to be preponderant.

[Sidenote: Hegel]

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel, pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable "time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit, or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720} Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show that the cause of the Protestant revolt in the corruption of the church was not accidental but necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of progress, that which is adored must necessarily be sensuous, but at the lofty German level the worshipper must look for God in the spirit and heart, that is, in faith. The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity manifesting the self-consciousness of the world-spirit; his doctrine of the eucharist, conservative as it seems to the rationalist, is in reality a manifestation of the same spirituality, in the assertion of an immediate relation of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of the Reformation is said to be that man in his very nature is destined to be free, and all history since Luther's time is but a working out of the implications of his position. If only the Germanic nations have adopted Protestantism, it is because only they have reached the highest state of spiritual development.

[Sidenote: Baur]

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of whom it has been said that he rather deduced history than narrated it. With much detail he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far as the subject of church history was concerned. He showed that the Reformation (a term to which he objected, apparently preferring Division, or Schism) was bound to come from antecedents already in full operation before Luther. At most, he admitted, the {721} personal factor was decisive of the time and place of the inevitable revolution, but said that the most powerful personality would have been helpless but for the popularity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he deduced the causes of the movement from the corruption of the medieval church, and like him he regarded all later history as but the tide of which the first wave broke in 1517. The true principle of the movement, religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he believed, had been achieved only for states in the sixteenth century, but thereafter logically and necessarily came to be applied to individuals.

[Sidenote: Ranke]

From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"--coined in 1770 and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution." The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722} rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective. Would he have thought so after 1919?

[Sidenote: Buckle]

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment, and a democratic rebellion.

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best classified as a member of the new school. His History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done more than any other movement to emancipate the mind from superstition and to secularize society.

[Sidenote: Protestants]

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short space at my command, the principal Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old "truths," Merle d'Aubigné won an enormous and unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won its enormous circulation.[1]

[Sidenote: Döllinger]

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by the Catholic Döllinger, the most theological of historians, the most historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really {724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.

[1] The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 were sold in England and America.

SECTION 4. THE ECONOMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY INTERPRETATIONS. (1859 TO THE PRESENT)

The year 1859 saw the launching of two new theories of the utmost importance. These, together with the political developments of the next twelve years, completely altered the view-point of the intellectual class, as well as of the peoples. In relation to the subject under discussion this meant a reversal of historical judgment as radical as that which occurred at the time of the French Revolution. The three new influences, in the order of their immediate importance for historiography, were the following: 1. The publication of Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie in 1859, containing the germ of the economic interpretation of history later developed in Das Kapital(1867) and in other works. 2. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, giving rise to an evolutionary treatment of history. 3. The Bismarckian wars (1864-71), followed by German intellectual and material hegemony, and the defeat of the old liberalism. This lasted only until the Great War (1914-18), when Germany was cast down and liberalism rose in more radical guise than ever.

[Sidenote: Marx]

Karl Marx not only viewed history for the first time from the point of view of the proletariat, or working class, but he directly asserted that in the march of mankind the economic factors had always been, in the last analysis, decisive; that the material basis of life, {725} particularly the system of production, determined, in general, the social, political and religious ideas of every epoch and of every locality. Revolutions follow as the necessary consequence of economic change. In the scramble for sustenance and wealth class war is postulated as natural and ceaseless. The old Hegelian antithesis of idea versus personality took the new form of "the masses" versus "the great man," both of whom were but puppets in the hands of overmastering determinism. As often interpreted, Marx's theory replaced the Hegelian "spirits of the time" by the classes, conceived as entities struggling for mastery.

This brilliant theory suffered at first in its application, which was often hasty, or fantastic. As the economic factor had once been completely ignored, so now it was overworked. Its major premise of an "economic man," all greed and calculation, is obviously false, or rather, only half true. Men's motives are mixed, and so are those of aggregates of men. There are other elements in progress besides the economic ones. The only effective criticism of the theory of economic determination is that well expressed by Dr. Shailer Mathews, that it is too simple. Self-interest is one factor in history, but not the only one.

[Sidenote: Bax]

Exception can be more justly taken to the way in which the theory has sometimes been applied than to its formulation. Belfort Bax, maintaining that the revolt from Rome was largely economic in its causes, gave as one of these "the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obviously due to its increasing exactions." Luther would have produced no result had not the economic soil been ready for his seed, and with that soil prepared he achieved a world-historical result even though, in Bax's opinion, his character and intellect were below those of the average English village grocer-deacon who sold sand for sugar. Luther, {726} in fact, did no more than give a flag to those discontented with the existing political and industrial life. Strange to say, Bax found even the most radical party, that of the communistic Anabaptists, retrograde, with its program of return to a golden age of gild and common land.

A somewhat better grounded, but still inadequate, solution of the problem was offered by Karl Kautsky. [Sidenote: Kautsky] He, too, found the chief cause of the revolt in the spoliation of Germany by Rome. In addition to this was the new rivalry of commercial classes. Unlike Bax, Kautsky finds in the Anabaptists Socialists of whom he can thoroughly approve.

The criticism that must be made of these and similar attempts, is that the causes picked out by them are too trivial. To say that the men who, by the thousands and tens of thousands suffered martyrdom for their faith, changed that faith simply because they objected to pay a tithe, reminds one of the ancient Catholic derivation of the whole movement from Luther's desire to marry. The effect is out of proportion to the cause. But some theorists were even more fantastic than trivial. When Professor S. N. Patten traces the origins of revolutions to either over-nutrition or under-nutrition, and that of the Reformation to "the growth of frugalistic concepts"; when Mr. Brooks Adams asserts that it was all due to the desire of the people for a cheaper religion, exchanging an expensive offering for justification by faith and mental anguish, which cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible--we feel that the dish of theory has run away with the spoon of fact. The climax was capped by the German sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the Reformation by the law of the operation of force along the line of least resistance. The Reformers, by sending the soul straight to God, spared it the detour via the {727} priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it were, and saving energy.

[Sidenote: Lamprecht]

The genius who first and most fully worked out a tenable economic interpretation of the Lutheran movement was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in much the same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, that of an independent, eclectic and better informed student. Lamprecht, as it is well known, divides history into periods according to their psychological character--perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism--but he maintains, and on the whole successfully, that the temper of each of these epochs is determined by their economic institutions. Thus, says he, the condition of the transition from medieval to modern times was the development of a system of "money economy" from a system of "natural economy," which took place slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. "The complete emergence of capitalistic tendencies, with their consequent effects on the social, and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual sphere, must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht shows how the rise of capitalism was followed by the growth of the cities and of the culture of the Renaissance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in large part as a natural consequence of the increased power and scope given to the ego by the possession of wealth. This individualism, he thinks, strengthened by and strengthening humanism, was made forever safe by the Reformation.

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points out, to suppose that we are living in the same era of civilization, psychologically considered, as that of Luther. Our subjectivism is as different from his individualism as his modernity was from medievalism. The eighteenth century was a transitional period from the one to the other.

{728} One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, continues Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, was the change from "polydynamism," or the worship of many saints, and the mediation of manifold religious agencies, to "monodynamism" or the direct and single intercourse of the soul with God. Still more different was the world-view of the nineteenth century, built on "an extra-Christian, though not yet anti-Christian foundation."

In the very same year in which Lamprecht's volume on the German Reformation appeared, another interpretation, though less profound and less in the economic school of thought, was put forth by A. E. Berger. [Sidenote: Berger] He found the four principal causes of the Reformation in the growth of national self-consciousness, the overthrow of an ascetic for a secular culture, individualism, and the growth of a lay religion. The Reformation itself was a triumph of conscience and of "German inwardness," and its success was due to the fact that it made of the church a purely spiritual entity.

The most brilliant essay in the economic interpretation of the origins of Protestantism, though an essay in a very narrow field, was that of Max Weber [Sidenote: Weber] which has made "Capitalism and Calvinism" one of the watchwords of contemporary thought. The intimate connection of the Reformation and the merchant class had long been noticed, e.g. by Froude and by Thorold Rogers. But Weber was the first to ask, and to answer, the question what it was that made Protestantism particularly congenial to the industrial type of civilization. In the first place, Calvinism stimulated just those ethical qualities of rugged strength and self-confidence needful for worldly success. In the second place, Protestantism abolished the old ascetic ideal of labor for the sake of the next world, and substituted for it the conception of a calling, that is, of doing {729} faithfully the work appointed to each man in this world. Indeed, the word "calling'" or "Beruf," meaning God-given work, is found only in Germanic languages, and is wanting in all those of the Latin group. The ethical idea expressed by Luther and more strongly by Calvin was that of faithfully performing the daily task; in fact, such labor was inculcated as a duty to the point of pain; in other words it was "a worldly asceticism." Finally, Calvin looked upon thrift as a duty, and regarded prosperity, in the Old Testament style, as a sign of God's favor. "You may labor in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain," said the Protestant divine Richard Baxter, "for you are bound to improve all your talents." And again, "If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward."

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the controversy caused by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, like Knodt, denied its validity, tracing capitalism back of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin; but most accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it were offered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky and Ashley. So commonly has it been received that it has finally been summed up in a brilliant but superficial epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been coined by him--though it is not, I believe, from his mint--that the Reformation was "the Revolution of the rich against the poor."

[Sidenote: Darwinism]

Contemporary with the economic historiography, there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers" had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching than had been that of the old deism.

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that the Reformation was the child, or sister, of the Renaissance, and the parent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We are in the midst of a gigantic movement," wrote Huxley, "greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only a continuation of that movement." "The Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude, incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving after the liberation of man from the darkness." "The truth is," according to Symonds, "that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important, indeed, in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than was the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same grand influence." William Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the essence of the Reformation was the same in the religious fields as that of the best thought contemporary to it in other lines.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche]

But these ideas were already obsolescent since Friedrich Nietzsche had worked out, with some care, the thought that "the Reformation was a re-action of old-fashioned minds, against the Italian Renaissance." One might suppose that this furious Antichrist, as he wished to be, would have thought well of Luther because of his opinion that the Saxon first taught the Germans to be unchristian, and because "Luther's merit is greater in nothing than that he had the courage of his sensuality--then called, gently enough, 'evangelic liberty.'" But no! With frantic passion Nietzsche charged: "The Reformation, a duplication {731} of the medieval spirit at a time when this spirit no longer had a good conscience, pullulated sects, and superstitions like the witchcraft craze." German culture was just ready to burst into full bloom, only one night more was needed, but that night brought the storm that ruined all. The Reformation was the peasants' revolt of the human spirit, a rising full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. It was "the rage of the simple against the complex, a rough, honest misunderstanding, in which (to speak mildly) much must be forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore apart a culture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not relish. Behind the formula "every man his own priest" lurked nothing but the abysmal hatred of the low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at its worst.

[Sidenote: Acceptance of Nietzsche's opinion]

Quite slowly but surely Nietzsche's opinion gained ground until one may say that it was, not long ago, generally accepted. "Our sympathies are more in unison, our reason less shocked by the arguments and doctrines of Sadolet than by those of Calvin," wrote R. C. Christie. Andrew D. White's popular study of The Warfare of Science and Theology proved that Protestant churches had been no less hostile to intellectual progress than had the Catholic church. "The Reformation, in fact," opined J. M. Robertson, "speedily overclouded with fanaticism what new light of free thought had been glimmering before, turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries and forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance of their age." "Before the Lutheran revolt," said Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought and speech was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after." Similar opinions might be collected in large number; I {732} mention only the works of Bezold and the brief but admirably expressed articles of Professor George L. Burr, and that of Lemonnier, who places in a strong light the battle of the Renaissance, intellectual, indifferent in religion and politics, but aristocratic in temper, and the Reformation, reactionary, religious, preoccupied with medieval questions and turning, in its hostility to the governing orders, to popular politics.

The reaction of the Reformation on religion was noticed by the critics, who thus came to agree with the conservative estimate, though they deplored what the others had rejoiced in. Long before Nietzsche, J. Burckhardt had pointed out that the greatest danger to the papacy, secularization, had been adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. It was this that roused the papacy from the soulless debasement in which it lay; it was thus that the moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies.

[Sidenote: Troeltsch]

The twentieth century has seen two brilliant critiques of the Reformation from the intellectual side by scholars of consummate ability, Ernst Troeltsch and George Santayana. The former begins by pointing out, with a fineness never surpassed, the essential oneness and slight differences between early Protestantism and Catholicism. The Reformers asked the same questions as did the medieval schoolmen and, though they gave these questions somewhat different answers, their minds, like those of other men, revealed themselves far more characteristically in the asking than in the reply. "Genuine early Protestantism . . . was an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization (kirchliche Zwangskultur), a claim to regulate state and society, science and education, law, commerce, and industry, according to the supernatural standpoint of revelation." The Reformers separated early and with cruel violence from the humanistic, philological, and philosophical {733} theology of Erasmus because they were conscious of an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was with assurance of salvation, and this could only be won at the cost of a miracle, not any longer the old, outward magic of saints and priestcraft, but the wonder of faith occurring in the inmost center of personal life. "The sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its stead appears the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and confidently assent to such a thought." Thus it came about that the way of salvation became more important than the goal, and the tyranny of dogma became at last unbearable. Troeltsch characterizes both his own position and that of the Reformers when he enumerates among the ancient dogmas taken over naïvely by Luther, that of the existence of a personal, ethical God. Finely contrasting the ideals of Renaissance and Reformation, [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] he shows that the former was naturalism, the latter an intensification of religion and of a convinced other-worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was based on "affirmation of life," that of the latter was based on "calling." Even as compared with Catholicism, Troeltsch thinks, supererogatory works were abolished because each Protestant Christian was bound to exert himself to the utmost at all times. The learned professor hazards the further opinion that the spirit of the Renaissance amalgamated better with Catholicism and, after a period of quiescence, burst forth in the "frightful explosion" of the Enlightenment and Revolution, both more radical in Catholic countries than in Protestant. But Troeltsch is too historically-minded to see in the Reformation only a reaction. He believes that it contributed to the formation of the modern world by the development of nationalism, individualism (qualified by the objectively conceived sanction of Bible and Christian community), moral health, and, {734} indirectly, by the introduction of the ideas of tolerance, criticism, and religious progress. Moreover, it enriched the world with the story of great personalities. Protestantism was better able to absorb modern elements of political, social, scientific, artistic and economic content, not because it was professedly more open to them, but because it was weakened by the memory of one great revolt from authority. But the great change in religion as in other matters came, Troeltsch is fully convinced, in the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: Santayana]

If Troeltsch has the head of a skeptic with the heart of a Protestant, Santayana's equally irreligious brain is biased by a sentimental sympathy for the Catholicism in which he was trained. The essence of his criticism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully remarked, no one could be more unintelligent, is that he moved away from the ideal of the gospel. Saint Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for it is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity, abominates the disreputable, thinks of contemplation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of poverty as a punishment, and of married and industrial life as typically godly. In short, it is a reversion to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for there would have been, he affirms, a Catholic revival without him. With all its old-fashioned insistence that dogma was scientifically true and that salvation was urgent and fearfully doubtful, Protestantism broke down the authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking the other part." It is the beauty and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism. Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both disappear, and only "consecrated worldliness" remains.

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote: Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the latter left much open. "The Reformation," according to H. A. L. Fisher, "was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive communities of the West."

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form, has been expressed by Salomon Reinach. "Instead of freedom of faith and thought the Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} thanks to the breach made by Luther in the ancient edifice of Rome."

[Sidenote: German nationalists]

A judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, to the effect that, though the logical result of some of Luther's premises would have been individual religion and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out, "his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no resemblance whatever to our subjectivism." His true originality was his personality which imposed on an optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true that the revolution was profound and yet it was not modern: "the classic spirit, free institutions, democratic ideals, all these great forces by which we live are not the heritage of Luther."

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept over Europe with the Bismarckian wars, men began to judge the Reformation as everything else by its relation, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. Even in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to exactly what this relation was. Paul de Lagarde idealized the Middle Ages as showing the perfect expression of German character and he detested "the coarse, scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two hobnailed shoes, and who by his demagogy, brought in barbarism and split Germany into fragments." Nevertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it significant that the Basques, who were not a nation, should have produced, in Loyola and Xavier, the two greatest champions of the anti-national church.

The tide soon started flowing the other way and scholars began to see clearly that in some sort the Reformation was a triumph of "Deutschtum" against the "Romanitas" of Latin religion and culture. Treitschke, as the representative of this school, trumpeted forth that "the Reformation arose from the good {737} German conscience," and that, "the Reformer of our church was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the road to a freer civilization." The dogma that might makes right was adopted at Berlin--as Acton wrote in 1886--and the mere fact that the Reformation was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historians like Waitz and Kurtz.

Naturally, all was not as bad as this. A rather attractive form of the thesis was presented by Karl Sell. Whereas, he thinks, Protestantism has died, or is dying, as a religion, it still exists as a mood, as bibliolatry, as a national and political cult, as a scientific and technical motive-power, and, last but not least, as the ethos and pathos of the Germanic peoples.

[Sidenote: The Great War]

In the Great War Luther was mobilized as one of the German national assets. Professor Gustav Kawerau and many others appealed to the Reformer's writings for inspiration and justification of their cause; and the German infantry sang "Ein' feste Burg" while marching to battle.

Even outside of Germany the war of 1870 meant, in many quarters, the defeat of the old liberalism and the rise of a new school inclined, even in America--witness Mahan--to see in armed force rather than in intellectual and moral ideas the decisive factors in history. Many scholars noticed, in this connection, the shift of power from the Catholic nations, led by France, to the Protestant peoples, Germany, England and America. Some, like Acton, though impressed by it, did not draw the conclusion ably presented by a Belgian, Emile de Laveleye, that the cause of national superiority lay in Protestantism, but it doubtless had a wide influence, partly unconscious, on the verdict of history.

[Sidenote: Reaction against German ideals]

But the recoil was far greater than the first movement. Paul Sabatier wrote (in 1913) that until 1870 Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of thoughtful {738} men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic virtues and its openness to science and literary criticism. This high opinion, strengthened by the prestige of German thought, was shattered, says our authority, by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train of horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved of their superiority and attributed to Luther the result of Sedan.

The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of Luther. "Literary and philosophic Germany," said Denys Cochin in an interview, "prepared the evolution of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty and aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and seconded the aberration."

[Sidenote: Paquier]

Paquier has written a book around the thesis: "Nothing in the present war would have been alien to Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was violent and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, but it is the logical conclusion of the religious revolution accomplished by Luther and of the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant." He finds the causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two important doctrines and several corollaries. First, the doctrine of justification by faith meant the disparagement of morality and the exaltation of the end at the expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the state. Finally, in his narrow patriotism, Luther is thought to have inspired the reckless deeds of his posterity.

On the other hand some French Protestants, notably Weiss, have sought to show that the modern doctrines of Prussia were not due to Luther but were an apostasy from him.

Practically all the older methods of interpreting the Reformation have survived to the present; to save space they must be noticed with the utmost brevity.

{739} [Sidenote: Protestants]

The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have all, as far as they are worthy of serious notice, escaped from the crudely supernaturalistic point of view. Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are conservative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their own. Harnack [Sidenote: Harnack] sees in Luther, as he does in Christ and Paul and all other of his heroes, exactly his own German liberal Evangelical mind. He is inclined to admit that Luther was little help to the progress of science and enlightenment, that he did not absorb the cultural elements of his time nor recognize the right and duty of free research, but yet he thinks the Reformation more important than any other revolution since Paul simply because it restored the true, i.e. Pauline and Harnackian theology. Loisy's criticism of him is brilliant: "What would Luther have thought had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to him with the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or with this amendment, 'faith in the merciful Father, for faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus'?" The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that accorded by Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy remarks, deduce from it the same humanitarian deism as that now fashionable at Berlin.

I should like to speak of the work of Below and Wernle, of Böhmer and Köhler, of Fisher and Walker and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant scholars, by which I have profited. But I can only mention one other Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who find the Reformation (quite naturally) too conservative for them. Laurent wrote in this sense in 1862-70, and he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of Protestant apologists, Charles Beard. [Sidenote: Beard] Beard saw in the Reformation the subjective form of religion over against the objectivity of Catholicism, and also, "the first great triumph of the scientific spirit"--the {740} Renaissance, in fact, applied to theology. And yet he found its work so imperfect and even hampering at the time he wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his book was to advocate a new Reformation to bring Christianity in complete harmony with science.

[Sidenote: Philosophers]

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than creed, adopted the Protestant standpoint. Eucken thinks that "the Reformation became the animating soul of the modern world, the principle motive-force of its progress. . . . In truth, every phase of modern life not directly or indirectly connected with the Reformation has something insipid and paltry about it." Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, and that the stamp of the conflict between the inner grace and the outward support is of the esse of Protestanism. William James was also in warm sympathy with Luther who, he thought, "in his immense, manly way . . . stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility." James added that the Reformer also invented a morality, as new as romantic love in literature, founded on a religious experience of despair breaking through the old, pagan pride.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher and Gasquet, labored fruitfully in the field of the Reformation by uncovering new facts, few or none of them had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the period. Janssen [Sidenote: Janssen] brought to its perfection a new method applied to a new field; the field was that of Kulturgeschichte, the method that of letting the sources speak for themselves, but naturally only those sources agreeable to the author's bias. In this way he represented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of the German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting frost to both culture and morality. Pastor's [Sidenote: Pastor] work, though dense with fresh knowledge, offers no connected {741} theory. The Reformation, he thinks, was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned classes and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat. From the learned uproar of Denifle's school emerges the explanation of the revolt as the "great sewer" which carried off from the church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's far finer psychology--characteristically Jesuit--tries to cast on Luther the origin of the present destructive subjectivism. Grisar's proof that "the modern infidel theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated way on the Luther of the first period, is suggestive.

[Sidenote: Acton]

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's favorite topics, I cannot find on that subject any new or fruitful thought at all in proportion to his vast learning. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the old Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it was merely the product of the wickedness and vagaries of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost equally blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the English Bishop Creighton too easy in his judgment of the popes, adding, "My dogma is not the special wickedness of my own spiritual superiors, but the general wickedness of men in authority--of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Cranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart and Henry VIII, of Philip II and Elizabeth, of Cromwell and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bossuet and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, believing that the fundamental characteristic of the period is the belief in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that "Luther at Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," but he confesses himself baffled by the problem, which is, to his mind, why Luther did not return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up {742} all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, then or later, dropped predestination, and admitted the necessity of good works, the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Acton, the one bar to his return to the church was his belief that the pope was Antichrist.

It is notable that none of the free minds starting from Catholicism have been attracted to the Protestant camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul and Protestantism were coming to the end of their reign. Paul Sabatier carefully proved that the Modernists owed nothing to Luther, and their greatest scholar, Loisy, succinctly put the case in the remark, "We are done with partial heresies."

[Sidenote: Anglicans]

The Anglicans have joined the Romanists to denounce as heretics those who rebelled against the church which still calls Anglicans heretics. Neville Figgis, having snatched from Treitschke the juxtaposition "Luther and Machiavelli," has labored to build up around it a theory by which these two men shall appear as the chief supports of absolutism and "divine right of kings." Figgis thinks that with the Reformation religion was merely the "performance for passing entertainment," but that the state was the "eternal treasure." A far more judicious and unprejudiced discussion of the same thesis is offered in the works of Professor A. F. Pollard. He sees both sides of the medal for, if religion had become a subject of politics, politics had become matter of religion. He thinks the English Reformation was primarily a revolt of the laity against the clergy.

[Sidenote: Other schools]

The liberal estimate of the Reformation fashionable a hundred years ago has also been revived in an elaborate work of Mackinnon, and is assumed in obiter dicta by such eminent historians as A. W. Benn, {743} E. P. Cheyney, C. Borgeaud, H. L. Osgood and Woodrow Wilson. Finally, Professor J. H. Robinson has improved the old political interpretation current among the secular historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essence of the Lutheran movement he finds in the revolt from the Roman ecclesiastical state.

SECTION 5. CONCLUDING ESTIMATE

The reader will expect me, after having given some account of the estimates of others, to make an evaluation of my own. Of course no view can be final; mine, like that of everyone else, is the expression of an age and an environment as well as that of an individual.

[Sidenote: Causes of the Reformation]

The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Social Revolution, was but the consequence of the operation of antecedent changes in environment and habit, intellectual and economic. There was the widening and deepening of knowledge, due in one aspect to the invention of printing, in the other to the geographical and historical discoveries of the fifteenth century and the consequent adumbration of the idea of natural law. Even in the later schoolmen, like Biel and Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages. The general economic antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change in the system of production from gild and barter to that of money and wages. This produced three secondary results, which in turn operated as causes: the rise of the moneyed class, individualism, and nationalism.

All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the religious, the political and the intellectual, produced the Reformation and its sisters, the Renaissance and the Social Revolution of the sixteenth century. The Reformation--including in that term both the Protestant movement and the Catholic reaction--partly occupied {744} all these fields, but did not monopolize any of them. There were some religious, or anti-religious, movements outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran impulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the intellectual and political fields, primarily occupied by Renaissance and Revolution.

[Sidenote: Religious aspect]

(1) The gêne felt by many secular historians in the treatment of religion is now giving way to the double conviction of the importance of the subject and of its susceptibility to scientific study. Religion in human life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard all theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rationalist[1] has remarked, it is usually priests who have freed mankind from taboos and superstitions. Indeed, in a religious age, no effective attack on the existing church is possible save one inspired by piety.

[Sidenote: Parallels to the Reformation]

Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be found both in Christian history and in that of other religions; they all markedly show the same consequences of the same causes. The publication of Christianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the Roman world and its accentuation of faith against the ceremonialism of the Jewish church, resembled that of Luther's "gospel." Marcion with his message of Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a second-century Reformer. The iconoclasm and nationalism of the Emperor Leo furnish striking similarities to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started by the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics Wyclif and Huss, rehearsed the religious drama of the sixteenth century. Many revivals in the Protestant church, such as Methodism, were, like the original movement, returns to personal piety and biblicism. The Old Catholic schism in its repudiation of the papal supremacy, and even Modernism, notwithstanding its {745} disclaimers, are animated in part by the same motives as those inspiring the Reformers. In Judaism the Sadducees, in their bibliolatry and in their opposition to the traditions dear to the Pharisees, were Protestants; a later counterpart of the same thing is found in the reform the Karaites by Anan ben David. Mohammed has been a favorite subject for comparison with Luther by the Catholics, but in truth, in no disparaging sense, the proclamation of Islam, with its monotheism, emphasis on faith and predestination, was very like the Reformation, and so were several later reforms within Mohammedanism, including two in the sixteenth century. Many parallels could doubtless be adduced from the heathen religions, perhaps the most striking is the foundation of Sikhism by Luther's contemporary Nanak, who preached monotheism and revolted from the ancient ceremonial and hierarchy of caste.

What is the etiology of religious revolution? The principal law governing it is that any marked change either in scientific knowledge or in ethical feeling necessitates a corresponding alteration in the faith. All the great religious innovations of Luther and his followers can be explained as an attempt to readjust faith to the new culture, partly intellectual, partly social, that had gradually developed during the later Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Faith vs. works]

The first shift, and the most important, was that from salvation by works to salvation by faith only. The Catholic dogma is that salvation is dependent on certain sacraments, grace being bestowed automatically (ex opere operato) on all who participate in the celebration of the rite without actively opposing its effect. Luther not only reduced the number of sacraments but he entirely changed their character. Not they, but the faith of the participant mattered, and {746} this faith was bestowed freely by God, or not at all. In this innovation one primary cause was the individualism of the age; the sense of the worth of the soul or, if one pleases, of the ego. This did not mean subjectivism, or religious autonomy, for the Reformers held passionately to an ideal of objective truth, but it did mean that every soul had the right to make its personal account with God, without mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and credit balance of outward work and merit was done away, and for it was substituted the nobler, or at least more spiritual and less mechanical, idea of disinterested morality and unconditioned salvation. The God of Calvin may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by bribes.

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the esse of religion that it is hard for us to do justice to the importance of this change. Really, it is not dogma so much as rite and custom that is fundamental. The sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval Christianity and to most primitive religions. For the first time Luther substituted for the sacramental habit, or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely ethical criterion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and the categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous sola fide.

[Sidenote: Monism]

The second great change made by Protestantism was more intellectual, that from a pluralistic to a monistic {747} standpoint. Far from the conception of natural law, the early Protestants did little or nothing to rationalize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but they had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy to find scandal in the worship of the saints, with its attendant train of daily and trivial miracles. To sweep away the vast hierarchy of angels and canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to preach pure monotheism was in the spirit of the time and is a phenomenon for which many parallels can be found. Instructive is the analogy of the contemporary trend to absolutism; neither God nor king any longer needed intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Political and economic aspects]

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the religious expression of the current political and economic change. In the first place it reflected and reacted upon the growing national self-consciousness, particularly of the Teutonic peoples. [Sidenote: Nationalism and Teutonism] The revolt from Rome was in the interests of the state church, and also of Germanic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at the hands of the Northern peoples is strikingly like the break-up of the Roman Empire under pressure from their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman church practically coincided with the boundaries of the Empire. The apparent exception of England proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman civilization was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth and following centuries.

That the Reformation strengthened the state was inevitable, for there was no practical alternative to putting the final authority in spiritual matters, after the pope had been ejected, into the hands of the civil government. Congregationalism was tried and failed as tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation was really responsible for the new despotism and the divine right of kings, is clear from a comparison with {748} the Greek church and the Turkish Empire. In both, the same forces which produced the state churches of Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, a bigoted Sunnite, after putting down the Shi'ite heresy, induced the last caliph of the Abbasid dynasty to surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet; thereafter he and his successors were caliphs as well as sultans. In Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, in 1547, head of the national church.

[Sidenote: Capitalism]

Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic revolution in that its ethics are, far more than those of Catholicism, oriented by a reference to this world. The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude, mortification of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under the sun of a new prosperity. In its light men began to realize the ethical value of this life, of marriage, of children, of daily labor and of success and prosperity. It was just in this work that Protestantism came to see its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. The man at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.

Moreover, the accentuation of the virtues of thrift and industry, which made capitalism and Calvinism allies, but reflected the standards natural to the bourgeois class. It was by the might of the merchants and their money that the Reformation triumphed; conversely they benefited both by the spoils of the church and by the abolition of a privileged class. Luther stated that there was no difference between priest and layman; some men were called to preach, others to make shoes, but--and this is his own illustration--the one vocation is no more spiritual than the other. No longer necessary as a mediator and dispenser of sacramental grace, the Protestant clergyman sank inevitably to the same level as his neighbors.

{749} [Sidenote: Intellectual aspect]

(3) In its relation to the Renaissance and to modern thought the Reformation solved, in its way, two problems, or one problem, that of authority, in two forms. Though anything but consciously rational in their purpose, the innovating leaders did assert, at least for themselves, the right of private judgment. Appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, from pope to council, from council to the Bible and (in Luther's own words) from the Bible to Christ, [Sidenote: Individualism] the Reformers finally came to their own conscience as the supreme court. Trying to deny to others the very rights they had fought to secure for themselves, yet their example operated more powerfully than their arguments, even when these were made of ropes and of thumb-screws. The delicate balance of faith was overthrown and it was put into a condition of unstable equilibrium; the avalanche, started by ever so gentle a push, swept onward until it buried the men who tried to stop it half way. Dogma slowly narrowing down from precedent to precedent had its logical, though unintended, outcome in complete religious autonomy, yes, in infidelity and skepticism.

[Sidenote: Vulgarization of the Renaissance]

Protestantism has been represented now as the ally, now as the enemy of humanism. Consciously it was neither. Rather, it was the vulgarization of the Renaissance; it transformed, adapted, and popularized many of the ideas originated by its rival. It is easy to see now that the future lay rather outside of both churches than in either of them, if we look only for direct descent. Columbus burst the bounds of the world, Copernicus those of the universe; Luther only broke his vows. But the point is that the repudiation of religious vows was the hardest to do at that time, a feat infinitely more impressive to the masses than either of the former. It was just here that the religious movement became a great solvent of conservatism; it made the masses think, passionately if not {750} deeply, on their own beliefs. It broke the cake of custom and made way for greater emancipations than its own. It was the logic of events that, whereas the Renaissance gave freedom of thought to the cultivated few, the Reformation finally resulted in tolerance for the masses. Logically also, even while it feared and hated philosophy in the great thinkers and scientists, it advocated education, up to a certain point, for the masses.

[Sidenote: The Reformation a step forward]

In summary, if the Reformation is judged with historical imagination, it docs not appear to be primarily a reaction. That it should be such is both a priori improbable and unsupported by the facts. The Reformation did not give our answer to the many problems it was called upon to face; nevertheless it gave the solution demanded and accepted by the time, and therefore historically the valid solution. With all its limitations it was, fundamentally, a step forward and not the return to an earlier standpoint, either to that of primitive Christianity, as the Reformers themselves claimed, or to the dark ages, as has been latterly asserted.

[1] S. Reinach: Cultes, Mythes et Religions, iv, 467.

{751}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRELIMINARY

1. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES.

The amount of important unpublished documents on the Reformation, though still large, is much smaller than that of printed sources, and the value of these manuscripts is less than that of those which have been published. It is no purpose of this bibliography to furnish a guide to archives.

Though the quantity of unpublished material that I have used has been small, it has proved unexpectedly rich. In order to avoid repetition in each following chapter, I will here summarize manuscript material used (most of it for the first time), which is either still unpublished or is in course of publication by myself. See Luther's Correspondence, transl. and ed. by Preserved Smith and C. M. Jacobs, 1913 ff; English Historical Review, July 1919; Scottish Historical Review, Jan. 1919; Harvard Theological Review, April 1919; The N. Y. Nation, various dates 1919.

From the Bodleian Library, I have secured a copy of an unpublished letter and other fragments of Luther, press mark, Montagu d. 20, fol. 225, and Auct. Z. ii, 2.

From the British Museum I have had diplomatic correspondence of Robert Barnes, Cotton MSS., Vitellius B XXI, foil. 120 ff.; a letter of Albinianus Tretius to Luther, Add. MS. 19, 959, fol. 4b ff; and a portion of John Foxe's Collection of Letters and Papers, Harleian MS 419, fol. 125.

From the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, collection of autographs made by Ferdinand J. Dreer, unpublished and hitherto unused letters of Erasmus, James VI of Scotland (2), Leo X, Hedio, Farel to Calvin, Forster, Melanchthon, Charles V, Albrecht of Mansfeld, Henry VIII, Francis I (3), Catherine de' Medici, Grynaeus, Viglius van Zuichem, Alphonso d'Este, Philip Marnix, Camden, Tasso, Machiavelli, Pius IV, Vassari, Borromeo, Alesandro Ottavio de' Medici (afterwards Leo XI), Clement VIII, Sarpi, Emperor Ferdinand, William of Nassau (1559), Maximilian III, Paul Eber (2), Rudolph II, Henry III, Philip II, Emanuel Philibert, Henry IV, Scaliger, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert Dudley (Leicester), Filippo Strozzi, and others.

From Wellesley College a patent of Charles V., dated Worms, March 6, 1521, granting mining rights to the Count of Belalcazar. Unpublished.

Prom the American Hispanic Society of New York unpublished letter of Henry IV of France to Du Font, on his conversion, and letter of Henry VII of England to Ferdinand of Aragon.

2. GENERAL WORKS

Encyclopaedia Britannica.[11] 1910-1. (Many valuable articles of a thoroughly scientific character).

The New International Encyclopaedia, 1915f. (Equally valuable).

Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche.[3] 24 vols. Leipzig. 1896-1913. (Indispensable to the student of Church History; The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religions Knowledge, 12 vols., 1908 ff, though in part based on this, is far less valuable for the present subject).

Wetzer und Welte: Kirchenlexikon oder Encyclopädie der katholischen Theologie und ihrer Hülfswissenschaften. Zweite Auflage von J. Card. Hergenröther und F. Kaulen. Freiburg im Breisgau. 1880-1901. 12 vols. (Valuable).

Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, hg. von H. Gunkel, O. Scheel, F. M. Schiele. 5 vols. 1909-13.

The Cambridge Modern History, planned by Lord Acton, edited by A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes. London and New York. 1902 ff. Vol. 1. The Renaissance. 1902. Vol. 2. The Reformation. 1904. Vol. 3. The Wars of Religion. 1905. Vol. 13. Tables and Index. 1911. Vol. 14. Maps. 1912. (A standard co-operative work, with full bibliographies).

Weltgeschichte, hg.v.J. von Pflugk-Harttung: Das Religiöse Zeitalter, 1500-1650. Berlin. 1907. (A co-operative work, written by masters of their subjects in popular style. Profusely illustrated).

E. Lavisse et A. Rambaud: Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours. Tome IV Renaissance et réforme, les nouveaux mondes 1492-1559. 1894. Tome V. Les guerres de religion 1559-1648. 1895.

R. L. Poole: Historical Atlas of Modern Europe. 1902.

W. R. Shepherd: Historical Atlas. 1911.

Ramsay Muir: Hammond's New Historical Atlas for Students. 1914.

A list of general histories of the Reformation will be found in the bibliography to the last chapter.

An excellent introduction to the bibliography of the public documents of all countries will be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Record."