II. GERMANY…

II. GERMANY

SECTION 1. THE LEADER

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful reagent possible.

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into hell. "They painted Christ," says Luther--and such pictures can still be seen in old churches--"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath."

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made "an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly as possible."

For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in Lefèvre d'Étaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith." [Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims, and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only.

The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle. Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel] This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517] He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant. [Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses stating his points more strongly than before.

The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again from the pope to a future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X, in the bull Cum postquam, authoritatively defined the doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.

The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special agent, the Saxon Charles von Miltitz, with instructions either to cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering him. In neither of these attempts was he successful. [Sidenote: January 1519] At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his opponents did the same.

Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the church could not let the heretic rest for a moment. The whole affair was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When he assailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:

{69} The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all councils, the Nicene.

[Sidenote: The Leipzig Debate, 1519]

A debate on this and other propositions between Eck on the one side and Luther and his colleague Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig in the days from June 27 to July 16, 1519. The climax of the argument on the power of popes and councils came when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring to show that Luther's opinions were identical with those of Huss, forced from his opponent the bold declaration that "among the opinions of John Huss and the Bohemians many are certainly most Christian and evangelic, and cannot be condemned by the universal church." The words sent a thrill through the audience and throughout Christendom. Eck could only reply: "If you believe that a general council, legitimately convoked, can err, you are to me a heathen and a publican." Reconciliation was indeed no longer possible. When Luther had protested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a loyal son of the church. Now at last he was forced to raise the standard of revolt, at least against Rome, the recognized head of the church. He had begun by appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from the pope to a universal council; now he declared that a great council had erred, and that he would not abide by its decision. The issue was a clear one, though hardly recognized as such by himself, between the religion of authority and the right of private judgment.

His opposition to the papacy developed with extraordinary rapidity. His study of the Canon Law made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the pope as either Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle. He {70} applauded Melancthon, a brilliant young man called to teach at Wittenberg in 1518, for denying transubstantiation. He declared that the cup should never have been withheld from the laity, and that the mass considered as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomination. His eyes were opened to the iniquities of Rome by Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine, published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519. After reading it he wrote:

Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God that such unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but prevailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might be wanting) that they became as articles of faith.

Like German troops Luther was best in taking the offensive. These early years when he was standing almost alone and attacking one abuse after another, were the finest of his whole career. Later, when he came to reconstruct a church, he modified or withdrew much of what he had at first put forward, and re-introduced a large portion of the medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever attained. It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the popular force of their language.

[Sidenote: To the Christian Nobility, 1520]

His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate. In this he asserts the right of the civil power to reform the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise this right. The priests, says he, defend themselves against all outside interference by three "walls," of {71} which the first is the claim that the church is superior to the state, in case the civil authority presses them; the second, the assertion, if one would correct them by the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope; the third, if they are threatened with a general council, the contention that no one can convoke such a council save the pope. Luther demolishes these walls with words of vast import. First, he denies any distinction between the spiritual and temporal estates. Every baptized Christian, he asserts, is a priest, and in this saying he struck a mortal blow at the great hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up by the Middle Ages. The second wall is still frailer than the first, says the writer, for anyone can see that in spite of the priests' claims to be masters of the Bible they never learn one word of it their whole life long. The third wall falls of itself, for the Bible plainly commands everyone to punish and correct any wrong-doer, no matter what his station.

[Sidenote: Reform measures]

After this introduction Luther proposes measures of reform equally drastic and comprehensive. The first twelve articles are devoted to the pope, the annates, the appointment of foreigners to German benefices, the appeal of cases to Rome, the asserted authority of the papacy over bishops, the emperor, and other rulers. All these abuses, as well as jubilees and pilgrimages to Rome should be simply forbidden by the civil government. The next three articles deal with sacerdotal celibacy, recommending that priests be allowed to marry, and calling for the suppression of many of the cloisters. It is further urged that foundations for masses and for the support of idle priests be abolished, that various vexatious provisions of the Canon Law be repealed, and that begging on any pretext be prohibited. The twenty-fourth article deals with the Bohemian schism, saying that Huss was wrongly {72} burned, and calling for union with the Hussites who deny transubstantiation and demand the cup for the laity. Next, the writer takes up the reform of education in the interests of a more biblical religion. Finally, he urges that sumptuary laws be passed, that a bridle be put in the mouth of the great monopolists and usurers, and that brothels be no longer tolerated.

Of all the writer's works this probably had the greatest and most immediate influence. Some, indeed, were offended by the violence of the language, defended by Luther from the example of the Bible and by the necessity of rousing people to the enormities he attacked. But most hailed it as a "trumpet-blast" calling the nation to arms. Four thousand copies were sold in a few days, and a second edition was called for within a month. Voicing ideas that had been long, though vaguely, current, it convinced almost all of the need of a reformation. According to their sympathies men declared that the devil or the Holy Ghost spoke through Luther.

[Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity, 1520]

Though less popular both in form and subject, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church was not less important than the Address to the German Nobility. It was a mortal blow at the sacramental system of the church. In judging it we must again summon the aid of our historical imagination. In the sixteenth century dogmas not only seemed but were matters of supreme importance. It was just by her sacramental system, by her claim to give the believer eternal life and salvation through her rites, that the church had imposed her yoke on men. As long as that belief remained intact progress in thought, in freedom of conscience, in reform, remained difficult. And here, as is frequently the case, the most effective arguments were not those which seem to us logically the strongest. Luther made no appeal to reason as such. He {73} appealed to the Bible, recognized by all Christians as an authority, and showed how far the practice of the church had degenerated from her standard. [Sidenote: Sacraments] In the first place he reduced the number of sacraments, denying that name to matrimony, orders, extreme unction and confirmation. In attacking orders he demolished the priestly ideal and authority. In reducing marriage to a civil contract he took a long step towards the secularization of life. Penance he considered a sacrament in a certain sense, though not in the strict one, and he showed that it had been turned by the church from its original significance of "repentance" [1] to that of sacramental penance, in which no faith was required but merely an automatic act. Baptism and the eucharist he considered the only true sacraments, and he seriously criticized the prevalent doctrine of the latter. He denied that the mass is a sacrifice or a "good work" pleasing to God and therefore beneficial to the soul either of living or of dead. He denied that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus, though he held that the body and blood are really present with the elements. He demanded that the cup be given to the laity.

The whole trend of Luther's thought at this time was to oppose the Catholic theory of a mechanical distribution of grace and salvation (the so-called opus operatum) by means of the sacraments, and to substitute for it an individual conception of religion in which faith only should be necessary. How far he carried this idea may be seen in his Sermon on the New Testament, that is on the Holy Mass,[2] published in the same year as the pamphlets just analysed. In it he makes the essence of the sacrament forgiveness, and the vehicle of this forgiveness the word of God apprehended by {74} faith, not the actual participation in the sacred bread and wine. Had he always been true to this conception he would have left no place for sacrament or priest at all. But in later years he grew more conservative, until, under slightly different names, almost the old medieval ideas of church and religion were again established, and, as Milton later expressed it, "New presbyter was but old priest writ large."

[1] In Latin penitentia means both penance and repentance.

[2] Cf. Matthew, xxvi, 28.

SECTION 2. THE REVOLUTION

[Sidenote: Germany]

Although the Germans had arrived, by the end of the fifteenth century, at a high degree of national self-consciousness, they had not, like the French and English, succeeded in forming a corresponding political unity. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, though continuing to assert the vast claims of the Roman world-state, was in fact but a loose confederacy of many and very diverse territories. On a map drawn to the scale 1:6,000,000 nearly a hundred separate political entities can be counted within the limits of the Empire and there were many others too small to appear. The rulers of seven of these territories elected the emperor; they were the three spiritual princes, the Archbishops of Mayence, Trèves and Cologne, the three German temporal princes, the Electors of the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg, and in addition the King of Bohemia, who, save for purposes of the imperial choice, did not count as a member of the Germanic body. Besides these there were some powerful dukedoms, like Austria and Bavaria, and numerous smaller bishoprics and counties. There were also many free cities, like Augsburg and Nuremberg, small aristocratic republics. Finally there was a large body of "free knights" or barons, whose tiny fiefs amounted often to no more than a castle and a few acres, but who owned no feudal superior save {75} the emperor. The unity of the Empire was expressed not only in the person of the emperor, but in the Diet which met at different places at frequent intervals. Its authority, though on the whole increasing, was small.

With no imperial system of taxation, no professional army and no centralized administration, the real power of the emperor dwindled. Such as it was he derived it from the fact that he was always elected from one of the great houses. Since 1438 the Hapsburgs, Archdukes of Austria, had held the imperial office. Since 1495 there was also an imperial supreme court of arbitration. [Sidenote: 1495] The first imperial tax was levied in 1422 to equip a force against the Hussites. In the fifteenth century also the rudiments of a central administration were laid in the division of the realm into ten "circles," and the levy of a small number of soldiers. And yet, at the time of the Reformation, the Empire was little better than a state in dissolution through the centrifugal forces of feudalism.

So little was the Empire an individual unit that the policy of her rulers themselves was not imperial. The statesmanship of Maximilian was something smaller than national; it was that of his Archduchy of Austria. The policy of his successor, on the other hand, was determined by something larger than Germany, the consideration of the Spanish and Burgundian states that he also ruled. Maximilian tried in every way to aggrandize his personal power, not that of the German Nation. [Sidenote: Maximilian I, 1493-1519] The Diet of Worms of 1495 tried to remodel the constitution. It proclaimed a perpetual public peace, provided that those who broke it should be outlawed, and placed the duty of executing the ban upon all territories within ninety miles of the offender. It also passed a bill for taxation, called the "common penny," which combined features of a poll tax, an {76} income tax and a property tax. The difficulty of collecting it was great; Maximilian himself as a territorial prince tried to evade it instead of setting his subjects the good example of paying it. He probably derived no more than the trifling sum of 50,000-100,000 gulden from it annually. The Diet also revived the Supreme Court and gave it a permanent home at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Feeble efforts to follow up this beginning of reform were made in subsequent Diets, but they failed owing to the insuperable jealousies of the princes and because the party of national unity lost the sympathy of the common people, to whom alone they could look for support.

Maximilian's external policy, though adventurous and unstable, was somewhat more successful. His only principle was to grasp whatever opportunity seemed to offer. Thus at one time he seriously proposed to have himself elected pope. His marriage with Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, added to the estates of his house Burgundy--the land comprising what is now Belgium, Luxemburg, most of Holland and large portions of north-eastern France. On the death of Mary, in 1482, Maximilian had much trouble in getting himself acknowledged as regent of her lands for their son Philip the Handsome. A part of the domain he also lost in a war with France. This was more than made up, however, by the brilliant match he made for Philip in securing for him the hand of Mad Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. This marriage produced two sons, Charles and Ferdinand. The deaths of Isabella (1504), of Philip (1506) and of Ferdinand of Aragon (1516) left Charles at the age of sixteen the ruler of Burgundy and of Spain with its immense dependencies in Italy and in America. [Sidenote: Charles V, 1500-1558] From this time forth the policy of Maximilian concentrated in the effort to {77} secure the succession of his eldest grandson to the imperial throne.

When Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, there were several candidates for election. So little was the office considered national that the kings of France and England entered the lists, and the former, Francis I, actually at one time secured the promise of votes from the majority of electors. Pope Leo made explicit engagements to both Charles and Francis to support their claims, and at the same time instructed his legate to labor for the choice of a German prince, either Frederic of Saxony, if he would in return give up Luther, or else Joachim of Brandenburg. But at no time was the election seriously in doubt. The electors followed the only possible course in choosing Charles on June 28. They profited, however, by the rivalry of the rich king of France to extort enormous bribes and concessions from Charles. The banking house of Fugger supplied the necessary funds, and in addition the agents of the emperor-elect were obliged to sign a "capitulation" making all sorts of concessions to the princes. One of these, exacted by Frederic of Saxony in the interest of Luther, was that no subject should be outlawed without being heard.

The settlement of the imperial election enabled the pope once more to turn his attention to the suppression of the rapidly growing heresy. After the Leipzig debate the universities of Cologne and Louvain had condemned Luther's positions. Eck went to Rome in March, 1520, and impressed the curia, which was already planning a bull condemning the heretic, with the danger of delay. After long discussions the bull Exsurge Domine was ratified by the College of Cardinals and promulgated by Leo on June 15. [Sidenote: Bull against Luther, 1520] In this, forty-one of Luther's sayings, relating to the sacraments of penance and the eucharist, to indulgences and {78} the power of the pope, to free will and purgatory, and to a few other matters, were anathematized as heretical or scandalous or false or offensive to pious ears. His books were condemned and ordered to be burnt, and unless he should recant within sixty days of the posting of the bull in Germany he was to be considered a heretic and dealt with accordingly. Eck was entrusted with the duty of publishing this fulmination in Germany, and performed the task in the last days of September.

The time given Luther in which to recant therefore expired two months later. Instead of doing so he published several answers to "the execrable bull of Anti-christ," and on December 10 publicly and solemnly burnt it, together with the whole Canon Law. This he had come to detest, partly as containing the "forged decretals," partly as the sanction for a vast mechanism of ecclesiastical use and abuse, repugnant to his more personal theology. The dramatic act, which sent a thrill throughout Europe, symbolized the passing of some medieval accretions on primitive Christianity. There was nothing left for the pope but to excommunicate the heretic, as was done in the bull Decet Pontificem Romanum drawn up at Rome in January, [Sidenote: 1521] and published at Worms on May 6.

In the meantime Charles had come to Germany. For more than a year after his election he remained in Spain, where his position was very insecure on account of the revolt against his Burgundian officers. Arriving in the Netherlands in the summer of 1520 Charles was met by the special nuncios of the pope, Caracciolo and Aleander. After he was crowned emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle, he opened his first Diet, at Worms. [Sidenote: October 23, 1520 January 27, 1521 The Diet of Worms]

Before this august assembly came three questions of highest import. The first related to the dynastic {79} policy of the Hapsburgs. For the chronic war with France an army of 24,000 men and a tax of 128,000 gulden was voted. The disposition of Württemberg caused some trouble. Duke Ulrich had been deposed for rebellion in 1518, and his land taken from him by the Swabian League and sold to the emperor in 1520. Together with the Austrian lands, which Charles secretly handed over to his young brother Ferdinand, this territory made the nucleus of Hapsburg power in Germany.

The Diet then took up the question of constitutional reform. In order to have a permanent administrative body, necessary during the long absences of the emperor, an Imperial Council of Regency was established and given a seat at Nuremberg. [Sidenote: Council of Regency] The emperor nominated the president and four of the twenty-two other members; each of the six German electors nominated one member; six were chosen by the circles into which the Empire was divided and six were elected by the other estates. The powers of the council were limited to the times when the emperor was away.

The third question treated by the Diet was the religious one. As usual, they drew up a long list of grievances against the pope, to which many good Catholics in the assembly subscribed. Next they considered what to do with Luther. Charles himself, who could speak no language but French, and had no sympathy whatever with a rebel from any authority spiritual or temporal, would much have preferred to outlaw the Wittenberg professor at once, but he was bound by his promise to Frederic of Saxony. Of the six electors, who sat apart from the other estates, Frederic was strongly for Luther, the Elector Palatine was favorably inclined towards him, and the Archbishop of Mayence represented a mediating policy. The other three electors were opposed. Among the {80} lesser princes a considerable minority was for Luther, whereas among the representatives of the free cities and of the knights, probably a majority were his followers. The common people, though unrepresented, applauded Luther, and their clamors could not pass unheeded even by the aristocratic members of the Diet. [Sidenote: February 13] The debate was opened by Aleander in a speech dwelling on the sacramental errors of the heretic and the similarity of his movement to that of the detested Bohemians. After a stormy session the estates decided to summon the bold Saxon before them and accordingly a citation, together with a safe-conduct, was sent him.

Though there was some danger in obeying the summons, Luther's journey to Worms, was a triumphal progress. Brought before the Diet in the late afternoon of April 17, he was asked if a certain number of books, the titles of which were read, were his and if he would recant the heresy contained in them. The form of the questions took him by surprise, for he had expected to be confronted with definite charges and to be allowed to defend his positions. He accordingly asked for time, and was granted one more day. [Sidenote: April 18, 1521] On his second appearance he made a great oration admitting that the books were his and closing with the words:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason (for I trust neither popes nor councils since they have often erred and contradicted themselves) . . . I neither can nor will recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen.

There he stood, braving the world, for he could do no other. . . . He left the hall the hero of his nation.

Hoping still to convince him of error, Catholic theologians held protracted but fruitless conferences with him before his departure from Worms on the 26th of {81} April. The sympathy of the people with him was shown by the posting at Worms of placards threatening his enemies. Charles was sincerely shocked and immediately drew up a statement that he would hazard life and lands on the maintenance of the Catholic faith of his fathers. An edict was drafted by Aleander on the model of one promulgated in September in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: Luther banned] The Edict of Worms put Luther under the ban of the Empire, commanded his surrender to the government at the expiration of his safe-conduct, and forbade all to shelter him or to read his writings. Though dated on May 8, to make it synchronize with a treaty between Charles and Leo, the Edict was not passed by the Diet until May 26. At this time many of the members had gone home, and the law was forced on the remaining ones, contrary to the wishes of the majority, by intrigue and imperial pressure.

After leaving Worms Luther was taken by his prince, Frederic the Wise, and placed for safe-keeping in the Wartburg, a fine old castle near Eisenach. [Sidenote: The Wartburg] Here he remained in hiding for nearly a year, while doing some of his most important work. Here he wrote his treatise On Monastic Vows, declaring that they are wrong and invalid and urging all priests, nuns and monks to leave the cloister and to marry. In thus freeing thousands of men and women from a life often unproductive and sterile Luther achieved one of the greatest of his practical reforms. At the Wartburg also Luther began his translation of the Bible. The New Testament appeared in September 1522, and the Old Testament followed in four parts, the last published in 1532.

[Sidenote: The radicals]

While Luther was in retirement at the Wartburg, his colleagues Carlstadt and Melanchthon, and the Augustinian friar Gabriel Zwilling, took up the movement at Wittenberg and carried out reforms more radical {82} than those of their leader. The endowments of masses were confiscated and applied to the relief of the poor on new and better principles. Prostitution was suppressed. A new order of divine service was introduced, in which the words purporting that the mass was a sacrifice were omitted, and communion was given to the laity in both kinds. Priests were urged to marry, and monks were almost forced to leave the cloister. An element of mob violence early manifested itself both at Wittenberg and elsewhere. An outbreak at Erfurt against the clergy occurred in June, 1521, and by the end of the year riots took place at Wittenberg.

Even now, at the dawn of the revolution, appeared the beginnings of those sects, more radical than the Lutheran, commonly known as Anabaptist. The small industrial town of Zwickau had long been a hotbed of Waldensian heresy. Under the guidance of Thomas Münzer the clothweavers of this place formed a religious society animated by the desire to renovate both church and state by the readiest and roughest means. Suppression of the movement at Zwickau by the government resulted only in the banishment, or escape, of some of the leaders. [Sidenote: December 27, 1521] Three of them found their way to Wittenberg, where they proclaimed themselves prophets divinely inspired, and conducted a revival marked with considerable, though harmless, extravagance.

[Sidenote: January 20, 1522]

As the radicals at Wittenberg made the whole of Northern Germany uneasy, the Imperial Council of Regency issued a mandate forbidding all the innovations and commanding the Elector of Saxony to stop them. It is remarkable that Luther in this felt exactly as did the Catholics. Early in March he returned to Wittenberg with the express purpose of checking the reforms which had already gone too far {83} for him. His personal ascendency was so great that he found no trouble in doing so. Not only the Zwickau prophets, but Carlstadt and Zwilling were discredited. Almost all their measures were repealed, including those on divine service which was again restored almost to the Catholic form. Not until 1525 were a simple communion service and the use of German again introduced.

[Sidenote: Rebellion of the knights, 1522-3]

It soon became apparent that all orders and all parts of Germany were in a state of ferment. The next manifestation of the revolutionary spirit was the rebellion of the knights. This class, now in a state of moral and economic decay, had long survived any usefulness it had ever had. The rise of the cities, the aggrandizement of the princes, and the change to a commercial from a feudal society all worked to the disadvantage of the smaller nobility and gentry. About the only means of livelihood left them was freebooting, and that was adopted without scruple and without shame. Envious of the wealthy cities, jealous of the greater princes and proud of their tenure immediately from the emperor, the knights longed for a new Germany, more centralized, more national, and, of course, under their special direction. In the Lutheran movement they thought they saw their opportunity; in Ulrich von Hutten they found their trumpet, in Francis von Sickingen their sword. A knight himself, but with possessions equal to those of many princes, a born warrior, but one who knew how to use the new weapons, gold and cannon, Sickingen had for years before he heard of Luther kept aggrandizing his power by predatory feuds. So little honor had he, that though appointed to high military command in the campaign against France, he tried to win personal advantage by treason, playing off the emperor against King Francis, with whom, for a long time, he almost {84} openly sided. In 1520 he fell under the influence of Hutten, who urged him to espouse the cause of the "gospel" as that of German liberty. By August 1522 he became convinced that the time was ripe for action, and issued a manifesto proclaiming that the feudal dues had become unbearable, and giving the impression that he was acting as an ally of Luther, although the latter knew nothing of his intentions and would have heartily disapproved of his methods.

Sickingen's first march was against Trèves. The archbishop's "unchristian cannon" forced him to retire from this city. On October 10 the Council of Regency declared him an outlaw. A league formed by Trèves, the Palatinate and Hesse, defeated him and captured his castle at Landstuhl in May, 1523. Mortally wounded he died on May 7.

Alike unhurt and unhelped by such incidents as the revolt of the knights, the main current of religious revolution swept onwards. Leo X died on December 1, 1521, and in his place was elected Adrian of Utrecht, a man of very different character. [Sidenote: Adrian VI, 1522-33] Though he had already taken a strong stand against Luther, he was deeply resolved to reform the corruption of the church. To the Diet called at Nuremberg [Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1522] in the latter part of 1522 he sent as legate Chieregato with a brief demanding the suppression of the schism. It was monstrous, said he, that one little brother should seduce a whole nation from the path trodden by so many martyrs and learned doctors. Do you suppose, he asked, that the people will longer respect civil government if they are taught to despise the canons and decrees of the spiritual power? At the same time Adrian wrote to Chieregato:

Say that we frankly confess that God permits this persecution of his church on account of the sins of men, especially those of the priests and prelates. . . . We {85} know that in this Holy See now for some years there have been many abominations, abuses in spiritual things, excesses in things commanded, in short, that all has become perverted. . . . We have all turned aside in our ways, nor was there, for a long time, any who did right,--no, not one.

This confession rather strengthened the reform party, than otherwise, making its demands seem justified; and all that the Diet did towards the settlement of the religious question was to demand that a council, with representation of the laity, should be called in a German city. A long list of grievances against the church was again drawn up and laid before the emperor.

The same Diet took up other matters. The need for reform and the impotence of the Council of Regency had both been demonstrated by the Sickingen affair. A law against monopolies was passed, limiting the capital of any single company to fifty thousand gulden. In order to provide money for the central government a customs duty of 4 per cent. ad valorem was ordered. Both these measures weighed on the cities, which accordingly sent an embassy to Charles. They succeeded in inducing him to disallow both laws.

[Sidenote: Diet of Nuremberg, 1524]

The next Diet, which assembled at Nuremberg early in 1524, naturally refrained from passing more futile laws for the emperor to veto, but on the other hand it took a stronger stand than ever on the religious question. The Edict of Worms was still nominally in force and was still to all intents and purposes flouted. Luther was at large and his followers were gaining. In reply to a demand from the government that the Edict should be strictly carried out, the Diet passed a resolution that it should be observed by each state as far as its prince deemed it possible. Despairing of an oecumenical council the estates demanded that a {86} German national synod be called at Spires before the close of the year with power to decide on what was to be done for the time being.

There is no doubt that by this time the public opinion of North Germany, at least, was thoroughly Lutheran. Ferdinand hardly exaggerated when he wrote his brother that throughout the Empire there was scarce one person in a thousand not infected with the new doctrines. [Sidenote: 1523] The place now occupied by newspapers and weekly reviews was taken by a vast swarm of pamphlets, most of which have survived. [Sidenote: Popular pamphlets] Those of the years immediately following the Diet of Worms reveal the first enthusiasm of the people for the "gospel." The greater part of the broadsides produced are concerned with the leader and his doctrines. The comparison of him to Huss was a favorite one. One pamphleteer, at least, drew the parallel between his trial at Worms and that of Christ before Pilate. The whole bent of men's minds was theological. Doctrines which now seem a little quaint and trite were argued with new fervor by each writer. The destruction of images, the question of the real presence in the sacrament, justification by faith, and free will were disputed. Above all the Bible was lauded in the new translation, and the priests continued, as before, to be the favorite butt of sarcasm.

Among the very many writers of these tracts the playwright of Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, took a prominent place. In 1523 he published his poem on "the Nightingale of Wittenberg, whose voice sounds in the glorious dawn over hill and dale." This bird is, of course, Luther, and the fierce lion who has sought his life is Leo. [Sidenote: Hans Sachs] The next year Hans Sachs published no less than three pamphlets favoring the reform. They were: 1. A Disputation between a Canon and a Shoemaker, defending the Word of God and the Christian {87} Estate. 2. Conversation on the Hypocritical Works of the Clergy and their Vows, by which they hope to be saved to the disparagement of Christ's Blood. 3. A Dialogue against the Roman Avarice. Multiply these pamphlets, the contents of which is indicated by their titles, by one hundred, and we arrive at some conception of the pabulum on which the people grew to Protestantism. Of course there were many pamphlets on the other side, but here, as in a thousand other cases, the important thing proved to be to have the cause ventilated. So long as discussion was forced in the channels selected by the reformers, even the interest excited by their adversaries redounded ultimately to their advantage.

[Sidenote: The Peasants' War, 1524-5]

The denunciation of authority, together with the message of the excellence of the humblest Christian and the brotherhood of man, powerfully contributed to the great rising of the lower classes, known as the Peasants' War, in 1524-5. It was not, as the name implied, confined to the rustics, for probably as large a proportion of the populace of cities as of the tillers of the soil joined it. Nor was there in it anything entirely new. The cry for justice was of long standing, and every single element of the revolt, including the hatred of the clergy and demand for ecclesiastical reform, is to be found also in previous risings. Thus, the rebellion of peasants under Hans Böhm, commonly called the Piper of Niklashausen, in 1476, was brought about by a religious appeal. The leader asserted that he had special revelations from the Virgin Mary that serfdom was to be abolished, and the kingdom of God to be introduced by the levelling of all social ranks; and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling. There had also been two risings, closely connected, the first, in 1513, deriving its name of "Bundschuh" from the peasant's tied shoe, a class emblem, and the {88} second, in 1514, called "Poor Conrad" after the peasant's nickname. If the memory of the suppression of all these revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, on the other hand the successful rise of the Swiss democracy was a perpetual example and encouragement to them.

[Sidenote: Causes]

The most fundamental cause of all these risings alike was, of course, the cry of the oppressed for justice. This is eternal, as is also one of the main alignments into which society usually divides itself, the opposition of the poor and the rich. It is therefore not very important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown off. But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As there are diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps incapable of being answered. In some districts, and in some respects, the lot of the poor was becoming a little easier; in other lands and in different ways it was becoming harder. The time was one of general prosperity, in which the peasant often shared. The newer methods of agriculture, manufacture and commerce benefited him who knew how to take advantage of them. That some did so may be inferred from the statement of Sebastian Brant that the rustics dress like nobles, in satin and gold chains. On the other hand the rising prices would bear hard on those laborers dependent on fixed wages, though relieving the burden of fixed rents. The whole people, except the merchants, disliked the increasing cost of living and legislated against it to the best of their ability. Complaints against monopoly were common, and the Diets sometimes enacted laws against them. Foreign trade was looked on with {89} suspicion as draining the country of silver and gold. Again, although the peasants benefited by the growing stability of government, they felt as a grievance the introduction of the new Roman law with its emphasis upon the rights of property and of the state. Burdens directly imposed by the territorial governments were probably increasing. If the exactions from the landlords were not becoming greater, it was simply because they were always at a maximum. At no time was the rich gentleman at a loss to find law and precedent for wringing from his serfs and tenants all that they could possibly pay. [Sidenote: Peasant classes] The peasants were of three classes: the serfs, the tenants who paid a quit-rent, and hired laborers. The former, more than the others, perhaps, had now arrived at the determination to assert their rights. For them the Peasants' War was the inevitable break with a long economic past, now intolerable and hopeless. There is some evidence to show that the number of serfs was increasing. This process, by menacing the freedom of the others, united all in the resolve to stop the gradual enslavement of their class, to reckon with those who benefited by it.

How little now there was in the ideals of the last and most terrible of the peasant risings may be seen by a study of the programs of reform put forward from time to time during the preceding century. There is nothing in the manifestos of 1525 that may not be found in the pamphlets of the fifteenth century. The grievances are the same, and the hope of a completely renovated and communized society is the same. One of the most influential of these socialistic pamphlets was the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund, written by an Augsburg clergyman about 1438, first printed in 1476, and reprinted a number of times before the end of the century. Its title bears witness to the Messianic belief of the people that one of their {90} great, old emperors should sometime return and restore the world to a condition of justice and happiness. The present tract preached that "obedience was dead and justice sick"; it attacked serfdom as wicked, denounced the ecclesiastical law and demanded the freedom given by Christ.

The same doctrine, adapted to the needs of the time, is preached in the Reformation of the Emperor Frederic III, published anonymously in 1523. Though more radical than Luther it reflects some of his ideas. Still more, however, does it embody the reforms proposed at Nuremberg in 1523. It may probably have been written by George Rüxner, called Jerusalem, an Imperial Herald prominent in these circles. It advocated the abolition of all taxes and tithes, the repeal of all imperial civil laws, the reform of the clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and the limitation of the amount of capital allowed any one merchant to 10,000 gulden.

Though there was nothing new in either the manner of oppression or in the demands of the third estate during the last decade preceding the great rebellion, there does seem to be a new atmosphere, or tone, in the literature addressed to the lower classes. While on the one hand the poor were still mocked and insulted as they always had been by foolish and heartless possessors of inherited wealth and position, from other quarters they now began to be also flattered and courted. The peasant became in the large pamphlet literature of the time an ideal figure, the type of the plain, honest, God-fearing man. [Sidenote: The peasant idealized] Nobles like Duke Ulrich of Württemberg affected to be called by popular nicknames. Carlstadt and other learned men proclaimed that the peasant knew better the Word of God and the way of salvation than did the learned. Many radical preachers, especially the Anabaptist {91} Münzer, carried the message of human brotherhood to the point of communism. There were a number of lay preachers, the most celebrated being the physician Hans Maurer, who took the sobriquet "Karsthans." This name, "the man with the hoe," soon became one of the catch-words of the time, and made its way into popular speech as a synonym for the simple and pious laborer. Hutten took it up and urged the people to seize flails and pitchforks and smite the clergy and the pope as they would the devil. [Sidenote: 1521] Others preached hatred of the Jews, of the rich, of lawyers. Above all they appealed to the Bible as the devine law, and demanded a religious reform as a condition and preliminary to a thorough renovation of society. Although Luther himself from the first opposed all forms of violence, his clarion voice rang out in protest against the injustice of the nobles. "The people neither can nor will endure your tyranny any longer," he said to them in 1523, "God will not endure it; the world is not what it once was when you drove and hunted men like wild beasts."

The rising began at Stühlingen, not far from the Swiss frontier, in June 1524, and spread with considerable rapidity northward, until the greater part of Germany was in the throes of revolution. The rebels were able to make headway because most of the regular troops had been withdrawn to the Turkish front or to Italy to fight the emperor's battle against France. In South Germany, during the first six months, the gatherings of peasants and townsmen were eminently peaceable. They wished only to negotiate with their masters and to secure some practical reforms. But when the revolt spread to Franconia and Saxony, a much more radically socialistic program was developed and the rebels showed themselves readier to enforce their demands by arms. For the year 1524 there {92} was no general manifesto put forward, but there were negotiations between the insurgents and their quondam masters. In this district or in that, lists of very specific grievances were presented and redress demanded. In some cases merely to gain time, in others sincerely, the lords consented to reply to these petitions. They denied this or that charge, and they promised to end this or that form of oppression. Neither side was prepared for civil war. In all it was more like a modern strike than anything else.

In the early months of 1525 several programs were drawn up of a more general nature than those previously composed, and yet by no means radical. The most famous of these was called The Twelve Articles, printed and widely circulated in February. [Sidenote: The Twelve Articles] The exact place at which they originated is unknown. The authorship has been much disputed, and necessarily so, for they were the work of no one brain, but were as composite a production as is the Constitution of the United States. The material in them is drawn from the mouths of a whole people. Far more than in other popular writings one feels that they are the genuine expression of the public opinion of a great class. Probably their draftsman was Sebastian Lotzer, the tanner who for years past had preached apostolic communism. It is not impossible that the Anabaptist Balthasar Hübmaier had a hand in them. Their demands are moderate and would be considered matters of self-evident justice to-day. The first article is for the right of each community to choose its own pastor. The second protests against the minor tithes on vegetables paid to the clergy, though expressly admitting the legality of the tithes on grain. The third article demands freedom for the serfs, the fourth and fifth, ask for the right to hunt and to cut wood in the forests. The sixth, seventh and eighth articles {93} protest against excessive forced labor, illegal payments and exorbitant rents. The ninth article denounces the new (Roman) law, and requests the reëstablishment of the old (German) law. The tenth article voices the indignation of the poor at the enclosure by the rich of commons and other free land. The eleventh demands the abolition of the heriot, or inheritance-tax, by which the widow of a rustic was obliged to yield to her lord the best head of cattle or other valuable possession. The final article expresses the willingness of the insurgents to have all their demands submitted to the Word of God. Both here and in the preamble the entire assimilation of divine and human law is postulated, and the charge that the Lutheran Gospel caused sedition, is met.

[Sidenote: Other manifestos]

Though the Twelve Articles were adopted by more of the bands of peasants than was any other program, yet there were several other manifestos drawn up about the same time. Thus, in the Fifty-nine Articles of the Stühlingen peasants the same demands are put forth with much more detail. The legal right to trial by due process of law is asserted, and vexatious payments due to a lord when his peasant marries a woman from another estate, are denounced. But here, too, and elsewhere, the fundamental demands were the same: freedom from serfdom, from oppressive taxation and forced labor, and for unrestricted rights of hunting and woodcutting in the forests. Everywhere there is the same claim that the rights of the people are sanctioned by the law of God, and generally the peasants assume that they are acting in accordance with the new "gospel" of Luther. The Swabians expressly submitted their demands to the arbitration of a commission of four to consist of a representative of the emperor, Frederic of Saxony, Luther and either Melanchthon or Bugenhagen.

{94} When the revolt reached the central part of Germany it became at once more socialistic and more bloody. [Sidenote: Münzer] The baleful eloquence of Thomas Münzer was exerted at Mühlhausen to nerve the people to strike down the godless with pitiless sword. Already in September 1524 he preached: "On! on! on! This is the time when the wicked are as fearful as hounds. . . . Regard not the cries of the godless. . . . On, while the fire is hot. Let not your swords be cold from blood. Smite bang, bang on the anvil of Nimrod; cast his tower to the ground!" Other leaders took up the message and called for the extirpation of the tyrants, including both the clergy and the lords. Communism was demanded as in the apostolic age; property was denounced as wrong. Regulation of prices was one measure put forward, and the committing of the government of the country to a university another.

The propaganda of deeds followed close upon the propaganda of words. During the spring of 1525 in central Germany forty-six cloisters and castles were burned to the ground, while violence and rapine reigned supreme with all the ferocity characteristic of class warfare. On Easter Sunday, April 16, one of the best-armed bands of peasants, under one of the most brutal leaders, Jäcklein Rohrbach, attacked Weinsberg. The count and his small garrison of eighteen knights surrendered and were massacred by the insurgents, who visited mockery and insult upon the countess and her daughters. Many of the cities joined the peasants, and for a short time it seemed as if the rebellion might be successful.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the rising]

But in fact the insurgents were poorly equipped, untrained, without coöperation or leadership. As soon as the troops which won the battle of Pavia in Italy were sent back to Germany the whole movement collapsed. [Sidenote: February 24, 1525] The Swabian League inflicted decisive {95} defeats upon the rebels at Leipheim on April 4, and at Wurzach ten days later. Other blows followed in May. In the center of Germany the Saxon Electorate lay supine. Frederic the Wise died in the midst of the tumult [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] after expressing his opinion that it was God's will that the common man should rule, and that it would be wrong to resist the divine decree. His young neighbor, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, acted vigorously. After coming to terms with his own subjects by negotiations, he raised troops and met a band of insurgents at Frankenhausen. He wished to treat with them also, but Münzer's fanaticism, promising the deluded men supernatural aid, nerved them to reject all terms. In the very ancient German style they built a barricade of wagons, and calmly awaited the attack of the soldiers. [Sidenote: May 15] Undisciplined and poorly armed, almost at the first shot they broke and fled in panic, more than half of them perishing on the field. Münzer was captured, and, after having been forced by torture to sign a confession of his misdeeds, was executed. After this there was no strength left in the peasant cause. The lords, having gained the upper hand, put down the rising with great cruelty. The estimates of the numbers of peasants slain vary so widely as to make certainty impossible. Perhaps a hundred thousand in all perished. The soldiers far outdid the rebels in savage reprisals. The laborers sank back into a more wretched state than before; oppression stalked with less rebuke than ever through the land.

SECTION 3. THE FORMATION or THE PROTESTANT PARTY

[Sidenote: Defections from Luther]

In the sixteenth century politics were theological. The groups into which men divided had religious slogans and were called churches, but they were also political parties. The years following the Diet of {96} Worms saw the crystallization of a new group, which was at first liberal and reforming and later, as it grew in stability, conservative. At Worms almost all the liberal forces in Germany had been behind Luther, the intellectuals, the common people with their wish for social amelioration, and those to whom the religious issue primarily appealed. But this support offered by public opinion was vague; in the next years it became, both more definite and more limited. At the same time that city after city and state after state was openly revolting from the pope, until the Reformers had won a large constituency in the Imperial Diets and a place of constitutional recognition, there was going on another process by which one after another certain elements at first inclined to support Luther fell away from him. During these years he violently dissociated himself from the extreme radicals and thus lost the support of the proletariat. In the second place the growing definiteness and narrowness of his dogmatism and his failure to show hospitality to science and philosophy alienated a number of intellectuals. Third, a great schism weakened the Protestant church. But these losses were counterbalanced by two gains. The first was the increasing discipline and coherence of the new churches; the second was their gradual but rapid attainment of the support of the middle and governing classes in many German states.

[Sidenote: The Radicals]

Luther's struggle with radicalism had begun within a year after his stand at Worms. He had always been consistently opposed to mob violence, even when he might have profited by it. At Worms he disapproved Hutten's plans for drawing the sword against the Romanists. When, from his "watchtower," he first spied the disorders at Wittenberg, he wrote that notwithstanding the great provocation given to the common man by the clergy, yet tumult was the work of {97} the devil. When he returned home he preached that the only weapon the Christian ought to use was the Word. "Had I wished it," said he then, "I might have brought Germany to civil war. Yes, at Worms I might have started a game that would not have been safe for the emperor, but it would have been a fool's game. So I did nothing, but only let the Word act." Driven from Wittenberg, the Zwickau prophets, assisted by Thomas Münzer, continued their agitation elsewhere. As long as their propaganda was peaceful Luther was inclined to tolerate it. "Let them teach what they like," said he, "be it gospel or lies." But when they began to preach a campaign of fire and sword, Luther wrote, in July 1524, to his elector begging him "to act vigorously against their storming and ranting, in order that God's kingdom may be advanced by word only, as becomes Christians, and that all cause of sedition may be taken from the multitude [Herr Omnes, literally Mr. Everybody], more than enough inclined to it already."

When the revolt at last broke out Luther was looked up to and appealed to by the people as their champion. In April 1525 he composed an Exhortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants, [Sidenote: Exhortation to Peace] in which he distributed the blame for the present conditions liberally, but impartially, on both sides, aristocrats and peasants. To the former he said that their tyranny, together with that of the clergy had brought this punishment on themselves, and that God intended to smite them. To the peasants he said that no tyranny was excuse for rebellion. Of their articles he approved of two only, that demanding the right to choose their pastors and that denouncing the heriot or death-duty. Their second demand, for repeal of some of the tithes, he characterized as robbery, and the third, for freedom of the serf, as unjustified because it made Christian {98} liberty a merely external thing, and because Paul had said that the bondman should not seek to be free (I Cor. vii, 20 f). The other articles were referred to legal experts.

Hardly had this pamphlet come from the press before Luther heard of the deeds of violence of Rohrbach and his fellows. Fearing that complete anarchy would result from the triumph of the insurgents, against whom no effective blow had yet been struck, he wrote a tract Against the Thievish, Murderous Hordes of Peasants. [Sidenote: The peasants denounced] In this he denounced them with the utmost violence of language, and urged the government to smite them without pity. Everyone should avoid a peasant as he would the devil, and should join the forces to slay them like mad dogs. "If you die in battle against them," said he to the soldiers, "you could never have a more blessed end, for you die obedient to God's Word in Romans 13, and in the service of love to free your neighbor from the bands of hell and the devil." A little later he wrote: "It is better that all the peasants be killed than that the princes and magistrates perish, because the rustics took the sword without divine authority. The only possible consequence of their Satanic wickedness would be the diabolic devastation of the kingdom of God." And again: "One cannot argue reasonably with a rebel, but one must answer him with the fist so that blood flows from his nose." Melanchthon entirely agreed with his friend. "It is fairly written in Ecclesiasticus xxxiii," said he, "that as the ass must have fodder, load, and whip, so must the servant have bread, work, and punishment. These outward, bodily servitudes are needful, but this institution [serfdom] is certainly pleasing to God."

Inevitably such an attitude alienated the lower classes. From this time, many of them looked not to {99} the Lutheran but to the more radical sects, called Anabaptists, for help. The condition of the Empire at this time was very similar to that of many countries today, where we find two large upper and middle-class parties, the conservative (Catholic) and liberal (Protestant) over against the radical or socialistic (Anabaptist).

[Sidenote: The Anabaptists]

The most important thing about the extremists was not their habit of denying the validity of infant baptism and of rebaptizing their converts, from which they derived their name. What really determined their view-point and program was that they represented the poor, uneducated, disinherited classes. The party of extreme measures is always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes. A complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors for them, but only promise.

A radical party almost always includes men of a wide variety of opinions. So the sixteenth century classed together as Anabaptists men with not only divergent but with diametrically opposite views on the most vital questions. Their only common bond was that they all alike rejected the authoritative, traditional and aristocratic organization of both of the larger churches and the pretensions of civil society. It is easy to see that they had no historical perspective, and that they tried to realize the ideals of primitive Christianity, as they understood it, without reckoning the vast changes in culture and other conditions, and yet it is impossible not to have a deep sympathy with the men most of whose demands were just and who sealed their faith with perpetual martyrdom. {100} [Sidenote: Spread of radicalism] Notwithstanding the heavy blow to reform given in the crushing of the peasants' rising, radical doctrines continued to spread among the people. As the poor found their spiritual needs best supplied in the conventicle of dissent, official Lutheranism became an established church, predominantly an aristocratic and middle-class party of vested interest and privilege.

It is sometimes said that the origin and growth of the Anabaptists was due to the German translation of the Bible. This is not true and yet there is little doubt that the publication of the German version in 1522 and the years immediately following, stimulated the growth of many sects. The Bible is such a big book, and capable of so many different interpretations, that it is not strange that a hundred different schemes of salvation should have been deduced from it by those who came to it with different prepossessions. While many of the Anabaptists were perfect quietists, preaching the duty of non-resistance and the wickedness of bearing arms, even in self-defence, others found sanction for quite opposite views in the Scripture, and proclaimed that the godless should be exterminated as the Canaanites had been. In ethical matters some sects practised the severest code of morals, while others were distinguished by laxity. By some marriage was forbidden; others wanted all the marriage they could get and advocated polygamy. The religious meetings were similar to "revivals," frequently of the most hysterical sort. Claiming that they were mystically united to God, or had direct revelations from him, they rejected the ceremonies and sacraments of historic Christianity, and sometimes substituted for them practices of the most absurd, or most doubtful, character. When Melchior Rink preached, his followers howled like dogs, bellowed like cattle, neighed like horses, and brayed like asses--some of them very {101} naturally, no doubt. In certain extreme cases the meetings ended in debauchery, while we know of men who committed murder in the belief that they were directed so to do by special revelation of God. Thus at St. Gall one brother cut another's throat, while one of the saints trampled his wife to death under the influence of the spirit. But it is unfair to judge the whole movement by these excesses.

The new sectaries, of course, ran the gauntlet of persecution. In 1529 the emperor and Diet at Spires passed a mandate against them to this effect: "By the plenitude of our imperial power and wisdom we ordain, decree, oblige, declare, and will that all Anabaptists, men and women who have come to the age of understanding, shall be executed and deprived of their natural life by fire, sword, and the like, according to opportunity and without previous inquisition of the spiritual judges." Lutherans united with Catholics in passing this edict, and showed no less alacrity in executing it. As early as 1525 the Anabaptists were persecuted at Zurich, where one of their earliest communities sprouted. Some of the leaders were drowned, others were banished and so spread their tenets elsewhere. Catholic princes exterminated them by fire and sword. In Lutheran Saxony no less than thirteen of the poor non-conformists were executed, and many more imprisoned for long terms, or banished.

And yet the radical sects continued to grow. The dauntless zeal of Melchior Hofmann braved all for the propagation of their ideas. For a while he found a refuge at Strassburg, but this city soon became too orthodox to hold him. He then turned to Holland, where the seed sowed fell into fertile ground. Two Dutchmen, the baker John Matthys of Haarlem and the tailor John Beuckelssen of Leyden went to the episcopal city of Münster in Westphalia [Sidenote: Münster] near the Dutch {102} border, and rapidly converted the mass of the people to their own belief in the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. An insurrection expelled the bishop's government and installed a democracy in February, 1534. After the death of Matthys on April 5, a rising of the people against the dictatorial power of Beucklessen was suppressed by this fanatic who thereupon crowned himself king under the title of John of Leyden. Communism of goods was introduced and also polygamy. The city was now besieged by its suzerain, the Bishop of Münster, and after horrible sufferings had been inflicted on the population, taken by storm on June 25, 1535. The surviving leaders were put to death by torture.

The defeat itself was not so disastrous to the Anabaptist cause as were the acts of the leaders when in power. As the Reformer Bullinger put it: "God opened the eyes of the governments by the revolt at Münster, and thereafter no one would trust even those Anabaptists who claimed to be innocent." Their lack of unity and organization told against them. Nevertheless the sect smouldered on in the lower classes, constantly subject to the fires of martyrdom, until, toward the close of the century, it attained some cohesion and respectability. The later Baptists, Independents, and Quakers all inherited some portion of its spiritual legacies. To the secular historian its chief interest is in the social teachings, which consistently advocated tolerance, and frequently various forms of anarchy and socialism.

[Sidenote: Defection of the humanists]

Next to the defection of the laboring masses, the severest loss to the Evangelical party in these years was that of a large number of intellectuals, who, having hailed Luther as a deliverer from ecclesiastical bondage, came to see in him another pope, not less {103} tyrannous than he of Rome. Reuchlin the Hebrew scholar and Mutian the philosopher had little sympathy with any dogmatic subtlety. Zasius the jurist was repelled by the haste and rashness of Luther. The so-called "godless painters" of Nuremberg, George Penz and the brothers Hans and Bartholomew Beham, having rejected in large part Christian doctrine, were naturally not inclined to join a new church, even when they deserted the old.

But a considerable number of humanists, and those the greatest, after having welcomed the Reformation in its first, most liberal and hopeful youth, deliberately turned their backs on it and cast in their lot with the Roman communion. The reason was that, whereas the old faith mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, and dogmatisms abominated by the humanists, it had also, at this early stage in the schism, within its close a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant opinion. The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though they purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, were forced, partly by their position, partly by the temper of their leaders, to a raw self-assertiveness, a bald concentration on the points at issue, incompatible with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness. How the humanists would have chosen had they seen the Index and Loyola, is problematical; but while there was still hope of reshaping Rome to their liking they had little use for Wittenberg.

I admit that for some years I was very favorably inclined to Luther's enterprise [wrote Crotus Rubeanus in 1531] [Sidenote: Rubeanus], but when I saw that nothing was left untorn and undefiled . . . I thought the devil might bring in great evil in the guise of something good, using Scripture as his shield. So I decided to remain in the church in which I was baptized, reared and taught. Even if some fault might be found in it, yet in time it {104} might have been proved, sooner, at any rate, than in the new church which in a few years has been torn by so many sects.

Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Greek scholar and historian of Nuremberg, hailed Luther so warmly at first that he was put under the ban of the bull Exsurge Domine. By 1529, however, he had come to believe him insolent, impudent, either insane or possessed by a devil.

I do not deny [he wrote] that at the beginning all Luther's acts did not seem to be vain, since no good man could be pleased with all those errors and impostures that had accumulated gradually in Christianity. So, with others, I hoped that some remedy might be applied to such great evils, but I was cruelly deceived. For, before the former errors had been extirpated, far more intolerable ones crept in, compared to which the others seemed child's play.

[Sidenote: Appeal to Erasmus]

To Erasmus, the wise, the just, all men turned as to an arbiter of opinion. From the first, Luther counted on his support, and not without reason, for the humanist spoke well of the Theses and commentaries of the Wittenberger. On March 28, 1519, Luther addressed a letter to him, as "our glory and hope," acknowledging his indebtedness and begging for support. Erasmus answered in a friendly way, at the same time sending a message encouraging the Elector Frederic to defend his innocent subject.

Dreading nothing so much as a violent catastrophe, the humanist labored for the next two years to find a peaceful solution for the threatening problem. Seeing that Luther's two chief errors were that he "had attacked the crown of the pope and the bellies of the monks," Erasmus pressed upon men in power the plan of allowing the points in dispute to be settled by an impartial tribunal, and of imposing silence on both parties. At the same time he begged Luther to do nothing {105} violent and urged that his enemies be not allowed to take extreme measures against him. But after the publication of the pamphlets of 1520 and of the bull condemning the heretic, this position became untenable. Erasmus had so far compromised himself in the eyes of the inquisitors that he fled from Louvain in the autumn of 1521, and settled in Basle. He was strongly urged by both parties to come out on one side or the other, and he was openly taunted by Ulrich von Hutten, a hot Lutheran, for cowardice in not doing so. Alienated by this and by the dogmatism and intolerance of Luther's writings, Erasmus finally defined his position in a Diatribe on Free Will. [Sidenote: 1524] As Luther's theory of the bondage of the will was but the other side of his doctrine of justification by faith only--for where God's grace does all there is nothing left for human effort--Erasmus attacked the very center of the Evangelical dogmatic system. The question, a deep psychological and metaphysical one, was much in the air, Valla having written on it a work published in 1518, and Pomponazzi having also composed a work on it in 1520, which was, however, not published until much later. It is noticeable that Erasmus selected this point rather than one of the practical reforms advocated at Wittenberg, with which he was much in sympathy. Luther replied in a volume on The Bondage of the Will reasserting his position more strongly than ever. [Sidenote: 1525] How theological, rather than philosophical, his opinion was may be seen from the fact that while he admitted that a man was free to choose which of two indifferent alternatives he should take, he denied that any of these choices could work salvation or real righteousness in God's eyes. He did not hesitate to say that God saved and damned souls irrespective of merit. Erasmus answered again in a large work, the Hyperaspistes (Heavy-Armed Soldier), which came {106} out in two parts. [Sidenote: 1526-7] In this he offers a general critique of the Lutheran movement. Its leader, he says, is a dogmatist, who never recoils from extremes logically demanded by his premises, no matter how repugnant they may be to the heart of man. But for himself he is a humanist, finding truth in the reason as well as in the Bible, and abhorring paradoxes.

The controversy was not allowed to drop at this point. Many a barbed shaft of wit-winged sarcasm was shot by the light-armed scholar against the ranks of the Reformers. "Where Lutheranism reigns," he wrote Pirckheimer, "sound learning perishes." "With disgust," he confessed to Ber, "I see the cause of Christianity approaching a condition that I should be very unwilling to have it reach . . . While we are quarreling over the booty the victory will slip through our fingers. It is the old story of private interests destroying the commonwealth." Erasmus first expressed the opinion, often maintained since, that Europe was experiencing a gradual revival both of Christian piety and of sound learning, when Luther's boisterous attack plunged the world into a tumult in which both were lost sight of. On March 30, 1527, he wrote to Maldonato:

I brought it about that sound learning, which among the Italians and especially among the Romans savored of nothing but pure paganism, began nobly to celebrate Christ, in whom we ought to boast as the sole author of both wisdom and happiness if we are true Christians. . . . I always avoided the character of a dogmatist, except in certain obiter dicta which seemed to me conducive to correct studies and against the preposterous judgments of men.

In the same letter he tells how hard he had fought the obscurantists, and adds: "While we were waging a fairly equal battle against these monsters, behold {107} Luther suddenly arose and threw the apple of Discord into the world."

In short, Erasmus left the Reformers not because they were too liberal, but because they were too conservative, and because he disapproved of violent methods. His gentle temperament, not without a touch of timidity, made him abhor the tumult and trust to the voice of persuasion. In failing to secure the support of the humanists Protestantism lost heavily, and especially abandoned its chance to become the party of progress. Luther himself was not only disappointed in the disaffection of Erasmus, but was sincerely rebelled by his rationalism. A man who could have the least doubt about a doctrine was to him "an Arian, an atheist, and a skeptic." He went so far as to say that the great Dutch scholar's primary object in publishing the Greek New Testament was to make readers doubtful about the text, and that the chief end of his Colloquies was to mock all piety. Erasmus, whose services to letters were the most distinguished and whose ideal of Christianity was the loveliest, has suffered far too much in being judged by his relation to the Reformation. By a great Catholic[1] he has been called "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," by an eminent Protestant scholar[2] "a John the Baptist and Judas in one."

[Sidenote: Sacramentarian schism]

The battle with the humanists was synchronous with the beginnings of a fierce internecine strife that tore the young evangelical church into two parts. Though the controversy between Luther and his principal rival, Ulrich Zwingli, was really caused by a wide difference of thought on many subjects, it focused its rays, like a burning-glass, upon one point, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the {108} eucharist. The explanation of this mystery evolved in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Lateran Council of 1215, was the theory, called "transubstantiation," that the substance of the bread turned into the substance of the body, and the substance of the wine into the substance of the blood, without the "accidents" of appearance and taste being altered. Some of the later doctors of the church, Durand and Occam, opposed this theory, though they proposed a nearly allied one, called "consubstantiation," that the body and blood are present with the bread and wine. Wyclif and others, among whom was the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, proposed the theory now held in most Protestant churches that the bread and wine are mere symbols of the body and blood.

At the dawn of the Reformation the matter was brought into prominence by the Dutch theologian Hoen, from whom the symbolic interpretation [Sidenote: Symbolism] was adopted first by Carlstadt and then by the Swiss Reformers Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Luther himself wavered. He attacked the sacrifice of the mass, in which he saw a "good work" repugnant to faith, and a great practical abuse, as in the endowed masses for souls, but he finally decided on the question of the real presence that the words "this is my body" were "too strong for him" and meant just what they said.

After a preliminary skirmish with Carlstadt, resulting in the latter's banishment from Saxony, there was a long and bitter war of pens between Wittenberg and the Swiss Reformers. Once the battle was joined it was sure to be acrimonious because of the self-consciousness of each side. Luther always assumed that he had a monopoly of truth, and that those who proposed different views were infringing his copyright, so to speak. "Zwingli, Carlstadt and Oecolampadius would never have known Christ's gospel rightly," he {109} opined, "had not Luther written of it first." He soon compared them to Absalom rebelling against his father David, and to Judas betraying his Master. Zwingli on his side was almost equally sure that he had discovered the truth independently of Luther, and, while expressing approbation of his work, refused to be called by his name. His invective was only a shade less virulent than was that of his opponent.

The substance of the controversy was far from being the straight alignment between reason and tradition that it has sometimes been represented as. Both sides assumed the inerrancy of Scripture and appealed primarily to the same biblical arguments. Luther had no difficulty in proving that the words "hoc est corpus meum" meant that the bread was the body, and he stated that this must be so even if contrary to our senses. Zwingli had no difficulty in proving that the thing itself was impossible, and therefore inferred that the biblical words must be explained away as a figure of speech. In a long and learned controversy neither side convinced the other, but each became so exasperated as to believe the other possessed of the devil. In the spring of 1529 Lutherans joined Catholics at the Diet of Spires in refusing toleration to the Zwinglians. The division of Protestants of course weakened them. Their leading statesman, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, seeing this, did his best to reconcile the leaders. For several years he tried to get them to hold a conference, but in vain. Finally, he succeeded in bringing together at his castle at Marburg on the Lahn, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and a large number of other divines. [Sidenote: Marburg colloquy October 1-3, 1529] The discussion here only served to bring out more strongly the irreconcilability of the two "spirits." Shortly afterwards, when the question of a political alliance came up, the Saxon theologians drafted a memorial stating that {110} they would rather make an agreement with the heathen than with the "sacramentarians." [Sidenote: 1530] The same attitude was preserved at the Diet of Augsburg, where the Lutherans were careful to avoid all appearance of friendship with the Zwinglians lest they should compromise their standing with the Catholics. Zwingli and his friends were hardly less intransigeant.

[Sidenote: October 11, 1531]

When Zwingli died in battle with the Catholic cantons and when Oecolampadius succumbed to a fever a few weeks later, Luther loudly proclaimed that was a judgment of God and a triumph for his own party. Though there was no hope of reconciling the Swiss, the South German Zwinglians, headed by the Strassburg Reformers Bucer and Capito, hastened to come to an understanding with Wittenberg, without which their position would have been extremely perilous. Bucer claimed to represent a middle doctrine, such as was later asserted by Calvin. As no middle ground is possible, the doctrine is unintelligible, being, in fact, nothing but the statement, in strong terms, of two mutually exclusive propositions. After much humiliation the divines succeeded, however, in satisfying Luther, with whom they signed the Wittenberg Concord on May 29, 1536. The Swiss still remained without the pale, and Luther's hatred of them grew with the years. Shortly before his death he wrote that he would testify before the judgment-seat of God his loathing for the sacramentarians. He became more and more conservative, bringing back to the sacrament some of the medieval superstitions he had once expelled. He began again to call it an offering and a sacrifice and again had it elevated in church for the adoration of the faithful. He wavered on this point, because, as he said, he doubted whether it were more his duty to "spite" the papists or the sacramentarians. He finally decided on the latter, "and if necessary," {111} continued he, "I will have the host elevated three, seven, or ten times, for I will not let the devil teach me anything in my church."

[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism in middle and upper classes]

Notwithstanding the bitter controversies just related Lutheranism flourished mightily in the body of the people who were neither peasants nor intellectuals nor Swiss. The appeal was to the upper and middle classes, sufficiently educated to discard some of the medievalism of the Roman Church and impelled also by nationalism and economic self-interest to turn from the tyranny of the pope. City after city and state after state enlisted under the banner of Luther. He continued to appeal to them through the press. As a popular pamphleteer he must be reckoned among the very ablest. His faults, coarseness and unbridled violence of language, did not alienate most of his contemporaries. Even his Latin works, too harshly described by Hallam as "bellowing in bad Latin," were well adapted to the spirit of the age. But nothing like his German writings had ever been seen before. In lucidity and copiousness of language, in directness and vigor, in satire and argument and invective, in humor and aptness of illustration and allusion, the numerous tracts, political and theological, which poured from his pen, surpassed all that had hitherto been written and went straight to the hearts of his countrymen. And he won his battle almost alone, for Melanchthon, though learned and elegant, had no popular gifts, and none of his other lieutenants could boast even second-rate ability.

[Sidenote: German Bible, 1522-32]

Among his many publications a few only can be singled out for special mention. The continuation of the German Bible undoubtedly helped his cause greatly. In many things he could appeal to it against the Roman tradition, and the very fact that he claimed to do so while his opponents by their attitude seemed to {112} shrink from this test, established the Protestant claim to be evangelical, in the eyes of the people. Next came his hymns, many popular, some good and one really great. [Sidenote: Hymns, 1528] Ein' feste Burg has been well called by Heine the Marseillaise of the Reformation. The Longer and Shorter Catechisms [Sidenote: Catechisms, 1529] educated the common people in the evangelical doctrine so well that the Catholics were forced to imitate their enemy, though tardily, by composing, for the first time, catechisms of their own.

Having overthrown much of the doctrine and discipline of the old church Luther addressed himself with admirable vigor and great success to the task of building up a substitute for it. In this the combination of the conservative and at the same time thoroughly popular spirit of the movement manifested itself. In divine service the vernacular was substituted for Latin. New emphasis was placed upon preaching, Bible-reading and hymn-singing. Mass was no longer incomprehensible, but was an act of worship in which all could intelligently participate; bread and wine were both given to the laity, and those words of the canon implying transubstantiation and sacrifice were omitted. Marriage was relegated from the rank of a sacrament to that of a civil contract. Baptism was kept in the old form, even to the detail of exorcizing the evil spirit. Auricular confession was permitted but not insisted upon.

[Sidenote: Church government]

The problems of church government and organization were pressing. Two alternatives, were theoretically possible, Congregationalism or state churches. After some hesitation, Luther was convinced by the extravagances of Münzer and his ilk that the latter was the only practicable course. The governments of the various German states and cities were now given supreme power in ecclesiastical matters. They took over the property belonging to the old church and {113} administered it generally for religious or educational or charitable purposes. A system of church-visitation was started, by which the central authority passed upon the competence of each minister. Powers of appointment and removal were vested in the government. The title and office of bishop were changed in most cases to that of "superintendent," though in some German sees and generally in Sweden the name bishop was retained.

[Sidenote: Lutheran accessions]

How genuinely popular was the Lutheran movement may be seen in the fact that the free cities, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strassburg, Ulm, Lübeck, Hamburg, and many others were the first to revolt from Rome. In other states the government led the way. Electoral Saxony evolved slowly into complete Protestantism. Though the Elector Frederic sympathized with almost everything advanced by his great subject, he was too cautious to interfere with vested interests of ecclesiastical property and endowments. On his death [Sidenote: May 5, 1525] his brother John succeeded to the title, and came out openly for all the reforms advocated at Wittenberg. The neighboring state of Hesse was won about 1524, [Sidenote: 1424-5] though the official ordinance promulgating the evangelical doctrine was not issued until 1526. A very important acquisition was Prussia. [Sidenote: 1525] Hitherto it had been governed by the Teutonic Order, a military society like the Knights Templars. Albert of Brandenburg became Grand Master in 1511, [Sidenote: Albert of Brandenburg, 1490-1568] and fourteen years later saw the opportunity of aggrandizing his personal power by renouncing his spiritual ties. He accordingly declared the Teutonic Order abolished and himself temporal Duke of Prussia, shortly afterwards marrying a daughter of the king of Denmark. He swore allegiance to the king of Poland.

The growth of Lutheranism unmolested by the imperial government was made possible by the {114} absorption of the emperor's energies in his rivalry with France and Turkey and by the decentralization of the Empire. [Sidenote: Leagues] Leagues between groups of German states had been quite common in the past, and a new stimulus to their formation was given by the common religious interest. The first league of this sort was that of Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1524] between Bavaria and other South German principalities; its purpose was to carry out the Edict of Worms. This was followed by a similar league in North Germany between Catholic states, known as the League of Dessau, [Sidenote: 1525] and a Protestant confederation known as the League of Torgau.

[Sidenote: The Diet of Spires, 1526]

The Diet held at Spires in the summer of 1526 witnessed the strength of the new party, for in it the two sides treated on equal terms. Many reforms were proposed, and some carried through against the obstruction by Ferdinand, the emperor's brother and lieutenant. The great question was the enforcement of the Edict of Worms, and on this the Diet passed an act, known as a Recess, providing that each state should act in matters of faith as it could answer to God and the emperor. In effect this allowed the government of every German state to choose between the two confessions, thus anticipating the principle of the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555.

The relations of the two parties were so delicate that it seemed as if a general religious war were imminent. In 1528, this was almost precipitated by a certain Otto von Pack, who assured the Landgrave of Hesse that he had found a treaty between the Catholic princes for the extirpation of the Lutherans and for the expropriation of their champions, the Elector of Saxony and Philip of Hesse himself. This was false, but the Landgrave armed and attacked the Bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, named by Pack as parties to the treaty, and he forced them to pay an indemnity.

{115}

[Sidenote: Recess of Spires]

The Diet which met at Spires early in 1529 endeavored to deal as drastically as possible with the schism. The Recess passed by the Catholic majority on April 7 was most unfavorable to the Reformers, repealing the Recess of the last Diet in their favor. Catholic states were commanded to execute the persecuting Edict of Worms, although Lutheran states were forbidden to abolish the office of the (Catholic) mass, and also to allow any further innovations in their own doctrines or practices until the calling of a general council. The princes were forbidden to harbor the subjects of another state. The Evangelical members of the Diet, much aggrieved at this blow to their faith, published a Protest [Sidenote: Protest, April 19] taking the ground that the Recess of 1526 had been in the nature of a treaty and could not be abrogated without the consent of both parties to it. As the government of Germany was a federal one, this was a question of "states' rights," such as came up in our own Civil War, but in the German case it was even harder to decide because there was no written Constitution defining the powers of the national government and the states. It might naturally be assumed that the Diet had the power to repeal its own acts, but the Evangelical estates made a further point in their appeal to the emperor, [Sidenote: April 25] by alleging that the Recess of 1526 had been passed unanimously and could only be repealed by a unanimous vote. The Protest and the appeal were signed by the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, a few smaller states, and fourteen free cities. From the Protest they became immediately known as "the Protesting Estates" and subsequently the name Protestant was given to all those who left the Roman communion.

[1] Alexander Pope.

[2] Walther Köhler.

{116}

SECTION 4. THE GROWTH OF PROTESTANTISM UNTIL THE DEATH OF LUTHER

Certain states having announced that they would not be bound by the will of the majority, the question naturally came up as to how far they would defend this position by arms. [Sidenote: March 6, 1530] Luther's advice asked and given to the effect that all rebellion or forcible resistance to the constituted authorities was wrong. Passive resistance, the mere refusal to obey the command to persecute or to act, otherwise contrary to God's law, he thought was right but he discountenanced any other measures, even those taken in self-defence. All Germans, said he, were the emperor's subjects, and the princes should not shield Luther from him, but leave their lands open to his officers to do what they pleased. This position Luther abandoned a year later, when the jurists pointed out to him that the authority of the emperor was not despotic but was limited by law.

The Protest and Appeal of 1529 at last aroused Charles, slow as he was, to the great dangers to himself that lurked in the Protestant schism. Having repulsed the Turk and having made peace with France and the pope he was at last in a position to address himself seriously to the religious problem. Fully intending to settle the trouble once for all, he came to Germany and opened a Diet at Augsburg [Sidenote: June 20, 1530] to which were invited not only the representatives of the various states but a number of leading theologians, both Catholic and Lutheran, all except Luther himself, an outlaw by the Edict of Worms.

The first action taken was to ask the Lutherans to state their position and this was done in the famous Augsburg Confession, [Sidenote: June 25] read before the Diet by the Saxon Chancellor Brück. It had been drawn up by {117} Melanchthon in language as near as possible to that of the old church. Indeed it undertook to prove that there was in the Lutheran doctrine "nothing repugnant to Scripture or to the Catholic church or to the Roman church." Even in the form of the Confession published 1531 this Catholicizing tendency is marked, but in the original, now lost, it was probably stronger. The reason of this was not, as generally stated, Melanchthon's "gentleness" and desire to conciliate all parties, for he showed himself more truculent to the Zwinglians and Anabaptists than did Luther. It was due to the fact that Melanchthon [Sidenote: Melanchthon] was at heart half a Catholic, so much so, indeed, that Contarini and others thought it quite possible that he might come over to them. In the present instance he made his doctrine conform to the Roman tenets to such an extent that (in the lost original, as we may judge by the Confutation) even transubstantiation was in a manner accepted. The first part of the Confession is a creed: the second part takes up certain abuses, or reforms, namely: the demand of the cup for the laity, the marriage of priests, the mass as an opus operatum or as celebrated privately, fasting and traditions, monastic vows and the power of the pope.

But the concessions did not satisfy the Catholics. A Refutation was prepared by Eck and others, and read before the Diet on August 3. Negotiations continued and still further concessions were wrung from Melanchthon, concessions of so dangerous a nature that his fellow-Protestants denounced him as an enemy of the faith and appealed to Luther against him. Melanchthon had agreed to call the mass a sacrifice, if the word were qualified by the term "commemorative," and also promised that the bishops should be restored to their ancient jurisdictions, a measure justified by him as a blow at turbulent sectaries but one also most {118} perilous to Lutherans. On the other hand, Eck made some concessions, mostly verbal, about the doctrine of justification and other points.

That with this mutually conciliatory spirit an agreement failed to materialize only proved how irreconcilable were the aims of the two parties. [Sidenote: September 22] The Diet voted that the Confession had been refuted and that the Protestants were bound to recant. The emperor promised to use his influence with the pope to call a general council to decide doubtful points, but if the Lutherans did not return to the papal church by April 15, 1531, they were threatened with coercion.

[Sidenote: League of Schmalkalden]

To meet this perilous situation a closer alliance was formed by the Protestant states at Schmalkalden in February 1531. This league constantly grew by the admission of new members, but some attempts to unite with the Swiss proved abortive.

On January 5, 1531, Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans--the title taken by the heir to the Empire--by six of the electors against the vote of Saxony. Three months later when the time granted the Lutherans expired, the Catholics were unable to do anything, and negotiations continued. [Sidenote: July 23, 1532] These resulted in the Peace of Nuremberg, a truce until a general council should be called. It was an important victory for the Lutherans, who were thus given time in which to grow.

The seething unrest which found expression in the rebellion of the knights, of the peasants and of the Anabaptists at Münster, has been described. One more liberal movement, which also failed, must be mentioned at this time. It was as little connected with religion as anything in that theological age could be. [Sidenote: Lübeck, 1533-35] The city of Lübeck, under its burgomaster George Wullenwever, tried to free itself from the influence of Denmark and at the same time to get a more popular {119} government. In 1536 it was conquered by Christian III of Denmark, and the old aristocratic constitution restored. The time was not ripe for the people to assert its rights in North Germany.

[Sidenote: May 1534]

The growth of Protestantism was at times assisted by force of arms. Thus, Philip of Hesse restored the now Protestant Duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg, who had been expelled for his tyranny by the Swabian League fifteen years before. This triumph was the more marked because the expropriated ruler was Ferdinand, King of the Romans. If in such cases it was the government which took the lead, in others the government undoubtedly compelled the people to continue Catholic even when there was a strongly Protestant public opinion. Such was the case in Albertine Saxony,[1] whose ruler, Duke George, though an estimable man in many ways, was regarded by Luther as the instrument of Satan because he persecuted his Protestant subjects. When he died, his brother, [Sidenote: April, 1539] the Protestant Henry the Pious, succeeded and introduced the Reform amid general acclamation. Two years later this duke was followed by his son, the versatile but treacherous Maurice. In the year 1539 a still greater acquisition came to the Schmalkaldic League in the conversion of Brandenburg and its Elector Joachim II.

[Sidenote: Philip of Hesse, 1504-67]

Shortly afterwards the world was scandalized by the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. This prince was utterly spoiled by his accession to the governing power at the age of fifteen. Though he lived in flagrant immorality, his religion, which, soon after he met Luther at Worms, became the Evangelical, was real enough to make his sins a burden to conscience. Much attracted {120} by the teachings of some of the Anabaptists and Carlstadt that polygamy was lawful, and by Luther's assertion in the Babylonian Captivity that it was preferable to divorce, [Sidenote: 1526] he begged to be allowed to take more wives, but was at first refused. His conscience was quickened by an attack of the syphilis in 1539, and at that time he asked permission to take a second wife and received it on December 10, from Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer. His secret marriage to Margaret von der Saal [Sidenote: March 4, 1540] took place in the presence of Melanchthon, Bucer, and other divines. Luther advised him to keep the matter secret and if necessary even to "tell a good strong lie for the sake and good of the Christian church." Of course he was unable to conceal his act, and his conduct, and that of his spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to the cause. As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip might have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have said that "nothing was lost but honor." Neither Germany nor Hesse nor the Protestant church suffered directly by his act. [Sidenote: 1541] Indeed it lead indirectly to another territorial gain. Philip's enemy Duke Henry of Brunswick, though equally immoral, attacked him in a pamphlet. Luther answered this in a tract of the utmost violence, called Jack Sausage. Henry's rejoinder was followed by war between him and the Schmalkaldic princes, in which he was expelled from his dominions and the Reformation introduced.

[Sidenote: 1541]

Further gains followed rapidly. The Catholic Bishop of Naumburg was expelled by John Frederic of Saxony, and a Lutheran bishop instituted instead. About the same time the great spiritual prince, Hermann von Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, became a Protestant, and invited Melanchthon and Bucer to reform his territories. One of the last gains, before the Schmalkaldic war, was the Rhenish Palatinate, under {121} its Elector Frederic III. [Sidenote: 1545] His troops fought then on the Protestant side, though later he turned against that church.

The opportunity of the Lutherans was due to the engagements of the emperor with other enemies. In 1535 Charles undertook a successful expedition against Tunis. The war with France simmered on until the Truce of Nice, intended to be for ten years, signed between the two powers in 1538. In 1544 war broke out again, and fortune again favored Charles. He invaded France almost to the gates of Paris, but did not press his advantage and on September 18 signed the Peace of Crépy giving up all his conquests.

Unable to turn his arms against the heretics, Charles continued to negotiate with them. The pressure he brought to bear upon the pope finally resulted in the summoning by Paul III of a council to meet at Mantua the following year. [Sidenote: June 2, 1536] The Protestants were invited to send delegates to this council, and the princes of that faith held a congress at Schmalkalden to decide on their course. [Sidenote: February 1537] Hitherto the Lutherans had called themselves a part of the Roman Catholic church and had always appealed to a future oecumenical or national synod. They now found this position untenable, and returned the papal citation unopened. Instead, demands for reform, known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, were drawn up by Luther. The four principal demands were (1) recognition of the doctrine of justification by faith only, (2) abolition of the mass as a good work or opus operatum, (3) alienation of the foundations for private masses, (4) removal of the pretentions of the pope to headship of the universal church. As a matter of fact the council was postponed.

[Sidenote: April 19, 1539]

Failing to reach a permanent solution by this method, Charles was again forced to negotiate. The {122} Treaty of Frankfort agreed to a truce varying in length from six to fifteen months according to circumstances. This was followed by a series of religious conferences with the purpose of finding some means of reconciling the two confessions. [Sidenote: Religious Colloquies] Among the first of these were the meetings at Worms and Hagenau. Campeggio and Eck were the Catholic leaders, Melanchthon the spokesman for the Lutherans. [Sidenote: 1540-1] Each side had eleven members on the commission, but their joint efforts were wrecked on the plan for limiting the papal power and on the doctrine of original sin. When the Diet of Ratisbon was opened in the spring of 1541 a further conference was held at which the two parties came closer to each other than they had done since Augsburg. The Book of Ratisbon was drawn up, emphasizing the points of agreement and slurring over the differences. Contarini made wide concessions, later condemned by the Catholics, on the doctrine of justification. Discussion of the nature of the church, the power of the pope, the invocation of saints, the mass, and sacerdotal celibacy seemed likely to result in some modus vivendi. What finally shattered the hopes of union was the discussion of transubstantiation and the adoration of the host. As Contarini had found in the statements of the Augsburg Confession no insuperable obstacle to an understanding he was astonished at the stress laid on them by the Protestants now.

[Sidenote: 1542]

It is not remarkable that with such results the Diet of Spires should have avoided the religious question and have devoted itself to more secular matters, among them the grant to the emperor of soldiers to fight the Turk. Of this Diet Bucer wrote "The Estates act under the wrath of God. Religion is relegated to an agreement between cities. . . . The cause of our evils is that few seek the Lord earnestly, but {123} most fight against him, both among those who have rejected, and of those who still bear, the papal yoke." At the Diet of Spires two years later the emperor promised the Protestants, in return for help against France, recognition until a German National Council should be called. For this concession he was sharply rebuked by the pope. [Sidenote: 1545] The Diet of Worms contented itself with expressing its general hope for a "Christian reformation."

[Sidenote: 1545]

During his later years Luther's polemic never flagged. His last book, Against the Papacy of Rome, founded by the Devil, surpassed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"--and so on for page after page. Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage or imprudent." Our judgment of it must be tempered by the consideration that Luther suffered in his last years from a nervous malady and from other painful diseases, due partly to overwork and lack of exercise, partly to the quantities of alcohol he imbibed, though he never became intoxicated.

Nevertheless, the last twenty years of his life were his happiest ones. His wife, Catherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and his children, brought him much happiness. Though the wedding gave his enemies plenty of openings for reviling him as an apostate, [Sidenote: June 13, 1525] and though it drew from Erasmus the scoffing jest that what had begun as a tragedy ended as a comedy, it {124} crowned his career, symbolizing the return from medieval asceticism to modern joy in living. Dwelling in the fine old friary, entertaining with lavish prodigality many poor relatives, famous strangers, and students, notwithstanding unremitting toil and not a little bodily suffering, he expanded in his whole nature, mellowing in the warmth of a happy fireside climate. His daily routine is known to us intimately through the adoring assiduity of his disciples, who noted down whole volumes of his Table Talk.

[Sidenote: Death and character of Luther]

On February 18, 1546, he died. Measured by the work that he accomplished and by the impression that his personality made both on contemporaries and on posterity, there are few men like him in history. Dogmatic, superstitious, intolerant, overbearing, and violent as he was, he yet had that inscrutable prerogative of genius of transforming what he touched into new values. His contemporaries bore his invective because of his earnestness; they bowed to "the almost disgraceful servitude" which, says Melanchthon, he imposed upon his followers, because they knew that he was leading them to victory in a great and worthy cause. Even so, now, many men overlook his narrowness and bigotry because of his genius and bravery.

His grandest quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and hell." Whether his ideal is ours or not, his courage in daring and his strength to labor for it must command our respect.

Next to his earnestness he owed his success to a {125} wonderful gift of language that made him the tongue, as well as the spear-point, of his people. [Sidenote: His eloquence] In love of nature, in wonder, in the power to voice some secret truth in a phrase or a metaphor, he was a poet. He looked out on the stars and considered the "good master-workman" that made them, on the violets "for which neither the Grand Turk nor the emperor could pay," on the yearly growth of corn and wine, "as great a miracle as the manna in the wilderness," on the "pious, honorable birds" alert to escape the fowler's net, or holding a Diet "in a hall roofed with the vault of heaven, carpeted with the grass, and with walls as far as the ends of the earth." Or he wrote to his son a charming fairy-tale of a pleasant garden where good children eat apples and pears and cherries and plums, and where they ride on pretty ponies with golden reins and silver saddles and dance all day and play with whistles and fifes and little cross-bows.

Luther's character combined traits not usually found in the same nature. He was both a dreamy mystic and a practical man of affairs; he saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for results. His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the mire. He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a wholesome, ready laugh. His words are now brutal invectives and again blossom with the most exquisite flowers of the soul--poetry, music, idyllic humor, tenderness. He was subtle and simple; superstitious and wise; limited in his cultural sympathies, but very great in what he achieved.

[1] Saxony had been divided in 1485 into two parts, the Electorate, including Wittenberg, Weimar and Eisenach, and the Duchy, including Leipzig and Dresden. The former was called after its first ruler Ernestine, the latter Albertine.

{126}

SECTION 5. THE RELIGIOUS WAR AND THE RELIGIOUS PEACE

[Sidenote: The Schmalkaldic War, 1546-7]

Hardly had Luther been laid to rest when the first general religious war broke out in Germany. There had been a few small wars of this character before, such as those of Hesse against Bamberg and Wurzburg, and against Württemberg, and against Brunswick. But the conflicts had been successfully "localized." Now at last was to come a general battle, as a foretaste of the Thirty Years War of the next century.

It has sometimes been doubted whether the Schmalkaldic War was a religious conflict at all. The emperor asserted that his sole object was to reduce rebellious subjects to obedience. Several Protestant princes were his allies, and the territories he conquered were not, for the most part, forced to give up their faith. Nevertheless, it is certain that the fundamental cause of the strain was the difference of creed. A parallel may be found in our own Civil War, in which Lincoln truly claimed that he was fighting only to maintain the union, and yet it is certain that slavery furnished the underlying cause of the appeal to arms.

It has recently been shown that the emperor planned the attack on his Protestant subjects as far back, at least, as 1541. All the negotiations subsequent to that time were a mere blind in disguise his preparations. For he labored indefatigably to bring about a condition in which it would be safe for him to embark on the perilous enterprise. Though he was a dull man he had the two qualities of caution and persistence that stood him in better stead than the more showy talents of other statesmen. If, with his huge resources, he never did anything brilliant, still less did he ever take a gambler's chance of failing.

{127} The opportune moment came at last in the spring of 1546. Two years before, he had beaten France with the help of the Protestants, and had imposed upon her as one condition of peace that she should make no allies within the Empire. In November of the same year he made an alliance with Paul III, receiving 200,000 ducats in support of his effort to extirpate the heresy.

Other considerations impelled him to attack at once. The secession of Cologne and the Palatinate from the Catholic communion gave the Protestants a majority in the Electoral College. Still more decisive was it that Charles was able at this time by playing upon the jealousies and ambitions of the states, to secure important allies within the Empire, including some of the Protestant faith. First, Catholic Bavaria forgot her hatred of Austria far enough to make common cause against the heretics. Then, two great Protestant princes, Maurice of Albertine Saxony and John von Küstrin--a brother of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg--abandoned their coreligionists and bartered support to the emperor in return for promises of aggrandizement.

[Sidenote: January 1546]

A final religious conference held at Ratisbon demonstrated more clearly than ever the hopelessness of conciliation. Whereas a semi-Lutheran doctrine of justification was adopted, the Protestants prepared two long memoirs rejecting the authority of the council recently convened at Trent. And then, in the summer, war broke out. At this moment the forces of the Schmalkaldic League were superior to those of its enemies. But for poor leadership and lack of unity in command they would probably have won.

Towards the last of August and early in September the Protestant troops bombarded the imperial army at Ingolstadt, but failed to follow this up by a decisive {128} attack, as was urged by General Schärtlin of Augsburg. Lack of equipment was partly responsible for this failure. When the emperor advanced, the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse retired each to his own land. Another futile attempt of the League was a raid on the Tyrol, possibly influenced by the desire to strike at the Council of Trent, certainly by no sound military policy. The effect of these indecisive counsels was that Charles had little trouble in reducing the South German rebels, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg, and Württemberg. The Elector Palatine hastened to come to terms by temporarily abandoning his religion. [Sidenote: February, 1547] A counter-reformation was also effected in Cologne. Augsburg bought the emperor's pardon by material concessions.

[Sidenote: October 1546]

In the meantime Duke Maurice of Albertine Saxony, having made a bargain with the emperor, attacked his second cousin the Elector. Though Maurice was not obliged to abjure his faith, his act was naturally regarded as one of signal treachery and he was henceforth known by the nickname "Judas." Maurice conquered most of his cousin's lands, except the forts of Wittenberg and Gotha. Charles's Spanish army under Alva now turned northward, forced a passage of the Elbe and routed the troops of John Frederic at the battle of Mülberg, near Torgau, on April 24, 1547. John Frederic was captured wounded, and kept in durance several years. Wittenberg capitulated on May 19, and just a month later Philip of Hesse surrendered at Halle. He also was kept a prisoner for some years. Peace was made by the mediation of Brandenburg. The electoral vote of Saxony was given to Maurice, and with it the best part of John Frederic's lands, including Wittenberg. No change of religion was required. The net result of the war was to {129} increase the imperial power, but to put a very slight check upon the expansion of Protestantism.

And yet it was for precisely this end that Charles chiefly valued his authority. Immediately, acting independently of the pope, he made another effort to restore the confessional unity of Germany. The Diet of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1547-8] accepted under pressure from him a decree called the Interim because it was to be valid only until the final decisions of a general council. Though intended to apply only to Protestant states--the Catholics had, instead, a formula reformationis--the Interim [Sidenote: The Interim, June 30, 1548], drawn up by Romanist divines, was naturally Catholic in tenor. The episcopal constitution was restored, along with the canon of the mass, the doctrine of the seven sacraments, and the worship of saints. On some doctrinal points vagueness was studied. The only concessions made to the Reformation were the pro tempore recognition of the marriage of the clergy and the giving of the cup to the laity. Various other details of practical reform were demanded. The Interim was intensely unpopular with both parties. The pope objected to it and German Catholics, especially in Bavaria, strongly opposed it. The South German Protestant states accepted it only under pressure. Maurice of Saxony adopted it in a modified form, known as the Leipzig Interim, in December 1548. The assistance rendered him by Melanchthon caused a fierce attack on the theologian by his fellow-Lutherans. In enforcing the Interim Maurice found his own profit, for when Magdeburg won the nickname of "our Lord God's pulpit" by refusing to accept it, Maurice was entrusted with the execution of the imperial ban, and captured the city on November 9, 1551.

Germany now fell into a confused condition, every state for itself. The emperor found his own {130} difficulties in trying to make his son Philip successor to his Brother Ferdinand. His two former Protestant allies, Maurice and John von Küstrin, made an alliance with France and with other North German princes and forced the emperor to conclude the Convention of Passau. [Sidenote: 1552] This guaranteed afresh the religious freedom of the Lutherans until the next Diet and forced the liberation of John Frederic and Philip of Hesse. Charles did not loyally accept the conditions of this agreement, but induced Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg-Culmbach, to attack the confederate princes in the rear. After Albert had laid waste a portion of North Germany he was defeated by Maurice at the battle of Sievershausen. [Sidenote: July 9, 1553] Mortally wounded, the brilliant but utterly unscrupulous victor died, at the age of thirty-two, soon after the battle. As the conflict had by this time resolved itself into a duel between him and Charles, the emperor was now at last able to put through, at the Diet of Augsburg, a settlement of the religious question.

[Sidenote: Religious Peace of Augsburg, September 25, 1555]

The principles of the Religious Peace were as follows:

(1) A truce between states recognizing the Augsburg Confession and Catholic states until union was possible. All other confessions were to be barred--a provision aimed chiefly at Calvinists.

(2) The princes and governments of the Free Cities were to be allowed to choose between the Roman and the Lutheran faith, but their subjects must either conform to this faith--on the maxim famous as cujus regio ejus religio--or emigrate. In Imperial Free Cities, however, it was specially provided that Catholic minorities be tolerated.

(3) The "ecclesiastical reservation," or principle that when a Catholic spiritual prince became Protestant he should be deposed and a successor appointed {131} so that his territory might remain under the church. In respect to this Ferdinand privately promised to secure toleration for Protestant subjects in the land of such a prince. All claims of spiritual jurisdiction by Catholic prelates in Lutheran lands were to cease. All estates of the church confiscated prior to 1552 were to remain in the hands of the spoliators, all seized since that date to be restored.

The Peace of Augsburg, like the Missouri Compromise, only postponed civil war and the radical solution of a pressing problem. But as we cannot rightly censure the statesmen of 1820 for not insisting on emancipation, for which public opinion was not yet prepared, so it would be unhistorical and unreasonable to blame the Diet of Augsburg for not granting the complete toleration which we now see was bound to come and was ideally the right thing. Mankind is educated slowly and by many hard experiences. Europe had lain so long under the domination of an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization that the possibility of complete toleration hardly occurred to any but a few eccentrics. And we must not minimize what the Peace of Augsburg actually accomplished. It is true that choice of religion was legally limited to two alternatives, but this was more than had been allowed before. [Sidenote: Actual results] It is true that freedom of even this choice was complete only for the rulers of the territories or Free Cities; private citizens might exercise the same choice only on leaving their homes. The hardship of this was somewhat lessened by the consideration that in any case the nonconformist would not have to go far before finding a German community holding the Catholic or Lutheran opinions he preferred. Finally, it must be remembered that, if the Peace of Augsburg aligned the whole nation into two mutually hostile camps, it at least kept them from war for more than {132} half a century. Nor was this a mere accident, for the strain was at times severe. When the imperial knight, Grumbach, broke the peace by sacking the city of Würzburg, [Sidenote: 1563-7] he was put under the ban, captured and executed. His protector, Duke John Frederic of Saxony, was also captured and kept in confinement in Austria until his death.

Notwithstanding such an exhibition of centralized power, it is probable that the Peace of Augsburg increased rather than diminished the authority of the territorial states at the expense of the imperial government. Charles V, worn out by his long and unsuccessful struggle with heresy, after giving the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1555, abdicated the crown of the Empire to his brother Ferdinand in 1556. [Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1556-64] He died two years later in a monastery, a disappointed man, having expressed the wish that he had burned Luther at Worms. The energies of Ferdinand were largely taken up with the Turkish war. His son, Maximilian II, [Sidenote: Maximilian II, 1564-76] was favorably inclined to Protestantism.

[Sidenote: Catholic reaction]

Before Maximilian's death, however, a reaction in favor of Catholicism had already set in. The last important gains to the Lutheran cause in Germany came in the years immediately following the Peace of Augsburg. Nothing is more remarkable than the fact that practically all the conquests of Protestantism in Europe were made within the first half century of its existence. After that for a few years it lost, and since then has remained, geographically speaking, stationary in Europe. It is impossible to get accurate statistics of the gains and losses of either confession. The estimate of the Venetian ambassador that only one-tenth of the German empire was Catholic in 1558 is certainly wrong. In 1570, at the height of the Protestant tide, probably 70 per cent. of Germans--including Austrians--were Protestant. In 1910 the Germans of the {133} German Empire and of Austria were divided thus: Protestants 37,675,000; Catholics 29,700,000. The Protestants were about 56 per cent., and this proportion was probably about that of the year 1600.

[Sidenote: Lutheran schisms]

Historically, the final stemming of the Protestant flood was due to the revival of energy in the Catholic Church and to the internal weakness and schism of the Protestants. Even within the Lutheran communion fierce conflicts broke out. Luther's lieutenants fought for his spiritual heritage as the generals of Alexander fought for his empire. The center of these storms was Melanchthon until death freed him from "the rage of the theologians." [Sidenote: April 19, 1560] Always half Catholic, half Erasmian at heart, by his endorsement of the Interim, and by his severe criticisms of his former friends Luther and John Frederic, he brought on himself the bitter enmity of those calling themselves "Gnesio-Lutherans," or "Genuine Lutherans." Melanchthon abolished congregational hymn-singing, and published his true views, hitherto dissembled, on predestination and the sacrament. He was attacked by Flacius the historian, and by many others. The dispute was taken up by still others and went to such lengths that for a minor heresy a pastor, Funck, was executed by his fellow-Lutherans in Prussia, in 1566. "Philippism" as it was called, at first grew, but finally collapsed when the Formula of Concord was drawn up in 1580 and signed by over 8000 clergy. This document is to the Lutheran Church what the decrees of Trent were to the Catholics. The "high" doctrine of the real presence was strongly stated, and all the sophistries advanced to support it canonized. The sacramental bread and wine were treated with such superstitious reverence that a Lutheran priest who accidentally spilled the latter was punished by having his fingers cut off. Melanchthon was against such "remnants of {134} papistry" which he rightly named "artolatry" or "bread-worship."

But the civil wars within the Lutheran communion were less bitter than the hatred for the Calvinists. By 1550 their mutual detestation had reached such a point that Calvin called the Lutherans "ministers of Satan" and "professed enemies of God" trying to bring in "adulterine rites" and vitiate the pure worship. The quarrel broke out again at the Colloquy of Worms. Melanchthon and others condemned Zwingli, thus, in Calvin's opinion, "wiping off all their glory." Nevertheless Calvin himself had said, in 1539, that Zwingli's opinion was false and pernicious. So difficult is the path of orthodoxy to find! In 1557 the Zwinglian leader M. Schenck wrote to Thomas Blaurer that the error of the papists was rather to be borne than that of the Saxons. Nevertheless Calvinism continued to grow in Germany at the expense of Lutheranism. Especially after the Formula of Concord the "Philippists" went over in large numbers to the Calvinists.

[Sidenote: Effect on the nation]

The worst thing about these distressing controversies was that they seemed to absorb the whole energies of the nation. No period is less productive in modern German history than the age immediately following the triumph of the Reformation. The movement, which had begun so liberally and hopefully, became, temporarily at least, narrower and more bigoted than Catholicism. It seemed as if Erasmus had been quite right when he said that where Lutheranism reigned culture perished. Of these men it has been said--and the epigram is not a bad one--that they made an intellectual desert and called it religious peace.

And yet we should be cautious in history of assuming post hoc propter hoc. That there was nothing {135} necessarily blighting in Protestantism is shown by the examples of England and Poland, where the Reform was followed by the most brilliant literary age in the annals of these peoples. [Sidenote: 16th century literature] The latter part of the sixteenth century was also the great period of the literature of Spain and Portugal, which remained Catholic, whereas Italy, equally Catholic, notably declined in artistic production and somewhat also in letters. The causes of the alterations, in various peoples, of periods of productivity and of comparative sterility, are in part inscrutable. In the present case, it seems that when a relaxation of intellectual activity is visible, it was not due to any special quality in Protestantism, but was rather caused by the heat of controversy.

SECTION 7. NOTE ON SCANDINAVIA, POLAND, AND HUNGARY

[Transcriber's note: The above section number is what appears in the original book, but it is a case of misnumbering, and is actually the chapter's sixth section.]

A few small countries bordering on the Empire, neither fully in the central stream of European culture, nor wholly outside of it, may be treated briefly. All of them were affected by the Protestant revolution, the Teutonic peoples permanently, the others transiently.

Scandinavia looms large in the Middle Ages as the home of the teeming multitudes of emigrants, Goths and Vandals, who swarmed over the Roman Empire. Later waves from Denmark and the contiguous portion of Germany flooded England first in the Anglo-Saxon conquest and then in the Danish. The Normans, too, originally hailed from Scandinavia. But though the sons of the North conquered and colonized so much of the South, Scandinavia herself remained a small people, neither politically nor intellectually of the first importance. The three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden became one in 1397; and, after Sweden's temporary separation from the other two, were again united. The fifteenth century saw the {136} great aggrandizement of the power of the prelates and of the larger nobles at the expense of the bönder, who, from a class of free and noble small proprietors degenerated not only into peasants but often into serfs. [Sidenote: 1513] When Christian II succeeded to the throne, it was as the papal champion. His attempt to consolidate his power in Sweden by massacring the magnates under the pretext that they were hostile to the pope, [Sidenote: November 8-11, 1520] an act called the "Stockholm bath of blood," aroused the people against him in a war of independence.

[Sidenote: Denmark]

Christian found Denmark also insubordinate. It is true that he made some just laws, protecting the people and building up their prosperity, but their support was insufficient to counterbalance the hatred of the great lords spiritual and temporal. He was quick to see in the Reformation a weapon against the prelates, and appealed for help to Wittenberg as early as 1519. His endeavors throughout 1520 to get Luther himself to visit Denmark failed, but early in 1521 he succeeded in attracting Carlstadt for a short visit. This effort, however, cost him his throne, for he was expelled on April 13, 1523, and wandered over Europe in exile until his death. [Sidenote: 1559]

The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, to whom the crown was offered, reigned for ten years as Frederic I. Though his coronation oath bound him to do nothing against the church, he had only been king for three years before he came out openly for the Reformation. In this again we must see primarily a policy, rather than a conviction. He was supported, however, by the common people, who had been disgusted by the indulgences sold by Arcimboldi [Sidenote: 1516-19] and by the constant corruption of the higher clergy. The cities, as in Germany, were the strongest centers of the movement. The Diet of 1527 decreed that Lutherans should be recognized on equal terms with Catholics, that marriage of priests {137} and the regular clergy be allowed. In 1530 a Lutheran confession was adopted.

Christian III, who reigned until 1559, took the final step, though at the price of a civil war. His victory enabled him to arrest all the bishops, August 20, 1536, and to force them to renounce their rights and properties in favor of the crown. Only one, Bishop Rönnow of Roskilde, refused, and was consequently held prisoner until his death. The Diet of 1536 abolished Catholicism, confiscated all church property and distributed it between the king and the temporal nobles. Bugenhagen was called from Wittenberg to organize the church on Lutheran lines. [Sidenote: 1537-9] In the immediately following years the Catholics were deprived of their civil rights. The political benefits of the Reformation inured primarily to the king and secondarily to the third estate.

[Sidenote: Norway]

Norway was a vassal of Denmark from 1380 till 1814. At no time was its dependence more complete than in the sixteenth century. Frederic I introduced the Reformation by royal decree as early as 1528, and Christian III put the northern kingdom completely under the tutelage of Denmark, [Sidenote: 1536] in spiritual as well as in temporal matters. The adoption of the Reformation here as in Iceland seemed to be a matter of popular indifference.

[Sidenote: Sweden]

After Sweden had asserted her independence by the expulsion of Christian II, Gustavus Vasa, an able ruler, ascended the throne. [Sidenote: Gustavus Vasa, 1523-60] He, too, saw in the Reformation chiefly an opportunity for confiscating the goods of the church. The way had, indeed, been prepared by a popular reformer, Olaus Petri, but the king made the movement an excuse to concentrate in his own hands the spiritual power. The Diet of Westeras [Sidenote: 1527] passed the necessary laws, at the same time expelling the chief leader of the Romanist party, John Brask, {138} Bishop of Linköping. The Reformation was entirely Lutheran and extremely conservative. Not only the Anabaptists, but even the Calvinists, failed to get any hold upon the Scandinavian peoples. In many ways the Reformation in Sweden was parallel to that in England. Both countries retained the episcopal organization founded upon the "apostolical succession." Olaus Magni, Bishop of Westeras, had been ordained at Rome in 1524, and in turn consecrated the first Evangelical Archbishop, Lawrence Petri, [Sidenote: Petri 1499-1573] who had studied at Wittenberg, and who later translated the Bible into Swedish [Sidenote: 1541] and protected his people from the inroads of Calvinism. The king, more and more absolutely the head of the church, as in England, did not hesitate to punish even prominent reformers when they opposed him. The reign of Gustavus's successor, Eric XIV, [Sidenote: Eric XIV, 1560-8] was characterless, save for the influx of Huguenots strengthening the Protestants. King John III [Sidenote: John III, 1569-92] made a final, though futile, attempt to reunite with the Roman Church. As Finland was at this time a dependency of Sweden, the Reformation took practically the same course as in Sweden itself.

[Sidenote: Poland]

A complete contrast to Sweden is furnished by Poland. If in the former the government counted for almost everything, in the latter it counted for next to nothing. The theater of Polish history is the vast plain extending from the Carpathians to the Düna, and from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. This region, lacking natural frontiers on several sides, was inhabited by a variety of races: Poles in the west, Lithuanians in the east, Ruthenians in the south and many Germans in the cities. The union of the Polish and Lithuanian states was as yet a merely personal one in the monarch. Since the fourteenth century the crown of Poland had been elective, but the grand-ducal crown of Lithuania was {139} hereditary in the famous house of Jagiello, and the advantages of union induced the Polish nobility regularly to elect the heir to the eastern domain their king. Though theoretically absolute, in practice the king had been limited by the power of the nobles and gentry, and this limitation was given a constitutional sanction in the law Nihil novi, [Sidenote: 1505] forbidding the monarch to pass laws without the consent of the deputies of the magnates and lesser nobles.

The foreign policy of Sigismund I [Sidenote: Sigismund I, 1506-1548] was determined by the proximity of powerful and generally hostile neighbors. It would not be profitable in this place to follow at length the story of his frequent wars with Muscovy and with the Tartar hordes of the Crimea, and of his diplomatic struggles with the Turks, the Empire, Hungary, and Sweden. On the whole he succeeded not only in holding his own, but in augmenting his power. He it was who finally settled the vexatious question of the relationship of his crown to the Teutonic Order, which, since 1466, had held Prussia as a fief, though a constantly rebellious and troublesome one. The election of Albert of Brandenburg as Grand Master of the Order threatened more serious trouble, [Sidenote: 1511] but a satisfactory solution of the problem was found when Albert embraced the Lutheran faith and secularized Prussia as an hereditary duchy, at the same time swearing allegiance to Sigismund as his suzerain. [Sidenote: 1525] Many years later Sigismund's son conquered and annexed another domain of the Teutonic order further north, namely Livonia. [Sidenote: 1561] War with Sweden resulted from this but was settled by the cession of Esthonia to the Scandinavian power.

Internally, the vigorous Jagiello strengthened both the military and financial resources of his people. To meet the constant inroads of the Tartars he established the Cossacks, a rough cavalry formed of the hunters, {140} fishers, and graziers of the Ukraine, quite analogous to the cowboys of the American Wild West. From being a military body they developed into a state and nation that occupied a special position in Poland and then in Russia. Sigismund's fiscal policy, by recovering control of the mint and putting the treasury into the hands of capable bankers, effectively provided for the economic life of the government.

[Sidenote: Reformation]

Poland has generally been as open to the inroads of foreign ideas as to the attacks of enemies; a peculiar susceptibility to alien culture, due partly to the linguistic attainments of many educated Poles and partly to an independent, almost anarchical disposition, has made this nation receive from other lands more freely than it gives. Every wave of new ideas innundates the low-lying plain of the Vistula. So the Reformation spread with amazing rapidity, first among the cities and then among the peasants of that land. In the fifteenth century the influence of Huss and the humanists had in different ways formed channels facilitating the inrush of Lutheranism. The unpopularity of a wealthy and indolent church predisposed the body politic to the new infection. Danzig, that "Venice of the North," had a Lutheran preacher in 1518; while the Edict of Thorn, intended to suppress the heretics, indicates that as early as 1520 they had attracted the attention of the central government. But this persecuting measure, followed thick and fast by others, only proved how little the tide could be stemmed by paper barriers. The cities of Cracow, Posen, and Lublin, especially susceptible on account of their German population, were thoroughly infected before 1522. Next, the contagion attacked the country districts and towns of Prussia, which had been pretty thoroughly converted prior to its secularization.

The first political effect of the Reformation was to {141} stimulate the unrest of the lower classes. Riots and rebellions, analogous to those of the Peasants' War in Germany, followed hard upon the preaching of the "gospel." Sigismund could restore order here and there, as he did at Danzig in 1526 by a military occupation, by fining the town and beheading her six leading innovators, but he could not suppress the growing movement. For after the accession of the lower classes came that of the nobles and gentry who bore the real sovereignty in the state. Seeing in the Reformation a weapon for humiliating and plundering the church, as well as a key to a higher spiritual life, from one motive or the other, they flocked to its standard, and, under leadership of their greatest reformer, John Laski, organized a powerful church.

The reign of Sigismund II [Sidenote: Sigismund II, 1548-1572] saw the social upheaval by which the nobility finally placed the power firmly in their own hands, and also the height of the Reformation. By a law known as the "Execution" the assembly of nobles finally got control of the executive as well as of the legislative branch of the government. At the same time they, with the cordial assistance of the king, bound the country together in a closer bond known as the Union of Lublin. [Sidenote: 1569] Though Lithuania and Prussia struggled against incorporation with Poland, both were forced to submit to a measure that added power to the state and opened to the Polish nobility great opportunity for political and economic exploitation of these lands. Not only the king, but the magnates and the cities were put under the heel of the ruling caste. This was an evolution opposite to that of most European states, in which crown and bourgeoisie subdued the once proud position of the baronage. But even here in Poland one sees the rising influence of commerce and the money-power, in that the Polish nobility was largely composed of small {142} gentry eager and able to exploit the new opportunities offered by capitalism. In other countries the old privilege of the sword gave way to the new privilege of gold; in Poland the sword itself turned golden, at least in part; the blade kept its keen, steel edge, but the hilt by which it was wielded glittered yellow.

[Sidenote: Protestantism]

Unchecked though they were by laws, the Protestants soon developed a weakness that finally proved fatal to their cause, lack of organization and division into many mutually hostile sects. [Sidenote: 1537] The Anabaptists of course arrived, preached, gained adherents, and were suppressed. [Sidenote: 1548] Next came a large influx of Bohemian Brethren, expelled from their own country and migrating to a land of freedom, where they soon made common cause with the Lutherans. [Sidenote: 1558] Calvinists propagated the seeds of their faith with much success. Finally the Unitarians, led by Lelio Sozini, found a home in Poland and made many proselytes, at last becoming so powerful that they founded the new city of Racau, whence issued the famous Racovian Catechism. At one time they seemed about to obtain the mastery of the state, but the firm union of the Trinitarian Protestants at Sandomir [Sidenote: 1570] checked them until all of them were swept away together by the resurging tide of Catholicism. Several versions of the Bible, Lutheran, Socinian, and Catholic, were issued.

So powerful were the Evangelicals that at the Diet of 1555 they held services in the face of the Catholic king, and passed a law abolishing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. This measure, of course, allowed freedom of all new sects, both those then in control of the Diet and the as yet unfledged Antitrinitarians. Nevertheless a strong wish was expressed for a national, Protestant church, and had Sigismund had the advantages, as he had the matrimonial difficulties, of Henry VIII, he might have {143} established such a body. But he never quite dared to take the step, dreading the hostility of Catholic neighbors. Singularly enough the championship of the Catholic cause was undertaken by Greek-Catholic Muscovy, [Sidenote: 1562] whose Czar, Ivan, represented his war against Poland as a crusade against the new iconoclasts. Unable to act with power, Sigismund cultivated such means of combating Protestantism as were ready to his hand. His most trenchant weapon was the Order of Jesuits, who were invited to come in and establish schools. Moreover, the excellence of their colleges in foreign lands induced many of the nobility to send their sons to be educated under them, and thus were prepared the seeds of the Counter-Reformation.

The death of Sigismund without an heir left Poland for a time masterless. During the interregnum the Diet passed the Compact of Warsaw by which absolute religious liberty was granted to all sects--"Dissidentes de Religione"--without exception. [Sidenote: January 28, 1573] But, liberal though the law was, it was vitiated in practice by the right retained by every master of punishing his serfs for religious as well as for secular causes. Thus it was that the lower classes were marched from Protestant pillar to Catholic post and back without again daring to rebel or to express any choice in the matter.

The election of Henry of Valois, [Sidenote: Henry, May 11, 1573] a younger son of Catharine de' Medici, was made conditional on the acceptance of a number of articles, including the maintenance of religious liberty. The prince acceded, with some reservations, and was crowned on February 21, 1574. Four months later he heard of the death of his brother, Charles IX, making him king of France. Without daring to ask leave of absence, he absconded from Poland on June 18, thereby abandoning a throne which was promptly declared vacant.

The new election presented great difficulties, and {144} almost led to civil war. While the Senate declared for the Hapsburg Maximilian II, the Diet chose Stephen Báthory, prince of Transylvania. [Sidenote: Stephen Báthory, 1576-86] Only the unexpected death of Maximilian prevented an armed collision between the two. Báthory, now in possession, forced his recognition by all parties and led the land of his adoption into a period of highly successful diplomacy and of victorious war against Muscovy. His religious policy was one of pacification, conciliation, and of supporting inconspicuously the Jesuit foundations at Wilna, Posen, Cracow, and Eiga. But the full fruits of their propaganda, resulting in the complete reconversion of Poland to Catholicism were not reaped until the reign of his successor, Sigismund III, a Vasa, of Sweden. [Sidenote: Sigismund III, 1586-1632]

[Sidenote: Bohemia]

Bohemia, a Slav kingdom long united historically and dynastically with the Empire, as the home of Huss, welcomed the Reformation warmly, the Brethren turning first to Luther and then to Calvin. After various efforts to suppress and banish them had failed of large success, the Compact of 1567 granted toleration to the three principal churches. As in Poland, the Jesuits won back the whole land in the next generation, so that in 1910 there were in Bohemia 6,500,000 Catholics and only 175,000 Protestants.

[Sidenote: Hungary, 1526]

Hungary was so badly broken by the Turks at the battle of Mohács that she was able to play but little part in the development of Western civilization. Like her more powerful rival, she was also distracted by internal dissention. After the death of her King Lewis at Mohács there were two candidates for the throne, Ferdinand the Emperor's brother and John Zapolya, [Sidenote: Zapolya, 1526-40] "woiwod" or prince of Transylvania. Protestantism had a considerable hold on the nobles, who, after the shattering of the national power, divided a portion of the goods of the church between them. {145} The Unitarian movement was also strong for a time, and the division this caused proved almost fatal to the Reformation, for the greater part of the kingdom was won back to Catholicism under the Jesuits' leadership. [Sidenote: 1576-1612] In 1910 there were about 8,600,000 Catholics in Hungary and about 3,200,000 Protestants.

[Sidenote: Transylvania]

Transylvania, though a dependency of the Turks, was allowed to keep the Christian religion. The Saxon colonists in this state welcomed the Reformation, formally recognizing the Augsburg Confession in a synod of 1572. Here also the Unitarians attained their greatest strength, being recruited partly from those expelled from Poland. They drew their inspiration not merely from Sozini, but from a variety of sources, for the doctrine appeared simultaneously among certain Anabaptist and Spiritualist sects. Toleration was granted them on the same terms as other Christians. The name "Unitarian" first appears in a decree of the Transylvania Diet of the year 1600. An appreciable body of this persuasion still remains in the country, together with a number of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Romanists, but the large majority of the people belong to two Greek Catholic churches.

{146}

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III. SWITZERLAND

SECTION 1. ZWINGLI

[Sidenote: The Swiss Confederation]

Amid the snow-clad Alps and azure lakes of Switzerland there grew up a race of Germans which, though still nominally a part of the Empire, had, at the period now considered, long gone on its own distinct path of development. Politically, the Confederacy arose in a popular revolt against the House of Austria. The federal union of the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, first entered into in 1291 and made permanent in 1315, was strengthened by the admission of Lucerne (1332), Zug (1352), Glarus (1351) and of the Imperial Cities of Zurich (1351) and Berne (1353). By the admission of Freiburg and Solothurn (1481), Basle (1501), Schaffhausen (1501) and Appenzell (1513) the Confederacy reached the number of thirteen cantons at which it remained for many years. By this time it was recognized as a practically independent state, courted by the great powers of Europe. Allied to this German Confederacy were two Romance-speaking states of a similar nature, the Confederacies of the Valais and of the Grisons.

The Swiss were then the one free people of Europe. Republican government by popular magistrates prevailed in all the cantons. Liberty was not quite democratic, for the cantons ruled several subject provinces, and in the cities a somewhat aristocratic electorate held power; nevertheless there was no state in Europe approaching the Swiss in self-government. Though they were generally accounted the best soldiers of the {147} day, their military valor did not redound to their own advantage, for the hardy peasantry yielded to the solicitations of the great powers around them to enter into foreign, mercenary service. The influential men, especially the priests, took pensions from the pope or from France or from other princes, in return for their labors in recruiting. The system was a bad one for both sides. Swiss politics were corrupted and the land drained of its strongest men; whereas the princes who hired the mercenaries often found to their cost that such soldiers were not only the most formidable to their enemies but also the most troublesome to themselves, always on the point of mutiny for more pay and plunder. The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of the system, and prohibited the taking of pensions in 1503, though this law remained largely a dead letter. [Sidenote: September 13-14, 1515] The reputation of the mountaineers suffered a blow in their defeat by the French at Marignano, followed by a treaty with France, intended by that power to make Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a large annual subsidy payable to each of the thirteen cantons and to the Grisons and Valais as well. The country suffered from faction. The rural or "Forest" cantons were jealous of the cities, and the latter, especially Berne, the strongest, pursued selfish policies of individual aggrandizement at the expense of their confederates.

As everywhere else, the cities were the centers of culture and of social movements. Basle was famous for its university and for the great printing house of Froben. Here Albert Dürer had stayed for a while during his wandering years. Here Sebastian Brant had studied and had written his famous satire. Here the great Erasmus had come to publish his New Testament.

But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in [Sidenote: 1521-9] {148} part a child of humanism. Nationalism played its rôle in the revolt from Rome, memories of councils lingered at Constance and Basle, and the desire for a purer religion made itself felt among the more earnest. Switzerland had at least one great shrine, that of Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and penalty of sin. Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. [Sidenote: The Jetzer scandal] A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. [Sidenote: 1509] When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake.

But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. [Sidenote: Zwingli] He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg, amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and beauty from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the squirrel crossed the stream on a chip. When he returned to the home of his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149} stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his soul a deep love of his native land. The religion he learned was good Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less weird and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remembered one little tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.

Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, the parish priest. At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle to study. Here he progressed well, becoming the head scholar, and here he developed a love of music and considerable skill in it. Later he went to school at Berne, where he attracted the attention of some friars who tried to guide him into their cloister, an effort apparently frustrated by his father. In the autumn of 1498 he matriculated at Vienna. For some unknown cause he was suspended soon afterwards, but was readmitted in the spring of 1500. Two years later he went to Basle, where he completed his studies by taking the master's degree. [Sidenote: 1506] While here he taught school for a while. Theology apparently interested him little; his passion was for the humanities, and his idol was Erasmus. Only in 1513 did he begin to learn Greek.

If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canonical age, Zwingli took orders, and became parish priest at Glarus, it was less because of any deep religious interest than because he found in the clerical calling the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters. He was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty gulden per annum. His first published work was a fable. [Sidenote: 1510] The lion, the leopard, and the fox (the Emperor, France, and Venice) try to drive the ox {150} (Switzerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the herdsman (the pope). The same tendencies--papal, patriotic, and political--are shown in his second book, [Sidenote: 1512] an account of the relations between the Swiss and French, and in The Labyrinth, [Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem. The various nations appear again as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame, and vice. Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano. [Sidenote: 1515]

Was he already a Reformer? Not in the later sense of the word, but he was a disciple of Erasmus. Capito wrote to Bullinger in 1536: "While Luther was in the hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light, Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope. For then our judgment was maturing under the influence of Erasmus's society and by reading good authors." Though Capito over-estimated the opposition of the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other respects. Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of humanists, perfectly evident in his notes on St. Paul, stimulated him to visit the older scholar at Basle in the spring of 1516. Their correspondence began at the same time. Is it not notable that in The Labyrinth the thread of Ariadne is not religion, but reason? His religious ideal, as shown by his notes on St. Paul, was at this time the Erasmian one of an ethical, undogmatic faith. He interpreted the Apostle by the Sermon on the Mount and by Plato. He was still a good Catholic, without a thought of breaking away from the church.

[Sidenote: October, 1516-December, 1518]

From Glarus Zwingli was called to Einsiedeln, where he remained for two years. Here he saw the superstitious absurdities mocked by Erasmus. Here, too, {151} he first came into contact with indulgences, sold throughout Switzerland by Bernard Samson, a Milanese Franciscan. Zwingli did not attack them with the impassioned zeal of Luther, but ridiculed them as "a comedy." His position did not alienate him from the papal authorities, [Sidenote: September 1, 1516] for he applied for, and received, the appointment of papal acolyte. How little serious was his life at this time may be seen from the fact that he openly confessed that he was living in unchastity and even joked about it.

Notwithstanding his peccadillos, as he evidently regarded them, high hopes were conceived of his abilities and independence of character. When a priest was wanted at Zurich, [Sidenote: January 1, 1519] Zwingli applied for the position and, after strenuous canvassing, succeeded in getting it.

Soon after this came the turning-point in Zwingli's life, making of the rather worldly young man an earnest apostle. Two causes contributed to this. The first was the plague. Zwingli was taken sick in September and remained in a critical condition for many months. As is so often the case, suffering and the fear of death made the claims of the other world so terribly real to him that, for the first time, he cried unto God from the depths, and consecrated his life to service of his Saviour.

[Sidenote: 1519]

The second influence that decided and deepened Zwingli's life was that of Luther. He first mentions him in 1519, and from that time forth, often. All his works and all his acts thereafter show the impress of the Wittenberg professor. Though Zwingli himself sturdily asserted that he preached the gospel before he heard of Luther, and that he learned his whole doctrine direct from the Bible, he deceived himself, as many men do, in over-estimating his own originality. He was truly able to say that he had formulated some {152} of his ideas, in dependence on Erasmus, before he heard of the Saxon; and he still retained his capacity for private judgment afterwards. He never followed any man slavishly, and in some respects he was more radical than Luther; nevertheless it is true that he was deeply indebted to the great German.

Significantly enough, the first real conflict broke out at Zurich early in 1520. Zwingli preached against fasting and monasticism, and put forward the thesis that the gospel alone should be the rule of faith and practice. He succeeded in carrying through a practical reform of the cathedral chapter, but was obliged to compromise on fasting. Soon afterwards Zurich renounced obedience to the bishop. The Forest Cantons, already jealous of the prosperity of the cities, endeavored to intervene, but were warned by Zwingli not to appeal to war, as it was an unchristian thing. Opposition only drove his reforming zeal to further efforts.

In the spring of 1522 Zwingli formed with Anna Reinhard Meyer a union which he kept secret for two years, when he married her in church. In the marriage itself, though it was by no means unhappy, there was something lacking of fine feeling and of perfect love.

[Sidenote: Reformation in Zurich]

As the reform progressed, the need of clarification was felt. This was brought about by the favorite method of that day, a disputation. The Catholics tried in vain to prevent it, and it was actually held in January, 1523, on 67 theses drawn up by Zwingli. Here, as so often, it was found that the battle was half won when the innovators were heard. They themselves attributed this to the excellence of their cause; but, without disparaging that, it must be said that, as the psychology of advertising has shown, any thesis presented with sufficient force to catch the public ear, is {153} sure to win a certain number of adherents. [Sidenote: October 27, 1523] The Town Council of Zurich ordered the abolition of images and of the mass. The opposition of the cathedral chapter considerably delayed the realization of this program. In December the Council was obliged to concede further discussion. It was not until Wednesday, April 12, 1525, that mass was said for the last time in Zurich. Its place was immediately taken, the next day, Maundy Thursday, by a simple communion service. At the same time the last of the convents were suppressed, or put in a condition assuring their eventual extinction. Other reforms included the abolition of processions, of confirmation and of extreme unction. With homely caution, a large number of simple souls had this administered to them just before the time allotted for its last celebration. Organs were taken out of the churches, and regular lectures on the Bible given.

Alarmed by these innovations the five original cantons,--Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, Lucerne and Zug,--formed a league in 1524 to suppress the "Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian heresies." For a time it looked like war. Zwingli and his advisers drew up a remarkably thorough plan of campaign, including a method of securing allies, many military details, and an ample provision for prayer for victory. War, however, was averted by the mediation of Berne as a friend of Zurich, and the complete religious autonomy of each canton was guaranteed.

The Swiss Reformation had to run the same course of separation from the humanists and radicals, and of schism, as did the German movement. Though Erasmus was a little closer to the Swiss than he had been to the Saxon Reformers, he was alienated by the outrageous taunts of some of them and by the equally unwarranted attempts of others to show that he agreed {154} with them. "They falsely call themselves evangelical," he opined, "for they seek only two things: a salary and a wife."

Then came the break with Luther, of which the story has already been told. The division was caused neither by jealousy, nor by the one doctrine--that of the real presence--on which it was nominally fought. There was in reality a wide difference between the two types of thought. The Saxon was both mystic and a schoolman; to him religion was all in all and dogma a large part of religion. Zwingli approached the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint. He felt for liberty and for the value of common action in the state. He interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the tuition of the Bible in its apparent meaning.

[Sidenote: Anabaptists, 1522]

Next came the turn of the Anabaptists--those Bolsheviki of the sixteenth century. Their first leaders appeared at Zurich and were for a while bosom friends of Zwingli. But a parting of the ways was inevitable, for the humanist could have little sympathy with an uncultured and ignorant group--such they were, in spite of the fact that a few leaders were university graduates--and the statesman could not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.

[Sidenote: 1523]

His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with the prevailing polity. As he was unable to condemn his opponents on any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer against them two charges that were false, though probably believed true by himself. As they were {155} ascetics in some particulars he branded them as monastic; for their social program he called them seditious.

The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the effect in Switzerland, as elsewhere, of causing the poor and oppressed to lose heart, and of alienating them from the cause of the official Protestant churches. A disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was held at Zurich; [Sidenote: November 6-8, 1525] they were declared refuted, and the council passed an order for all unbaptized children to be christened within a week. The leaders were arrested and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that they advocated communism, which he considered wrong as the Bible's injunction not to steal implied the right of private property. The Anabaptists denied that they were communists, but the leaders were bound over to keep the peace, some were fined and others banished. As persecuting measures almost always increase in severity, it was not long before the death penalty was denounced against the sectaries, and actually applied. In a polemic against the new sect entitled In Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus, [Sidenote: July 1527] Zwingli's only argument is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the Anabaptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force. His strife with them was harder than his battle with Rome. It seems that the reformer fears no one so much as him who carries the reformer's own principles to lengths that the originator disapproves. Zwingli saw in the fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political and social matters as he had done in ecclesiastical affairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at least, subversion of the polity he preferred, and, like all the other men of his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished it as crime.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the same tyrannical type as that later made famous by {156} Geneva. Zwingli took the position of an Old Testament prophet, subordinating state to church. At first he had agreed with the Anabaptists in separating (theoretically) church and state. But he soon came to believe that, though true Christians might need no government, it was necessary to control the wicked, and for this purpose he favored an aristocratic polity. All matters of morals were strictly regulated, severe laws being passed against taverns and gambling. The inhabitants were forced to attend church. After the suppression of the Catholics and the radicals, there developed two parties just as later in Geneva, the Evangelical and the Indifferent, the policy of the latter being one of more freedom, or laxity, in discipline, and in general a preference of political to religious ends.

[Sidenote: Basle November, 1522]

The Reformation had now established itself in other cities of German Switzerland. Oecolampadius coming to Basle as the bearer of Evangelical ideas, won such success that soon the bishop was deprived of authority, [Sidenote: 1524] two disputations with the Catholics were held, [Sidenote: 1525] and the monasteries abolished. [Sidenote: 1527] Oecolampadius, after taking counsel with Zwingli on the best means of suppressing Catholic worship, branded the mass as an act worse than theft, harlotry, adultery, treason, and murder, called a meeting of the town council, and requested them to decree the abolition of Catholic worship. [Sidenote: October 27, 1527] Though they replied that every man should be free to exercise what religion he liked, on Good Friday, 1528, the Protestants removed the images from Oecolampadius's church, and grumbled because their enemies were yet tolerated. Liberty of conscience was only assured by the fairly equal division of the membership of the town council. On December 23, 1528, two hundred citizens assembled and presented a petition, drawn up by Oecolampadius, for the suppression of {157} the mass. On January 6, 1529, under pressure from the ambassadors of Berne and Zurich, the town council of Basle decreed that all pastors should preach only the Word of God, and asked them to assemble for instruction on this point. The compromise suited no one and on February 8 the long prepared revolution broke out. Under pretence that the Catholics had disobeyed the last decree, a Protestant mob surrounded the town hall, planted cannon, and forced the council to expel the twelve Catholic members, meanwhile destroying church pictures and statues. "It was indeed a spectacle so sad to the superstitious," Oecolampadius wrote to Capito, "that they had to weep blood. . . . We raged against the idols, and the mass died of sorrow."

A somewhat similar development took place in Berne, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and Glarus. The favorite instrument for arousing popular interest and support was the disputation. Such an one was held at Baden in May and June, 1526. Zwingli declined to take part in this and the Catholics claimed the victory. This, however, did them rather harm than good, for the public felt that the cards had been stacked. A similar debate at Berne in 1528 turned that city completely to the Reformation. A synod of the Swiss Evangelical churches was formed in 1527. This made for uniformity. The publication of the Bible in a translation by Leo Jud and others, with prefaces by Zwingli, proved a help to the Evangelical cause. [Sidenote: 1530] This translation was the only one to compete at all successfully with Luther's.

The growing strength of the Protestant cantons encouraged them to carry the reform by force in all places in which a majority was in favor of it. Zwingli's far-reaching plans included an alliance with Hesse and with Francis I to whom he dedicated his {158} two most important theological works, True and False Religion and An Exposition of the Christian Faith. [Sidenote: April, 1529] The Catholic cantons replied by making a league with Austria. War seemed imminent and Zwingli was so heartily in favor of it that he threatened resignation if Zurich did not declare war. This was accordingly done on June 8. Thirty thousand Protestant soldiers marched against the Catholic cantons, which, without the expected aid from Austria, were able to put only nine thousand men into the field. Seeing themselves hopelessly outnumbered, the Catholics prudently negotiated a peace without risking a battle. [Sidenote: First Peace of Cappel] The terms of this first Peace of Cappel forced the Catholics to renounce the alliance with Austria, and to allow the majority of citizens in each canton to decide the religion they would follow. Toleration for Protestants was provided for in Catholic cantons, though toleration of the old religion was denied in the Evangelical cantons.

This peace marked the height of Zwingli's power. He continued to negotiate on equal terms with Luther, and he sent missionaries into Geneva to win it to his cause and to the Confederacy. The Catholic cantons, stung to the quick, again sought aid from Austria and raised another and better army. [Sidenote: Defeat of Zwingli] Zwingli heard of this and advocated a swift blow to prevent it--the "offensive defence." Berne refused to join Zurich in this aggression, but agreed to bring pressure to bear on the Catholics [Sidenote: May 1531] by proclaiming a blockade of their frontiers. An army was prepared by the Forest Cantons, but Berne, whose entirely selfish policy was more disastrous to the Evangelical cause than was the hostility of the league, still refused to engage in war. Zurich was therefore obliged to meet it alone. An army of only two thousand Zurichers marched out, accompanied by Zwingli as field chaplain. Eight thousand Catholic troops attacked, utterly defeated them, and {159} killed many on the field of battle. [Sidenote: October 11, 1531] Zwingli, who, though a non-combatant, was armed, was wounded and left on the field. Later he was recognized by enemies, killed, and his body burned as that of a heretic.

The defeat was a disaster to Protestant Switzerland not so much on account of the terms of peace, which were moderate, as because of the loss of prestige and above all of the great leader. His spirit however, continued to inspire his followers, and lived in the Reformed Church. Indeed it has been said, though with exaggeration, that Calvin only gave his name to the church founded by Zwingli, just as Americus gave his name to the continent discovered by Columbus. In many respects Zwingli was the most liberal of the Reformers. In his last work he expressed the belief that in heaven would be saved not only Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but also "Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios. . . . In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall there exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very foundation of the world to its consummation, whom you will not see there with God." Nevertheless, Zwingli was a persecutor and was bound by many of the dogmatic prepossessions of his time. But his religion had in it less of miracle and more of reason than that of any other founder of a church in the sixteenth century. He was a statesman, and more willing to trust the people than were his contemporaries, but yet he was ready to sacrifice his country to his creed.

For a short time after the death of so many of its leading citizens in the battle of Cappel, Zurich was reduced to impotence and despair. Nor was she much comforted or assisted by her neighbors. Oecolampadius died but a few weeks after his friend; while {160} Luther and Erasmus sang paeans of triumph over the prostration of their rivals. Even Calvin considered it a judgment of God. Gradually by her own strength Zurich won her way back to peace and a certain influence. [Sidenote: Bullinger, 1504-75] Zwingli's follower, Henry Bullinger, the son of a priest, was a remarkable man. He not only built up his own city but his active correspondence with Protestants of all countries did a great deal to spread the cause of the Evangelical religion. In conjunction with Myconius, he drew up the first Swiss confession, [Sidenote: 1536] accepted by Zurich, Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, Mülhausen and Biel; [Sidenote: 1549] and later he made the agreement with Calvin known as the Consensus Tigurinus. In this the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines of the eucharist were harmonized as far as possible. But while the former decreased the latter increased, and Geneva took the place of Zurich as the metropolis of the Reformed faith.

SECTION 2. CALVIN

On January 15, 1527, Thomas von Hofen wrote Zwingli from Geneva that he would do all he could to exalt the gospel in that city but that he knew it would be vain, for there were seven hundred priests working against him. This letter gives an insight into the methods by which new territory was evangelized, the quarters whence came the new influences, and the forces with which they had to contend.

Among the early missionaries of "the gospel" in French-speaking lands, one of the most energetic was William Farel. [Sidenote: Farel, 1489-1565] He had studied at Paris under Lèfevre d'Étaples, and was converted to Lutheranism as early as 1521. He went first to Basle, where he learned to know Erasmus. Far from showing respect to the older and more famous man, he scornfully told him to his face that Froben's wife knew more theology than {161} did he. Erasmus's resentment showed itself in the nickname Phallicus that he fastened on his antagonist. From Basle Farel went to Montbéliard and Aigle, preaching fearlessly but so fiercely that his friend Oecolampadius warned him to remember rather to teach than to curse. [Sidenote: 1528] After attending the disputation at Berne he evangelized western Switzerland. His methods may be learned from his work at Valangin on August 15, 1530. He attended a mass, but in the midst of it went up to the priest, tore the host forcibly from his hands, and said to the people: "This is not the God whom you worship: he is above in heaven, even in the majesty of the Father." In 1532 he went to Geneva. Notwithstanding the fact that here, as often elsewhere, he narrowly escaped lynching, he made a great impression. His red hair and hot temper evidently had their uses.

[Sidenote: Calvin, 1509-64]

The Reformer of French Switzerland was not destined to be Farel, however, but John Calvin. Born at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died early and his father, who did not care for children, sent him to the house of an aristocratic friend to be reared. In this environment he acquired the distinguished manners and the hauteur for which he was noted. When John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might have got him a scholarship. At the age of twelve Gerard's influence procured for his son another of these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the boy to go to Paris. Here for some years, at the College of Montaigu, Calvin studied scholastic philosophy and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval logic-chopper and schoolman by temperament. At the university Calvin won from his fellows the sobriquet of "the accusative case," on account of his censorious {162} and fault-finding disposition. At his father's wish John changed from theology to law. For a time he studied at the universities of Orleans and Bourges. At Orleans he came under the influence of two Protestants, Olivetan and the German Melchior Volmar. On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote himself to the humanities. His first work, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, witnesses his wide reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical interests.

It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus and Lefèvre that he was led to the study of the Bible and of Luther's writings. Probably in the fall of 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former life with tears.

In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure benefices he had held, and towards the end of the year left France because of the growing persecution, for he had already rendered himself suspect. After various wanderings he reached Basle, where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. [Sidenote: Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536] It was dedicated, like two of Zwingli's works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new faith. It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt publicly in France in 1542. Originally written in Latin it was translated by the author into French in 1541, and reissued from time to time in continually larger editions, the final one, of 1559, being five times as bulky as the first impression. The thought, too, though not fundamentally changed, was rearranged and developed. Only in the redaction of 1541 was {163} predestination made perfectly clear. The first edition, like Luther's catechism, took up in order the Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. To this was added a section on Christian liberty, the power of the church, and civil government. In the last edition the arrangement followed entirely the order of articles in the Apostles' Creed, all the other matter being digested in its relation to faith.

[Sidenote: A system of theology]

In the Institutes Calvin succeeded in summing up the whole of Protestant Christian doctrine and practice. It is a work of enormous labor and thought. Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the Summa of Aquinas has in the Roman theology. It is like the Summa, in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered infallible. Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older schoolmen. Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress had made necessary. This is not denying that his work was well written and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time. Calvin cultivated style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense utility for propaganda. He studied especially brevity, and thought that he carried it to an extreme, though the French edition of the Institutes fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages. However, all things are relative, and compared to many other theologians Calvin is really concise and readable.

There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's works. I do not mean "original" in any narrow sense, for to the searcher for sources it seems that {164} there is literally nothing new under the sun. But there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority cannot be found in his predecessors. Recognizing the Bible as his only standard, he interpreted it according to the new Protestant doctors. First and foremost he was dependent on Luther, and to an extent that cannot be exaggerated. Especially from the Catechisms, The Bondage of the Will, and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Calvin drew all his principal doctrines even to details. He also borrowed something from Bucer, Erasmus and Schwenckfeld, as well as from three writers who were in a certain sense his models. Melanchthon's Commonplaces of Theology, Zwingli's True and False Religion, and Farel's Brief Instruction in Christian Faith had all done tentatively what he now did finally.

[Sidenote: Theocentric character]

The center of Calvin's philosophy was God as the Almighty Will. His will was the source of all things, of all deeds, of all standards of right and wrong and of all happiness. The sole purpose of the universe, and the sole intent of its Creator, was the glorification of the Deity. Man's chief end was "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." God accomplished this self-exaltation in all things, but chiefly through men, his noblest work, and he did it in various ways, by the salvation of some and the damnation of others. And his act was purely arbitrary; he foreknew and predestined the fate of every man from the beginning; he damned and saved irrespective of foreseen merit. "God's eternal decree" Calvin himself called "frightful." [1] The outward sign of election to grace he thought was moral behavior, and in this respect he demanded the uttermost from himself and from his followers. The elect, he thought, were certain of salvation. The highest virtue was faith, a matter more {165} of the heart than of the reason. The divinity of Christ, he said, was apprehended by Christian experience, not by speculation. Reason was fallacious; left to itself the human spirit "could do nothing but lose itself in infinite error, embroil itself in difficulties and grope in opaque darkness." But God has given us his Word, infallible and inerrant, something that "has flowed from his very mouth." "We can only seek God in his Word," he said, "nor think of him otherwise than according to his Word."

Inevitably, Calvin sought to use the Bible as a rigid, moral law to be fulfilled to the letter. His ethics were an elaborate casuistry, a method of finding the proper rule to govern the particular act. He preached a new legalism; [Sidenote: Legalism] he took Scripture as the Pharisees took the Law, and Luther's sayings as they took the Prophets, and he turned them all into stiff, fixed laws. Thus he crushed the glorious autonomy of his predecessor's ethical principles. It was Kant, who denied all Luther's specific beliefs, but who developed his idea of the individual conscience, that was the true heir of his spirit, not Calvin who crushed the spirit in elaborating every jot and tittle of the letter. In precisely the same manner Calvin killed Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. To Calvin the church was a sacramental, aristocratic organization, with an authoritative ministry. The German rebelled against the idea of the church as such; the Frenchman simply asked what was the true church. So he brought back some of the sacramental miracle of baptism and the eucharist. In the latter he remained as medieval as Luther, never getting beyond the question of the mode of the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. His endeavor to rationalize the doctrine of Augsburg, especially with reference to the Zwinglians, had disastrous results. Only two {166} positions were possible, that the body and blood were present, or that they were not. By endeavoring to find some middle ground Calvin upheld a contradiction in terms: the elements were signs and yet were realities; the body was really there when the bread was eaten by a believer, but really not there when the same bread was eaten by an infidel. The presence was actual, and yet participation could only occur by faith. While rejecting some of Luther's explanations, Calvin was undoubtedly nearer his position than that of Zwingli, which he characterized as "profane."

As few instructed and thinking persons now accept the conclusions of the Institutes, it is natural to underestimate the power that they exercised in their own day. This book was the most effective weapon of Protestantism. This was partly because of the style, but, still more because of the faultless logic. [Sidenote: His logic] The success of an argument usually depends far less on the truth of the premises than on the validity of the reasoning. And the premises selected by Calvin not only seemed natural to a large body of educated European opinion of his time, but were such that their truth or falsity was very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Calvin's system has been overthrown not by direct attack, but by the flank, in science as in war the most effective way. To take but one example out of many that might be given: what has modern criticism made of Calvin's doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture? But this science was as yet all but unknown: biblical exegesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute extent literary and historical; it was almost exclusively philological and dogmatic.

Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation irrespective of merit has often excited a moral rather than an intellectual revulsion. To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding bright, pleasant and sweet." [Sidenote: Eternal damnation] But many men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean. Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where to strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, aroused an intense opposition. Erasmus argued that damnation given for inevitable crimes would make God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for calling God the cause of evil and for saying "God doth damn so huge a number of people to intolerable torments only for his own pleasure and for his own deeds wrought in them only by himself." An English heretic, Cole of Faversham, said that the doctrine of predestination was meeter for devils than for Christians. "The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome Bolsec, "is a hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself."

But there was another side to the doctrine of election. There was a certain moral grandeur in the complete abandon to God and in the earnestness that was ready to sacrifice all to his will. And if we judge the tree by its fruits, at its best it brought forth a strong and good race. The noblest examples are not the theologians, Calvin and Knox, not only drunk with God but drugged with him, much less politicians like Henry of Navarre and William of Orange, but the rank and file of the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England, "the choice and sifted seed wherewith God sowed the wilderness" of America. These men bore themselves with I know not what of lofty seriousness, and with a matchless disdain of all mortal peril and all earthly grandeur. Believing themselves chosen vessels and elect instruments of grace, they could neither {168} be seduced by carnal pleasure nor awed by human might. Taught that they were kings by the election of God and priests by the imposition of his hands, they despised the puny and vicious monarchs of this earth. They remained, in fact, what they always felt themselves to be, an elite, "the chosen few."

Having finished his great work, Calvin set out on his wanderings again. For a time he was at the court of the sympathetic Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara. When persecution broke out here, he again fled northward, and came, by chance, to Geneva. [Sidenote: Geneva] Here Farel was waging an unequal fight with the old church. Needing Calvin's help he went to him and begged his assistance, calling on God to curse him should he not stay. "Struck with terror," as Calvin himself confessed, he consented to do so.

Beautifully situated on the blue waters of Lake Leman in full view of Mont Blanc, Geneva was at this time a town of 16,000 inhabitants, a center of trade, pleasure, and piety. The citizens had certain liberties, but were under the rule of a bishop. As this personage was usually elected from the house of the Duke of Savoy, Geneva had become little better than a dependency of that state. The first years of the sixteenth century had been turbulent. The bishop, John, had at one time been forced to abdicate his authority, but later had tried to resume it. The Archbishop of Vienne, Geneva's metropolitan, had then excommunicated the city and invited Duke Charles III of Savoy to punish it. The citizens rose under Bonivard, renounced the authority of the pope, expelled the bishop and broke up the religious houses. To guard against the vengeance of the duke, a league was made with Berne and Freiburg.

On October 2, 1532, William Farel arrived from Berne. At Geneva as elsewhere tumult followed his {169} preaching, but it met with such success that by January, 1534, he held a disputation which decided the city to become evangelical. The council examined the shrines [Sidenote: 1535] and found machinery for the production of bogus miracles; provisionally abolished the mass; [Sidenote: May 21, 1536] and soon after formally renounced the papal religion.

At this point Calvin arrived, and began preaching and organizing at once. He soon aroused opposition from the citizens, galled at his strictness and perhaps jealous of a foreigner. [Sidenote: Calvin expelled, February 1538] The elections to the council went against him, and the opposition came to a head shortly afterwards. The town council decided to adopt the method of celebrating the eucharist used at Rome. For some petty reason Calvin and Farel refused to obey, and when a riot broke out at the Lord's table, the council expelled them from the city.

Calvin went to Strassburg, where he learned to know Bucer and republished his Institutes. Here he married Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist, [Sidenote: August, 1540] who was never in strong health and died, probably of consumption, on March 29, 1549. Calvin's married life lacked tenderness and joy. The story that he selected his wife because he thought that by reason of her want of beauty she would not distract his thoughts from God, is not well founded, but it does illustrate his attitude towards her. The one or more children born of the union died in infancy.

Calvin attended the Colloquy at Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1541] in the result of which he was deeply disappointed. In the meantime he had not lost all interest in Geneva. When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote, in the most polished Latin, an appeal to the city to return to the Roman communion, Calvin answered it. [Sidenote: September 1, 1539] The party opposed to him discredited itself by giving up the city's rights to Berne, and, was therefore overthrown. The perplexities presenting themselves to the council were {170} beyond their powers to solve, and they felt obliged to recall Calvin, [Sidenote: Calvin returns, 1541] who returned to remain for the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

His position was so strong that he was able to make of Geneva a city after his own heart. The form of government he caused to prevail was a strict theocracy. The clergy of the city met in a body known as the Congregation, a "venerable company" that discussed and prepared legislation for the consideration of the Consistory. In this larger body, besides the clergy, the laity were represented by twelve elders chosen by the council, not by the people at large. The state and church were thus completely identified in a highly aristocratic polity.

"The office of the Consistory is to keep watch on the life of every one." Thus briefly was expressed the delegation of as complete powers over the private lives of citizens as ever have been granted to a committee. The object of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances was to create a society of saints. The Bible was adopted as the norm; all its provisions being enforced except such Jewish ceremonies as were considered abrogated by the New Testament. The city was divided into quarters, and some of the elders visited every house at least once a year and passed in review the whole life, actions, speech, and opinions of the inmates. The houses of the citizens were made of glass; and the vigilant eye of the Consistory, served by a multitude of spies, was on them all the time. In a way this espionage but took the place of the Catholic confessional. A joke, a gesture was enough to bring a man under suspicion. The Elders sat as a regular court, hearing complaints and examining witnesses. It is true that they could inflict only spiritual punishments, such as public censure, penance, excommunication, or forcing the culprit to demand pardon in church on his knees. But when {171} the Consistory thought necessary, it could invoke the aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom doubtful. Among the capital crimes were adultery, blasphemy, witchcraft, and heresy. Punishments for all offences were astonishingly and increasingly heavy. During the years 1542-6 there were, in this little town of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight executions and seventy-six banishments.

In judging the Genevan theocracy it is important to remember that everywhere, in the sixteenth century, punishments were heavier than they are now, and the regulation of private life minuter.[2] Nevertheless, though parallels to almost everything done at Geneva can be found elsewhere, it is true that Calvin intensified the medieval spirit in this respect and pushed it to the farthest limit that human nature would bear.

First of all, he compelled the citizens to fulfil their religious duties. He began the process by which later the Puritans identified the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day. Luther had thought the injunction to rest on the Seventh Day a bit of Jewish ceremonial abrogated by the new dispensation and that, after attending church, the Christian might devote the day to what work or pleasure he thought proper. Calvin, however, forbade all work and commanded attendance on sermons, of which an abundance were offered to the devout. In addition to Sunday services there were, as in the Catholic church, morning prayers every work day and a second service three days a week. All ceremonies with a vestige of popery about them were forbidden. [Sidenote: 1555] The keeping of Christmas was prohibited under pain of fine and imprisonment.

"As I see that we cannot forbid men all diversions," sighed Calvin, "I confine myself to those that are really bad." This class was sufficiently large. The {172} theater was denounced from the pulpit, especially when the new Italian habit of giving women's parts to actresses instead of to boys was introduced. According to Calvin's colleague Cop, "the women who mount the platform to play comedies are full of unbridled effrontery, without honor, having no purpose but to expose their bodies, clothes, and ornaments to excite the impure desires of the spectators. . . . The whole thing," he added, "is very contrary to the modesty of women who ought to be shamefaced and shy." Accordingly, attendance on plays was forbidden.

[Sidenote: Supervision of conduct]

Among other prohibited amusements was dancing, especially obnoxious as at that time dances were accompanied by kisses and embraces. Playing cards, cursing and swearing were also dealt with, as indeed they were elsewhere. Among the odd matters that came before the Consistory were: attempted suicide, possessing the Golden Legend (a collection of saints' lives called by Beza "abominable trash"), paying for masses, betrothing a daughter to a Catholic, fasting on Good Friday, singing obscene songs, and drunkenness. A woman was chastized for taking too much wine even though it did not intoxicate. Some husbands were mildly reprimanded, not for beating their wives which was tolerated by contemporary opinion, but for rubbing salt and vinegar into the wales. Luxury in clothing was suppressed; all matters of color and quality regulated by law, and even the way in which women did their hair. In 1546 the inns were put under the direct control of the government and strictly limited to the functions of entertaining--or rather of boarding and lodging--strangers and citizens in temporary need of them. Among the numerous rules enforced within them the following may be selected as typical:

[Sidenote: Rules for inns]

If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, "By {173} the body, 'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives himself to the devil or uses similar execrable imprecations, he shall be punished. . . .

If any one insults any one else the host shall be obliged to deliver him up to justice.

If there are any persons who make it their business to frequent the said inns, and there to consume their goods and substance, the host shall not receive them.

Item the host shall be obliged to report to the government any insolent or dissolute acts committed by the guests.

Item the host shall not allow any person of whatever quality he be, to drink or eat anything in his house without first having asked a blessing and afterwards said grace.

Item the host shall be obliged to keep in a public place a French Bible, in which any one who wishes may read, and he shall not prevent free and honest conversation on the Word of God, to edification, but shall favor it as much as he can.

Item the host shall not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or cards, nor shall he receive any one suspected of being a debauche or ruffian.

Item he shall only allow people to play honest games without swearing or blasphemy, and without wasting more time than that allowed for a meal.

Item he shall not allow indecent songs or words, and if any one wishes to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall make them do it in a decent and not in a dissolute way.

Item nobody shall be allowed to sit up after nine o'clock at night except spies.

Of course, such matters as marriage were regulated strictly. When a man of seventy married a girl of twenty-five Calvin said it was the pastor's duty to reprehend them. The Reformer often selected the women he thought suitable for his acquaintances who wanted wives. He also drew up a list of baptismal names which he thought objectionable, including the names of "idols,"--i.e. saints venerated near Geneva--the names of kings and offices to whom God alone {174} appoints, such as Angel or Baptist, names belonging to God such as Jesus and Emanuel, silly names such as Toussaint and Noel, double names and ill-sounding names. Calvin also pronounced on the best sort of stoves and got servants for his friends. In fact, there was never such a busy-body in a position of high authority before nor since. No wonder that the citizens frequently chafed under the yoke.

If we ask how much was actually accomplished by this minute regulation accompanied by extreme severity in the enforcement of morals, various answers are given. When the Italian reformer Bernardino Occhino visited Geneva in 1542, he testified that cursing and swearing, unchastity and sacrilege were unknown; that there were neither lawsuits nor simony nor murder nor party spirit, but that universal benevolence prevailed. Again in 1556 John Knox said that Geneva was "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places," he continued, "I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides." But if we turn from these personal impressions to an examination of the acts of the Consistory, we get a very different impression. [Sidenote: Morals of Geneva] The records of Geneva show more cases of vice after the Reformation than before. The continually increasing severity of the penalties enacted against vice and frivolity seem to prove that the government was helpless to suppress them. Among those convicted of adultery were two of Calvin's own female relatives, his brother's wife and his step-daughter Judith. What success there was in making Geneva a city of saints was due to the fact that it gradually became a very select population. The worst of the incorrigibles were soon either executed or banished, and their places taken by a large influx of {175} men of austere mind, drawn thither as a refuge from persecution elsewhere, or by the desire to sit at the feet of the great Reformer. Between the years 1549 and 1555 no less than 1297 strangers were admitted to citizenship. Practically all of these were immigrants coming to the little town for conscience's sake.

[Persecution]

Orthodoxy was enforced as rigidly as morality. The ecclesiastical constitution adopted in 1542 brought in the Puritan type of divine service. Preaching took the most important place in church, supplemented by Bible reading and catechetical instruction. Laws were passed enforcing conformity under pain of losing goods and life. Those who did not expressly renounce the mass were punished. A little girl of thirteen was condemned to be publicly beaten with rods for saying that she wanted to be a Catholic. Calvin identified his own wishes and dignity with the commands and honor of God. One day he forbade a citizen, Philibert Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table. Berthelier protested and was supported by the council. "If God lets Satan crush my ministry under such tyranny," shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with me." The slightest assertion of liberty on the part of another was stamped out as a crime. Sebastian Castellio, a sincere Christian and Protestant, but more liberal than Calvin, fell under suspicion because he called the Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new French version of the Bible to replace the one of Olivetan officially approved. He was banished in 1544. Two years later Peter Ameaux made some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.

But opposition only increased. The party opposing Calvin he called the Libertines--a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word "miscreant" had formerly done. [Sidenote: January, 1547] One of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the city. He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his accomplices. This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month. The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He was charged with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other man. . . . He also said that all laws, human and divine, were made at the pleasure of man." He was therefore sentenced to death for blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547, "calling on God as his Lord." After his death one of his books was found and condemned. To justify this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said that Jesus Christ was a good-for-nothing, a liar, and a false seducer, and that he (Gruet) denied the existence of God and immortality. Evangelical freedom had now arrived at the point whore its champions first took a man's life and then his character, merely for writing a lampoon!

Naturally such tyranny produced a reaction. The enraged Libertines nicknamed Calvin Cain, and saved from his hands the next personal enemy, Ami Perrin, whom he caused to be tried for treason. [Sidenote: October 16, 1551] A still more bitter dose for the theocrat was that administered by Jerome Bolsec, who had the audacity to preach against the doctrine of predestination. Calvin and Farel refuted him on the spot and had him arrested. Berne, Basle and Zurich intervened and, when solicited for {177} an expression on the doctrine in dispute, spoke indecisively. The triumph of his enemies at this rebuke was hard for Calvin to bear and prepared for the commission of the most regrettable act of his career.

[Sidenote: Servetus, 1531]

The Spanish physician Michael Servetus published, in Germany, a work on the Errors concerning the Trinity. His theory was not that of a modern rationalist, but of one whose starting point was the authority of the Bible, and his unitarianism was consequently of a decidedly theological brand, recalling similar doctrines in the early church. Leaving Germany he went to Vienne, [Sidenote: 1553] in France, and got a good practice under an assumed name. He later published a work called, perhaps in imitation of Calvin's Institutio, The Restitution of Christianity, setting forth his ideas about the Trinity, which he compared to the three-headed monster Cerberus, but admitting the divinity of Christ. He also denied the doctrine of original sin and asserted that baptism should be for adults only. He was poorly advised in sending this book to the Reformer, with whom he had some correspondence. With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his instigation, though he later issued an equivocating denial, William Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the Catholic inquisition at Vienne and forwarded the material sent by the heretic to Calvin. On June 17, 1553, the Catholic inquisitor, expressly stating that he acted on this material, condemned Servetus to be burnt by slow fire, but he escaped and went to Geneva.

Here he was recognized and arrested. Calvin at once appeared as his prosecutor for heresy. The charges against him were chiefly concerned with his denial of the Trinity and of infant baptism, and with his attack on the person and teaching of Calvin. As an example of the point to which Bibliolatry could suppress candor it may be mentioned that one of the {178} charges against him was that he had asserted Palestine to be a poor land. This was held to contradict the Scriptural statement that it was a land flowing with milk and honey. The minutes of the trial are painful reading. It was conducted on both sides with unbecoming violence. Among other expressions used by Calvin, the public prosecutor, were these: that he regarded Servetus's defence as no better than the braying of an ass, and that the prisoner was like a villainous cur wiping his muzzle. Servetus answered in the same tone, his spirit unbroken by abuse and by his confinement in a horrible dungeon, where he suffered from hunger, cold, vermin, and disease. He was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to be burnt with slow fire. Calvin said that he tried to alter the manner of execution, but there is not a shred of evidence, in the minutes of the trial or elsewhere, that he did so. Possibly, if he made the request, it was purely formal, as were similar petitions for mercy made by the Roman inquisitors. At any rate, while Calvin's alleged effort for mercy proved fruitless, he visited his victim in prison to read him a self-righteous and insulting lecture. Farel, also, reviled him on the way to the stake, at which he perished on October 26, 1553, [Sidenote: Death of Servetus] crying, "God preserve my soul! O Jesus, Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" Farel called on the bystanders to witness that these words showed the dying man to be still in the power of Satan.

This act of persecution, one of the most painful in the history of Christianity, was received with an outburst of applause from almost all quarters. Melanchthon, who had not been on speaking terms with Calvin for some years, was reconciled to him by what he called "a signal act of piety." Other leading Protestants congratulated Calvin, who continued persecution systematically. Another victim of his was Matthew {179} Gribaldi, whom he delivered into the hands of the government of Berne, with a refutation of his errors. [Sidenote: 1564.] Had he not died of the plague in prison he would probably have suffered the same fate as Servetus.

[Sidenote: Complete theocracy, 1555]

Strengthened by his victory over heresy, Calvin now had the chance to annihilate his opponents. On May 15, 1555, he accused a number of them of treason, and provided proof by ample use of the rack. With the party of Libertines completely broken, Calvin ruled from this time forth with a rod of iron. The new Geneva was so cowed and subservient that the town council dared not install a new sort of heating apparatus without asking the permission of the theocrat. But a deep rancor smouldered under the surface. "Our incomparable theologian Calvin," wrote Ambrose Blaurer to Bullinger, "labors under such hatred of some whom he obscures by his light that he is considered the worst of heretics by them." Among other things he was accused of levying tribute from his followers by a species of blackmail, threatening publicly to denounce them unless they gave money to the cause.

[Sidenote: International Calvinism]

At the same time his international power and reputation rose. Geneva became the capital of Protestantism, from which mandates issued to all the countries of Western Europe. Englishmen and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Italians, thronged to "this most perfect school of Christ since the apostles" to learn the laws of a new type of Christianity. For Calvin's Reformation was more thorough and logical than was Luther's. The German had regarded all as permitted that was not forbidden, and allowed the old usages to stand in so far as they were not repugnant to the ordinances of the Bible. But Calvin believed that all was forbidden save what was expressly allowed, and hence abolished as superstitious accretions all the elements of the medieval cult that could find no warrant in the {180} Bible. Images, vestments, organs, bells, candles, ritual, were swept away in the ungarnished meeting-house to make way for a simple service of Bible-reading, prayer, hymn and sermon. The government of the church was left by Calvin in close connection with the state, but he apparently turned around the Lutheran conception, making the civil authority subordinate to the spiritual and not the church to the state.

Whereas Lutheranism appealed to Germans and Scandinavians, Calvinism became the international form of Protestantism. Even in Germany Calvin made conquests at the expense of Luther, but outside of Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, he moulded the type of reformed thought in his own image. It is difficult to give statistics, for it is impossible to say how far each particular church, like the Anglican for example, was indebted to Calvin, how far to Luther, and how far to other leaders, and also because there was a strong reaction against pure Calvinism even in the sixteenth century. But it is safe to say that the clear, cold logic of the Institutes, the good French and Latin of countless other treatises and letters, and the political thought which amalgamated easily with rising tides of democracy and industrialism, made Calvin the leader of Protestantism outside of the Teutonic countries of the north. His gift for organization and the pains he took to train ministers and apostles contributed to this success.

[Sidenote: Death of Calvin, May 27, 1564]

On May 27, 1564 Calvin died, worn out with labor and ill health at the age of fifty-five. With a cold heart and a hot temper, he had a clear brain, an iron will, and a real moral earnestness derived from the conviction that he was a chosen vessel of Christ. Constantly tortured by a variety of painful diseases, he drove himself, by the demoniac strength of his will, to perform labor that would have taxed the strongest. {181} The way he ruled his poor, suffering body is symbolic of the way he treated the sick world. To him the maladies of his own body, or of the body politic, were evils to be overcome, at any cost of pain and sweat and blood, by a direct effort of the will. As he never yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt with the vice and frivolity he detested, crushing it out by a ruthless application of power, hunting it with spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it on the wheel. But a gentler, more understanding method would have accomplished more, even for his own purpose.

[Sidenote: Beza, 1519-1605]

His successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, was a man after his own heart but, as he was far weaker, the town council gradually freed itself from spiritual tyranny. Towards the end of the century the pastors had been humbled and the questions of the day were far less the dogmatic niceties they loved than ethical ones such as the right to take usury, the proper penalty for adultery, the right to make war, and the best form of government.

[1] "Decretum Dei aeternum horribile."

[2] See below. Chapter X, section 3.

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