"He that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What hath the straw to do with the wheat? saith the Lord."-Jer. xxiii. 28. THE Reformation is very inadequately and negatively represented by the word "Protestantism." If in its narrower aspect it was a revolt against Romanism, it was in reality but one scene in the vast drama of human progress in which Rome herself was compelled to take her part. Her awakenment, her purification, her better line of Popes, her Council of Trent, her Society of Jesus, resulted in no small degree from the work which owed its personal impulse to the mighty passion and genius of Luther. Those who reconcile it with their sense of justice to call him the father of infidelity, might with just as much truth have called him the restorer of the Papacy. For the work of Luther, like that of Origen, was the watershed of many divergent influences. If in the one direction he is to be held responsible for the teaching of Denck and Müntzer, and in another of Lessing and Strauss; assuredly he was also the cause of a marked improvement in the Romish Church, of the energy of her counter-Reformation, and of the improvement in morality and discipline within her pale. It should however be observed that the Protest of Spiers, if negative against particular doctrines, was positive in its assertion of the liberty of conscience. But in point of fact, as history has proved again and again, it is absurd and misleading to charge men with all the results which may spring indirectly from their teaching or character. Their work must be judged with reference to the times and circumstances in which it was accomplished. We might as well make St. Paul responsible for Marcion or St. John for Valentinus, or charge Christianity with the follies and extravagances of Gnosticism, or lay at the door of Las Casas the guilt of negro slavery, or brand the memory of Lafayette with the blood spilt in the Reign of Terror, as lay at Luther's door the errors which have arisen among the sects and churches which were first called into existence by his heroic personality. He was but one among many influences mightier than himself, and his work was but a single current in a tide of which the forces are to this day unspent. The Reformation was "the life of the Renaissance infused into religion under the influence of men of the grave and earnest. Teutonic race; a return to nature which was not a rebellion against God, an appeal to reason which left room for loyal allegiance to the Bible and to Christ."1 He must indeed be incapable of fairness who can ignore the services once rendered by the Papacy to the cause of civilisation and humanity. These services have been recognised as generously by Comte and Mazzini as by De Lamennais and Le Maistre.5 But 4 2 "The old order changeth, giving place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways 3 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." In the sixteenth century the whole Papal system had, even on the confession of its own historians, sunk into a formalism and corruption which made it a curse to mankind. 1 Beard, Hibbert Lectures, p. 2. Perhaps rather "Religion infused into the Renaissance." What the Renaissance was without the Reformation may be seen in such men as Leo X., Bembo, Bibbiena, Panormita, Filelfo, Politian, Pomponatius, &c. (see Gieseler, v. 181–184). 2 Cours de Politique Positive. 3 See the very powerful and eloquent testimony of Mazzini in the Fortnightly Review, 1870, p. 731. 4 Essai sur l'Indifférence, 1817. 5 Du Pape, 1819. How An even more tremendous indictment against the decadent morality of Rome and her priesthood might be drawn from the writings of Petrarch, Gerson, Machiavelli, Picus of Mirandola, or Savonarola, than from those of Boccaccio and the Italian novelists. Even in the Paradiso of Dante you may hear the cry of holy indignation wrung from the assembled saints while St. Pietro Damiano denounces the gross luxuries of the priesthood; and in the same mighty song the unworthiness of the successors of St. Peter had made the living topazes of heaven bicker into ruby hues of fiery wrath while the great Apostle fulminates his more than papal anathema against the blood-stained and avaricious pontiffs who have usurped on earth "My place, my place, MY PLACE!" And things grew worse and worse. could Rome be respected when the world saw such pontiffs as Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Clement VII., not to mention such a once-dissolute sophist as Pius II. (Aeneas Sylvius), or such an elegant epicurean as Leo X.? How could the world tolerate on the lips of simonists, nepotists, adulterers, and worse, the claim to absolute dominion over religion, the claim to be sole interpreters of Scripture, and the immediate recipients of the power and authority of Christ ? How could men endure that such persons should be addressed by a trembling sycophancy as "our Lord and God"? How could they suffer a man so vile as Sixtus IV. to found, unquestioned, that Spanish Inquisition which is perhaps the most abhorrent phenomenon ever presented to the loathing of the world? Was his successor, Innocent VIII., amid his life of criminal luxury to let loose, unquestioned, a man like Sprenger, whose Malleus Maleficarum has well been called "a monstrous 1 See proofs only too overwhelming in Gieseler, v. § 139. 2 See Dorner, Hist. of Prot. Theol. i. 35, E. I. The most extravagant statement of Papal claims may be found in Augustin Trionfo, De Potestate Ecclesiae, who says that "worship, equal to that due to the saints, greater than that to the angels, belongs to the Pope" (Trionfo, ix. 72). Papal claims were supported by such exegesis as this: Quod Papa sit Deus Imperatoris juxta illud Ecce constitni te Deum Pharaonis." Gerson (De Potest. Eccl. 1; Considerat. 10), protests against these extravagances. bastard of priestcraft and scholasticism?" Were popes, of whom some were equal to Nero and Domitian in crime, but from their positions and their professions far viler in infamy, to be suffered for ever to wield in the name of Jesus, a power with which that even of the Caesars was not to be compared? The ecclesiastical casuistry which could not quite suffocate the moral sense or suppress the burning blush of the Emperor Sigismund at the Council of Constance, was still less able to crush a rebellion which was headed, on all sides, by the noble indignation and the revolted conscience of mankind. The institutions of piety were thoroughly corrupted. Theology had sunk into a dull, dead, and cumbrous scholasticism,1 which so far from reconciling faith with knowledge had but deepened the chasm between the two. If John of Salisbury in the twelfth century had complained of its slavish dependence, and miserable pettiness-if Roger Bacon in the thirteenth had said that it languet et asininat circum male intellecta in the course of three more centuries its questions had become more "vermiculate," its terminology more barbarous, and its whole foundationless superstructure, reared only on the sand, was tottering under the waterfloods, which began to burst upon it. A sacerdotalism at once arrogant, intolerant, immoral, and idle, headed by a Pope who might be at once a "priest, an atheist, and a god," had radically corrupted the lifeblood of the Church by dividing it into two classes, the ruling and the ruled. It had poisoned the veins. of all Christian life by substituting a visionary satisfaction for a true reconciliation, and a mechanical conformity for a holy life. Piety was practically identified with the observance of ecclesiastical rules. Impunity was sold to the living and deliverance to the dead. Monasticism, itself polluted 1 "Theologiae tum materia non sacrae literae et Scripturae divinae erant, sed quaedam obscurae et spinosae intricataeque quaestiones, quarum nugatoria subtilitate exercebantur et defatigabantur ingenia" (Camerarius, Vit. Melanchth. c. iii.). 2 See a very fine passage of Erasmus (Annott. in 1 Tim. i. 6), which is too long to quote, but is full of indignant eloquence against the slothful and corrupt priesthood-“Metuebant tyrannidi suae, si mundus resipisceret (Opp. ix. 490). But perhaps some may be more open to conviction if I Decadence of Religion. 311 by confessed and countless abominations, seized upon selfishness as the basis of religion, and expanded it to infinity. Asceticism, darkening at once the teaching of Scripture, the meaning of life, and the character of God, taught that celibacy was holier than marriage, and that self-inflicted tortures could expiate for spiritual sins. The very conception of morality was vitiated. A priesthood calling itself the Church-a priesthood whose vices were the complaint of the theologian and the motive of the novelist, the despair of the good and the execration of the multitude-claimed absolute authority over men's bodies and souls, shut the Bible from the many, turned Christ into a wrathful Avenger, made it easier for the rich than for the poor to escape damnation, and gave even to the grace of God the aspect of capricious concession to the purchased intercessions of the Virgin Mary. The Christian Rome of Borgia had come to deserve every one of the denunciations which had been hurled at the Pagan Rome of Nero by the Apocalyptic seer. The name of faith was prostituted by being bestowed on the abject acceptance of unproved postulates; the name of morals was conferred upon a blind obedience to human traditions; the name of grace was confined to the mechanical operation of perverted sacraments; the name of truth to a mass of infallible falsehoods; the name of orthodoxy to the passive repetition of traditional ignorance. The results were frightful. There was mental coercion and moral disorder.1 Even Bellarmine acknowledges that some years before the Reformation "there was no strictness in spiritual courts, no chastity in manners, no reverence in presence of what was sacred, no scholarship, in short almost no religion." 2 The necessary deliverance came through the study of the Holy Scriptures. Long before the days of Luther some, at summon a Pope as witness. Pope Adrian VI., at the Diet of Nürnberg, which was convened to suppress Lutheranism, declared through the Bishop of Fabriane that "these disorders had sprung more especially from the sins of priests and prelates; even in the Holy Chair many horrible crimes have been committed." 1 See Hampden, Bampton Lectures, p. 38. 2 See Dorner, i. 23-49. |