James Harvey Robinson

“ From this time on three new streams begin to reinforce the rather feeble current of official efforts for reform. The common man, to whom the diet of Augsburg alludes, had long been raising his voice against the “parsons” (Pfaffen) ; the men of letters, Brand, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and above all Ulrich von Hutten, contributed, each in their way, to discredit the Roman Curia; and lastly, a new type of theology, represented chiefly by Martin Luther, threatened to sweep away the very foundations of the papal monarchy. ”

“ He declares that the distinction between the “spiritual estate, ” composed of pope, bishops, priests and monks, as over against the “temporal estate ” composed of princes, lords, artisans and peasants, is a very ine hypocritical invention of which no one should be afraid. “ A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man has his own calling and duty, just like the consecrated priests and bishops, and every one in his calling or office must help and serve the rest, so that all may work together for the common good.” ”

“ He was a firm believer in the efficacy of culture. He maintained that old prejudices would disappear with the progress of knowledge, and that superstition and mechanical devices of salvation would be insensibly abandoned. The laity should read their New Testament, and would in this way come to feel the true significance of Christ’s life and teachings, which, rather than the Church, formed the centre of Erasmus’s religion. The dissidence of dissent, however, filled him with uneasiness, and he abhorred Luther’s denial of free will and his exaggerated notion of man’s utter depravity ”

“ When Luther made his first great appeal to the German people in his Address to the German Nobility, he scarcely adverts to religious matters at all. He deals, on the contrary, almost exclusively with the social, financial, educational, industrial and general moral problems of the day. If Luther, who above all others had the religious issue ever before him, attacks the Church as a source of worldly disorder, it is not surprising that his contemporary Ulrich von Hutten should take a purely secular view of the issues involved. ”

“ So salvation was to him not a painful progress toward a goal to be reached by the sacraments and by right conduct, but a state in which man found himself so soon as he despaired absolutely of his own efforts, and threw himself on God's assurances. Man's utter incapacity to do anything to please God, and his utter personal dependence on God's grace seemed to render the whole system of the Church well-nigh gratuitous even if it were purged of all the “ sophistry ” which to Luther seemed to bury out of sight all that was essential in religion. ”

“ An appreciation of the issues of the Reformation—or Protestant revolt, as it might be more exactly called—depends therefore upon an understanding of the development of the papal monarchy, the nature of its claims, the relations it established with the civil powers, the abuses which developed in it and the attempts to rectify them, the sources of friction between the Church and the government, and finally the process by which certain of the European states threw off their allegiance to the Christian commonwealth, of which they had so long formed a part. ”

“ These measures, and the excitement which followed the arrival of the radicals from Zwickau, led Luther to return to Wittenberg in March 1522, Where he preached a series of sermons attacking the impatience of the radical party, and setting forth clearly his own views of what the progress of the Reformation should be. “The Word created heaven and earth and all things; the same Word will also create now, and not we poor sinners. Faith must be unconstrained and must be accepted without compulsion. ”

“ At the same time that the Neo-Platonists, like Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, and the pantheists, whose God was little more than a reverential conception of the universe at large, and the purely worldly humanists, like Celtes and Bebel, were widely diverging each by his own particular path from the ecclesiastical Weltanschauung of the middle ages, Ulrich von Hutten was busy attacking the Curia in his witty Dialogues, in the name of German patriotism. He, at least, among the well-known scholars eagerly espoused Luther's cause, as he understood it. ”

“ Gregory of Heimburg, who accused the pope of issuing the bull so that he and his cardinals might conveniently pillage Germany unhampered by the threat of a council. “By forbidding appeals to a council the pope treats us like slaves, and wishes to take for his own pleasures all that we and our ancestors have accumulated by honest labour. ”

“ No one Will, of course, question the importance of the schism which created the distinction between Protestants and Catholics, but it must always be remembered that the religious questions at issue comprised a relatively small part of the whole compass of human aspirations and conduct, even to those to whom religion was especially vital, while a large majority of the leaders in literature, art, science and public affairs went their way seemingly almost wholly unaffected by theological problems. ”

“ Luther, who believed that the peasants were trying to cloak their dreadful sins with 'excuses from the gospel, exhorted the government to put down the insurrection. “Have no pity on the poor folk; stab, smite, throttle, who can!” To him the peasants' attempt to abolish serfdom was wholly unchristian, since it was a divinely sanctioned institution, and if they succeeded they would “make God a liar.” The German rulers took Luther’s advice with terrible literalness, and avenged themselves upon the peasants, whose lot was apparently worse afterwards than before. ”

“ In the Habsburg hereditary dominions the traditional policy and Catholic fervour of the ruling house resulted, after a long struggle, in the restoration of the supremacy of Rome; while in Hungary the national spirit of independence kept Calvinism alive to divide the religious allegiance of the people. In Italy and Spain, on the other hand, the rulers, who continued loyal to the pope, found little difficulty in suppressing any tendencies of revolt on the part of the few converts to the new doctrines. ”

“ The Lutheran heresy he held to be God’s terrible judgment on the sins of the clergy. The diet refused to accede to the pope’s demand' that the edict of Worms should be enforced, and recommended that a Christian council should be summoned in January, to include not only ecclesiastics but laymen, who should be permitted freely to express their opinions. While the diet approved the list of abuses drawn up at Worms, it ordered that Luther’s books should no longer be published, and that Luther himself should hold his peace, while learned men were to admonish the erring preachers. ”

“ Christian perfection is this: to fear God sincerely, to trust assuredly that we have, for Christ’s sake, a gracious and merciful God; to ask and look with confidence for help from him in all our affairs, accordingly to our calling, and outwardly to do good works diligently, and to attend to our vocation. ”

“ Singularly enough it is the modern Catholic scholars, Johannes Janssen above all, who, in their efforts further to discredit the Protestant revolt by rehabilitating the institutions which the reformers attacked, have done most to explain the success of the Reformation. A humble, patient Bohemian priest, Hasak, set to work toward half a century ago to bring together the devotional works published during the seventy years immediately succeeding the invention of printing. Every one knows that one at least of these older books, The German Theology, was a great favourite of Luther’s ”

“ In the matter of the pope's supremacy, the council followed the canon law and Thomas Aquinas, not the decrees of the council of Constance. It prepared the way for the dogmatic formulation of the plenitude of the papal power three centuries later by the council of the Vatican. The Protestants have sometimes taken credit to themselves for the indubitable reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, which by the end of the 16th century had done away with many of the crying abuses against which councils and diets had so long been protesting. ”

“ A “reformed” prince could seize the property of the monasteries, and appropriate such ecclesiastical foundations as he desired. He could make rules for the selection of the clergy, disregarding the ancient canons of the Church and the claims of the pope to the right of ratification. He could cut off entirely all forms of papal taxation and put an end to papal jurisdiction. The personnel, revenue, jurisdiction, ritual, even the faith of the Church, were in this way placed under the complete control of the territorial governments. ”

“ After overthrowing the other two walls, Luther invites the attention of the German rulers to the old theme of the pomp of the pope and cardinals, for which the Germans must pay. “ What the Romanists really mean to do, the 'drunken Germans' are not to see until they have lost everything .... If we rightly hang thieves and behead robbers, why do we leave the greed of Rome unpunished P for Rome is the greatest thief and robber that has ever appeared on earth, or ever will; and all in the holy names of the Church and St Peter.” ”

“ The urgent necessity for healing the schism, the difficulty of uniting the colleges of cardinals, and the prolonged and futile negotiations carried on between the rival popes inevitably raised the whole question of the papal supremacy, and led to the search for a still higher ecclesiastical authority, which, when the normal system of choosing the head of the Church broke down, might re-establish that ecclesiastical unity to which all Europe as yet clung. ”

“ It is free to every one to form his own conclusions in religious matters; and so we do no more than set forth the meaning of divine things as they appear to our minds Without, however, attacking or insulting those who differ from us. ”

“ In the first place, when the temporal power has pressed them hard, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them-that, on the contrary, the spiritual is above the temporal. Secondly, when it was proposed to admonish them from the Holy Scriptures they said, 'It beseems no one but the pope to interpret the Scriptures, ' and, thirdly, when they were threatened with a council, they invented the idea that no one but the pope can call a council. ”

“ As is well known, temporal rulers constantly selected clergymen as their most trusted advisers. The existence of this theocratic international state was of course conditioned by the weakness of the civil government. So long as feudal monarchy continued, the Church supplied to some extent the deficiencies of the turbulent and ignorant princes by endeavouring to maintain order, administer justice, protect the weak and encourage learning. So soon as the modern national state began to gain strength, the issue between secular rulers and the bishops of Rome took a new form. ”

“ The peasants demanded that the gospel should be taught them as a guide in life, and that each community should be permitted to choose its pastor and depose him if he conducted himself improperly. “The pastor thus chosen should teach us the gospel pure and simple, without any addition, doctrine or ordinance of man.” ”

“ The class of humanists which had grown up in Italy during the 15th century, and whose influence had been spreading into Germany, France and England during the generation immediately preceding the opening of the Protestant revolt, represented every phase of religious feeling from mystic piety to cynical indifference, but there were very few anti-clerical among them. ”

“ The governing council, which had been organized to represent him in Germany, fell rapidly into disrepute, and exercised no restraining influence on those princes who might desire to act on Luther’s theory that the civil government was supreme in matters of Church reform.
The records of printing indicate that religious, social and economic betterment was the subject of an ever-increasing number of pamphlets. The range of opinion was wide. Men like Thomas Murner, for instance, heartily denounced “the great Lutheran fool,” but at the sameWide divergence
of opinion in Germany. ”

“ There was also the old discontent among the orthodox in regard to the Church’s exactions, bad clerics and dissolute and lazy monks. Scholars, like Colet, read the New Testament in Greek and lectured on justification by faith before they knew of Luther, and More included among the institutions of Utopia a rather more liberal and enlightened religion than that which he observed around him. Erasmus was read and approved, and his notion of reform by culture no doubt attracted many adherents among English scholars. ”

“ In the “recesses” or formal statements issued at the conclusion of the sessions of the diet one can follow the trend of opinion among the German princes, secular and ecclesiastical. The pope is constantly accused of violating the concordat, and constant demands are made for a general council, or at least a national one, which should undertake to remedy the abuses. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks afforded a new excuse for papal taxation. In 1453 crusading bull was issued imposing a tenth on all benefices of the earth to equip an expedition against the infidel. ”

“ While there was in a certain sense freedom of opinion, all printers had to seek a licence from the government for every manner of book or paper, and heresy was so closely affiliated with treason that the free expression of thought, whether reactionary or revolutionary, was beset with grave danger.
Attempts to estimate the width of the gulf separating the Church of England in Elizabeth's time from the corresponding institution as it existed in the early years of her father's reign are likely to be gravely affected by personal bias. ”

“ In February parliament discovered that “ by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles ” it was manifest that the realm of England was an empire governed by one supreme head, the king, to whom all sorts and degrees of people-both clergy and laity ought to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience, and that to him God had given the authority finally to determine all causes and contentions in the realm, “ without restraint, or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world.” ”