Thomas M. Lindsay

“ He was the brilliant partisan leader, seeing only what lay before his eyes; incapable of self-restraint; a learned theologian, yet careless in his expression of doctrine, and continually liable to misapprehension. No one was better fitted to attack the enemy’s strongholds, few less able to hold them when once possessed. He saw, without the faintest trace of jealousy—the man was too noble—others building on the foundations he had laid. It is almost pathetic to see that none of the Romance Swiss churches whose Apostle he had been, cared to retain him as their permanent leader. ”

“ If Scotland could be kept for France and the Roman Church, and its Romanist Queen make good her claim to the English throne, then the Reformation would be crushed not merely within Great Britain, but in Germany and the Low Countries also. So thought the politicians, secular and ecclesiastical, in Rome and Geneva, in Paris, Madrid, and in London. The European situation had been summed up by Cecil: “The Emperor is aiming at the sovereignty of Europe, which he cannot obtain without the suppression of the Reformed religion, and, unless he crushes England, he cannot crush the Reformation.” ”

“ She contrasts, as Luther was accustomed to do, the Law which searches, tries, and punishes, with the Gospel which pardons the sinner for the sake of Christ and of the work which He finished on the Cross. She looks forward with eager hope to a world redeemed and regenerated through the Evangel of Jesus Christ. She insists on justification by faith, on the impossibility of salvation by works, on predestination in the sense of absolute dependence on God in the last resort. Works are good, but no one is saved by works; salvation comes by grace, and “is the gift of the Most High God.” ”

“ Goodness touched them as it does all men. But the immorality of their religious guides did not embarrass them; a bad priest had as powerful spells as a good one. The only kind of Christianity which seemed able to impress them and hold them was that of Francis of Assisi. He was the highest embodiment of the Christian spirit for the Italian peasantry; the impression he had made upon the people of the Peninsula was enduring; the wandering revivalist preacher who lived as Francis had done always made the deepest impression. ”

“ It is surprising that a man who appears to us in his life and writings so unsympathetic should have been the centre of an immense movement in his generation, and that this harsh and severe tone should have exercised so great an influence on the minds of his contemporaries. How was it, for example, that one of the most distinguished women of her time, Renée of France, in her Court at Ferrara, surrounded by the flower of European wits, was captivated by that stern master, and by him drawn into a course that must have been so thickly strewn with thorns? ”

“ Pope had persuaded him to permit himself to be made Cardinal because the Holy See had need of his service. He was conscious with a sort of proud humility that he was generally esteemed the foremost Italian of his generation, that enthusiastic friends spoke of his learning and virtue as “more divine than human.” He thought much more of his position as a Venetian Senator and the trusted counsellor of the Republic, whose constitution he believed to be the embodiment of the best political principles of the time, than he did of his place in the Roman Court. ”

“ Men with the passion of learning in their blood came from all lands—from Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, even from Russia, and, above all, from France. Pastors educated in Geneva, taught by the most distinguished scholars of the day, who had gained the art of ruling others in having learned how to command themselves, went forth from its schools to become the ministers of the struggling Protestants in the Netherlands, in England, in Scotland, in the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, in France. ”

“ During the whole of the period of the Renaissance the peasantry and the clergy who served the village chapels were regarded by those above them with a scorn that degenerated into hatred. We may search in vain through the whole of the literature of the time for the thought that any attempt ought to be made to lead them to a deeper faith and a purer life. The whole of the peasant population of Italy were believed to be beneath the level of desire for something better than what the religious life of the times gave. ”

“ He delivered men from the fear of priestcraft; he taught men, in a way that no other did, that redemption was not a secret science practised by the priests within an institution called the Church; that all believers had the privilege of direct access to the very presence of God; and that the very thought of a priesthood who alone could mediate between God and man was both superfluous and irreconcilable with the truest instincts of the Christian religion. ”

“ He must be alone in some holy place to think things out with his own soul. His brother’s servants hoisted the maimed body of the once brilliant soldier on an ass, one foot in a boot, the wounded leg still swathed in bandages and its foot in a large soft slipper, and Iñigo left the old castle determined to live a hermit’s life on Montserrat, the holy hill of Aragon. ”

“ They saw themselves confronted by a religion full of mysteries inaccessible to reason, expressing itself even in public worship in a language unintelligible to most of the worshippers, full of pomp, of luxury, of ceremonies whose symbolical meaning had been forgotten. They saw a clergy commonplace and ignorant, or aristocratic and indifferent; a nobility greedy and restless; a Court whose luxurious display and scandals were notorious ”

“ Like Erasmus, he does not seem to have been much influenced by the mystical combination of Platonism and Christianity which entranced the Christian Humanists of Italy and filled the minds of the “group of Meaux”; and like him he broke through the narrow circle of elegant trifling within which most of the Italian scholars were confined, and used the New Learning for modern purposes. Humanism taught him to think imperially in the best fashion of ancient Rome, to see that great moral ideas ought to rule in the government of men. ”

“ But the persecution, with its peculiar atrocities, had been acting in its usual way on the Anabaptists of the Netherlands. They had been tortured on the rack, scourged, imprisoned in dungeons, roasted to death before slow fires, and had seen their women drowned, buried alive, pressed into coffins too small for their bodies till their ribs were broken, others stamped into them by the feet of the executioners. It is to be wondered at that those who stood firm sometimes gave way to hysterical excesses; that their leaders began to preach another creed than that of passive resistance ”

“ Then occurred the awful pillage of the great city, when, during three terrible November days, populous and wealthy Antwerp suffered all the horrors that could be inflicted upon it.
The sudden death of Requesens had left everything in confusion; and leading men, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, conceived that advantage should be taken of the absence of any Spanish Governor to see whether all the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands could not combine on some common programme which would unite the country in spite of their religious differences. ”

“ The Emperor, Charles V., had come to believe that there were no insuperable differences of doctrine between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, and that mutual explanations and a real desire to give and take, combined with the removal of scandals which all alike deplored, would heal the schism. He had never seen the gulf which the Lutheran principle of the spiritual priesthood of all believers had created between the Protestants and mediæval doctrines and ceremonies. ”

“ They value the Church because it represents to them in a visible and historical way a fellowship with Christ and His saints which is the result of His redeeming work.
This thought is as deeply rooted in Reformation as in mediæval piety. The Reformers felt compelled to protest against the political form which the mediæval Church had assumed. They conceived that to be a degradation from its ideal. They saw the manifold abuses which the degradation had given rise to. But they always regarded visible Christendom as a religious community called into being by the work of Christ. ”

“ The other anti-Trinitarians of the first rank were all cultured Italians, whom the spirit of the Renaissance prompted to criticise and reconstruct theology as they found it. They were all men who had been driven to reject the Roman Church because of its corruptions and immoralities, and who had no conception of any other universal Christian society. Men of pure lives, pious after their own fashion, they never had any idea of what lay at the root of the Reformation thought of what real religion was. ”

“ Under the influence of these writings the Reformation took shape, was something more than the devout imagination of a few pious thinkers, and became an endeavour to give expression to common religious certainties in change of creed, institutions, and worship. Thus Luther helped the Reformation in every land. The actual beginnings in England, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere had come into existence years before Luther had become known; it is possible that the movements might have come to fruition apart from his efforts ”

“ It was an age in which sovereigns were everywhere gaining despotic power, when the might of feudal barons was being broken, when the commonalty was dumb. A young Queen, whose training from childhood had stamped indelibly on her character that kingship meant the possession of unlimited autocratic privileges before which everything must give way, who had seen that none in France had dared dispute the will of her sickly, dull boy-husband simply because he was King, was suddenly confronted by something above and beyond her comprehension:
“‘What have ye to do,’ said sche, ‘with my marriage? ”

“ They went about saying to each other, “If all Christian princes permitted a free discussion like our MM. of Geneva, the affair would soon be settled without burnings, or slaughter, or murders; but the Pope and his followers, the cardinals and the bishops and the priests, know well that if free discussion is permitted all is lost for them. So all these powers forbid any discussion or conversation save by fire and by sword.” They knew that all throughout Romance Switzerland the Reformers, whether in a minority or in a majority, were eager for a public discussion. ”

“ What the depressed Romanists of the sixteenth century saw was a body of men whom no difficulties daunted, who spent themselves in training boys and girls and in animating them with religious principles; who persuaded boys and youths to attend daily Mass, to resort to monthly confession, to study the articles of their faith; who elevated that obedience, which for generations they had been taught was due to the earthly head of the Church, into a sublime religious principle. ”

“ His favourite teacher was Thomas Wyttenbach, who was half a Reformer and half a pure follower of Erasmus. No man influenced him more than the learned Dutchman. It was his guidance and not the example of Luther which made him study the Scriptures and the theologians of the early Church, such as Origen, Jerome, and Chrysostom. The influence and example of Erasmus can be seen even in his attempts to create a rational theory of the Holy Supper. His reformation, in its beginning more especially, was much more an intellectual than a religious movement. ”

“ He spoke with His Holiness for more than an hour in his private room; he explained the views and intentions of himself and of his companions; he told how he had been accused of heresy several times in Spain and at Paris, how he had even been imprisoned at Alcala and Salamanca, and that in each case careful inquiry had established his innocence; he said he knew that men who wished to preach incurred a great responsibility before God and man, and that they must be free from every taint of erroneous doctrine; and he besought the Pope to examine and test him thoroughly. ”