European Reformation

“ The Reformers before the Reformation, though vanquished, had indeed not lived in vain. The European peoples were outgrowing feudal vassalage, and moving toward nationalization and separation between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. Travel, exploration, and discovery had introduced new subjects of human interest and contemplation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Reformation lifted vast weights from the human mind. Slowly, but surely, the European populations have arrived at the comprehension of their just claims, and have decided that the end of government shall be the happiness of the people, and not the exaltation of the few. ”

“ Together with the progress of the Reformation, a phase of absolute monarchy had developed itself through which the European nations passed, and the enforcement of the regalia put an end to a large part of the grievances which had caused the Church of the fifteenth century to be so fiercely hated. ”

“ The growing consciousness of nationalism in religion was one of the mainsprings of the Reformation, the Reformation being among other things the protest of the European nationalities attaining full consciousness of their own individuality, against the inherited universality of Rome. ”

“ The people of Europe were beginning to feel the influence of the Reformation—at the period here referred to—so extensively, especially in Germany, as to comprehend the fact that the evils which had afflicted them, as well as the decaying condition of the Church, were attributable to the long-continued union of Church and State. ”

“ We affirmed the right of man to worship his Creator according to his own conscience. Workingmen, seigneurs, bourgeois—all proclaimed in chorus: 'We refuse to bend under the yoke of Rome; whosoever should seek to impose it upon us by the sword will be resisted with the sword.' To-day, the Reformation in Germany defies its enemies. Germany is not France; but men are men everywhere. Everywhere resolution has the name of resolution, nor are its consequences anywhere different. We are bound to uphold our rights by our arms. ”

“ If the Reformation, the great revival of northern Europe, was the enfranchisement of the individual from bondage to a collective religious tradition that had lost its virtue, the Renaissance, the earlier revival of southern Europe, was the admission to participate in the noblest collective tradition of free intellect which the achievements of the race could then hand down. ”

“ Europe was in the throes of the bloody and destructive struggles following the Reformation. The efforts for religious freedom seemed rather to hamper than to promote the efforts for the political enfranchisement of peoples. ”

“ It would be interesting to speculate what the Renaissance of the sixteenth century would have done for Europe had it been unaccompanied by a Reformation of religion. Without the Reformation, we may aver there would have been for the British nation no Bible of 1611, no Pilgrim Fathers to America, and no Revolution of 1688, along with all that these things imply of progress many-fold. ”

“ The serious Germanic races made the Reformation, feeling that without it there was no safety 45 and continuance for those moral ideas which they loved and which were the ground of their being. France did not go with the Reformation ”

“ The great ideas of the Reformation began now to agitate the mind of England,—not so much the logical doctrines of Calvin as the emancipating ideas of Luther. The Renaissance had begun, and the two movements were incorporated,—the religious one of Germany and the Pagan one of Italy, both favoring liberality of mind, a freer style of literature, restless inquiries, enterprise, the revival of learning and art, an intense spirit of progress, and disgust for the Dark Ages and all the dogmas of scholasticism. ”

“ From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. ”

“ And because we possess immeasurably better instruments for the dissemination of ideas, we should be able to achieve the Political Reformation of Europe much more rapidly and effectively than our predecessors achieved the great intellectual Reformation of their time. ”

“ You will follow falsity, and think it truth, you unfortunate man or nation. You will right surely, you for one, stumble to the Devil; and are every day and hour, little as you imagine it, making progress thither.
Austria, Spain, Italy, France, Poland,—the offer of the Reformation was made everywhere ”

“ Germany, given over to theological speculation, crushed beneath the weight of the Napoleonic wars, and torn by internal dissensions, gave but little hope that upon her altars the dying fire of the great Reformation would ever again flame forth as in the older and more heroic days. ”

“ The Western Church was and remained until the Reformation one and indivisible, and the very fact that it had, as we have seen, its own laws and its own organisation, and that prior to and independent of the very existence of any nation of modern Europe, was in itself enough to prevent its becoming in any intelligible sense of the word 'national.' It extended into all the nations of Europe, and was national in none of them. ”

“ The teachings, claims, and crimes native to Rome, nay, even the imported refinements of the arts and letters and elegancies of Paganism did what legions of full-blown Luthers could not have done.
The Reformation, with its complex causes, its complex methods, its complex products, is, more than other great movements, brimful of matter for observation, thought, and inference. ”

“ The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union ”

“ In the struggle of the Reformation they were at one moment far nearer losing tradition than was Britain. Their recovery of the Faith determined—humanly speaking—the survival of religion. Their enthusiasm for the revolutionary trend transformed all Europe. ”

“ In looking back, with our present experience, we are driven to the melancholy conclusion that, instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously increased it. We may look in vain for any period since Constantine, in which the clergy, as a body, exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a particular war, with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the crusaders, in producing the atrocious massacre of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation. ”

“ The foundation of the Reformation in Germany was not to be laid by magistrates, who must often shape their conduct according to political exigencies, nor by nobles fired with the love of military glory, nor by a greedy and ambitious clergy, working religion for profit, as if it were their exclusive property. ”

“ Meanwhile, all the other evils of the time, the monopolies of the merchant-princes of the cities and of the trading-syndicates, the dearness of living, the scarcity of money, etc., did not abate, but rather increased from year to year. The Catholic Church maintained itself especially in the South of Germany, and the official Reformation took on a definitely aristocratic character. ”

“ As the great interest of the Middle Ages, in an historical point of view, centres around the throne of the popes, so the most prominent subject of historical interest in our modern times is the revolt from their almost unlimited domination. The Protestant Reformation, in its various relations, was a movement of transcendent importance. The history of Christendom, in a moral, a political, a religious, a literary, and a social point of view, for the last three hundred years, cannot be studied or comprehended without primary reference to that memorable revolution. ”

“ When we remember the century and a half of wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going reconstruction ”

“ Involuntarily, unconsciously, unwillingly, every government found that the Reformation formed part of its scheme and policy. One nation, and one only, had the clear eye and firm hand to make it ostensibly, and of its deliberate choice, the guide and landmark in its dangerous and finally triumphant career. ”

“ Just as the history of the church and the world as a whole is distributed into ancient and modern, so the special history of the Germano-Roman world can and must be distributed into ancient and modern, the dividing boundary of which is the Reformation of the 16th century. ”

“ Greater men than he deny that grace underlies the whole original movement of the reformers, and they talk of the Reformation as a mere revolt from Rome, as a war against papal corruption, as a protest against monkery and the dark ages, brought about by the spirit of a new age, the onward march of humanity, the necessary progress of society. ”

“ France who saw through the whole matter at once: "You have your interests of the Reformation, as we have ours of the revolution."
It is a matter in which I have no interest but that of truth. I have given not as a polemic, but as a humble narrator, an account of my motives and reasons for adopting as truth that which has been believed as such by the bulk and great majority of the Christian world in all nations and in all ages, from the foundation of Christianity. ”

“ Yet amid the wars, bloodshed, anarchy and persecutions, society made rapid steps in the path of progress.
The Reformation promoted national growth, and mental activity. During the middle ages, the various nations of Europe were in the condition of colonies to a vast religious empire whose center and seat of government was Rome. But after the peace at Augsburg, 1555, all this was changed. Each nation that accepted the Reformation, became socially and religiously as well as politically free. Rome was shorn of her power. ”

“ It is not a little remarkable that the secret of the reformation, namely, the incompatibility of the claims of the church with the rights of the different nations that formed it, should have been so early discovered. ”

“ They believed, however, that whatever change was desirable could best be achieved by means of a reformation within the Catholic Church—that is, without disturbing the unity of its organization or denying the validity of its dogmas—while the critics of northern Europe, as we have seen, preferred to put their reforms into practice by means of a revolution—an out-and-out break with century-old traditions of Catholic Christianity. ”

“ Germany, including the Netherlands and Switzerland, was the stronghold of the Reformation. It was natural that such a movement should spring up and rise to its highest power among a people in whom a love of independence was mingled with a yearning for a more spiritual form of religion than was encouraged by mediæval ecclesiasticism. ”

“ And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. ”

“ Men were to be left free to join either the Reformed or the Catholic Church, and any person making war upon others, or molesting them because of their religion was to be accounted the public enemy of Germany.
42. Such was the fruit of the great revolution of the sixteenth century in Germany—religious liberty. To that end all the struggles tended, and its result was indeed glorious, worth all the tears and blood it had cost to gain it. But it was not a reformation, if by that is meant the bringing back of primitive Christianity. That the Reformers did not do. ”

“ The Relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance.—The series of revolts from the Catholic Church, generally known collectively as the ‘Reformation,’ may be regarded as closely connected with the Renaissance. As shown in the last chapter, humanism in the North led to a renewed study of the Scriptures and a reform of ecclesiastical doctrines and abuses, and took on a moral and religious color. Reformers arose, like Wimpfeling and Erasmus, who, while remaining within the Church, sought to purify it of corruption and obscurantism. ”

“ The claim to spiritual supremacy therefore involved endless interference with the rights of temporal sovereignty in every country in Europe, and things civil and things sacred were so inextricably mixed that it is quite impossible to speak of the Reformation as a purely religious movement. ”

“ Europe was imperilled before the Reformation, as it had often been imperilled before, but it might easily have been saved. Only a very few political incidents turned the scale against the recovering of unity, and produced the trouble from which we are increasingly suffering to-day. ”