Protestant Reformation

“ The act which commenced with the Protestant Reformation is nearly played out, and a wider and a deeper change than that effected three centuries ago—a reformation, or rather a revolution of thought, the extremes of which are represented by the intellectual heirs of John of Leyden, and of Ignatius Loyola, rather than by those of Luther and of Leo—is waiting to come on, nay, visible behind the scenes to those who have good eyes. ”

“ The Protestant Reformation claims the sixteenth century as exclusively its own. I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated that, by its most beautiful and most enduring parts and characteristics, the century belongs neither to Luther nor Calvin; but that the Catholic Church can exhibit it with just pride alike to her friends and her enemies. ”

“ We need not wonder that the Reformers, with all their influence, could not carry their reformation, on this head, to any thing like the Bible pattern, or to what they themselves saw to have been the primitive practice: when we consider that multitudes embraced the reformed doctrines, who gave no evidence of conversion to God, and that all who became Protestants, were admitted to fellowship with the Protestant churches. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, some readers may be ready to accuse us of placing the Roman Catholics of those times in too favourable a light. We can only reply that the same undoubted authorities have guided our pen. We will yield to no man in our attachment to Protestant principles, nor in our estimation of their paramount truth and value. We regard the liberation of mind effected by the Reformation as the source of all our present blessings, and our national preeminence. ”

“ In this respect, the principle of the Lutheran reformation was the common principle of all the Protestant reformers, as we may see in the fact that Protestantism, under any or all of its multitudinous forms, wherever not restrained by influences foreign to itself, tends incessantly to eliminate the supernatural, and to run into pure rationalism or naturalism. How absurd, then, to talk of "Protestant Catholicity, or of Catholic Protestantism"! ”

“ Under the specious pretence of deference to Antiquity and respect for primitive models, the foundations of the Protestant Church are undermined by men, who dwell within her walls, and those who sit in the Reformers' seat are traducing the Reformation. ”

“ The Protestant Reformation was one of the great stages in the conflict for freedom against the universal tyranny that had arisen, but the reformers very naturally retained a considerable portion of the bias against which they had fought. ”

“ From Romish night to the light of justification by faith, possessed among Protestant sects generally since the sixteenth century reformation, had been a great step upward. Also the Wesleyan reformation, bringing in the light of perfect holiness as a Christian attainment subsequent to regeneration, marked an advance for the truth in its progress by stages unto the end of time. There needed to be yet another step, another reformation, which should bring the church to her fulness of glory, and visualize her unity and solidarity. ”

“ The grand doctrine of the Reformation was that of justification by faith, and was therefore held by all the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The Papists assert that man’s inherent righteousness is the meritorious cause of his justification; many Protestant divines have endeavoured to unite the two, and have held that men are justified by faith and good works ”

“ Nor did the Protestant Reformation, which now came in, diminish them at first; it rather strengthened them and fixed them more firmly in the popular mind. They seemed destined to last forever. How they were thus strengthened at first, under Protestantism, and how they were finally dissolved away in the atmosphere of scientific thought, will be shown in the following chapter. ”

“ The necessary assumption which underlies the inherited Protestant history of the Reformation in the sixteenth century is the general corruption of manners and morals no less than of doctrine, and the ignorance of religious truths no less than the neglect of religious precepts on the part of both clergy and people. ”

“ Yet, under the name of Reformation and greater liberty, this grand march towards human perfection and eternal bliss was to be stayed, and even for a time turned backwards, so that morally and politically Christendom has not yet, nor is it likely for a long time, to recover from the shock which it experienced at the hands of the Protestant reformers, their aiders and abettors. ”

“ From the Reformation till the latter part of the last century, we are told, the Protestant Church dwelt chiefly on the human side of Christ, and since that time many works have been written to show how the two—perfect Deity and perfect manhood—were united in His character. ”

“ At first this compromise had worked in favour of the Reformation, but presently the Catholic princes began to turn it against their Protestant subjects. “Governments learned to oppress them wisely, depriving them of church and school, of pastor and schoolmaster; and by those nameless arts with which the rich used to coerce the poor in the good old days. Fervent preachers came amongst them, widely differing in morality, education, earnestness and eloquence from the parish clergy, whose deficiencies gave such succour to Luther. ”

“ The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant Reformation. ”

“ The longer we ponder our work the more are we convinced of its utility, and confirmed in our resolution to pursue it. Well aware, as we are, that the Reformation has proved a failure, except it be as a preparation for a higher form of Christianity to follow nearer the old landmarks, and free from the democratic tendencies that have crept into the Protestant Church from the institutions of the state, or which, perhaps, more properly have moulded the institutions of the state themselves as the natural outgrowth of the system taught by Luther and Calvin, we cannot but rejoice that this is so. ”

“ The real character of the Protestant movement was a movement in behalf of nationalism—the distinctive feature of Gentilism—revived by the insurgent worldly spirit. The church herself, in the nations that adhered to her, was defended against the so-called Reformation, except by the theologians, not on Catholic principles, but on national principles ”

“ The Reformation required to be reformed, and of this many pious and holy men were aware. At length, in 1694, a violent controversy arose in nearly all the Protestant churches of those two countries, in consequence of the attempts which were being made to promote a practical and vital religion. ”

“ Protestant theology is at the present day less hostile, so to speak, than the theologians. For whilst theology has levelled the strongest bulwarks and doctrinal barriers which the Reformation had set up to confirm the separation, the divines, instead of viewing favourably the consequent facilities for union, often labour, on the contrary, to conceal the fact, or to provide new points of difference. ”

“ 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 reformed Church of England was, for a protecting father, to be surrendered to a nursling of the Pope’s, who by his religion is, and must be, a determined enemy to the whole Reformation in general, and to the Church of England in particular; and is under the menaces and horrors of damnation, if he do not exert his whole policy and power to extirpate the Protestant name, and introduce a religion which is worse than none; as it professedly tolerates no other, and persecutes conscience, which is the source and seat of religion, the only source that any religion can have. ”

“ With regard to the influence of the Protestant Reformation on that temper of mind and habit of thought which have led sceptics and those whose faith has been overturned by the blasphemies of Calvin or the immoral principle of the Lutheran systems and their offshoots, to become votaries of Spiritualism, we cannot do better than put on record Mr. ”

“ But the Protestant view was apt to seem intangible, and the influence of the The Reformation.learned tradition was strong—for a time, indeed, doctrine was more cultivated among Protestants than in the Church of Rome. The result was a structure which is well named the Protestant scholasticism. The new view of faith is bracketed with the old, and practically neutralized by it ”

“ The strenuous endeavours put forth by the Roman Catholic church to restrict within the narrowest limits possible the victorious course of the Reformation, and so far as might be to reconquer lost ground, bulk so largely in its sixteenth century movement, that we may review that entire era in its history from the standpoint of the counter-reformation. ”

“ The sole justification of Protestantism was found in the abominable corruptions of Rome, and its only defence is that it is a purer worship, capable of creating a higher morality. The history of the Reformation, as written by Protestants, traces its origin to an awful and heaven-inspired indignation at the sight of papal iniquity, which resulted in a divine Protest against sin. It is this feeling, indeed, which is the living human magnetism in the words of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. ”

“ When Church writers no longer felt bound to exert all their powers of argument against Rome or rival modes of Protestantism, and when disputes about forms of government, rites, and ceremonies, and other externals of religion ceased to excite any strong interest, attention began to be turned in good earnest to the deeper and more fundamental issues involved in the Reformation. ”

“ He may be right; but we think, in discussing the future of Protestantism, he makes too much account of these pious persons; for if as well disposed as he assumes them to be, they can hardly fail, as time goes on and the real character of the Reformation becomes more and more manifest, to follow out their Christian tendency, and return to the communion of the Catholic Church. ”

“ But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. ”

“ On the other hand, the Church was not withdrawn from the every-day life of men; the division into a worldly and spiritual life, neither of which had much to do with the other, was a creation of the protestantism of the Reformation, and had no place in the practice at least of the mediæval Church, which we cannot too carefully remember is little more represented by modern Catholicism than by modern Protestantism. ”

“ In view of these and similar assertions, it is of interest and importance to ascertain, if possible, what really was the position of the Church in the eyes of the nation at large on the eve of the Reformation, to understand the attitude of men’s minds to the system as they knew it, and to discover, as far as may be, what in regard to religion they were doing and saying and thinking about, when the change came upon them. ”

“ The Reformation, you remember, is the characteristic of this century. We have traced it in Germany to its recognition as a separate and liberated faith. In England we are going to see Protestantism established and triumphant. But not yet; for we have first to notice a period when Protestantism seems at its last hour, when Mary, wife of the bigot Philip, and true and honourable daughter of the Church, is determined to restore her nation to the Romish chair, or die in the holy attempt. ”

“ Protestants wish not its destruction, but its reformation.
Some there may be, who, in their zeal for truth, would pull the whole edifice to pieces; but this is not God's method: he destroys what is evil, and saves what is good. It is reformation, not annihilation, that this Church needs. ”

“ This consisted in restricting the Protestants to certain boundaries, as if Protestantism was such an evil that it was necessary to confine it within the narrowest possible limits. It appeared as if the disciples of the Reformation were told, “Since you exist in the kingdom, we tolerate you; but remain where you are, and guard yourselves from trespassing. Unity of faith is our rule, dissent the exception; and far from authorizing it to spread, we will restrict it to the fullest extent of our power.” ”

“ We cannot but remember that libels scarcely less scandalous than those of Hebert, mummeries scarcely less absurd than those of Clootz, and crimes scarcely less atrocious than those of Marat, disgrace the early history of Protestantism. The Reformation is an event long past. ”