The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2), by Thomas M. Lindsay This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2) Author: Thomas M. Lindsay Release Date: September 18, 2012 [EBook #40798] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF REFORMATION, VOL 2 *** Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) The International Theological Library EDITED BY CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., Professor of Theological Encyclopædia and Symbolics, Union Theological Seminary, New York; AND The Late STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D., Principal, and Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament Exegesis, United Free Church College, Aberdeen. A HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. By THOMAS M. LINDSAY, D.D., LL.D. IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. II. INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY A HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION [Pg iii] [Pg v] BY THOMAS M. LINDSAY, D.D., LL.D. PRINCIPAL, THE UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW IN TWO VOLUMES Volume II THE REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND, FRANCE THE NETHERLANDS, SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND THE ANABAPTIST AND SOCINIAN MOVEMENTS THE COUNTER-REFORMATION WITH MAP OF THE REFORMATION AND COUNTER-REFORMATION (1520-1580). EDINBURGH T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1907 PREFACE. In this volume I have endeavoured to fulfil the promise made in the former one to describe the Reformed Churches, the Anabaptist and Socinian movements and the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. It has been based on a careful study of contemporary sources of information, and no important fact has been recorded for which there is not contemporary evidence. Full use has been made of work done by predecessors in the same field. The sources and the later books consulted have been named at the beginning of each chapter; but special reference is due to the writings of Professor Pollard on the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and to those of MM. Lemonnier and Mariéjol for the history of Protestantism in France. The sources consulted are, for the most part, printed in Calendars of State Papers issued by the various Governments of Europe, or in the correspondence of prominent men and women of the sixteenth century, edited and published for Historical and Archæological Societies; but the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, relating to the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, is little more than a brief account of the contents of the documents, and has to be supplemented by reference to the original documents in the Record Office. The field covered in this volume is so extensive that the accounts of the rise and progress of the Reformation in the various countries included had to be very much condensed. I have purposely given a larger space to the beginnings of each movement, believing them to be less known and more deserving of study. One omission must be noted. Nothing has been said directly about the Reformed Churches in Bohemia, Hungary, and the neighbouring lands. It would have been easy to devote a few pages to the subject: but such a brief description would have been misleading. The rise, continuance, and decline of these Churches are so inseparably connected with the peculiar social and political conditions of the countries, that no adequate or informing account of them could be given without largely exceeding the limits of space at my disposal. After the volume had been fully printed, and addition or alteration was impossible, two important documents bearing on subjects discussed came into my hands too late for references in the text. I have found that the Library of the Technical College in Glasgow contains a copy, probably unique, of the famous Hymn-book of the Brethren published at Ulm in 1538. It is entitled: Ein hubsch neu Gesangbuch darinnen begrieffen die Kirchenordnung und Geseng die zür Lants Kron und Fulneck in Behem, von der Christlichen Bruderschafft den Piccarden, die bishero für Unchristen und Ketzer gehalten, gebraucht und teglich Gutt zum Ehren gesungen werden. Gedruckt zu Ulm bey Hans Varnier. An. MDXXXVIII. I know of a copy of much later date in Nürnberg; but of no perfect copy of this early impression. It is sufficient to say that the book confirms what I have said of the character of the religion of the Brethren. Then in December 1906, Señor Henriques published at Lisbon the authentic records of the trial of George Buchanan and two fellow professors in the Coimbra College before the Inquisition. These records show that the prosecution had not been instigated by the Jesuits, as was generally conjectured, but was due to the malice of a former Principal of the College. The statement made on p. 556 has therefore to be corrected. [Pg vii] [Pg viii] [Pg ix] The kindness of the publishers has provided an historical map, which I trust will be found useful. It gives, I think for the first time, a representation to the eye of the wide extent of the Anabaptist movement. The red bars denote districts where contemporary documents attest the existence of Anabaptist communities. At least four maps, representing successive periods, would be needed to show with exactness the shifting boundaries of the various confessions: one map can only give the general results. My thanks are again due to my colleague, Dr. Denney, and to another friend, for the care they have taken in revising the proof sheets, and for many valuable suggestions. THOMAS M. LINDSAY. January, 1907. CONTENTS BOOK III. THE REFORMED CHURCHES. CHAPTER I. Introduction. PAGE § 1.The limitations of the Peace of Augsburg 1 § 2.The Reformation outside Germany 5 § 3.The Reformed type of Doctrine 6 § 4.The Reformed ideal of Ecclesiastical Government 7 § 5.The influence of Humanism on the Reformed Churches 9 § 6.What the Reformed Churches owed to Luther 13 § 7.National Characteristics as they affected the Reformation 18 CHAPTER II. The Reformation in Switzerland under Zwingli. § 1.The political condition of Switzerland 21 § 2.Zwingli’s youth and education 24 § 3.Zwingli at Glarus and at Einsiedeln 27 § 4.Zwingli in Zurich 29 § 5.The Public Disputations 33 § 6.The Reformation outside Zurich 38 In Basel—Oecolampadius and William Farel 38 [Pg xi] In Bern—The Ten Theses 40 In Appenzell and other Cantons 46 The Christian Civic League (Protestant). The Christian Union (Romanist) 48 § 7.The Sacramental Controversy 52 CHAPTER III. The Reformation in Geneva under Calvin. § 1.Geneva 61 § 2.The Reformation in Western Switzerland 66 Farel and his band of evangelists 71 § 3.Farel in Geneva 74 Bern, Freiburg, and Geneva 77 The Public Disputation and the Thèses Évangéliques 85 § 4.Calvin: Youth and education 92 Christianæ Religionis Institutio 99 § 5.Calvin with Farel in Geneva 102 Articuli de regimine ecclesiæ—Discipline in the Church 105 The theologians of Eastern Switzerland and excommunication 110 Calvin and Farel banished from Geneva 120 Calvin recalled to Geneva—Les ordonnances ecclésiastiques de l’Église de Genève 128 What Calvin did for Geneva 131 CHAPTER IV. The Reformation in France. § 1.Marguerite d’Angoulême and the “group of Meaux” 136 § 2.Attempts to repress the movement for Reform 144 § 3.Change in the character of the movement for Reform 151 § 4.Calvin and his influence in France 153 § 5.Persecution under Henry II. 161 [Pg xii] § 6.The organisation of the French Protestant Church 164 § 7.Reaction against persecution 169 § 8.The higher aristocracy won for the Reformation in France 171 § 9.France ruled by the Guises 173 § 10.Catherine de’ Medici becomes Regent 178 § 11. The Conference at Poissy 186 § 12.The massacre at Vassy 189 § 13.The beginning of the Wars of Religion 191 § 14.The massacre of St. Bartholomew 198 § 15.The Huguenot resistance after the massacre 200 § 16.The beginnings of the League 205 § 17.The League becomes disloyal 207 § 18.The day of Barricades 211 § 19. The King takes refuge with the Huguenots 214 § 20. The Declaration of Henry IV. 217 § 21.Henry IV. becomes a Roman Catholic 219 § 22. The Edict of Nantes 221 CHAPTER V. The Reformation in the Netherlands. § 1.The political situation 224 § 2.The beginnings of the Reformation 228 § 3.The Anabaptists in the Netherlands 234 § 4.Philip of Spain and the Netherlands 240 § 5.William of Orange 254 CHAPTER VI. The Reformation in Scotland. Preparation for the Reformation 274 [Pg xiii] Lollardy in Scotland 276 Lutheran writings in Scotland 279 The Beginnings of the Reformation 282 George Wishart 284 John Knox, early work in Scotland 285 Knox in England, in Switzerland, and at Frankfurt 286 The “Band subscrived by the Lords.” “The Congregation” 289 Knox’s final return to Scotland 293 Knox and Cecil. The English alliance 294 The Scots Confession of Faith 302 The First Book of Discipline, or the Policie and Discipline of the Church. The Book of Common Order 304 Return of Queen Mary to Scotland 309 BOOK IV. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. The Church of Henry viii. Influences in England making for the Reformation. Lollardy, Hatred of the Clergy, Humanism, Luther 315 The marriage of Henry and Catharine of Aragon, and the doubts entertained of its validity 322 The Revolt of England from Roman jurisdiction 325 The Ten Articles and the Injunctions 333 The Bishops’ Book, and its teaching 336 The English Bible 337 Projected alliance with the German Protestants 340 The visitation and dissolution of monasteries 343 The Six Articles and the King’s Book 347 CHAPTER II. [Pg xiv] The Reformation under Edward vi. The Injunctions and the Articles of Inquiry 351 The condition of the English Clergy 353 The First Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. 356 Continental Reformers in England 358 The Second Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. 361 Beginnings of the controversy about Vestments 364 CHAPTER III. The Reaction under Mary. The beginnings of Queen Mary’s reign 368 The restoration of England to the papal obedience 371 The Injunctions and the Visitation 374 The revival of heresy laws and the persecutions 375 The martyrdom of Cranmer 378 CHAPTER IV. The Settlement under Elizabeth. Elizabeth resolves to be a Protestant. The political situation 385 The Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity 390 The Elizabethan Prayer-Book 396 The Act of Uniformity and the Rubric about Ornaments 402 The dealings with recalcitrant clergymen 408 The Thirty-Nine Articles 411 How Discipline was regulated 417 The character of the Elizabethan settlement 418 BOOK V. ANABAPTISM AND SOCINIANISM. [Pg xv] CHAPTER I. Revival of Mediæval Anti-Ecclesiastical Movements. Mediæval Nonconformists 421 The Anti-Trinitarians 424 CHAPTER II. Anabaptism. The mediæval roots of Anabaptism 430 Anabaptism organisation 434 Varieties of teaching among the Anabaptists 437 Anabaptists object to a State Church 442 The Anabaptists in Switzerland. Their persecution 445 Anabaptist hymnology 449 The Kingdom of God in Münster 451 Bernhard Rothmann and his work in Münster 452 Dutch Anabaptists in Münster 459 Polygamy in Münster 463 CHAPTER III. Socinianism. Lelio and Fausto Sozzini 470 Socinianism took its rise from a criticism of Doctrines 473 Socinianism and the Scoto-Pelagian theology 474 The doctrines of God, the Work of Christ and the Church 477 BOOK VI. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION. CHAPTER I. The Necessity of a Reformation of some sort universally admitted. Variety of complaints against the mediæval Church 484 Formation of local churches 487 CHAPTER II. The Spanish Conception of a Reformation. § 1.The religious condition of Spain 488 § 2.The reformation under Ximenes 490 § 3.The Spaniards and Luther 493 § 4.Pope Adrian VI. and the Spanish Reformation 496 CHAPTER III. Italian liberal Roman Catholics and their Conception of a Reformation. § 1.The religious condition of Italy 501 § 2.Italian Roman Catholic Reformers 504 § 3.Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa 513 § 4.The Conference at Regensburg 519 CHAPTER IV. Ignatius Loyola and the Company of Jesus. § 1.At Manresa 525 § 2.Ignatius at Paris. The ecclesiastical situation at Paris 533 § 3.The Spiritual Exercises 538 § 4.Ignatius in Italy 545 § 5.The Society of Jesus 549 CHAPTER V. The Council of Trent. § 1.The assembling of the Council 564 [Pg xvi] § 2.Procedure at the Council 568 § 3.Restatement of Doctrines 570 The Doctrine of the Rule of Faith 572 Original Sin and Justification 575 § 4.The second meeting of the Council 581 § 5.The third meeting of the Council 587 The position of the Pope strengthened 593 CHAPTER VI. The Inquisition and the Index. § 1.The Inquisition in Spain 597 § 2.The Inquisition in Italy 600 § 3.The Index of prohibited books 602 § 4.The Society of Jesus and the Counter-Reformation 606 BOOK III. THE REFORMED CHURCHES. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. § 1. The Limitations of the Peace of Augsburg. The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) secured the legal recognition of the Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, and consequently within European polity. Henceforward States, which declared through their responsible rulers that they meant to live after the religion described in the Augsburg Confession, were admitted to the comity of nations, and the Pope was legally and practically debarred from excommunicating them, from placing them under interdict, and from inviting obedient neighbouring potentates to conquer and dispossess their sovereigns. The Bishop of Rome could no longer, according to the recognised custom of the Holy Roman Empire, launch a Bull against a Lutheran prince and expect to have its execution enforced as in earlier days. The Popes were naturally slow to see this, and had to be reminded of the altered state of matters more than once.[1] Of course, the exalted Romanist powers, civil and ecclesiastical, never meant this settlement to be lasting. They intrigued secretly among themselves, and fought openly, against it. The final determined effort to overthrow it was that hideous nightmare which goes by the name of the Thirty Years’ War, mainly caused by the determination of the Jesuits that by the help of God and the devil, for that, as Carlyle has remarked, was the peculiarity of the plan, all Germany must be brought back to the obedience of Holy Stepmother Church, and to submission to the Supreme Headship of the Holy Roman Empire—the Supreme Headship becoming more and more shadowy as the years passed. The settlement lasted, however, and remains in general outline until the present. But the Religious Peace of Augsburg did not end the revolt against Rome which was simmering in every land in Western [Pg xvii] [Pg 1] [Pg 2] Europe. It made no provision for the multitude of believers in the Augsburg Confession, whose princes, for conscience’ sake or for worldly policy, remained steadfast to Rome, save that they were to be permitted to emigrate to territories where the rulers were of the same faith as theirs. These Lutherans were to be found in every part of Germany, and were very abundant in the Duchy of Austria. The statement of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, that the only good Catholics in that city were himself and the Archduke Ferdinand, was, of course, rhetorical; but it is a proof of the numbers of the followers of Luther.[2] It chained irrevocably to the Romanist creed, by the clause called the ecclesiastical reservation, not merely the people, but the rulers in the numerous ecclesiastical principalities scattered all over Germany. This provision secured that if an ecclesiastical prince adopted the Lutheran faith, he was to be deprived of his principality. It is probable that this provision did more than anything else to secure for the Romanists the position they now have in Germany. It was partly due to the alarms excited by the fact that Albert of Brandenburg, Master of the Teutonic Knights, had secularised his land of East Prussia and had become a Lutheran, and by the narrow escape of the province of Köln from following in the same path, under its reforming archbishop, Hermann von Wied. The Peace of Augsburg made no provision for any Protestants other than those who accepted the Augsburg Confession; and thousands in the Palatinate and all throughout South Germany preferred another type of Protestant faith. It is probable that, had Luther lived for ten or fifteen years longer, the great division between the Reformed or Calvinist and the Evangelical or Lutheran Churches would have been bridged over; but after his death his successors, intent to maintain, as they expressed it, the deposit of truth which Luther had left, actually ostracised Melanchthon for his endeavour to heal the breach. The consequence was that the Lutheran Church within Germany after 1555 lost large districts to the Reformed Church. Under Elector Frederick III., surnamed the Pious, the territorial Church of the Palatinate separated from the circle of Lutheran Churches, and in 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism was published. This celebrated doctrinal formula at once became, and has remained, the distinctive creed of the various branches of the Reformed Church within Germany; and its influence extended even farther. Bremen followed the example of the Palatinate in 1568. Its divines published a doctrinal Declaration in 1572, and a more lengthy Consensus Bremenensis in 1595. Anhalt, under its ruler John George (1587-1603), did away with the consistorial system of Church government, and abandoned the use of Luther’s Catechism. Hesse-Cassel joined the circle of German Reformed Churches in 1605. These examples were followed in many smaller principalities, most of which, imitating all the Reformed Churches, published separate and distinctive confessions of faith, which were nevertheless supposed to contain the sum and substance of the common Reformed creed.[3] These German principalities, rulers and inhabitants, placed themselves deliberately outside the protection of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The fundamental principles of their faith were not very different from the Lutheran, but they were important enough to make them forego the protection which the treaty afforded. Setting aside minor differences and sentiments, perhaps more powerful than doctrines, their separation from neighbouring Protestants was based on their objection to the doctrine of Ubiquity, essential to the Lutheran theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, and to the consistorial system of ecclesiastical government. They repudiated the two portions of the Lutheran system which were derived professedly from the mediæval Church, and insisted on basing their exposition of doctrine and their scheme of ecclesiastical government more directly on the Word of God. They had come in contact with another reformation movement, had recognised its sturdier principles, and had become so enamoured of them that they felt compelled to leave the Lutheran Church for the Reformed. Still confining ourselves to Germany, it is to be noticed that the Augsburg Confession ostentatiously and over and over again separated those who accepted it from protesters against the mediæval Church, who were called Anabaptists. It repudiated views supposed to be held by them on Baptism, the Holy Scripture, the possibility of a life of sinless perfection, and the relation of Christian men to the magistracy. In some of the truces arranged between the Emperor and the evangelical princes,—truces which anticipated the religious Peace of Augsburg,—attempts were made to induce Lutherans and Romanists to unite in suppressing those sectaries. It is needless to say that they were not included in the settlement in 1555. Yet they had spread all over Germany, endured with constancy bloody persecutions, and from them have come the large and influential Baptist Churches in Europe and America. From beginning to end they were outside the Lutheran Reformation. § 2. The Reformation outside Germany. When we go beyond Germany and survey the other countries of Western Europe, it is abundantly evident that the story of the Lutheran movement from its beginning down to its successful issue in the Religious Peace of Augsburg is only a small part of the history of the Reformation. France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Bohemia, Hungary, even Italy, Spain, and Poland, throbbed with the religious revival of the sixteenth century, and its manifestations in these lands differed in many respects from that which belonged to Germany. All shared with Germany the common experiences, intellectual and religious, political and economic, of that period of transition which is called the Renaissance in the wider sense of the word—the transition from mediæval to modern life.[4] They had all come to the parting of the ways. They had all emerged from Mediævalism, and all saw the wider outlook which was the heritage of the time. All felt the same longing to shake themselves clear of the incubus of clericalism which weighed heavily on their national life, whether religious or political. Each land went forward, marching by its own path marked out for it by its past history, intellectual, [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] religious, and civil. The movements in these various countries towards a freer and more real religious life cannot be described in the same general terms; but if Italy and Spain be excepted, their attempts at a national reformation had one thing in common which definitely separated them from the Lutheran movement. § 3. The Reformed type of Doctrine. If the type of doctrine professed by the Protestants in those countries be considered (confessedly a partial, one-sided, and imperfect standard), it may be said that they all refused to accept some of the distinctive Lutheran dogmatic conclusions, and that they all departed more widely from some of the conceptions of the Mediæval Church. Their national confessions in their final forms borrowed more from Zurich and Geneva than from Wittenberg, and they all belong to the Reformed as distinguished from the Lutheran or Evangelical circle of creeds.[5] It was perhaps natural that differences in the ritual and theory of the Holy Supper, the very apex and crown of Christian Public Worship, should be to the general eye the visible cleavage between rival forms of Christianity. In the earlier stages of the Reformation movement, the great popular distinction between the Romanists and Protestants was that the one refused and the other admitted the laity to partake of the Cup of Communion; and later, within an orthodox Protestantism, the thought of ubiquity was the dividing line. The Lutherans asserted and the Reformed denied or ignored the doctrine; and those confessions took the Reformed view. § 4. The Reformed ideal of Ecclesiastical Government. This similarity of published creed was the one positive bond which united all those Churches; but it may also be said that all of them, with the doubtful exception of the Church of England,[6] would have nothing to do with the consistorial system of the Lutheran Churches, and that most of them accepted in theory at least Calvin’s conception of ecclesiastical government. They strove to get away from the mediæval ideas of ecclesiastical rule, and to return to the principles which they believed to be laid down for them in the New Testament, illustrated by the conduct of the Church of the early centuries. The Church, according to Calvin, was a theocratic democracy, and the ultimate source of authority lay in the membership of the Christian community, inspired by the Presence of Christ promised to all His people. But in the sixteenth century this conception was confronted and largely qualified in practice, by the dread that it might lead to a return to the clerical tutelage of the mediæval Church from which they had just escaped. Presbyter might become priest writ large; and the leaders of the Reformation in many lands could see, as Zwingli did in Zurich and Cranmer in England, that the civil authorities might well represent the Christian democracy. Even Calvin in Geneva had to content himself with ecclesiastical ordinances which left the Church completely under the control of les très honnorès seigneurs syndicques et conseil de Genève; and the Scottish Church in 1572 had to recognise that the King was the “Supreme Governor of this realm as well in things temporal as in the conservation and purgation of religion.” The nations and principalities in Western Europe which had adopted and supported the Reformation believed that manifold abuses had arisen in the past, directly and indirectly, through the exemption of the Church and its possessions from secular control, and they were determined not to permit the possibility of a return to such a state of things. The scholarship of the Renaissance had discovered the true text of the old Roman Civil Code, and one of the features of that time of transition—perhaps its most important and far-reaching feature, for law enters into every relation of human life—was the substitution of civil law based on the Codes of Justinian and Theodosius, for canon law based on the Decretum of Gratian. These old Roman codes taught the lawyers and statesmen of the sixteenth century to look upon the Church as a department of the State; and the thought that the Christian community had an independent life of its own, and that its guidance and discipline ought to be in the hands of office-bearers chosen by its membership, was everywhere confronted, modified, largely overthrown by the imperious claim of the civilian lawyers. Ecclesiastical leaders within the Reformed Churches might strive as they liked to draw the line between the possessions of the Church, which they willingly placed under the control of civil law, and its discipline in matters of faith and morals, which they declared to be the inalienable possession of the Church; but, as a rule, the State refused to perceive the distinction, and insisted in maintaining full control over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Hence it came about that in every land where the secular authorities were favourable to the Reformation, the Church became more or less subject to the State; and this resulted in a large variety of ecclesiastical organisations in communities all belonging to the Reformed Church. While it may be said with perfect truth that the churchly ideal in the minds of the leaders in most of the Reformed Churches was to restore the theocratic democracy of the early centuries, and that this was a strong point of contrast between them and Luther, who insisted that the jus episcopale belonged to the civil magistrate, in practice the secular authorities in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Palatinate, etc., kept almost as tight a hold on the Reformed national Churches as did the Lutheran princes and municipalities. In one land only, France, the ecclesiastical ideal of Calvin had full liberty to embody itself in a constitution, and that only because the French Reformed Church struggled into existence under the civil rule of a Romanist State, and, like the Christian Church of the early centuries, maintained itself in spite of the opposition of the secular authorities which persecuted it. § 5. The Influence of Humanism on the Reformed Churches. The portion of the Reformation which lay outside the Peace of Augsburg had another characteristic which distinguished it from the Lutheran Reformation included within the treaty—it owed much more to Humanism. Erasmus and what he represented had a greater share in its birth and early progress, and his influence appeared amidst the most dissimilar surroundings. Henry VIII. and Zwingli seem to stand at opposite poles; yet the English autocrat and the Swiss [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] [Pg 10] democrat were alike in this, that they owed much to Erasmus, and that the reformations which they respectively led were largely prompted by the impulse of Humanism. One has only to compare the Bishops’ Book and the King’s Book of the Henrican period in England with the many statements Erasmus has made about the kind of reformation he desired to see, to recognise that they were meant to serve for a reformation in life and morals which would leave untouched the fundamental doctrinal system of the mediæval Church and its organisation in accordance with the principles laid down by the great Humanist. The Bible, the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, with the doctrinal decisions of the first four Œcumenical Councils, were recognised as the standards of orthodoxy in the Ten Articles; and the Scholastic Theology, so derided by Erasmus, was contemptuously ignored. The accompanying Injunctions set little store by pilgrimages, relics, and indulgences, and the other superstitions of the popular religious life which the great Humanist had treated sarcastically. The two books alluded to above are full of instructions for leading a wholesome life. The whole programme of reformation is laid down on lines borrowed from Erasmus. Zwingli was under the influence of Humanism from his boyhood. His young intellect was fed on the masterpieces of classical antiquity—Cicero, Homer, and Pindar. 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. It aimed at a clearer understanding of the Holy Scriptures, at the purgation of the popular religious life from idolatry and superstition, and at a clearly reasoned out scheme of intellectual belief. The deeper religious impulse which drove Luther, step by step, in his path of revolt from the mediæval Church was lacking in Zwingli. He owed little to Wittenberg, much to Rotterdam. It was this connection with Erasmus that created the sympathy between Zwingli and such early Dutch Reformers as Christopher Hoen, and made the Swiss Reformer a power in the earlier stages of the Reformation in the Netherlands. The beginnings of the Reformation movement in France, Italy, and Spain were even more closely allied to Humanism. If the preparation for reformation to be found in the work and teaching of mediæval evangelical nonconformists like the Picards be set aside, the beginnings of the Reformation in France must be traced to the small group of Christian Humanists who surrounded Marguerite d’Angoulême and Briçonnet the Bishop of Meaux. Marguerite herself and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the real leader of the group of scholars and preachers, found solace for soul troubles in the Christian Platonism to which so many of the Humanists north and south of the Alps had given themselves. The aim of the little circle of enthusiasts was a reformation of the Church and of society on the lines laid down by Erasmus. They looked to reform without “tumult,” to a reformation of the Church by the Church and within the Church, brought about by a study of the Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St. Paul, by individual Christians weaning themselves from the world while they remained in society, and by slowly leavening the people with the enlightenment which the New Learning was sure to bring. They cared little for theology, much for intimacy with Christ; little for external changes in institutions, much for personal piety. Their efforts had little visible effect, and their via media between the stubborn defenders of Scholasticism on the one hand and more thorough Reformers on the other, was found to be an impossible path to persevere in; but it must not be forgotten that they did much to prepare France for the Reformation movement which they really inaugurated; nor that William Farel, the precursor of Calvin himself in Geneva, belonged to the “group of Meaux.” If Humanism influenced the “group of Meaux,” who were the advance guard of the French Reformation, it manifested itself no less powerfully in the training of Calvin, who in 1536 unconsciously became the leader of the movement. He was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic students of the band of “royal lecturers” appointed by Francis I. to give France the benefits of the New Learning. He had intimate personal relations with Budé and Cop, who were allied to the “group of Meaux,” and were leaders among the Humanists in the University. His earliest book, a Commentary on the De Clementia of Seneca, shows how wide and minute was his knowledge of the Greek and Latin classical authors. 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. It filled him with a generous indignation at the evils which flowed from an abuse of absolute and arbitrary power. The young scholar (he was only three-and-twenty) attacked the governmental abuses of the times with a boldness which revived the best traditions of Roman statesmanship. He denounced venal judges who made “justice a public merchandise.” He declared that princes who slew their people or subjected them to wholesale persecution were not legitimate rulers, but brigands, and that brigands were the enemies of the whole human race. At a time when persecution was prevalent everywhere, the Commentary of the young Humanist pleaded for tolerance in language as lofty as Milton employed in his Areopagitica. He was not blind to the defects of the stoical morality displayed in the book he commented upon. He contrasted the stoical indifference with Christian sympathy, and stoical individualism with the thought of Christian society; but he seized upon and made his own the loftier moral ideas in Stoicism, and applied them to public life. Luther was great, none greater, in holding up the liberty of the Christian man; but there he halted, or advanced beyond it with very faltering step. Humanism taught Calvin the claims and the duties of the Christian society; he proclaimed them aloud, and his thoughts spread throughout that portion of the Reformation which followed his leadership and accepted his principles. The Holy Scriptures, St. Augustine, and the imperial ethics of the old Roman Stoicism coming through Humanism, were a trinity of [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] influence on all the Reformed Churches. The Reformation in Spain and Italy was only a brief episode; but in its short-lived existence in these lands, Humanism was one of the greatest forces supporting it and giving it strength. In both countries the young life was quenched in the blood of martyrs. So quickly did it pass, that it seems surprising to learn that Erasmus confidently expected that Spain would be the land to accomplish the Reformation without “tumult” which he so long looked forward to and expected; that the Scriptures were read throughout the Spanish peninsula, and that women vied with men in knowledge of their contents, during the earlier part of the sixteenth century. § 6. What the Reformed Churches owed to Luther. There was, then, a Reformation movement which in its earliest beginnings and in its final outcome was quite distinct from that under the leadership of Luther; but it would be erroneous to say that it was altogether outside Luther’s influence, and that it owed little or nothing to the great German Reformer. It is vain to speculate on what might have been, or to ask whether the undoubted movements making for reformation in lands outside Germany would have come to fruition had not Luther’s trumpet-call sounded over Europe. It is enough to state what did actually occur. If it cannot be said that the beginnings of the Reformation in every land came from Luther, it can scarcely be denied that he gave to his contemporaries the inspiration of courage and of assured conviction. 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. His teaching had a sounding board of dramatic environment which compelled men to listen, to attend, to be impressed, to understand, and to follow. He had been and was a deeply pious man, with the piety of the type most esteemed by his contemporaries, and therefore easily understood and sympathised with by the common man. His piety had driven him into the convent, as then seemed both natural and necessary. Inside the monastery he had lived the life of a “young saint”—so his fellow monks believed, when, in the fashion of the day and of their class, they boasted that they had among them one destined to revive again the best type of mediæval saintship. No coarse, vulgar sins of the flesh, common enough at the time and easily condoned, smirched his young life. When he attained to peace in believing, he had no doubt of his vocation; no sudden wrench tore him away from the approved religious life of his time; no intellectual doubt separated him from the beliefs of his Church. His very imperviousness to the intellectual liberalising tendencies of Humanism made him all the more fit to be a trusted religious leader. He went forward step by step with such a slow, sure foot-tread that the common man could see and follow. When he did come forward as a Reformer he did not run amuck at things in general. He felt compelled to attack the one portion of the popular religious life of the times which all men who gave the slightest thought to religion felt to be a gross abuse. The way he dealt with it revealed that he was the great religious genius of his age—an age which was imperatively if confusedly calling for reform within the sphere of religion. If to be original means simply to be the first to see and make known a single truth or a fresh aspect of a truth, it is possible to contest the claim of Luther to be an original thinker. It would not be difficult to point out anticipations of almost every separate truth which he taught to his generation. To take two only—Wessel had denounced indulgences in language so similar to Luther’s, that, when the Reformer read it long after the publication of the Theses, he could say that people might well imagine that he had simply borrowed from the old Dutch theologian; and Lefèvre d’Étaples had taught the doctrine of justification by faith before it had flashed on Luther’s soul with all the force of a revelation. But if originality be the gift to seize, to combine into one organic whole, separate isolated truths, to see their bearing upon the practical religious life of all men, educated and ignorant, to use the new light to strip the common religious life of all paralysing excrescences, to simplify it and to make it clear that the sum and essence of Christianity is “unwavering trust of the heart in Him who has given Himself to us in Christ Jesus as our Father, personal assurance of faith because Christ with His work undertakes our cause,” and to do all this with the tenderest sympathy for every true dumb religious instinct which had made men wander away from the simplicity which is in Christ Jesus, then Luther stands alone in his day and generation, unapproachable by any other. Hence it was that to the common people in every land in Europe up till about 1540, when Calvin’s individuality began to make itself felt, Luther represented the Reformation; and all who accepted the new teaching were known as Lutherans, whether in England, the Low Countries, France, or French speaking Switzerland.[7] Ecclesiastical historians of the Reformed Church from the sixteenth century downward have often been inclined to share Luther’s supremacy with Zwingli. The Swiss Reformer was gifted with many qualities which Luther lacked. He stood in freer relation to the doctrines and practices of the mediæval Church, and his scheme of theology was perhaps wider and truer than Luther’s. He had a keener intellectual insight, and was quicker to discern the true doctrinal tendencies of their common religious verities. But the way in which he regarded indulgences, and his manner of protesting against them, showed his great inferiority to Luther as a religious guide. “Oh the folly of it!” said Zwingli with his master Erasmus,—“the crass, unmitigated stupidity of it all!” and they scorned it, and laughed at it, and attacked it with the light keen shafts of raillery and derisive wit. “Oh the pity of it!” said Luther; and he turned men travelling by the wrong road on their quest for pardon (a real quest for them) into the right path. Zwingli never seemed to see that under the purchase of indulgences, the tramping on pilgrimages from shrine to shrine, the kissing, reverencing, and adoring of relics, there was a real inarticulate cry for pardon of sins felt if not vividly [Pg 14] [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] repented of. Luther knew it, and sympathised with it. He was a man of the people, not merely because he was a peasant’s son and had studied at a burgher University, but because he had shared the religion of the common people. He had felt with them that the repeated visits of the plague, the new mysterious diseases, the dread of the Turks, were punishments sent by God because of the sins of the generation. He had gone through it all; plunged more deeply in the terror, writhed more hopelessly under the wrath of God, wandered farther on the wrong path in his quest for pardon, and at last had seen the “Beatific Vision.” The deepest and truest sympathy with fellow-men and the vision of God are needed to make a Reformer of the first rank, and Luther had both as no other man had, during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. So men listened to him all over Europe wherever there had been a stirring of the heart for reformation, and it would be hard to say where there had been none. Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles in the east; Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutch, and Scots in the west; Swedes in the north, and Italians in the south—all welcomed, and read, and were moved by what Luther wrote. First the Theses, then sermons and tracts, then the trumpet call To the Nobility of the German Nation and the Præludium to the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of Christ, and, above all, his booklet On the Liberty of a Christian Man. As men read, what had been only a hopeful but troubled dream of the night became a vision in the light of day. They heard proclaimed aloud in clear unfaltering speech what they had scarcely dared to whisper to themselves. Fond and devout imaginations became religious certainties. They risked all to get possession of the sayings of this “man of God.” Cautious, dour Scotch burghers ventured ship and cargo for the sake of the little quarto tracts hid in the bales of cloth which came to the ports of Dundee and Leith. Oxford and Cambridge students passed them from hand to hand in spite of Wolsey’s proclamations and Warham’s precautions. Luther’s writings were eagerly studied in Paris by town and University as early as May 1519.[8] Spanish merchants bought Luther’s books at the Frankfurt Fair, spent some of their hard won profits in getting them translated and printed in Spanish, and carried them over the Pyrenees on their pack mules. 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; but the influence of his writings was like that of the sun when it quickens and makes the seed sprout that has been “happed” in a tilled and sown field. § 7. National Characteristics. It was not that the Reformation in any of these countries was to become Lutheran in the end, or had a Lutheran stage of development. The number of genuine Lutherans outside Germany and Scandinavia was very small. Here and there a stray one was to be found, like Dr. Barnes in England or Louis Berquin in France. One of the deepest principles of the great Reformer’s teaching itself checked the idea of a purely Lutheran Reformation which would embrace the whole Reformation Church. He taught that the practical exercise of faith ought to manifest itself within the great institutions of human life which have their origin in God—in marriage, the family, the calling, and the State, in the ordinary life we lead with its environment. Nations have their character and characteristics as well as individual men, and they mould in natural ways the expression in creed and institution of the religious certainties shared by all. The Reformation in England was based on the same spiritual facts and forces which were at work in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, but each land had its own ways of embodying them. It is interesting to note how national habits, memories, and even prejudices compelled the external embodiment to take very varying shapes, and force the historian to describe the Reformation in each country as something by itself. The new spiritual life in England took a shape distinctly marked out for it by the almost forgotten reformatory movement under Wiclif which had been native to the soil. Scotland might have been expected to follow the lead of England, and bring her ecclesiastical reconstruction into harmony with that of her new and powerful ally. The English alliance was the great political fact of the Scottish Reformation, and leading statesmen in both countries desired the still nearer approach which conformity in the organisation of the Churches could not fail to foster. But the memory of the old French alliance was too strong for Cecil and Lethington, and Scotland took her methods of Church government from France (not from Geneva), and drifted farther and farther away from the model of the English settlement. The fifteenth century War of the Public Weal repeated itself in the Wars of Religion in France; and in the Edict of Nantes the Reformed Church was offered and accepted guarantees for her independence such as a feudal prince might have demanded. The old political local independence which had characterised the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages reasserted itself in the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Netherlands. The civic republics of Switzerland demanded and received an ecclesiastical form of government which suited the needs of their social and political life. Yet amidst all this diversity there was the prevailing sense of an underlying unity, and the knowledge that each national Church was part of the Catholic Church Reformed was keener than among the Lutheran Churches. Protestant England in the time of Edward VI. welcomed and supported refugees banished by the Augsburg Interim from Strassburg. Frankfurt received and provided for families who fled from the Marian persecutions in England. Geneva became a city of refuge for oppressed Protestants from every land, and these strangers frequently added quite a third to her population. The feeling of fraternity was maintained, as in the days of the early Church, by constant interchange of letters and messengers, and correspondence gave a sense of unity which it was impossible to embody in external political organisation. The sense of a common danger was also a wonderful bond of kinship; and the feeling that Philip of Spain was always plotting their destruction, softened inter-ecclesiastical jealousies. The same sort of events occurred in all the [Pg 18] [Pg 19] [Pg 20]