CHAPTER VI.
HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.
_Advance of the Reformation--Differences of Opinion--Erasmus--The Protestant Opinions spread farther--Their Prevalence in Italy-- Reaction of Church of Rome--Theological Writings--Luther--Spirit of the Reformation--Translations of Scripture._
|Progress of the Reformation.|
1. The separation of part of Europe from the church of Rome is the great event that distinguishes these thirty years. But as it is not our object to traverse the wide field of civil or ecclesiastical history, it will suffice to make a few observations rather in reference to the spirit of the times, than to the public occurrences that sprung from it. The new doctrine began to be freely preached, and with immense applause of the people, from the commencement of this period, or, more precisely, from the year 1522, in many parts of Germany and Switzerland; the Duke of Deuxponts in that year, or, according to some authorities, in 1523, having led the way in abolishing the ancient ceremonies, and his example having been successively followed in Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, Brunswick, many imperial cities, and the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, by the disciples of Luther; while those who adhered to Zwingle made similar changes in several cantons of Switzerland.
|Interference of civil power.|
2. The magistrates generally proceeded, especially at the outset, with as great caution and equity as were practicable in so momentous a revolution; though perhaps they did not always respect the laws of the empire. They commonly began by allowing freedom of preaching, and forbad that any one should be troubled about his religion. This, if steadily acted upon, repressed the tumultuous populace, who were eager for demolishing images, the memorials of the old religion, as much as it did the episcopal courts, which, had they been strong enough, might have molested those who so plainly came within their jurisdiction. The Reformation depended chiefly on zealous and eloquent preachers; the more eminent secular clergy, as well as many regulars, having espoused its principles. They encountered no great difficulty in winning over the multitude; and when thus a decisive majority was obtained, commonly in three or four years from the first introduction of free preaching, the government found it time to establish, by a general edict, the abolition of the mass, and of such ceremonies as they did not deem it expedient to retain. The conflict between the two parties in Germany seems to have been less arduous than we might expect. It was usually accompanied by an expulsion of the religious of both sexes from their convents, a measure, especially as to women, unjust and harsh,[675] and sometimes by an alienation of ecclesiastical revenues to the purposes of the state, but this was not universal in Germany, nor was it countenanced by Luther. I cannot see any just reason to charge the Protestant princes of the empire with having been influenced generally by such a motive. In Sweden, however, the proceedings of Gustavus Vasa, who confiscated all ecclesiastical estates, subject only to what he might deem a sufficient maintenance for the possessors, have very much the appearance of arbitrary spoliation.[676]
[675] Bilibald Pirckheimer wrote to Melanchthon complaining that a convent of nuns at Nuremberg, among whom were two of his sisters, had been molested and insulted because they would not accept confessors appointed by the senate. Res eo deducta est ut quicunque miserandas illas offendere et incessere audet, obsequium Deo se præstitisse arbitretur. Idque non solum a viris agitur, sed et a mulieribus; et illis mulieribus, quarum liberis omnem exhibuere caritatem. Non solum enim viris, qui alios docere contendunt, se ipsos vero minime emendant, urbs nostra referta est, sed et mulieribus curiosis, garrulis et otiosis, quæ omnia potius quam domum propriam gubernare satagunt. Pirckheimer Opera, Frankf. 1610, p. 375. He was a moderate man, concurring with the Lutherans in most of their doctrine, but against the violation of monastic vows. Several letters passed between him and Erasmus. The latter, though he could not approve the hard usage of women, hated the monks so much, that he does not greatly disapprove what was done towards them. In Germaniâ multa virginum ac monachorum monasteria crudeliter direpta sunt. Quidam magistratus agunt moderatius. Ejecerunt eos duntaxat, qui illic non essent professi, et vetuerunt novitios recipi; ademerunt illis curam virginum, et jus alibi concionandi quam in suis monasteriis. Breviter, absque magistratus permissu nihil licet illis agere. Videntur huc spectare, ut ex monasteriis faciant parochias. Existimant enim hos conjuratos phalangas et tot privilegiis armatos diutius ferri non posse. (Basil. Aug. 1525.) Epist. Dcccliv. Multis in locis durè tractati sunt monachi; verum plerique cum sint intolerabiles, alia tamen ratione corrigi non possunt. Epist. Dcclvii.
[676] Gerdes Hist. Evangel. Reform. Seckendorf, et alii supra nominati. The best account I have seen of the Reformation in Denmark and Sweden is in the third volume of Gerdes, p. 279, &c.
|Excitement of revolutionary spirit.|
3. But while these great innovations were brought in by the civil power, and sometimes with too despotic a contempt of legal rights, the mere breaking up of old settlements had so disturbed the minds of the people, that they became inclined to further acts of destruction, and more sweeping theories of revolution. It is one of the fallacious views of the Reformation, to which we have adverted in a former page, to fancy that it sprung from any notions of political liberty, in such a sense as we attach to the word. But, inasmuch as it took away a great deal of coercive jurisdiction exercised by the bishops, without substituting much in its place, it did unquestionably relax the bonds of laws not always unnecessary; and inasmuch as the multitude were in many parts instrumental in destroying by force the exterior symbols of the Roman worship, it taught them a habit of knowing and trying the efficacy of that popular argument. Hence the insurrection of the German peasants in 1525 may, in a certain degree, be ascribed to the influence of the new doctrine; and, in fact, one of their demands was the establishment of the Gospel. But as the real cause of that rebellion was the oppressive yoke of their lords, which, in several instances before the Reformation was thought of, had led to similar efforts at relief, we should not lay too much stress on this additional incitement.[677]
[677] Seckendorf.
|Growth of fanaticism.|
4. A more immediate effect of overthrowing the ancient system was the growth of fanaticism, to which, in its worst shape, the antinomian extravagances of Luther yielded too great encouragement. But he was the first to repress the pretences of the Anabaptists;[678] and when he saw the danger of general licentiousness which he had unwarily promoted, he listened to the wiser counsels of Melanchthon, and permitted his early doctrine upon justification to be so far modified, or mitigated in expression, that it ceased to give apparent countenance to immorality; though his differences with the church of Rome, as to the very question from which he had started, thus became of less practical importance, and less tangible to ordinary minds than before.[679] Yet in his own writings we may find to the last such language as to the impossibility of sin in the justified man, who was to judge solely by an internal assurance as to the continuance of his own justification, as would now be universally condemned in all our churches, and is hardly to be heard from the lips of the merest enthusiast.
[678] Id. Melanchthon was a little staggered by the first Anabaptists, who appeared during the concealment of Luther in the castle of Wartburg. Magnis rationibus, he says, adducor certè ut contemnere eos nolim, nam esse in iis spiritus quosdam multis argumentis apparet, sed de quibus judicare præter Martinum nemo facile possit. As to infant baptism, he seemed to think it a difficult question. But the Elector observed that they passed for heretics already, and it would be unwise to moot a new point. Luther, when he came back, rejected the pretences of the Anabaptists at once.
[679] See two remarkable passages in Seckendorf, part ii. p. 90, and p. 106. The æra of what may be called the palinodia of early Lutheranism was in 1527, when Melanchthon drew up instructions for the visitation of the Saxon churches. Luther came into this; but it produced that jealousy of Melanchthon among the rigid disciples, such as Amsdorf and Justus Jonas, which led to the molestation of his latter years. In 1537, Melanchthon writes to a correspondent: Scis me quædam minus horridè dicere, de prædestinatione, de assensu voluntatis, de necessitate obedientiæ nostræ, de peccato mortali. De his omnibus scio re ipsa Lutherum sentire eadem, sed ineruditi quædam ejus Φορτικωτερα [Phortikôtera] dicta, cum non videant quo pertineant, nimium amant. Epist. p. 445. (edit. 1647.)
I am not convinced that this apology for Luther is sufficient. Words are of course to be explained, when ambiguous, by the context and scope of the argument. But when single detached aphorisms, or even complete sentences in a paragraph, bear one obvious sense, I do not see that we can hold the writer absolved from the imputation of that meaning, because he may somewhere else have used a language inconsistent with it. If the Colloquia Mensalia are to be fully relied upon, Luther continued to talk in the same antinomian strain as before, though he grew sometimes more cautious in writing. See chap. xii. of that work; and compare with the passages quoted by Milner, v. 517, from the second edition (in 1536) of his Commentary on the Galatians. It would be well to know if these occur in that of 1519. But Luther had not gone greater lengths than Melanchthon himself.
|Differences of Luther and Zwingle.|
5. It is well known that Zwinglius, unconnected with Luther in throwing off his allegiance to Rome, took in several respects rather different theological views, but especially in the article of the real presence, asserted by the Germans as vigorously as in the Church of Rome, though with a modification sufficient, in the spirit of uncompromising orthodoxy, to separate them entirely from her communion, but altogether denied by the Swiss and Belgian reformers. The attempts made to disguise this division of opinion, and to produce a nominal unanimity by ambiguous and incoherent jargon, belong to ecclesiastical history, of which they form a tedious and not very profitable portion.
|Confession of Augsburg.|
6. The Lutheran princes, who the year before had acquired the name of Protestants, by their protest against the resolutions of the majority in the diet of Spire, presented in 1530 to that held at Augsburg the celebrated confession, which embodies their religious creed. It has been said that there are material changes in subsequent editions, but this is denied by the Lutherans. Their denial can only be as to the materiality, for the fact is clear.[680]
[680] Bossuet, Variations des Eglises Protestantes, vol. i. Seckendorf, p. 170. Clement, Bibliothèque Curieuse, vol. ii. In the editions of 1531 we read: De cœna Domini docent, quod corpus et sanguis Christi vere adsint, et distribuantur vescentibus in cœna Domini, et improbant secus docentes. In those of 1540, it runs thus: De cœna Domini docent, quod cum pane et vino vere exhibeantur corpus et sanguis Christi vescentibus in cœna Domini.
|Conduct of Erasmus.|
7. Meantime, it was not all the former opponents of abuses in the church who now served under the banner of either Luther or Zwingle. Some few, like Sir Thomas More, went violently back to the extreme of maintaining the whole fabric of superstition; a greater number, without abandoning their own private sentiments, shrunk, for various reasons, from an avowed separation from the church. Such we may reckon Faber Stapulensis, the most learned Frenchman of that age after Budæus; such perhaps was Budæus himself;[681] and such were Bilibaldus Pirckheimer,[682] Petrus Mosellanus, Beatus Rhenanus, and Wimpfeling, all men of just renown in their time. Such, above all, was Erasmus himself, the precursor of bolder prophets than himself, who, in all his later years, stood in a very unenviable state, exposed to the shafts of two parties who forgave no man that moderation which was a reproach to themselves. At the beginning of this period, he had certainly an esteem for Melanchthon, Œcolampadius, and other reformers; and though already shocked by the violence of Luther, which he expected to ruin the cause altogether, had not begun to speak of him with disapprobation.[683] In several points of opinion, he professed to coincide with the German reformers; but his own temper was not decisive; he was capable of viewing a subject in various lights; his learning, as well as natural disposition, kept him irresolute; and it might not be easy to determine accurately the tenets of so voluminous a theologian. One thing was manifest, that he had greatly contributed to the success of the Reformation. It was said, that Erasmus had laid the egg, and Luther had hatched it. Erasmus afterwards, when more alienated from the new party, observed, that he had laid a hen’s egg, but Luther had hatched a crow’s.[684] Whatever was the bird, it pecked still at the church. In 1522, came out the Colloquies of Erasmus, a book even now much read, and deserving to be so. It was professedly designed for the instruction and amusement of youth; but both are conveyed at the expense of the prevalent usages in religion. The monkish party could not be blind to its effect. The faculty of theology at Paris, in 1526, led by one Beda, a most bigoted enemy of Erasmus, censured the Colloquies for slighting the fasts of the church, virginity, monkery, pilgrimages, and other established parts of the religious system. They incurred of course the displeasure of Rome, and have several times been forbidden to be read in schools. Erasmus pretended that in his Ιχθυοφαγια [Ichthyophagia] he only turned into ridicule the abuse of fasting, and not the ordinances of the church. It would be difficult, however, to find out this distinction in the dialogue, or, indeed, anything favourable to the ecclesiastical cause in the whole book of Colloquies. The clergy are everywhere represented as idle and corrupt. No one who desired to render established institutions odious could set about it in a shorter or surer way; and it would be strange if Erasmus had not done the church more harm by such publications than he could compensate by a few sneers at the reformers in his private letters. In the single year 1527, Colinæus printed 24,000 copies of the Colloquies, all of which were sold.
[681] Budæus was suspected of Protestantism, and disapproved many things in his own church; but the passages quoted from him by Gerdes, i. 186, prove that he did not mean to take the leap.
[682] Gerdes, vol. i. § 66-83. We have seen above the moderation of Pirckheimer in some respects. I am not sure, however, that he did not comply with the Reformation after it was established at Nuremberg.
[683] Male metuo misero Luthero; sic undique fervet conjuratio; sic undique irritantur in illum principes, ac præcipuè Leo pontifex. Utinam Lutherus meum secutus consilium, ab odiosis illis ac seditiosis abstinuisset. Plus erat fructus et minus invidiæ. Parum esset unum hominem perire; si res hæc illis succedit, nemo feret illorum insolentiam. Non conquiescent donec linguas ac bonas literas omnes subverterint. Epist. Dxxviii Sept. 1520.
Lutherus, quod negari non potest, optimam fabulam susceperat, et Christi pene aboliti negotium summo cum orbis applausu cœperat agere. Sed utinam rem tantam gravioribus ac sedatioribus egisset consiliis, majoreque cum animi calamique moderatione; atque utinam in scriptis illius non essent tam multa bona, aut sua bona non vitiasset malis haud ferendis. Epist. Dcxxxv. 3d Sept. 1521.
[684] Epist. Dccxix. Dec. 1524.
|Estimate of it.|
8. But about the time of this very publication we find Erasmus growing by degrees more averse to the radical innovations of Luther. He has been severely blamed for this by most Protestants; and doubtless, so far as an undue apprehension of giving offence to the powerful, or losing his pensions from the emperor and king of England might influence him, no one can undertake his defence. But it is to be remembered, that he did not by any means espouse all the opinions either of Luther or Zwingle; that he was disgusted at the virulent language too common among the reformers, and at the outrages committed by the populace; that he anticipated great evils from the presumptuousness of ignorant men in judging for themselves in religion; that he probably was sincere in what he always maintained as to the necessity of preserving the communion of the Catholic church, which he thought consistent with much latitude of private faith; and that, if he had gone among the reformers, he must either have concealed his real opinions more than he had hitherto done, or lived, as Melanchthon did afterwards, the victim of calumny and oppression. He had also to allege, that the fruits of the Reformation had by no means shown themselves in a more virtuous conduct; and that many heated enthusiasts were depreciating both all profane studies, and all assistance of learning in theology.[685]
[685] The letters of Erasmus, written under the spur of immediate feelings, are a perpetual commentary on the mischiefs with which the Reformation, in his opinion, was accompanied. Civitates aliquot Germaniæ implentur erroribus, desertoribus monasteriorum, sacerdotibus conjugatis, plerisque famelicis ac nudis. Nec aliud quam saltatur, editur, bibitur ac subatur; nec docent nec discunt; nulla vitæ sobrietas, nulla sinceritas. Ubicunque sunt, ibi jacent omnes bonæ disciplinæ cum pietate (1527) Epist. Dccccii. Satis jam diu audivimus, Evangelium, Evangelium, Evangelium; mores Evangelicos desideramus. Epist. Dccccxlvi. Duo tantum quærunt, censum et uxorem. Cætera præstat illis Evangelium, hoc est, potestatem vivendi ut volunt. Epist. Mvi. Tales vidi mores (Basileæ) ut etiamsi minus displicuissent dogmata, non placuisset tamen cum hujusmodi [sic] fœdus inire. Epist. Mlxvi. Both these last are addressed to Pirckheimer, who was rather more a protestant than Erasmus; so that there is no fair suspicion of temporising. The reader may also look at the 788th and 793d Epistle, on the wild doctrines of the Anabaptists and other reformers, and at the 731st, on the effects of Farel’s first preaching at Basle in 1525. See also Bayle, Farel, note B.
It is become very much the practice with our English writers to censure Erasmus for his conduct at this time. Milner rarely does justice to any one who did not servilely follow Luther. And Dr. Cox, in his life of Melanchthon, p. 35, speaks of a third party, “at the head of which the learned, witty, vacillating, avaricious, and artful Erasmus is unquestionably to be placed.” I do not deny his claim to this place; but why the last three epithets? Can Erasmus be shown to have vacillated in his tenets? If he had done so, it might be no great reproach; but his religious creed was nearly that of the moderate members of the church of Rome, nor have I observed any proof of a change in it. But vacillation may be imputed to his conduct. I hardly think this word is applicable; though he acted from particular impulses, which might make him seem a little inconsistent in spirit; and certainly wrote letters not always in the same tone, according to his own temper at the moment, or that of his correspondent. Nor was he avaricious; at least I know no proof of it; and as to the epithet artful, it ill applies to a man who was perpetually involving himself by an unguarded and imprudent behaviour. Dr. Cox proceeds to charge Erasmus with seeking a cardinal’s hat. But of this there is neither proof nor probability; he always declared his reluctance to accept that honour, and I cannot think that in any part of his life he went the right way to obtain it.
Those who arraign Erasmus so severely (and I am not undertaking the defence of every passage in his voluminous Epistles), must proceed either on the assumption that no man of his learning and ability could honestly remain in the communion of the church of Rome, which is the height of bigotry and ignorance; or that, according to his own religious opinions, it was impossible for him to do so. This is somewhat more tenable, inasmuch as it can only be answered by a good deal of attention to his writings. But from various passages in them, it may be inferred, that, though his mind was not made up on several points, and perhaps for that reason, he thought it right to follow, in assent as well as conformity, the catholic tradition of the church, and above all, not to separate from her communion. The reader may consult, for Erasmus’s opinions on some chief points of controversy, his Epistles, Dcccxxiii., Dcccclxxvii. (which Jortin has a little misunderstood), Mxxxv., Mliii., Mxciii. And see Jortin’s own fair statement of the case, i. 274.
Melanchthon had doubtless a sweeter temper and a larger measure of human charities than Erasmus, nor would I wish to vindicate one great man at the expense of another. But I cannot refrain from saying, that no passage in the letters of Erasmus is read with so much pain as that in which Melanchthon, after Luther’s death, and writing to one not very friendly, says of his connection with the founder of the Reformation, Tuli servitutem pœne deformen, &c. Epist. Melanchthon, p. 21 (edit. 1647). But the characters of literary men are cruelly tried by their correspondence, especially in an age when more conventional dissimulation was authorised by usage than at present.
|His controversy with Luther.|
9. In 1524, Erasmus, at the instigation of those who were resolved to dislodge him from a neutral station his timidity rather affected, published his diatribe, De Libero Arbitrio, selecting a topic upon which Luther, in the opinion of most reasonable men, was very open to attack. Luther answered in a treatise, De Servo Arbitrio, flinching not, as suited his character, from any tenet because it seemed paradoxical, or revolting to general prejudice. The controversy ended with a reply of Erasmus, entitled Hyperaspistes.[686] It is not to be understood, from the titles of these tracts, that the question of free will was discussed between Luther and Erasmus in a philosophical sense; though Melanchthon, in his Loci Communes, like the modern Calvinists, had combined the theological position of the spiritual inability of man with the metaphysical tenet of general necessity. Luther on most occasions, though not uniformly, acknowledged the freedom of the will as to indifferent actions, and also as to what they called the works of the law. But he maintained that, even when regenerated and sanctified by faith and the Spirit, man had no spiritual free will; and as before that time he could do no good, so after it, he had no power to do ill; nor, indeed, could he, in a strict sense, do either good or ill, God always working in him, so that all his acts were properly the acts of God, though, man’s will being of course the proximate cause, they might, in a secondary sense, be ascribed to him. It was this that Erasmus denied, in conformity with the doctrine afterwards held by the council of Trent, by the church of England, and, if we may depend on the statements of writers of authority, by Melanchthon and most of the later Lutherans. From the time of this controversy Luther seems to have always spoken of Erasmus with extreme ill-will; and if the other was a little more measured in his expressions, he fell not a jot behind in dislike.[687]
[686] Seckendorf took hold of a few words in a letter of Erasmus, to insinuate that he had taken a side against his conscience in writing his treatise, De Libero Arbitrio. Jortin, acute as he was, seems to have understood the passage the same way, and endeavours to explain away the sense, as if he meant only that he had undertaken the task unwillingly. Milner of course repeats the imputation; though it must be owned that, perceiving the absurdity of making Erasmus deny what in all his writings appears to have been his real opinion, he adopts Jortin’s solution. I am persuaded that they are all mistaken, and that Erasmus was no more referring to his treatise against Luther, than to the Trojan war. The words occur in an answer to a letter of Vives, written from London, wherein he had blamed some passages in the Colloquies on the usual grounds of their freedom as to ecclesiastical practices. Erasmus, rather piqued at this, after replying to the observations, insinuates to Vives, that the latter had not written of his own free will, but at the instigation of some superior. Verum, ut ingenue dicam, perdidimus liberum arbitrium. Illic mihi aliud dictabat animus, aliud scribebat calamus. By a figure of speech far from unusual, he delicately suggests his own suspicion as Vives’s apology. And the next letter of Vives leaves no room for doubt: Liberum arbitrium non perdidimus, quod tu asserueris,--words, that could have no possible meaning upon the hypothesis of Seckendorf. There is nothing in the context that can justify it; and it is equally difficult to maintain the interpretation Jortin gives of the phrase, aliud dictabat animus, aliud scribebat calamus, which can mean nothing but that he wrote what he did not think. The letters are Dcccxxix. Dccclxxi. Dccclxxvi. in Erasmus’s Epistles; or the reader may turn to Jortin, i. 413.
[687] Many of Luther’s strokes at Erasmus occur in the Colloquia Mensalia, which I quote from the translation. “Erasmus can do nothing but cavil and flout, he cannot confute.” “I charge you in my will and testament, that you hate and loath Erasmus, that viper.” ch. xliv. “He called Erasmus an epicure and ungodly creature, for thinking that if God dealed with men here on earth as they deserved, it would not go so ill with the good, or so well with the wicked.” ch. vii. Lutherus, says the other, sic respondit (diatribæ De Libero Arbitrio), ut antehac in neminem virulentius; et homo suavis post editum librum per literas dejerat se in me esse animo candidissimo, ac propemodum postulat, ut ipsi gratias agam, quod me tam civiliter tractavit, longe aliter scripturus si cum hoste fuisset res. Ep. Dcccxxxvi.
|Character of his epistles.|
10. The epistles of Erasmus, which occupy two folio volumes in the best edition of his works, are a vast treasure for the ecclesiastical and literary history of his times. Morhof advises the student to commonplace them; a task which, even in his age, few would have spared leisure to perform, and which the good index of the Leyden edition renders less important. Few men carry on so long and extensive a correspondence without affording some vulnerable points to the criticism of posterity. The failings of Erasmus have been already adverted to; it is from his own letters that we derive our chief knowledge of them. An extreme sensibility to blame in his own person, with little regard to that of others; a genuine warmth of friendship towards some, but an artificial pretence of it too frequently assumed; an inconsistency of profession both as to persons and opinions, partly arising from the different character of his correspondents, but in a great degree from the varying impulses of his ardent mind, tend to abate that respect which the name of Erasmus at first excites, and which, on a candid estimate of his whole life, and the tenor even of this correspondence, it ought to retain. He was the first conspicuous enemy of ignorance and superstition, the first restorer of Christian morality on a scriptural foundation, and, notwithstanding the ridiculous assertion of some moderns that he wanted theological learning, the first who possessed it in its proper sense, and applied it to its proper end.
|His alienation from the reformers increases.|
11. In every succeeding year the letters of Erasmus betray increasing animosity against the reformers. He had long been on good terms with Zwingle and Œcolampadius, but became so estranged by these party differences, that he speaks of their death with a sort of triumph.[688] He still however kept up some intercourse with Melanchthon. The latter years of Erasmus could not have been happy; he lived in a perpetual irritation from the attacks of adversaries on every side; his avowed dislike of the reformers by no means assuaging the virulence of his original foes in the church, or removing the suspicion of lukewarmness in the orthodox cause. Part of this should fairly be ascribed to the real independence of his mind in the formation of his opinions, though not always in their expression, and to their incompatibility with the extreme doctrines of either side. But an habitual indiscretion, the besetting sin of literary men, who seldom restrain their wit, rendered this hostility far more general than it need have been, and, accompanied as it was with a real timidity of character, exposed him to the charge of insincerity, which he could better palliate by the example of others than deny to have some foundation. Erasmus died in 1536, having returned to Basle, which, on pretence of the alterations in religion, he had quitted for Friburg in Brisgau a few years before. No differences of opinion had abated the pride of the citizens of Basle in their illustrious visitor. Erasmus lies interred in their cathedral, the earliest, except Œcolampadius, in the long list of the literary dead, which has rendered that cemetery conspicuous in Europe.
[688] Bene habet, quod duo Coryphæi perierint, Zuinglius in acie, Œcolampadius paulo post febri et apostemate. Quod si illis favisset ενυαλιορ [enyalior], actum fuisset de nobis. Epist. Mccv. It is of course to be regretted, that Erasmus allowed this passage to escape him, even in a letter. With Œcolampadius he had long carried on a correspondence. In some book the latter had said, Magnus Erasmus noster. This was at a time when much suspicion was entertained of Erasmus, who writes rather amusingly, in Feb. 1525, to complain, telling Œcolampadius that it was best neither to be praised nor blamed by his party; but if they must speak of him, he would prefer their censure to being styled _noster_. Epist. Dccxxviii. Milner quotes this, leaving poor Erasmus to his reader’s indignation for what he would insinuate to be a piece of the greatest baseness. But in good truth, what right had Œcolampadius to use the word _noster_, if it could be interpreted as claiming Erasmus to his ownside? He was not theirs as Œcolampadius well knew, in exterior profession nor theirs in the course they had seen fit to pursue.
It is just towards Erasmus to mention, that he never dissembled his affection for Lewis Berquin, the first martyr to protestantism in France, who was burned in 1528, even in the time of his danger. Epist. Dcccclxxvi. Erasmus had no more inveterate enemies than in the university of Paris.
|Appeal of the reformers to the ignorant.|
12. The most striking effect of the first preaching of the Reformation was that it appealed to the ignorant; and though political liberty, in the sense we use the word, cannot be reckoned the aim of those who introduced it, yet there predominated that revolutionary spirit which loves to witness destruction for its own sake, and that intoxicated self-confidence which renders folly mischievous. Women took an active part in religious dispute; and though in many respects the Roman catholic religion is very congenial to the female sex, we cannot be surprised that many ladies might be good protestants against the right of any to judge better than themselves. The translation of the New Testament by Luther in 1522, and of the Old a few years later, gave weapons to all disputants; it was common to hold conferences before the burgomasters of German and Swiss towns, who settled the points in controversy, one way or other, perhaps as well as the learned would have done.
|Parallel of those times with the present.|
13. We cannot give any attention to the story of the Reformation, without being struck by the extraordinary analogy it bears to that of the last fifty years. He who would study the spirit of this mighty age may see it reflected as in a mirror from the days of Luther and Erasmus. Man, who, speaking of him collectively, has never reasoned for himself, is the puppet of impulses and prejudices, be they for good or for evil. These are, in the usual course of things, traditional notions and sentiments, strengthened by repetition, and running into habitual trains of thought. Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive any thing as true, or seek its own interest in any manner, but as its forefathers have opined or acted. Change in these respects has been, even in Europe, where there is most of flexibility, very gradual; the work, not of argument or instruction, but of exterior circumstances slowly operating through a long lapse of time. There have been, however, some remarkable exceptions to this law of uniformity, or, if I may use the term, of _secular variation_. The introduction of Christianity seems to have produced a very rapid subversion of ancient prejudices, a very conspicuous alteration of the whole channel through which moral sentiments flow, in nations that have at once received it. This has also not unfrequently happened through the influence of Mohammedism in the East. Next to these great revolutions in extent and degree, stand the two periods we have begun by comparing; that of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and that of political innovation wherein we have long lived. In each, the characteristic features are a contempt for antiquity, a shifting of prejudices, an inward sense of self-esteem leading to an assertion of private judgment in the most uninformed, a sanguine confidence in the amelioration of human affairs, a fixing of the heart on great ends with a comparative disregard of all things intermediate. In each there has been so much of alloy in the motives, and, still more, so much of danger and suffering in the means, that the cautious and moderate have shrunk back, and sometimes retraced their own steps, rather than encounter evils which at a distance they had not seen in their full magnitude. Hence we may pronounce with certainty what Luther, Hutten, Carlostadt, what again More, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Cassander, would have been in the nineteenth century, and what our own contemporaries would have been in their times. But we are too apt to judge others, not as the individualities of personal character and the varying aspects of circumstances rendered them, and would have rendered us, but according to our opinion of the consequences, which, even if estimated by us rightly, were such as they could not determinately have foreseen.
|Calvin.|
|His Institutes.|
14. In 1531, Zwingle lost his life on the field of battle. It was the custom of the Swiss that their pastors should attend the citizens in war to exhort the combatants, and console the dying. But the reformers soon acquired a new chief in a young man superior in learning and probably in genius, John Calvin, a native of Noyon in Picardy. His Institutions, published in 1536, became the text-book of a powerful body, who deviated in some few points from the Helvetic school of Zwingle. They are dedicated to Francis I., in language, good, though not perhaps as choice as would have been written in Italy, temperate, judicious, and likely to prevail upon the general reader, if not upon the king. This treatise was the most systematic and extensive defence and exposition of the protestant doctrine which had appeared. Without the over-strained phrases and wilful paradoxes of Luther’s earlier writings, the Institutes of Calvin seem to contain most of his predecessor’s theological doctrine, except as to the corporal presence. He adopted a middle course as to this, and endeavoured to distinguish himself from the Helvetic divines. It is well known that he brought forward the predestinarian tenets of Augustin more fully than Luther, who seems however to have maintained them with equal confidence. They appeared to Calvin, as doubtless they are, clearly deducible from their common doctrine as to the sinfulness of all natural actions, and the arbitrary irresistible conversion of the passive soul by the power of God. The city of Geneva, throwing off subjection to its bishop, and embracing the reformed religion in 1536, invited Calvin to an asylum, where he soon became the guide and legislator, though never the ostensible magistrate, of the new republic.
|Increased differences among reformers.|
15. The Helvetian reformers at Zurich and Bern were now more and more separated from the Lutherans; and in spite of frequent endeavours to reconcile their differences, each party, but especially the latter, became as exclusive and nearly as intolerant as the church which they had quitted. Among the Lutherans themselves, those who rigidly adhered to the spirit of their founder’s doctrine, grew estranged, not externally, but in language and affection, from the followers of Melanchthon.[689] Luther himself, who never withdrew his friendship from the latter, seems to have been alternately under his influence, and that of inferior men. The Anabaptists, in their well-known occupation of Munster, gave such proof of the tremendous consequences of fanaticism, generated, in great measure, by the Lutheran tenet of assurance, that the paramount necessity of maintaining human society tended more to silence these theological subtilties, than any arguments of the same class. And from this time that sect, if it did not lose all its enthusiasm, learned how to regulate it in subordination to legal and moral duties.
[689] Amsdorfius Luthero scripsit, viperam eum in sinu alere, me significans, omitto alia multa. Epist. Melanchthon, p. 450 (edit. 1647). Luther’s temper seems to have grown more impracticable as he advanced in life. Melanchthon threatened to leave him. Amsdorf and that class of men flattered his pride. See the following letters. In one, written about 1549, he says: Tuli etiam antea servitutem pæne deformem, cum sæpe Lutherus magis suæ naturæ, in qua φιλονεικια [philoneikia] erat haud exigua, quam vel personæ suæ, vel utilitati communi serviret, p. 21. This letter is too apologetical and temporising. Nec movi has controversias quæ distraxerunt rempublicam; sed incidi in motas, quæ cum et multæ essent et inexplicatæ, quodam simplici studio quaerendæ veritatis, præsertim cum multi docti et sapientes initio applauderent, considerare eas cœpi. Et quamquam materias quasdam horridiores autor initio miscuerat, tamen alia vera et necessaria non putavi rejicienda esse. Hæc cum excerpta amplecterer, paulatim aliquas absurdas opiniones vel sustuli vel lenii. Melanchthon should have remembered, that no one had laid down these opinions with more unreserve, or in a more “horrid” way of disputation than himself in the first edition of his Loci Communes. In these and other passages, he endeavours to strike at Luther for faults which were equally his own, though doubtless not so long persisted in.
Melanchthon, in the first edition of the Loci Communes, which will scarcely be found except in Von der Hardt, sums up the free will question thus:
Si ad prædestinationem referas humanum voluntatem, nec in externis, nec in internis operibus ulla est libertas, sed eveniunt omnia juxta destinationem divinam.
Si ad opera externa referas voluntatem, quædam videtur esse, judicio naturæ, libertas.
Si ad affectus referas voluntatem, nulla plane libertas est, etiam naturæ judicio. This proves what I have said in another place, that Melanchthon held the doctrine of strict philosophical necessity. Luther does the same, in express words, once at least in the treatise De Servo Arbitrio, vol. ii. fol. 429 (edit. Wittenberg, 1554).
In an epistle often quoted, Melanchthon wrote: Nimis horridæ fuerunt apud nostros disputationes de fato, et disciplinæ nocuerunt. But a more thoroughly ingenuous man might have said nostros for apud nostros. Certain it is, however, that he had changed his opinions considerably before 1540, when he published his Moralis Philosophiæ Epitome, which contains evidence of his holding the synergism, or activity and co-operation with divine grace, of the human will. See p. 39.
The animosity excited in the violent Lutherans by Melanchthon’s moderation in drawing up the confession of Augsburg is shown in Camerarius, Vita Melanchthon, p. 124 (edit. 1696). From this time it continued to harass him till his death.
|Reformed tenets spread in England.|
|In Italy.|
16. England, which had long contained the remnants of Wicliffe’s followers, could not remain a stranger to this revolution. Tyndale’s New Testament was printed at Antwerp in 1526; the first translation that had been made into English. The cause of this delay has been already explained; and great pains were taken to suppress the circulation of Tyndale’s version. But England was then inclined to take its religion from the nod of a capricious tyrant. Persecution would have long repressed the spirit of free judgment, and the king, for Henry’s life at least, have retained his claim to the papal honour conferred on him as defender of the faith, if “Gospel light,” as Gray has rather affectedly expressed it, had not “flashed from Boleyn’s eyes.” But we shall not dwell on so trite a subject. It is less familiar to every one, that in Italy the seeds of the Reformation were early and widely sown. A translation of Melanchthon’s Loci Communes under the name of Ippofilo da Terra Nigra, was printed at Venice in 1521, the very year of its appearance at Wittenberg; the works of Luther, Zwingle, and Bucer, were also circulated under false names.[690] The Italian translations of Scripture made in the fifteenth century were continually reprinted; and in 1530 a new version was published at Venice by Brucioli, with a preface written in a protestant tone.[691] The great intercourse of Italy with the cisalpine nations, through war and commerce, and the partiality of Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara, to the new doctrines, whose disciples she encouraged at her court, under the pretext of literature, contributed to spread an active spirit of inquiry. In almost every considerable city, between 1525 and 1540, we find proofs of a small band of protestants, not in general abandoning the outward profession of the church, but coinciding in most respects with Luther or Zwingle. It has lately been proved that a very early proselyte to the Reformation, and one whom we should least expect to find in that number, was Berni, before the completion, if not the commencement, of his labour on the Orlando Innamorato; which he attempted to render in some places the vehicle of his disapprobation of the church. This may account for the freedom from indecency which distinguishes that poem, and contrasts with the great licentiousness of Berni’s lighter and earlier productions.[692]
[690] M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Italy. Epigrams were written in favour of Luther as early as 1521 (p. 32).
[691] Id. p. 53, 55.
[692] This curious and unexpected fact was brought to light by Mr. Panizzi, who found a short pamphlet of extreme scarcity, and unnoticed, I believe, by Zeno or any other bibliographer (except Niceron, xxxviii. 76), in the library of Mr. Grenville. It is written by Peter Paul Vergerio, and printed at Basle in 1554. This contains eighteen stanzas, intended to have been prefixed by Berni to the twentieth canto of the Orlando Innamorato. They are of a decidedly protestant character. For these stanzas others are substituted in the printed editions, much inferior, and, what is remarkable, almost the only indecent passage in the whole poem. Mr. Panizzi is of opinion, that great liberties have been taken with the Orlando Innamorato, which is a posthumous publication, the earliest edition being at Venice, 1541, five years after the author’s death. Vergerio, in this tract, the whole of which has been reprinted by Mr. P. in iii. 361 of his Boiardo, says of Berni: Costui quasi agli ultimi suoi anni non fù altro che carne e mondo; di che ci fanno ampia fede alcuni suoi capitoli e poesie, delle quali egli molti fogli imbrattò. Ma perchè il nome suo era scritto nel libro della vita, ne era possibile ch’egli potesse fuggire delle mani del celeste padre, &c. Veggendo egli che questo gran tiranno non permittea onde alcuno potesse comporre all’aperta di quei libri, per li quali altri possa penetrare nella cognizione del vero, andando attorno per le man d’ognuno un certo libro profano chiamato innamoramento d’Orlando, che era inetto e mal composto, il Berna [sic] s’immaginò di fare un bel trattato; e ciò fù ch’egli si pose a racconciare le rime e le altre parti di quel libro, di che esso n’era ottimo artefice, e poi aggiungendovi di suo alcune stanze, pensò di entrare con questa occasione e con quel mezzo (insin che d’Altro migliore ne avesse potuto avere) ad insegnare la verità dell’Evangelio, &c. Whether Vergerio is wholly to be trusted in all this account, more of which will be found on reference to Panizzi’s edition of the Orlando Innamorato, I must leave to the competent reader. The following expressions of Mr. P., though, I think, rather strong, will show the opinion of one conversant with the literature and history of those times. “The more we reflect on the state of Italy at that time, the more have we reason to suspect that the reforming tenets were as popular among the higher classes in Italy in those days, as liberal notions in ours.” P. 361.
|Italian heterodoxy.|
17. The Italians are an imaginative, but not essentially a superstitious people, or liable, nationally speaking, to the gloomy prejudices that master the reason. Among the classes, whose better education had strengthened and developed the acuteness and intelligence so general in Italy, a silent disbelief of the popular religion was far more usual than in any other country. In the majority, this has always taken the turn of a complete rejection of all positive faith; but, at the æra of the Reformation especially, the substitution of Protestant for Romish Christianity was an alternative to be embraced by men of more serious temperaments. Certain it is, that we find traces of this aberration from orthodoxy, in one or the other form, through much of the literature of Italy, sometimes displaying itself only in censures of the vices of the clergy; censures, from which, though in other ages they had been almost universal, the rigidly Catholic party began now to abstain. We have already mentioned Pontanus and Mantuan. Trissino, in his Italia Liberata, introduces a sharp invective against the church of Rome.[693] The Zodiacus Vitæ of Manzolli, whose assumed Latin name, by which he is better known, was Palingenius Stellatus, teems with invectives against the monks, and certainly springs from a protestant source.[694] The first edition is of 1537, at Basle. But no one writer is more indignantly severe than Alamanni.[695]
[693] This passage, which is in the sixteenth canto, will be found in Roscoe’s Leo X., Append. No. 164; but the reader would be mistaken in supposing, as Roscoe’s language seems to imply, that it is only contained in the first edition of 1548. The fact is that Trissino cancelled these lines in the unsold copies of that edition, so that very few are found to contain them; but they are restored in the edition of the Italia Liberata, printed at Verona in 1729.
[694] The Zodiacus Vitæ is a long moral poem, the books of which are named from the signs of the zodiac. It is not very poetical, but by no means without strong passages of sense and spirit in a lax Horatian metre. The author has said more than enough to incur the suspicion of Lutheranism. I have observed several proofs of this; the following will suffice:--
Sed tua præsertim non intret limina quisquam Frater, nec monachus, vel quavis lege sacerdos. Hos fuge; pestis enim nulla hac immanior; hi sunt Fæx hominum, fons stultitiæ, sentina malorum, Agnorum sub pelli lupi, mercede colentes, Non pietate Deum; falsa sub imagine vecti Decipiunt stolidos, ac religionis in umbra Mille actus vetitos, et mille piacula condunt, &c. Leo (lib. 5).
I could find, probably, more decisive Lutheranism in searching through the poem, but have omitted to make notes in reading it.
[695] Ahi cieca gente, che l’hai troppo ’n pregio; Tu credi ben, che questa ria semenza Habbian più d’Altri gratia e privilegio; Ch’altra trovi hoggi in lei vera scienza Che di simulation, menzogne e frodi. Beato ’l mondo, che sarà mai senza, &c. Satir. i.
The twelfth Satire concludes with a similar execration, in the name of Italy, against the church of Rome.
|Its progress in the literary classes.|
18. This rapid, though rather secret progress of heresy among the more educated Italians, could not fail to alarm their jealous church. They had not won over the populace to their side; for, though censures on the superior clergy were listened to with approbation in every country, there was little probability that the Italians would generally abjure modes of faith so congenial to their national temper as to have been devised, or retained from heathen times, in compliance with it. Even of those who had associated with the reformers, and have been in consequence reckoned among them, some were far from intending to break off from a church which had been identified with all their prejudices and pursuits. Such was Flaminio, one of the most elegant of poets and best of men; and such was the accomplished and admirable Vittoria Colonna.[696] But those who had drunk deeper of the cup of free thought had no other resource, when their private assemblies had been detected, and their names proscribed, than to fly beyond the Alps. Bernard Ochino, a Capuchin preacher of great eminence, being summoned to Rome, and finding his death resolved upon, fled to Geneva. His apostacy struck his admirers with astonishment, and possibly put the Italians more on their guard against others. Peter Martyr, well known afterwards in England, soon followed him; the academy of Modena, a literary society highly distinguished, but long suspected of heresy, was compelled, in 1542, to subscribe a declaration of faith; and though Lombardy was still full of secret protestants, they lived in continual terror of persecution during the rest of this period. The small reformed church of Ferrara was broken up in 1550; many were imprisoned and one put to death.[697]
[696] M’Crie discusses at length the opinions of these two, p. 164-177, and seems to leave those of Flaminio in doubt; but his letters, published at Nuremberg in 1571, speak in favour of his orthodoxy.
[697] Besides Dr. M’Crie’s History of the Reformation in Italy, which has thrown a collected light upon a subject interesting and little familiar, I have made use of his predecessor Gerdes, Specimen Italiæ Reformatæ; of Tiraboschi, viii. 150; of Giannone, iv. 108, et alibi; and of Galluzzi, Istoria del Gran Ducato, ii. 292, 369.
|Servetus.|
19. Meantime the natural tendency of speculative minds to press forward, though checked at this time by the inflexible spirit of the leaders of the Reformation, gave rise to some theological novelties. A Spanish physician, Michael Reves, commonly called Servetus, was the first to open a new scene in religious innovation. The ancient controversies on the Trinity had long subsided; if any remained whose creed was not unlike that of the Arians, we must seek for them among the Waldenses, or other persecuted sects. But even this is obscure; and Erasmus, when accused of Arianism, might reply with apparent truth, that no heresy was more extinct. Servetus, however, though not at all an Arian, framed a scheme, not probably quite novel, which is a difficult matter, but sounding very unlike what was deemed orthodoxy. Being an imprudent and impetuous man, he assailed the fundamental doctrines of reformers as much as of the Catholic church, with none of the management necessary in such cases, as the title of his book, printed in 1531, De Trinitatis Erroribus, is enough to show. He was so little satisfied with his own performance, that in a second treatise, called Dialogues on the Trinity, he retracts the former as ill written, though without having changed any of his opinions. These works are very scarce and obscurely worded, but the tenets seem to be nearly what are called Sabellian.[698]
[698] The original editions of the works of Servetus very rarely occur: but there are reprints of the last century, which themselves are by no means common.
|Arianism in Italy.|
20. The Socinian writers derive their sect from a small knot of distinguished men, who met privately at Vicenza about 1540; including Lælius Socinus, at that time too young to have had any influence, Ochino, Gentile, Alciati, and some others. This fact has been doubted by Mosheim and M’Crie, and does not rest on much evidence; while some of the above names are rather improbable.[699] It is certain, however, that many of the Italian reformers held anti-trinitarian opinions, chiefly of the Arian form. M’Crie suggests, that these had been derived from Servetus; but it does not appear that they had any acquaintance, or concurred in general with him, who was very far from Arianism; and it is much more probable that their tenets originated among themselves. If, indeed, it were necessary to look for an heresiarch, a Spanish gentleman, resident at Naples, by name Valdes, is far more likely than Servetus. It is agreed that Valdes was one of the chief teachers of the Reformation in Italy; and he has also been supposed to have inclined towards Arianism.[700]
[699] Lubienecius, Hist. Reformat. Polonicæ. M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Italy, p. 154.
[700] Dr. M’Crie is inclined to deny the Arianism of Valdes, and says it cannot be found in his writings (p. 122); others have been of a different opinion. See Chalmers’s Dictionary, art. Valdesso, and Bayle. His considerations were translated into English in 1638; I can find no evidence as to this point one way or the other in the book itself, which betrays a good deal of fanaticism, and confidence in the private teaching of the Spirit. The tenets are high Lutheranism as to human action, and derived perhaps from the Loci Communes of Melanchthon. Beza condemned the book.
|Protestants in Spain and Low Countries.|
21. Even in Spain, the natural soil of tenacious superstition, and the birthplace of the Inquisition, a few seeds of Protestantism were early sown. The first writings of Luther were translated into Spanish soon after their appearance; the Holy Office began to take alarm about 1530. Several suspected followers of the new creed were confined in monasteries, and one was burnt at Valladolid in 1541.[701] But in no country, where the Reformation was severely restrained by the magistrate, did it spread so extensively as in the Netherlands. Two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels in 1523, and their death had the effect, as Erasmus tells us, of increasing prodigiously the number of heretics.[702] From that time a bitter persecution was carried on, both by destroying books, and punishing their readers; but most of the seventeen provinces were full of sectaries.
[701] M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Spain.
[702] Cœpta est carnificina. Tandem Bruxellæ tres Augustinenses [duo?] publicitus affecti sunt supplicio. Quæris exitum? Ea civitas antea purissima cœpit habere Lutheri discipulos, et quidem non paucos. Sævitum est et in Hollandiâ. Quid multis? Ubicunque fumos excitavit nuncius, ubicunque sævitiam exercuit Carmelita, ibi diceres fuisse factam hæresion sementem. Ep. Mclxiii. The history of the Reformation in the Low Countries has been copiously written by Gerard Brandt, to whose second and third books I refer the reader.
|Order of Jesuits.|
22. Deeply shaken by all this open schism and lurking disaffection, the church of Rome seemed to have little hope in the superstition of the populace, the precarious support of the civil power, or the quarrels of her adversaries. But she found an unexpected source of strength in her own bosom; a green shoot from the yet living trunk of an aged tree. By a bull, dated the 27th of September, 1540, Paul III. established the order of Jesuits, planned a few years before by Ignatius Loyola. The leading rules of this order were, that a general should be chosen for life, whom every Jesuit was to obey as he did God; and that besides the three vows of the regulars, poverty, chastity, and obedience, he should promise to go wherever the pope should command. They were to wear no other dress than the clergy usually did; no regular hours of prayer were enjoined; but they were bound to pass their time usefully for their neighbours, in preaching, in the direction of consciences, and the education of youth. Such were the principles of an institution which has, more effectually than any other, exhibited the moral power of a united association in moving the great unorganised mass of mankind.
|Their popularity.|
23. The Jesuits established their first school in 1546, at Gandia in Valencia, under the auspices of Francis Borgia, who derived the title of duke from that city. It was erected into a university by the pope and king of Spain.[703] This was the commencement of that vast influence they were speedily to acquire by the control of education. They began about the same time to scatter their missionaries over the East. This had been one of the great objects of their foundation. And when news was brought, that thousands of barbarians flocked to the preaching of Francis Xavier, that he had poured the waters of baptism on their heads, and raised the cross over the prostrate idols of the East, they had enough, if not to silence the envy of competitors, at least to secure the admiration of the Catholic world. Men saw in the Jesuits courage and self-devotion, learning and politeness; qualities the want of which had been the disgrace of monastic fraternities. They were formidable to the enemies of the church; and those who were her friends cared little for the jealousy of the secular clergy, or for the technical opposition of lawyers. The mischiefs and dangers that might attend the institution were too remote for popular alarm.
[703] Fleury, Hist. Eccles. xxix. 221.
|Council of Trent.|
24. In the external history of protestant churches, two events, not long preceding the middle of the sixteenth century, served to compensate each other,--the unsuccessful league of the Lutheran princes of Germany, ending in their total defeat, and the establishment of the reformed religion in England by the council of Edward VI. It admits however of no doubt, that the principles of the Reformation were still progressive, not only in those countries where they were countenanced by the magistrate, but in others, like France and the Low Countries, where they incurred the risk of martyrdom. Meantime Paul III. had, with much reluctance, convoked a general council at Trent. This met on the 13th of December, 1545; and after determining a large proportion of the disputed problems in theology, especially such as related to grace and original sin, was removed by the pope in March, 1547, to his own city of Bologna, where they sat but a short time before events occurred which compelled them to suspend their sessions. They did not reassemble till 1551.
|Its chief difficulties.|
25. The greatest difficulties which embarrassed the council of Trent, appear to have arisen from the clashing doctrines of scholastic divines, especially the respective followers of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, embattled as rival hosts of Dominicans and Franciscans.[704] The fathers endeavoured, as far as possible, to avoid any decision which might give too unequivocal a victory to either; though it has generally been thought, that the former, having the authority of Augustin, as well as their own great champion, on their side, have come off, on the whole, superior in the decisions of the council.[705] But we must avoid these subtilties, into which it is difficult not to slide when we touch on such topics.
[704] Fleury, xxix., 154, et alibi. F. Paul, lib. ii. and iii. passim.
[705] It is usual for protestant writers to inveigh against the Tridentine fathers. I do not assent to their decision, which is not to the purpose, nor vindicate the intrigues of the papal party. But I must presume to say, that, reading their proceedings in the pages of that very able and not very lenient historian, to whom we have generally recourse, an adversary as decided as any that could have come from the reformed churches, I find proofs of much ability, considering the embarrassments with which they had to struggle, and of an honest desire of reformation, among a large body, as to those matters which, in their judgment, ought to be reformed. The notes of Courayer on Sarpi’s history, though he is not much less of a protestant than his original, are more candid, and generally very judicious. Pallavicini I have not read: but what is valuable in him will doubtless be found in the continuation of Fleury, vol. xxix. et alibi.
|Character of Luther.|
26. In the History of the Reformation, Luther is incomparably the greatest man. We see him, in the skilful composition of Robertson, the chief figure of a group of gownsmen, standing in contrast on the canvas with the crowned rivals of France and Austria, and their attendant warriors, but blended in the unity of that historic picture. This amazing influence on the revolutions of his own age, and on the opinions of mankind, seems to have produced, as is not unnatural, an exaggerated notion of his intellectual greatness. It is admitted on all sides, that he wrote his own language with force and purity; and he is reckoned one of its best models. The hymns in use with the Lutheran church, many of which are his own, possess a simple dignity and devoutness, never, probably, excelled in that class of poetry, and alike distinguished from the poverty of Sternhold or Brady, and from the meretricious ornament of later writers. But, from the Latin works of Luther, few readers, I believe, will rise without disappointment. Their intemperance, their coarseness, their inelegance, their scurrility, their wild paradoxes, that menace the foundations of religious morality, are not compensated, so far at least as my slight acquaintance with them extends, by much strength or acuteness, and still less by any impressive eloquence. Some of his treatises, and we may instance his reply to Henry VIII., or the book “against the falsely-named order of bishops,” can be described as little else than bellowing in bad Latin. Neither of these books display, as far as I can judge, any striking ability. It is not to be imagined, that a man of his vivid parts fails to perceive an advantage in that close grappling, sentence by sentence, with an adversary, which fills most of his controversial writings; and in scornful irony he had no superior. His epistle to Erasmus, prefixed to the treatise De servo Arbitrio, is bitterly insolent in terms as civil as he could use. But the clear and comprehensive line of argument, which enlightens the reader’s understanding, and resolves his difficulties, is always wanting. An unbounded dogmatism, resting on an absolute confidence in the infallibility, practically speaking, of his own judgment, pervades his writings; no indulgence is shown, no pause allowed, to the hesitating; whatever stands in the way of his decisions, the fathers of the church, the schoolmen and philosophers, the canons and councils, are swept away in a current of impetuous declamation; and as everything contained in Scripture, according to Luther, is easy to be understood, and can only be understood in his sense, every deviation from his doctrine incurs the anathema of perdition. Jerome, he says, far from being rightly canonised, must, but for some special grace, have been damned for his interpretation of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.[706] That the Zwinglians, as well as the whole church of Rome, and the Anabaptists, were shut out by their tenets from salvation, is more than insinuated in numerous passages of Luther’s writings. Yet he had passed himself through several changes of opinion. In 1518, he rejected auricular confession; in 1520, it was both useful and necessary; not long afterwards, it was again laid aside. I have found it impossible to reconcile, or to understand, his tenets concerning faith and works; and can only perceive, that, if there be any reservation in favour of the latter, not merely sophistical, of which I am hardly well convinced, it consists in distinctions too subtle for the people to apprehend. These are not the oscillations of the balance in a calm understanding, conscious of the difficulty which so often attends the estimate of opposite presumptions, but alternate gusts of dogmatism, during which, for the time, he was as tenacious of his judgment as if it had been uniform.
[706] Infernum potius quam cœlum Hieronymus meruit; tantum abest ut ipsum canonizare aut sanctum esse audeam dicere. Vol. ii. fol. 478. (Witt. 1554.)
27. It is not impossible, that some offence will be taken at this character of his works by those who have thought only of the man; extraordinary as he doubtless was in himself, and far more so as the instrument of mighty changes on the earth. Many of late years, especially in Germany, without holding a single one of Luther’s more peculiar tenets, have thought it necessary to magnify his intellectual gifts. Frederic Schlegel is among these; but in his panegyric there seems a little wish to insinuate, that the reformer’s powerful understanding had a taint of insanity. This has not unnaturally occurred to others, from the strange tales of diabolical visions Luther very seriously recounts, and from the inconsistencies as well as the extravagance of some passages. But the total absence of self-restraint, with the intoxicating effects of presumptuousness, is sufficient to account for aberrations, which men of regular minds construe into actual madness. Whether Luther were perfectly in earnest as to his personal interviews with the devil, may be doubtful; one of them he seems to represent as internal.
|Theological writings. Erasmus.|
28. Very little of theological literature, published between 1520 and 1550, except such as bore immediately on the great controversies of the age, has obtained sufficient reputation to come within our researches, which, upon this most extensive portion of ancient libraries, do not extend to disturb the slumbers of forgotten folios. The paraphrase of Erasmus was the most distinguished work in scriptural interpretation. Though not satisfactory to the violent of either party, it obtained the remarkable honour of being adopted in the infancy of our own protestantism. Every parish church in England, by an order of council in 1547, was obliged to have a copy of this paraphrase. It is probable, or rather obviously certain, that this order was not complied with.[707]
[707] Jortin says that, “taking the Annotations and the Paraphrase of Erasmus together, we have an interpretation of the New Testament as judicious and exact as could be made in his time, and to which very few deserve to be preferred of those which have since been published.” ii. 91.
|Melanchthon. Romish writers.|
29. The Loci Communes of Melanchthon have already been mentioned. The writings of Zwingle, collectively published in 1544, did not attain equal reputation; with more of natural ability than erudition, he was left behind in the general advance of learning. Calvin stands on higher ground. His Institutes are still in the hands of that numerous body who are usually denominated from him. The works of less conspicuous advocates of the Reformation, which may fall within this earlier period of controversy, will not detain us; nor is it worth while to do more on this occasion than mention the names of a few once celebrated men in the communion of Rome, Vives, Cajetan, Melchior Cano, Soto, and Catharin.[708] The two latter were prominent in the council of Trent, the first being of the Dominican party, or that of Thomas Aquinas, which was virtually that of Augustin; the second a Scotist, and in some points deviating a little from what passed for the more orthodox tenets either in the catholic or protestant churches.[709]
[708] Eichhorn, vi. 210-226. Andrès, xviii. 236.
[709] Sarpi and Fleury, passim.
|This literature nearly forgotten.|
30. These elder champions of a long war, especially the Romish, are, with a very few exceptions, known only by their names and lives. These are they, and many more there were down to the middle of the seventeenth century, at whom, along the shelves of an ancient library, we look and pass by. They belong no more to man, but to the worm, the moth, and the spider. Their dark and ribbed backs, their yellow leaves, their thousand folio pages, do not more repel us than the unprofitableness of their substance. Their prolixity, their barbarous style, the perpetual recurrence, in many, of syllogistic forms, the reliance, by way of proof, on authorities that have been abjured, the temporary and partial disputes, which can be neither interesting nor always intelligible at present, must soon put an end to the activity of the most industrious scholar.[710] Even the coryphæi of the Reformation are probably more quoted than read, more praised than appreciated; their works, though not scarce, are voluminous and expensive; and it may not be invidious to surmise, that Luther and Melanchthon serve little other purpose, at least in England, than to give an occasional air of erudition to a theological paragraph, or to supply its margin with a reference that few readers will verify. It will be unnecessary to repeat this remark hereafter; but it must be understood as applicable, with such few exceptions as will from time to time appear, throughout at least the remainder of the sixteenth century.
[710] Eichhorn.
|Sermons.|
31. No English treatise on a theological subject, published before the end of 1550, seems to deserve notice in the general literature of Europe, though some may be reckoned interesting in the history of our Reformation. The sermons of Latimer, however, published in 1548, are read for their honest zeal and lively delineation of manners. They are probably the best specimens of a style then prevalent in the pulpit, and which is still not lost in Italy, nor among some of our own sectaries; a style that came at once home to the vulgar, animated and effective, picturesque and intelligible, but too unsparing both of ludicrous associations and commonplace invective. The French have some preachers, earlier than Latimer, whose great fame was obtained in this manner, Maillard and Menot. They belong to the reign of Louis XII. I am but slightly acquainted with the former, whose sermons, printed if not preached in Latin, with sometimes a sort of almost macaronic intermixture of French, appeared to me very much inferior to those of Latimer. Henry Stephens, in his Apologie pour Herodote, has culled many passages from these preachers, in proof of the depravity of morals in the age before the Reformation. In the little I have read of Maillard, I did not find many ridiculous, though some injudicious passages; but those who refer to the extracts of Niceron, both from him and Menot, will have as much gratification, as consummate impropriety and bad taste can furnish.[711]
[711] Niceron, vols. xxiii. and xxiv. If these are the original sermons, it must have been the practice in France, as it was in Italy, to preach in Latin; but Eichhorn tells us that the sermons of the fifteenth century, published in Germany, were chiefly translated from the mother tongue. vi. 113. Tauler certainly preached in German, yet Eichhorn in another place (iii. 282), seems to represent Luther and his protestant associates as the first who used that language in the pulpit.
|Spirit of the Reformation.|
32. The vital spirit of the Reformation, as a great working in the public mind, will be inadequately discerned in the theological writings of this age. Two controversies overspread their pages, and almost efface more important and more obvious differences between the old and the new religions. Among the Lutherans, the tenet of justification or salvation by faith alone, called, in the barbarous jargon of polemics, solifidianism, was always prominent: it was from that point their founder began; it was there that, long afterwards, and when its original crudeness had been mellowed, Melanchthon himself thought the whole principle of the contest was grounded.[712] In the disputes again of the Lutherans with the Helvetic reformers, as well as in those of the latter school, including the church of England, with that of Rome, the corporal or real presence (which are synonymous with the writers of that century) in the Lord’s supper was the leading topic of debate. But in the former of these doctrines, after it had been purged from the Antinomian extravagances of Luther, there was found, if not absolutely a verbal, yet rather a subtle, and by no means practical, difference between themselves and the church of Rome;[713] while, in the Eucharistic controversy, many of the reformers bewildered themselves, and strove to perplex their antagonists, with incompatible and unintelligible propositions, to which the mass of the people paid as little regard as they deserved. It was not for these trials of metaphysical acuteness that the ancient cathedrals shook in their inmost shrines; and though it would be very erroneous to deny, that many not merely of the learned laity, but of the inferior ranks, were apt to tread in such thorny paths, we must look to what came closer to the apprehension of plain men for their zeal in the cause of reformed religion, and for the success of that zeal. The abolition of saint-worship, the destruction of images, the sweeping away of ceremonies, of absolutions, of fasts and penances, the free circulation of the Scriptures, the communion in prayer by the native tongue, the introduction, if not of a good, yet of a more energetic and attractive style of preaching than had existed before; and besides this, the eradication of monkery which they despised, the humiliation of ecclesiastical power which they hated, the immunity from exactions which they resented, these are what the north of Europe deemed its gain by the public establishment of the Reformation, and to which the common name of protestantism was given. But it is rather in the history, than in the strictly theological literature of this period, that we are to seek for the character of that revolution in religious sentiment, which ought to interest us from its own importance, and from its analogy to other changes in human opinion.
[712] Melanchth. Epist. p. 290. ed. Peucer, 1570.
[713] Burnet on eleventh article.
|Limits of private judgment.|
33. It is often said, that the essential principle of protestantism, and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned, a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of the right of private judgment. But, to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a change of masters; a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any choice; and in this sense, an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the confession of Augsburg, or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify those creeds at his pleasure. He might of course become an Anabaptist or an Arian; but he was not the less a heretic in doing so, than if he had continued in the church of Rome. By what light a protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide; but in practice, the law of the land, which established one exclusive mode of faith was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.
|Passions instrumental in Reformation.|
34. The adherents to the church of Rome have never failed to cast two reproaches on those who left them: one, that the reform was brought about by intemperate and calumnious abuse, by outrages of an excited populace, or by the tyranny of princes; the other, that after stimulating the most ignorant to reject the authority of their church, it instantly withdrew this liberty of judgment, and devoted all who presumed to swerve from the line drawn by law, to virulent obloquy, or sometimes to bonds and death. These reproaches, it may be a shame for us to own, “can be uttered, and cannot be refuted.” But, without extenuating what is morally wrong, it is permitted to observe that the protestant religion could, in our human view of consequences, have been established by no other means. Those who act by calm reason are always so few in number, and often so undeterminate in purpose, that without the aid of passion and folly, no great revolution can be brought about. A persuasion of some entire falsehood, in which every circumstance converges to the same effect on the mind; an exaggerated belief of good or evil disposition in others; a universal inference peremptorily derived from some particular case; these are what sway mankind, not the simple truth, with all its limits and explanations, the fair partition of praise and blame, or the measured assent to probability that excludes not hesitation. That condition of the heart and understanding which renders men cautious in their judgment, and scrupulous in their dealings, unfits them for revolutionary seasons. But of this temper there is never much in the public. The people love to be told that they can judge; but they are conscious that they can act. Whether a saint in sculpture ought to stand in the niches of their cathedrals, it was equally tedious and difficult to inquire; that he could be defaced, was certain; and this was achieved. It is easy to censure this as precipitancy; but it was not a mere act of the moment; it was, and much more was of the same kind, the share that fell naturally to the multitude in a work which they were called to fulfil, and for which they sometimes encountered no slight danger.
|Establishment of new dogmatism.|
35. But, if it were necessary, in the outset of the Reformation, to make use of that democratic spirit of destruction, by which the populace answered to the bidding of Carlostadt or of Knox, if the artizans of Germany and Switzerland were to be made arbiters of controversy, it was not desirable that this reign of religious anarchy should be more than temporary. Protestantism, whatever, from the generality of the word, it may since be considered, was a positive creed; more distinctly so in the Lutheran than in the Helvetic churches, but in each, after no great length of time, assuming a determinate and dogmatic character. Luther himself, as has been already observed, built up before he pulled down; but the confession of Augsburg was the first great step made in giving the discipline and subordination of regular government to the rebels against the ancient religion. In this, however, it was taken for granted, that their own differences of theological opinion were neither numerous nor inevitable: a common symbol of faith, from which no man could dissent without criminal neglect of the truth or blindness to it, seemed always possible, though never attained; the pretensions of catholic infallibility were replaced by a not less uncompromising and intolerant dogmatism, availing itself, like the other, of the secular power, and arrogating to itself, like the other, the assistance of the Spirit of God. The mischiefs that have flowed from this early abandonment of the right of free inquiry are as evident as its inconsistency with the principles upon which the reformers had acted for themselves; yet, without the confession of Augsburg and similar creeds, it may be doubtful whether the protestant churches would have possessed a sufficient unity to withstand their steady, veteran adversaries, either in the war of words, or in those more substantial conflicts to which they were exposed for the first century after the Reformation. The schism of the Lutheran and Helvetic protestants did injury enough to their cause; a more multitudinous brood of sectaries would, in the temper of those times, have been such a disgrace as it could not have overcome. It is still very doubtful, whether the close phalanx of Rome can be opposed, in ages of strong religious zeal, by anything except established or at least confederate churches.
|Editions of Scripture.|
36. We may conclude this section with mentioning the principal editions of translations of Scripture published between 1520 and 1550. The Complutensian edition of the New Testament, suspended since the year 1514, when the printing was finished, became public in 1522. The Polyglott of the Old Testament, as has been before mentioned, had appeared in 1517. An edition of the Septuagint and of the Greek Testament was published at Strasburg by Cephalæus in 1524 and 1526. The New Testament appeared at Haguenaw in 1521, and from the press of Colinæus at Paris in 1534; another at Venice in 1538. But these, which have become very scarce, were eclipsed in reputation by the labours of Robert Stephens, who printed three editions in 1546, 1549, and 1550; the two former of a small size, the last in folio. In this he consulted more manuscripts than any earlier editor had possessed; and his margin is a register of their various readings. It is therefore, though far from the most perfect, yet the first endeavour to establish the text on critical principles.
|Translations of Scripture.|
|English.|
37. The translation of the Old and New Testament by Luther is more renowned for the purity of its German idiom, than for its adherence to the original text. Simon has charged him with ignorance of Hebrew; and when we consider how late he came to the study of either that or the Greek language, and the multiplicity of his employments, it may be believed that his knowledge of them was far from extensive.[714] From this translation, however, and from the Latin Vuglate, the English one of Tyndale and Coverdale, published in 1535 or 1536, is avowedly taken.[715] Tyndale had printed his version of the New Testament in 1526. That of 1537, commonly called Matthew’s Bible, from the name of the printer, though in substance the same as Tyndale’s, was superintended by Rogers, the first martyr in the persecution of Mary, who appears to have had some skill in the original languages. The Bible of 1539, more usually called Cranmer’s Bible, was certainly revised by comparison with the original. It is however questionable, whether there was either sufficient leisure, or adequate knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek languages, in the reign of Henry VIII., to consummate so arduous a task as the thorough censure of the Vulgate text.
[714] Simon, Hist. Critique, V. T., p. 432. Andrès, xix. 160. Eichhorn however says, that Luther’s translation must astonish any impartial judge, who reflects on the lamentable deficiency of subsidiary means in that age, iii. 317. The Lutherans have always highly admired this work on account of its pure Germanism: it has been almost as ill spoken of among Calvinists as by the Catholics themselves. St. Aldegonde says, it is farther from the Hebrew than any one he knows; ex qua manavit nostra ex vitiosa Germanicâ facta vitiosior Belgico-Teutonica. Gerdes, iii. 60.
[715] Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch had been published in 1530. It has been much controverted of late years, whether he were acquainted or not with Hebrew.
|In Italy and Low Countries.|
38. Bruccioli of Venice published a translation of the Scriptures into Italian, which he professes to have formed upon the original text.[716] It was retouched by Marmocchini, and printed as his own in 1538. Zaccarias, a Florentine monk, gave another version in 1542, taken chiefly from his two predecessors. The earlier translation of Malerbi passed through twelve editions in this century.[717] The Spanish New Testament by Francis de Enzina was printed at Antwerp in 1543, as the Pentateuch in the same language was by some Jews at Constantinople in 1547.[718] Olaus Petri, the chief ecclesiastical adviser of Gustavus Vasa, translated the Scriptures into Swedish, and Palladius into Danish, before the middle of the century. But in no language were so many editions of Scripture published as in that of Flanders or Holland; the dialects being still more slightly different, I believe, at that time than they are now. The old translation from the Vulgate, first printed at Delft in 1497, appeared several times before the Reformation from the presses of Antwerp and Amsterdam. A Flemish version of the New Testament from that of Luther came out at Antwerp in 1522, the very year of its publication at Wittenberg; and twelve times more in the next five years. It appears from the catalogue of Panzer, that the entire Bible was printed in the Flemish or Dutch language, within the first thirty-six years of the sixteenth century, in fifteen editions, one of which was at Louvain, one at Amsterdam, and the rest at Antwerp. Thirty-four editions of the New Testament alone in that language appeared within the same period; twenty-four of them at Antwerp.[719] Most of these were taken from Luther, but some from the Vulgate. There can be no sort of comparison between the number of these editions, and consequently the eagerness of the people of the Low Countries for biblical knowledge, considering the limited extent of their language, and anything that could be found in the protestant states of the empire.
[716] The truth of this assertion is denied by Andrès, xix. 188.
[717] M’Crie’s Reformation in Italy, p. 43.
[718] This translation, which could have been of little use, was printed in Hebrew characters, with the original, and with a version in modern Greek, but in the same characters. It was reprinted in 1553 by some Italian Jews, in the ordinary letter. This Spanish translation is of considerable antiquity, appearing by the language to be of the twelfth century: it was made for the use of the Spanish Jews, and preserved privately in their synagogues and schools. This is one out of several translations of Scripture that were made in Spain during the middle ages; one of them, perhaps, by order of Alfonso X. Andrès, xix. 151. But in the sixteenth century, even before the alarm about the progress of heresy began in Spain, a stop was put to their promulgation, partly through the suspicions entertained of the half-converted Jews. Id. 183. The translation of Enzina, a suspected protestant, was of course not well received, and was nearly suppressed. Id. ibid. M’Crie’s Hist. of the Reformation in Spain.
[719] Panzer, Annales Typographici, Index.
|Latin translations.|
39. Notwithstanding the authority given to the Vulgate by the church of Rome, it has never been forbidden either to criticise the text of that version, or to publish a new one. Sanctes Pagninus, an oriental scholar of some reputation, published a translation of the Old and New Testament at Lyons in 1528. This has been reckoned too literal, and consequently obscure and full of solecisms. That of Sebastian Munster, a more eminent Hebraist, printed at Basle in 1534, though not free from oriental idioms, which indeed very few translations have been, or perhaps rightly can be, and influenced, according to some, by the false interpretations of the rabbins, is more intelligible. Two of the most learned and candid Romanists, Huet and Simon, give it a decided preference over the version of Pagninus. Another translation by Leo Juda and Bibliander, at Zurich in 1543, though more elegant than that of Munster, deviates too much from the literal sense. This was reprinted at Paris in 1545 by Robert Stephens, with notes attributed to Vatable.[720]
[720] Simon, Hist. Crit. du V. T. Biogr. Univ. Eichhorn, v. 565, et post. Andrès, xix. 165.
|French translations.|
40. The earliest protestant translation in French is that by Olivetan at Neufchatel in 1535. It has been said that Calvin had some share in this edition; which, however, is of little value, except from its scarcity, if it be true that the text of the version from the Vulgate, by Faber Stapulensis, has been merely retouched. Faber had printed this, in successive portions some time before; at first in France; but the parliament of Paris, in 1525, having prohibited his translation, he was compelled to have recourse to the press of Antwerp. This edition of Faber appeared several times during the present period. The French Bible of Louvain, which is that of Faber, revised by the command of Charles V., appeared as a new translation in 1550.[721]
[721] Idem.