As early as the eleventh century we have seen at work in both eastern and western Europe movements of popular resistance at once to the religious claims and the financial methods of the Christian priesthood, to the dogmas on which those claims and methods proceeded, and to the ceremonialism which backed them. Early in the thirteenth century the region in which such heresy had most largely spread was systematically warred upon by armies called out by the Church, and there the movement was destroyed by many years of bloodshed, the once heretical territory becoming a centre of orthodox fanaticism. The scattered seeds, however, bore fresh fruit, and in the fourteenth century movements of thought, some of which were no less deeply heretical, and many no less anti-hierarchical, went far in the west and north of Europe. Still they failed to effect any revolution; and in the middle of the fifteenth century the Church of Rome, corrupt as its rulers were, might have seemed to calculating observers more surely established than ever before. It had passed through a long and scandalous series of papal schisms, and its power seemed strengthened by reunion after a century and a half of divisions.

Heretical forces of course there were, several of the leading sects of the fourteenth century being still active, especially in Germany and the Low Countries. Thus the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who leant to pantheism in doctrine and to some degree of antinomianism in practice, persisted in spite of persecution, as did the kindred movements of Beghards or Turlupins; members of these and similar sects even found shelter in the lower orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians; and in Italy and France the heretical Franciscan Fraticelli still obstinately fought the papacy, which followed them up with fire and sword. But there are no signs that the papacy had thus far been shaken; and more than one anti-clerical movement had died out. Thus in England Lollardry had virtually disappeared in the reign of Henry VI; and in Bohemia, where the Wiclifian John Huss in the opening years of the century had preached vehemently against clerical and papal abuses, not only had he been burned alive on the sentence of the Council of Constance (1415), in iniquitous disregard of the emperor’s letter of safe-conduct, but his followers, after long and savage wars in which great numbers were burned alive and they themselves broke up into two sections, had finally been either reconciled to the Church or reduced to peaceful nonconformity.

Nowhere could the anti-papal spirit be said to be dangerously strong; nor was it much regarded by the popes. A little earlier than Huss, Matthew of Cracow, Bishop of Worms, had written “On the Pollutions (de squaloribus) of the Roman Curia,” but he was never molested. It does not seem, further, that the cause of the cruel sentence on Huss was so much his attacks on the clergy or the papacy as the enmities he had aroused (1) in what passed for philosophy (he being a zealous “Realist,” and as such hated by the “Nominalists,”1 who were strong in the Council) and (2) on the side of nationality, he being a Czech nationalist and a vehement enemy of the German race and interest, which also were present in force. And though the cruelty and the gross treachery of the sentence on Huss, and the infliction of the same cruel death on Jerome of Prague in the following year, roused a furious revolt among the Hussites, these outrages awoke no general sympathy in Europe.

As the fifteenth century wore on, fresh movements of anti-papal feeling rose, and some were put down. A professor of theology at the university of Erfurt, John of Wesel (not to be confounded with John Wessel, also a critical reformer in theology, but never persecuted), began about the middle of the century to write against indulgences; and when he became a popular preacher at Mayence and Worms he carried his criticism further. The result was that in 1479 he was arraigned before a “court of Inquisition” at Mayence and cast into prison, where he soon died. Wesel was a Nominalist, and as such was no less hated by the Realists than Huss had been by the Nominalists; but since he was also denounced as a Hussite, and was further an extremely free-tongued assailant of the hierarchy, there is reason in his case to suppose a professional animus. Still there was no formidable movement. Before John of Wesel, the Netherlander John of Goch, Confessor to the Nuns of Tabor (d. 1475), had opposed both monasticism and episcopal power; but he was associated with the orthodox Brethren of the Common Lot, and had criticized the antinomian morals of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, so that he hardly figured as a heretic. John Wessel, again (d. 1489), anticipated, as Luther declared, most of the latter’s doctrines; but though he wandered in France and Italy, studied and taught at Paris, and was a professor at Heidelberg, exercising a wide influence, he never roused enmity enough to bring him into trouble. On the other hand, Savonarola’s strong dissentient movement at Florence, as we have already noted, fell with him in 1498.

All the while, nevertheless, there was proceeding an intellectual process which had not before been possible—a permeation of the northern part of the continent, especially Germany, by a spirit of comparatively orthodox anti-Romanism, based on a growing scholarship, which found in the sacred books themselves a basis for its course. The scholarly impulse had come from Italy, where it had been fostered by the papacy itself; but in the north it had a different social and political effect. In Germany and the Netherlands, to begin with, elementary education was gaining ground. The Brethren of the Common Lot had done much for it, and many of their pupils started fresh schools, which weakened the first, but carried further their work. At the same time sprang up new universities; those of TÜbingen, Mayence, Wittemberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder being founded between 1477 and 1506. In the higher Biblical scholarship, further, there had begun a new era. Laurentius Valla’s Notes on the New Testament created a spirit of scholarlike criticism; and John Reuchlin, after a training in France, began in Germany an equally vigorous movement of Hebrew scholarship by producing the first Hebrew grammar. Numbers of educated men were now in a position of intellectual superiority to the great mass of the clergy; and all the while the process of translating the New Testament or the gospels into the modern languages for the use of the unlearned was going on in all the more civilized countries. There were German translations before Luther; Wiclif’s versions had been current in England among the Lollards; and French and Italian versions had been made by several hands in the fifteenth century. The important result was that anti-clerical heresy began to claim to be the stricter orthodoxy, and the Church could no longer bracket the sin of anti-clericalism with that of rejecting the leading Christian dogmas. Thus, when Erasmus of Rotterdam began with a new and remarkable literary skill to write Latin satires on the old text of the vices and ignorance of the monks and other clergy, he had such an audience as no man had yet had on that theme. In Petrarch’s day, a century before, though he too had exclaimed like every other educated layman at the corruption of the papal court and system, humanist literature was still largely a matter of exquisite art for art’s sake; in that of Erasmus it had begun to handle the most vital intellectual and moral interests.

Yet, though such an intellectual ferment was a condition precedent of the Reformation, it was not the proximate cause of the explosion. The doctrinal movement is seen at its strongest after Luther’s disruptive work had been done, in the allied movement set up in France by Calvinism. More perhaps than in Geneva itself, the Huguenot cause in France was one of moral and intellectual revolt, certainly fanatical but in large measure disinterested. What precipitated the Reformation in Germany was the coalition of the decisive economic interest of the self-seeking nobles, and the anti-Roman national sentiment of the people, with the moral and doctrinal appeal of Luther.

Even the grievance of indulgence-selling, which gave the immediate impulse to Luther’s action, was an economic as well as a moral question. Many of the best Catholics were entirely at one with him and such of his predecessors as Wesel and Wessel in deploring and denouncing the form the traffic had taken. The process of farming out the sale of indulgences to districts, as governments farmed out the taxes, was enough to stagger all men capable of independent judgment; and the expedition of the Dominican monk Tetzel had reduced it to something like burlesque. Yet it was typical of what papal administration had become. Archbishop Albert of Mayence and Magdeburg, who was also margrave of Brandenburg, owed the pope the usual large sum for his investiture, and could not pay. The pope, Leo X, greatly needed money for his building outlays; and the supreme prince of the Church gave to the lesser permission to set up in his province a vigorous trade in indulgences. For this trade Tetzel was selected, not by the pope but by the archbishop, as a notoriously suitable tool. Albert in turn made a financial arrangement with the great German banking house of Fuggers, and their agent accompanied Tetzel to take care of the cash. Thus, though the transaction was strictly a German one, the procedure was externally one of bleeding a German province, through its superstition, in the financial interest of Rome. Well-informed people knew that the papal agent carried off at least the archbishop’s debt; and others might plausibly surmise that there had gone a million thalers more, as the takings had been abnormally great.

Obviously the mass of the citizens were superstitious believers, otherwise the traffic could not have gone on; and Luther in his pulpit began merely by opposing the abuse of the practice, not the canonical principle. In absolution, he correctly argued, there were according to the established doctrine three elements—contrition, confession, and remission of penalties; and indulgences could effect only the third. He accordingly refused to absolve any on the mere ground of an indulgence; whereupon Tetzel, finding his traffic thus ostensibly hampered, preached against him, and the historic battle began. The theses nailed to the Wittemberg church door by Luther (1517) did not assail the Church or the pope; they simply challenged on orthodox lines the abuse of indulgences; and when Luther began to publish his views he expressed himself with perfect submission to the pope.

What won him the support of a vigorous popular party, albeit a minority, and of a sufficient section of the nobility, was in the first place his courage, and in the second place the growing restiveness of the Germans as such under what was practically an Italian domination. In past history, the “Germanic empire” had been wont to lord it over Italy on feudal grounds, and it was always a sore point with many that Italy none the less received an increasing tribute from Germany as from other States. The blunder of the papacy in Luther’s case lay in not realizing how far such feelings, in connection with a fresh scandal, might go in setting up a northern tide of anti-Roman animus. So long wont to brow-beat all insubordination, and to decide doctrinal disputes by fiat instead of by persuasion, it either prescribed or permitted to its agents the usual tone in their dealings with Luther; and finally the pope thought to clinch matters by a bull (1520) against his doctrines, giving him his choice between submission and excommunication. His defiance, and the act of excommunication, duly followed, and the Protestant Church began.

Even now the papacy, witless of new developments, could very well suppose the new heresy transient. Charles V, the new Emperor, was thoroughly orthodox; and not many of the German nobles were ostensibly otherwise. But Charles was under a deep obligation to Frederick the Elector of Saxony for his election; and Frederick was one of those who had begun, for racial and financial reasons, to contemplate “home rule” in matters ecclesiastical. Frederick accordingly was allowed to protect Luther, whose courage in going to the Diet of Worms, with Huss’s fate in common memory, further established his popular influence. Manhood always loves manhood. After 1526, however, the process of the Reformation in Germany was substantially one of wholesale confiscation of Church lands and goods by the nobles, who were thus irrevocably committed to the cause; and though Luther and his more single-minded colleagues were naturally disgusted, there was no other way in which they could have won, popular sympathy counting for nothing in such a matter without military force.

A rupture took place, finally, between the Emperor and the new Medicean pope, Clement VII, over the desperate politics of Italy, the papacy for once taking a national course in resisting an imperialist invasion. But the invaders triumphed; Italy was overrun anew; Rome was sacked (1527) with all the atrocity which historically distinguishes the Christian conquests of the city from those of the ancient Gauls and Goths; and during the critical years of the establishment of Protestantism the emperor was in no mood to quarrel with his German friends in the interests of a pope whose friendship he could not trust. All the political conditions were thus abnormally favourable to the Lutheran movement. At the same time, every menace from Rome led naturally to intensification of the Lutheran heresy; and though it always remained nearer Catholicism than did Calvinism, it emphasized more and more its differences.

In the meantime the success of the movement of Zwingli at Zurich had proved independently that the strength of the Reformation lay in its appeal to economic interest. Confiscation of the possessions of the Church by the municipal authorities was a first step, and one for which, once taken, the community would fight rather than revoke it. With signal unwisdom, the Roman curia had contrived to allot most of the Swiss town livings to Italians, so that the vested interests were alien and not local. The municipality, on the other hand, sagaciously pacified those interests by guaranteeing pensions or posts as teachers or preachers to the whole twenty-four cantons of the chapter; and there and in some other cantons the economic Reformation, thus effected, was permanent.

In the case of England, on the other hand, the primary factor in the repudiation of papal rule was the personal insistence of Henry VIII on a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the emperor, Charles V. Henry was so far from being inclined to Protestantism that he caused to be compiled by his bishops (1521) a treatise in reply to Luther, to which he put his name, thereupon receiving from Leo X the title of “Defender of the Faith.” To the very last, he burned doctrinal Protestants as heretics, and despite revival of the old Lollard propaganda the country remained substantially Catholic in creed. But when it came to the king’s demand for a divorce, the new pope, Clement VII, was in a hopeless dilemma, since if he granted the request, which he was personally and theologically not unwilling to do, he would exasperate the emperor Charles, of whom he dreaded to make an irreconcilable enemy, besides offending the whole Catholicism of Spain and even much of that of England. When once Henry decided to take ecclesiastical rule into his own hands he found that, little as he liked the new doctrines, he must in his own interest proceed to confiscate Church lands and bestow the bulk of them on adherents, thereby establishing a firm anti-papal interest. So little way did positive Protestant doctrine make that when his daughter Mary came to the throne, though she dared not try to resume the Church lands, the people were in substantial sympathy with her faith, and only her marriage with Philip and her persecution of heretics turned any large number against her. Even under Elizabeth it was the new national enmity to Spain, and not religious propaganda, that made the bulk of the people Protestant in creed and worship.

The process of the Reformation in Scotland clearly follows the economic law. So late as 1535 Scotland was so Catholic in belief, despite the usual grievances against priestly rapacity and luxury, that the parliament passed a law forbidding all importation of the writings of Luther, and all discussion of his “damnable opinions.” But as soon as the English king by his confiscation of the rich monastery lands (1536–39) showed the Scots nobles how they might enrich themselves by turning Protestant, they began to favour heresy; and from the death (1542) of the last Catholic king, James V, throughout the minority of his daughter Mary, they protected the reforming preachers. In 1543 began the wrecking of monasteries by mobs; in 1546 was assassinated Cardinal Beaton, who had taken active steps to destroy heresy; and though the ferocious war with England delayed developments, as did the regency of the Queen’s French mother, the preaching of Calvinism by John Knox and others carried enough of the townspeople to make easy the passing, in 1560, of an Act which made Protestantism the established religion of the country. As usual, by far the greater part of the plunder went to the landowning class, who brazenly broke all their promises of endowment to the preachers. But the latter had perforce to submit, indignant as they were; and when the young Catholic queen Mary arrived in 1561 she found a Protestant kingdom, in which the most powerful class was rich with church spoils. Again the political and the economic forces had been the obviously determining factors in the change.

Scandinavian Protestantism, in turn, moved on the same line of economic opportunity and pressure. A popular movement seems to have begun in Denmark, but it was favoured by the throne; and the nobles, seeing the possibilities of the case, soon followed; whereupon King Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, suppressed Catholicism with the nobles’ help, and confiscated the rich possessions of the bishops. In Sweden, on the other hand, Gustavus Vasa took the initiative against the clergy, who had supported the Danish rule which he succeeded in throwing off; and he naturally had with him the mass of the laity, especially when he gave the nobles leave to reclaim the lands that had been granted by their ancestors to the monasteries. Doctrinal Protestantism followed in the wake of confiscation.

The Protestantism of Holland, again, was plainly the result of the mismanagement of Philip II. When Protestantism had in other countries reached its fullest extension the Low Countries were still mainly Catholic, only a few of the poorer classes having changed, apart from the Anabaptist movement, which had a much larger following; and the slaughter of such heretics by the Inquisition went on for many years with the acquiescence of the middle and upper orders. In the Netherlands the local Inquisition, conducted by natives, was positively more cruel than that of Spain. It is thus clear that there was no special bias to Protestantism in the “Teutonic” races as such. The orthodox Protestant movement entered Holland not from the German but from the French side; and it needed not only the ferocity but the rapacity of Alva to create a permanent Protestant and rationalist movement among the needy nobility. When the Protestant mobs began to resort to image-breaking they put their cause in great peril. The real reason of the slowness of the nobles to turn Protestant was, doubtless, that they had little to gain from plunder of their Church in any case, it having long been abnormally poor by reason of the restrictive policy of the Flemish and Dutch feudal princes in the past. When the rupture with Spain was complete the Church estates were scrupulously disposed of in the public interest, Dutch Protestantism being thus exceptionally clean-handed.

Philip’s attempts to enrich the priesthood were certainly part of the provocation he gave his subjects in the Netherlands; but their resentment was at the outset strictly political, not religious; and it is reasonable to say that had he chosen to reside among them and conciliate them he could easily have kept them Catholic, while in that case Spain might very well have become Protestant, and Dutch and Flemish resources would have been turned against Spanish disaffection. Even in what remained the Spanish Netherlands Catholicism entirely recovered its ground. The Teutonic Charles V had been as rigidly Catholic as his predecessors on the Spanish throne, and for the same reasons, (1) that the Church in his dominions helped him and did not thwart him; and (2) that his large revenues from the Netherlands made it unnecessary for him to plunder the Church as did the Scandinavian kings and Henry VIII.

In the case of France, where Protestantism reached its highest development in point of intellectual and militant energy, but became stationary after a generation of desperate strife, and later decayed, the play of political and economic causation is little less clear. There, as has been said, there was much less ostensible pressure of wealth-seeking interest on the side of the Reformation than in Germany and elsewhere; yet so far as the nobles were concerned an economic motive was certainly at work. At the outset of his reign Francis I had won from the pope, practically at the sword’s point, the concession (1516) of the right to appoint bishops and abbots, the papacy in return receiving the annates, or first year’s revenue. The result was that the Gallican Church was at least as corrupt as any other section of the fold, its dignities being usually bestowed on court favourites, whose exactions exasperated the rural gentry as much as those of papal nominees would have done. The throne being strong, however, and the king having no special financial motive to go further, the cause of reform had no help from his side. Had he turned “reformer,” as he once had some thought of doing, he could probably have made France Protestant with less difficulty than Henry VIII met with in England; but in view of the political divisions set up by Lutheranism in Germany he decided against the new propaganda.

That, nevertheless, proceeded. There had always been keen criticism of the Church in France; and as early as 1512 there began at Meaux a reform movement on substantially Protestant lines, under the auspices of the local bishop. He, however, was put down by the threats of the college of the Sorbonne, the ecclesiastical faculty of the university of Paris; and the first notable signs of anti-Romanism came from the Vaudois of Provence, a small population who had been settled there after the virtual extermination of their predecessors of the same name and stock in the thirteenth century, and who were latterly found to have the same anti-clerical tendencies. Under Louis XII the Church had sought to punish them, but he refused to permit it, declaring them better people than the orthodox. Finding themselves in sympathy with the Reform movement, they sent some of their own preachers to Switzerland and Germany (1530) to learn from it, and began a similar propaganda. Decrees were issued against them in 1535 and 1540, but Francis proposed to spare them on condition that they should enter the Church of Rome. This policy failing, and Francis having made a treaty with Charles V, under which, on papal pressure, he agreed to put down heresy, the Vaudois were given up to coercion. There ensued a massacre so vile (1545) that the king, now near his end, was revolted by it, declaring that his orders had been grossly exceeded. A slow process of inquiry, left to his son, dragged on for years, but finally came to nothing.

The Vaudois had been nearly exterminated, in the old fashion; but the massacre served to proclaim and spread their doctrine, which rapidly gained ground among the skilled artisan class as well as among the nobles, the Swiss printing-presses doing it signal service. Persecution, as usual, kept pace with propaganda; and in 1557 Pope Paul IV, with the king’s approval, decreed that the Inquisition should be set up in France, where it had never yet been established. The legal “parliament” of Paris, jealous for its privileges, successfully resisted; but the Sorbonne and the Church carried on the work of heretic-burning, till at length the Huguenots were driven to arms (1562). Their name had probably come from that of the German-speaking Eidgenossen (“oath-fellows”) of Switzerland; but their doctrine was that of Calvin, who, driven from France (1533), was now long established at Geneva; and their tenacity showed the value of his close-knit dogmatism as a political inspiration. Catholic fanaticism and treachery on the one hand, and Huguenot intemperance on the other, brought about eight furious civil wars in the period 1562–94. The high-water mark of wickedness in that generation was the abominable Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), which followed on the third truce, and roused a new intensity of hatred. So evenly balanced were the forces that only after more than twenty years of further convulsions was the strife ended by the politic decision of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to turn Catholic and so win the crown (1594), on the score that “Paris was well worth a Mass.” He thus secured for his Protestant supporters a perfect toleration, which he confirmed by the Edict of Nantes (1597).

In Poland and Bohemia, where also Protestantism went far, on bases laid by the old movements of the Hussites, the process was at first facilitated, as in Germany, by the political conditions; and the economic motive was clearly potent. The subsequent collapse and excision of Protestantism in those countries, as in France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, completes the proof that for the modern as for the ancient world political and economic forces are the determinants of a creed’s success or failure, culture movements being, as it were, the force of variation which they condition.

On the side of daily life, it fared with Protestantism as with the early Church: where it was warred upon it was socially circumspect; where it had easier course it was lax. Thus we have the express admissions of Luther and of Calvin that under Protestantism they found less spirituality around them than there had been under Romanism; and there is abundant evidence that the first effect of the new regimen in Germany was to promote what Catholic and Protestant teachers alike professed to think the most serious form of immorality—sexual licence. In point of fact, Luther’s own doctrines of predestination and grace were a species of unbought indulgences, sure to injure good morals, even apart from the effect of a free use of the Bible as a working code. Some of Luther’s fellow-preachers justified and practised bigamy; and he and his colleagues not only counselled Henry VIII to marry a second time without divorcing his first queen, but gave their official consent, albeit reluctantly, to such a proceeding on the part of the Landgrave of Hesse. Among the common people, the new sense of freedom quickly gave a religious impulse to the lamentable Peasants’ War, and later to the so-called Anabaptist movement, which, though it contained elements of sincerity and virtue that are not always acknowledged, amounted in the main to a movement of moral and social chaos.

Luther, during whose time of hiding in the Wartburg (1521–22) the new ferment began at Wittemberg, came thither to denounce it as a work of Satan; but it was a sequel of his own action. The new leaders, Storch and MÜnzer and Carlstadt, had turned as he had advised to the Bible, and there they found texts for whatever they were minded to try, from image-smashing to the plunder and burning of monasteries and castles, and a general effort at social revolution. In all they did, they declared and believed they were moved by the Spirit of God. Luther had done this service to Catholicism, that his course led to the practical proof that the Bible, put in the hands of the multitude as the sufficient guide to conduct, wrought far more harm than good. Peasant revolts, indeed, had repeatedly occurred in Germany before his time, the gross tyranny of the nobles provoking them; but the religious frenzy of MÜnzer gave to the rising of 1524–25 in Swabia and Franconia, though the formulated demands of the insurgents were just and reasonable, a character of wildness and violence seldom seen before. Luther, accordingly, to save his own position, vehemently denounced the rising, and hounded on the nobles to its bloody suppression, a work in which they needed no urging. His protector, the wise Frederick of Saxony, then on his deathbed, gave no such evil counsel, but advised moderation, and admitted the guilt of his order towards the common people. The end was, however, that at least 100,000 peasants were slain; and the lot of those left was worse than before. The later Anabaptist movement, which set up a short-lived republic (1535) in the city of MÜnster in Westphalia, and spread to Holland, was too destitute of political sanity to gain any but visionaries, and was everywhere put down with immense bloodshed.

Yet vaster social and political evils were to come from the Reformation. In 1526, at the Diet of Spires, the emperor Charles V called for strong measures against Lutheranism, but was firmly resisted by the new Elector of Saxony and the other Lutheran princes, whereupon the emperor waived his claim, not caring to raise a war in the pope’s interest; and it was agreed that each head of a State in the empire should take his own way in regard to religion, his subjects being at his disposal. It was at this stage that the German Reformation began its most decisive progress. In the next few years the papal party, backed by the Emperor, twice carried decrees rescinding that of 1526. First came the decree of the second Diet of Spires (1529). Against this a formal protest was made to the emperor by the Lutheran princes and a number of the free imperial cities of Germany and Switzerland, whence arose first the title of “Protestants.” In 1530 the emperor convened a fresh Diet at Augsburg, to which the Lutherans were required to bring a formal Confession of Faith. This was framed on conciliatory lines; but the emperor issued a fresh coercive decree, whereupon the Germans formed the defensive League of Smalkald, from which the Swiss were excluded on their refusal to sign the Augsburg Confession. At this stage the invasion of Austria by the Turks delayed civil war, so that Luther was able to die in peace (1546). Then war began, and the Protestant League was quickly and thoroughly overthrown by the emperor. After a few years, however, the imperial tyranny, exercised through Spanish troops, forced a revolt of the Protestant princes, who with the help of France defeated Charles (1552). Now was effected the Peace of Augsburg (signed 1555), which left the princes as before to determine at their own will whether their States should be Lutheran or Catholic, and entitled them to keep what Church lands they had confiscated before 1552. No protection whatever was decreed for Calvinists, with whom the Lutherans had long been at daggers drawn, and who had not yet gained much ground in Germany.

Such a peace failed to settle the vital question as to whether in future the Protestant princes could make further confiscations, on the plea of the conversion of Catholic bishops and abbots or otherwise. As the century wore on, accordingly, the princes “secularized” many more Church estates; and as Protestantism was all the while losing moral ground in Germany through the adoption of Calvinism by several princes, and the bitter quarrels of the sects and sub-sects, the Catholics held the more strongly to their view of the Augsburg treaty, which was that all bishoprics and abbeys held directly from the emperor were to remain Catholic. Friction grew from decade to decade, and, civic wisdom making no progress on either side, a number of the Lutherans and Calvinists at length formed (1608) a militant union, led by the Calvinist prince Christian of Anhalt, to defend their gains; and the Catholics, led by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, formed another. The Calvinists were the chief firebrands; and Christian was bent on aggression, to the end of upsetting the power of the Catholic House of Austria.

The train, however, was fired from Bohemia, where the Protestant nobles were at odds with their two successive kings, Matthias and Ferdinand, both of that house, and both bent on putting down Protestantism on the crown lands. The nobles began a revolt in a brutally lawless fashion; and when, in a winter pause of the war, Ferdinand was elected emperor (1619), they deposed him from the throne of Bohemia, and elected in his place the Calvinist prince Frederick, Elector Palatine (son-in-law of James I of England), who foolishly accepted. The capable Maximilian, with Tilly for general, took the field on behalf of Ferdinand; the Lutheran princes stood aloof from Frederick, who for his own part had offended his Lutheran subjects by slighting their rites; his few allies could not sustain him, and he was easily defeated and put to headlong flight. At once the leading Protestant nobles of Bohemia were put to death; their lands were confiscated; the clergy of the chief Protestant body, the Bohemian Brethren, dating back to the time of Huss, were expelled in mass; and Protestantism in Bohemia was soon practically at an end. Many of both the Lutheran and Calvinist churches, in their resentment at the slackness of the German Protestant League, voluntarily went over to Catholicism. At the same period the Protestant Prince of Transylvania had been in alliance with the Turks to attack Vienna; and the Protestant faith was thus discredited on another side.

Meantime, however, the Thirty Years’ War had begun. Frederick’s general, Mansfeld, held out for him in the Palatinate; the dissolution of the army of the Protestant Union supplied him with fresh soldiers, content to live by plunder; English volunteers and new German allies joined; and the struggle went from bad to worse. The failure or defeat of the first Protestant combatants brought others upon the scene; James of England appealed to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Christian IV of Denmark to join him in recovering the Palatinate for his son-in-law, and, unable to subsidize Gustavus as he required, made terms with Christian, who at once entered the war. Thereupon the emperor employed Wallenstein, and the Protestants were defeated and hard pressed, till the great Gustavus came to their aid. Under his masterly leadership they regained their ground, but could not decisively triumph. After his death at the battle of LÜtzen (1632) new developments took place, France entering the imbroglio by way of weakening her enemies Austria and Spain, the two pillars of the empire; and one period of war passed into another without stay or respite.

In the course of this inconceivable struggle children grew to middle age, and men grew from youth to grey hairs; most of those who began the strife passed away ere it had ended; the French Richelieu rose to greatness and died; and the English Civil War passed through nearly its whole course, a mere episode in comparison. When at length there was signed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the German world was reduced to mortal exhaustion. The armies on both sides had been to the common people as the monstrous dragons of fable, bestial devourers, dealing ruin to friend and foe alike. Every sack of a city was a new triumph of cruelty and wickedness; tortures were inflicted by the mercenaries which almost redeemed the name of the Inquisition; and, as of old in the Ireland of Elizabeth’s day, peasants were found dead with grass in their mouths. According to some calculations, half of the entire population of Germany was gone; and it is certain that in many districts numbers and wealth, man and beast, had been reduced in a much greater proportion, whole provinces being denuded of live stock, and whole towns going to ruin. German civilization had been thrown back a full hundred years, morally and materially. No such procession of brutality and vice as followed the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein had been seen since the first Crusade; and the generation which had seen them and been able to survive them was itself grown callous. Capacity, culture, and conduct had alike fallen below the levels of a century before.

By the Peace of Westphalia were settled the boundaries of the two creeds which had thus battled for a whole generation. In Germany proselytism was at an end; but the States whose princes had been Protestant remained so, they and their Catholic neighbours keeping the right to impose their faith on their subjects. Protestantism had gained nothing beyond rooting Catholicism more completely out of Protestant States; and, on the other hand, the Catholics had rooted heresy out of theirs. No racial dividing-line subsisted. Teutonic Bavaria and Austria remained Catholic, as the five original Teutonic cantons of Switzerland had done from the first; and between Lutherans and Calvinists, of whatever stock, there remained a sullen doctrinal division. Bohemia had been lost to Protestantism, and Poland was now far on the way to the same fate.

The diverse cases of Poland and France here supply yet another lesson in economic causation. In France at the accession of Henry IV the Protestants were a very strong party, including many of the nobles, though a minority of the nation; in Poland, at the accession of Sigismund III, in 1586, they were considerably stronger. Within half-a-century they were in full decadence in both countries, from similar causes. Sigismund (the cousin of Gustavus Adolphus), though grandson of the Protestant Gustavus Vasa of Sweden, had been bred a Catholic with a view to his inheriting the Polish crown; and from the day of his accession he set himself to the aggrandizement of his creed. He thereby lost the crown of Sweden, but he went far to make Poland Catholic; and the newly constituted order of Jesuits did the rest. To the Polish crown belonged the right of conferring life appointments to which were attached great tracts of crown land; and the constant use of this economic force for Catholicism during a long reign began the downfall of the Protestantism of the nobility, who, though including many men of superior capacity, had been moved as usual by the economic motive in their heresy. The complete ascendancy of the Jesuits during the seventeenth century ultimately wrought the ruin of Poland, their policy having expelled the Protestants, alienated the Cossacks, who belonged to the Greek Church, and paralyzed the intellectual life of the nation.

In France the decay of Protestantism was caused substantially by economic means. When Richelieu obtained power the Huguenot party was strong, turbulent, intolerant, and aggressive. Practising on the one hand a firm political control, and on the other a strict tolerance, he began the policy of detaching the ablest nobles from the Huguenot interest by giving them positions of the highest honour and trust, the holding of which soon reconciled them to the court. Thus deprived of leaders who were men of the world, the Huguenot party fell into the hands of its fanatical clergy, under whose guidance it became more aggressive, and so provoked fresh civil war. The balance of military power being now easily on the side of the crown, the revolts were decisively put down; and the policy of anti-ecclesiasticism and toleration, persisted in by Richelieu and carried on after him by Mazarin, prevented any further strife. Thus French Protestantism was irretrievably on the decline when Louis XIV, reverting to the politics of Catholic bigotry, and not content with setting on foot cruel persecutions which drove many from the country despite the laws against emigration, committed the immense and criminal blunder of revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685), and so expelling from France the remnant of the Huguenots. He had been advised that the refusal of liberty of worship would bring them to the Church, and that they could be hindered from emigrating. On the contrary, his plan lost to France fifty thousand families of industrious inhabitants, whose Protestantism had ceased to be turbulent, though it remained austere; and by thus grievously weakening a kingdom already heavily bled by his wars, the French king prepared his own military humiliation, and the consequent depression of his Church. It must always be remembered, however, that his course was acclaimed by the Élite of Catholic culture.

The alarm and resentment set up by his act counted for much in stirring the English people three years later to resist their Romanizing king James II, who, had he gone his way more prudently, might have done much to rehabilitate Catholicism in virtue of the fanatical devotion to the throne already developed by the reaction against the Puritan rebellion. On the other hand, the tyrannous policy which had kept Ireland Catholic, by identifying Protestantism with oppression, and Catholicism with the national memories, was cruelly carried on by England, with the result of maintaining a perpetual division between the two countries, and preparing a great source of Catholic population for the United States in a later age. The profound decivilization inflicted on Ireland by Protestant England is probably the greatest of the social and political evils resulting from the Reformation; but the persecution of dissenters in England, and the more savage dragooning of Presbyterians in Scotland under Charles II and James II (which had an excuse in the aggressive intolerance of the Covenanters) must go to the same account. Nowhere, not even in Protestant Switzerland—save in the case of Zurich, well led by Zwingli, and in that of the Grisons, where Catholics and Protestants agreed to abolish feudal abuses—did the Reformation work social betterment for the common people. In England the tyranny of the Protestant nobles under Edward VI was both corrupt and cruel; and the Norfolk rising of 1549 was as savagely suppressed as that of Wat Tyler had been in Catholic times.

In the processes by which Protestantism lost ground, as in those by which Catholicism counteracted its own successes, there was a considerable play of intellectual forces, which we shall consider apart. But though the economic, the political, and the intellectual forces always interact, the two former have had a potency which has thus far been little acknowledged. It is essential to realize that they have affected the movement of thought more than they have been affected by it; and above all that they, and not the imaginary bias of race, have determined the total fortunes of the Reformation.

The intellectual reactions set up by the Reformation were complex, and on some sides apparently contradictory. Some populations, and in general the populace of the countries which remained Protestant, were made collectively more fanatical than they had been under Catholicism, even as Catholicism itself became for a time more strenuous under the stress of the conflict; but, on the other hand, there grew up on the intellectual border of Protestantism forms of heresy which outraged its majority; and within the political sphere of Catholicism there came a new growth of skepticism. All these varying results can be traced to the initial shock of the revolt against Rome.

Luther and Calvin, it is clear, were alike bigots, as little disposed to religious toleration as the papacy ever was. Of pope Paul III (1534–49) it is recorded that he “bore with contradiction in the consistory, and encouraged freedom of discussion.” No such tribute could be paid to the Protestant leaders of his day. Indeed, it is noteworthy that while the Catholic hierarchy of the period were not a little open to new scientific thought, Luther derided the teaching of Copernicus, and would have suppressed it if he could. It resulted from the spirit of such leaders that their polities could not be reconciled. Luther, though he proceeded from a theoretical retention of the Mass (set forth in the conciliatory Augsburg Confession of 1530, drawn up by Melanchthon) to a bitter denunciation of it, always leant towards the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist in that he merely substituted the dogma of “consubstantiation” for “transubstantiation,” and refused to go further. The Swiss Protestants took up another position. Their chief founder, Ulrich Zwingli, a more rational spirit than Luther, and brave enough to teach that good heathens might be saved, went boldly back to the position of John Scotus, and taught that the bread and wine of the sacrament were merely memorial symbols. On this head, despite the efforts of Melanchthon, Luther refused all compromise, and denounced the Zwinglians with his usual violence. Calvin, whose power in Geneva was established in 1541, tempered their formula after Luther’s death to the extent of affirming, in Lutheran language, that in the eucharist a certain divine influence was communicated to faithful participants. But even this could not secure the dogmatic agreement that the theological ideal demanded; and the followers of Luther soon gave the quarrel a quality of incurable bitterness. Even on the question of predestination the sects could not agree, though both Luther and Calvin, in their different terminologies, affirmed the foreordination of all things.

These were only the most comprehensive of a multitude of Protestant divisions. In the sixteenth century there are enumerated by ecclesiastical historians at least eighty Protestant sects, all named for certain special tenets, or after leaders who held themselves apart. The general resort to the Bible had thus revived the phenomena of the early ages of the faith; and each leading sect or church within its own sphere sought in the papal fashion to suppress variation. The result was a maximum of dogmatism and malice. Every sect split into many. Thus there were some thirteen groups of Anabaptists; over thirty separate confessions were drawn up among the main bodies; and Luther enumerated nine varieties of doctrine on the eucharist alone. The doctrine seldomest broached was that of mutual toleration. Between Lutherans and Calvinists the quarrel went so far that when John Laski, the learned Polish Calvinist, was sailing from England to the continent on his expulsion with his adherents from England under Mary, he was refused leave to remain at the Lutheran ports of Elsinore, Hamburg, LÜbeck, and Rostock. But as time went on the Lutherans were divided endlessly and irreconcilably on doctrinal issues among themselves. Melanchthon died declaring the gladness with which he passed away from a world filled with the rabid hatreds of theologians; and after his day matters grew worse instead of better.

From the very first, in short, the temper of Protestant propaganda, met as it was by brutal resistance, had been one of brutal animosity. There is indeed no more grotesque spectacle in human history than the association of the phrase “a religion of love” with the masses of furious controversy which constitute the bulk of Christian theological literature in all ages of faith. Amenity has been much rarer in religious strife than in actual warfare, where animal good humour could at times mitigate or overlay animal hate. Fighters could meet and banquet after a fight: theologians could not. They could feel kindly towards those only who joined them in hating the foe. England, with her Pecock and her Hooker, makes as good a show in this matter as any other country; but in England the temper of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism is from the first one of intense hate, the cultured Catholic Sir Thomas More showing as little capacity for gentleness of spirit as do the violent assailants who exasperated him. Bale, a typical Protestant polemist, seems habitually to foam at the mouth. War was the natural and inevitable expression of such hatreds wherever it could come about; and when the establishment of Protestantism left the sectarian spirit free play as between sects, they turned to the new debate all the ferocity that had marked the old.

It was thus abundantly proved that the cult of the Bible gave no help towards peace and goodwill; and Catholicism naturally profited by the demonstration, many peaceable Protestants returning to its fold. In Germany such reversions were set up alike by the attitude of Luther towards the revolting peasants, many of whom in turn rejected his doctrine, and by the wild licence of the Anabaptists, whose madness could be traced to his impetus. Equally did Romanism gain from the admission that freedom of profession was found to give outlets for atheism; and from the open growth of Unitarianism which, taking rise in Italy in the Lutheran period, was thence carried to Switzerland and elsewhere, and made considerable headway in Poland. The younger Socinus (Sozzini), who joined and developed the movement, was not its founder even in Poland; but when modified and organized by him there it received his name. The Socinian cult terrified many Protestants, driving them back to the old ways; and it may have been partly the resentful fear of such effects that led Calvin to commit his historic crime of causing the Spaniard Servetus to be burned at the stake (1553) for uttering Unitarian doctrine. But Calvin’s language at every stage of the episode, his heartless account of the victim’s sufferings, and his gross abuse of him afterwards, tell of the ordinary spirit of the bigot—incensed at opposition and exulting in vengeance.

Where a scholar could so sink, the bulk of the Protestant communities inevitably became fanatical and hard. In Holland, where Calvin’s church became that of the republic, it treated Arminianism in the seventeenth century as itself had been treated by Lutheranism in the sixteenth. Arminius (Jacobus Harmensen) had sought in a halting fashion to modify the dogma of predestination, and to prove that all men might repent and be saved. Dying after much controversy (1609), he left a sect who went further than he; and the strife came to the verge of civil war, the Arminian Barneveldt being beheaded as a traitor (1619), and the illustrious Grotius sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, from which however he contrived to escape. In England in the next generation the Presbyterians, whose doctrine was Calvinistic, showed the same tyrannous temper; the Arminian archbishop Laud was no better; and in Calvinist Scotland and Lutheran Germany alike the common people were similarly intolerant. Standing with their leaders on the Bible as the beginning and end of truth, the Protestants everywhere assumed infallibility, and proceeded to decree pains and penalties with a quite papal inhumanity. Had Luther been able to give effect to his hatred of the Jews, they would have been persecuted as they never had been—apart from the chronic massacres—in the Catholic period. He would have left them neither synagogues nor homes, neither books nor property. Thus taught, Protestants became persecutors in mass.

In particular, they everywhere turned with a new zest to the burning of witches, the old superstitions being frightfully reinforced by the newly current doctrine of the Pentateuch. No argument—though it was tried by some—could countervail the testimony of the Sacred Book against witchcraft, and its decree of the death penalty. As the frenzy of witch-burning was equally intense in the Catholic countries in the Lutheran period, the mania may be traced in the first instance to the Inquisition, which made a specialty of such action. But it is clear that the new study of the Bible in Protestant countries gave it as strong a stimulus. In England and Scotland, for instance, there had been very little witch-burning in the Catholic period; and the first English law for the purpose was passed under Henry VIII, in 1541; but in both countries the madness thenceforth went step for step with the growth of Puritanism; and the amount of insane cruelty caused by it is past human power to realize.

If the merits of Christianity as a civilizing force are to be in any way determined by its influence in working bloodshed, its record in the matter of witch-slaying alone would serve to place it, in that regard, lower than any other creed. Classic paganism knew no such infamy. All the horrors which Christians are wont to cite as typically heathen, the legends of Juggernaut and the pictures of Dahomey, dwindle in moral bulk beside the dreadful sum of evil set forth in the past of their own faith. For the Protestant lands burned at least as many hapless women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft as the Inquisition burned men for heresy. Most of the victims were women whose sole offence had been to have few friends. To be left a childless widow or an old maid was to run the risk of impeachment as a witch by any superstitious or malevolent neighbour; and the danger seems to have been actually doubled when such a woman gave herself to the work of rustic medicine-making in a spirit of goodwill to her kind. Lonely women who suffered in their minds from their very loneliness were almost sure to be condemned; and in cases where partial insanity did not lead them to admit the insane charges against them, torture easily attained the same end. But the mere repute for scientific studies could bring a man to his death; and in Scotland a physician was horribly tortured and at last burned on the charge of having raised the storm which endangered the life of King James on his return voyage from Denmark with his bride.

The crowning touch of horror is the fact that in Protestant history for generations there is hardly a trace of popular compassion for the victims. In the north of Catholic Italy there was a rebellion against witch-burning, perhaps because it was a part of the machinery of the Inquisition; in the Protestant countries there was nothing of the kind. Luther, a man normally fond of children, was capable of advising that a “possessed” child should be thrown into the river to drown or be cured. In Italy and France there had always been skepticism on the matter among educated men; in the Protestant world the new Bibliolatry made such skepticism go in fear of its life. Wherever it arose, piety met it with the consciousness of perfect wisdom, derived from revelation. Calvin was as confident on the subject as Luther; and when Doctor John Wier of ClÈves, apparently a believer in demons, whose numbers he afterwards statistically estimated at over seven thousand millions, ventured to argue in 1563 that many of the so-called witches were simply lunatics, he met as little favour in the Protestant as in the Catholic sphere. It is to be remembered, as a landmark in intellectual history, that the great French publicist Jean Bodin, the most original political thinker of his age, and far from orthodox on the Christian creed, was the foremost champion of the reigning superstition, which had become one of his rooted prejudices.

In England, in 1584, a notable book was written against it, the Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot; but still the mania deepened. King James I caused Scot’s book to be burned by the hangman in the next generation; and the superstition, thus accredited, reached its height in the period of the Commonwealth, whereafter it declined in the skeptical era of the Restoration. Nowhere did effective resistance arise on the religious plane. The reaction was conspicuously the work of the skeptics, noted as such. Montaigne began it in France, by the sheer force of his hardy and luminous common sense, which made no account of either the theology or the learning arrayed against it; and inasmuch as the most brutal fanaticism was in this matter everywhere bound up with the popular creed, the new enlightenment became in England anti-democratic because democracy there was the power of persecution, as in France it became anti-clerical. The Protestant movement had in its own despite set up a measure of mental freedom, by breaking up the ecclesiastical unity of Europe; but its spirit soon revealed to clear eyes that freedom of thought was not to be reached by mere reform of the Church as such. It thus evolved a skepticism which struck at the roots of all Christian beliefs.

The intellectual fatality of the Reformation was that it set up against the principle of papal authority not that of private judgment but that of revelation, and thus still made ancient ignorance the arbiter in the deepest problems. It is indeed vain to say, with Erasmus and with Goethe, that Luther did ill to force a crisis, and that the reform of the Church should have been left to time and the process of culture. No culture could have reformed the papacy as an economic system: the struggle there was finally not between knowledge and ignorance but between vested interests and outsiders’ rights. In the Rome of Leo X, as Ranke has calculated, there were twenty-five hundred venal offices, half of them created by Leo to raise funds for the building of St. Peter’s; and probably most were held by cultured men. What they fought for was not dogma but revenue: Luther when among them had been scandalized by their irreligion, not by their superstition. Looking back, we may still say that a violent rupture was inevitable. Two generations later, we find Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) raising money as did Leo X by the sale of places, and putting the prices so high as to promote official corruption in an extreme degree.

Rome, as a city, lived on its ecclesiastical revenue, and the total vested interest was irreversible. During the long papal schism in which the main wealth of the Church went to the Popes of Avignon, Rome sank visibly to the level of “a town of cowherds,” and the old church of St. Peter’s was in danger of falling to pieces. From the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the popes laboured successively to make their city the most splendid in Europe; and only a great revenue, extorted by corrupt or corrupting methods, could maintain it. The great Council of Trent, begun in 1545 to reform and reorganize the Church, had accomplished at its close in 1563 only a few doctrinal, disciplinary, and hierarchical modifications; and its own history proved the impossibility of a vital reform from within. Twice suspended for long periods, on the pretext of the disturbed state of Europe, it revealed in its closing session the inability of the nations as such to agree on any curative policy. The emperor, Ferdinand I, called for many reforms in a Protestant direction, such as marriage of priests, schools for the poor, “the cup for the laity,” and the reform of convents; and the French prelates supported him; but those of Spain violently resisted, though they agreed in wishing to restrict the pope’s power; while the Italians, the most numerous party, stood by the pope in all things, denouncing all gainsayers. In the end, the diplomatic cardinal Morone arranged matters with the different courts; the bishops had for the most part to give way; and the powers of the pope, which in 1545 the movers of the Council had been bent on curtailing, were established in nearly every particular, without any important change being made in the administrative system. The Council had indeed repudiated the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of predestination to sin and salvation; and on this head the Lutherans gradually came round to the Catholic view; but on the side of Church government the Reformation remained practically justified. Still, it is the historic fact that its first general result was intellectual retrogression. Save in England, where Elizabeth’s irreligious regimen gave scope for a literary and scientific renascence while it correlatively humiliated religion and the Church, leaving the fanatical growth of Protestantism to come later, the Protestant atmosphere was everywhere one of theological passion and superstition, in which art and science and fine letters were for a time blighted.

And even in England, the result of plunging an ignorant population into the turmoil of theological strife was markedly evil, whatever countervailing force there was in the freer play of mental life on other lines. Were it only in respect of the new ecclesiastical quarrels, the fierce and scurrilous wrangles between prelatists and anti-prelatists, the intensities of malice set up by questions of vestments, the insoluble disputes over the meaning of the eucharist—all heading towards the great Civil War of the seventeenth century—the Reformation was a letting out of the waters of enmity. But all intellectual life was bound to suffer from the erection of a historic delusion into a popular code of moral and social law. Men assured that the ethical and ceremonial law of the ancient Hebrews was the beginning and end of all civic wisdom and righteousness could not lead a sane civic life. The sermons of the Reformers were vain asseverations of a non-existent moral order. All social evil, all individual misfortune, was declared, in the Hebraic manner, to be God’s vengeance for sin; when all the while the infliction of evil by persecutors was denounced as in itself sin against God. The most popular preachers made the wildest promises of material welfare to the faithful as the due reward of faith; and every failure of fulfilment was as confidently explained in terms alternately of divine benevolence and divine chastening. The most repellent teachings of the Hebrew books were erected into infallible canons and commands; and every contemporary problem was put on the rack of Hebrew precedent. On all sides, the human soul was bewildered by unreason.

No mode of mental activity could escape the play of perversion. Hooker’s appeal to reason in Church policy was forever clouded by unreasoning resort to ancient texts. Bacon, complaining of the theological mortmain on all mental life, tacitly endorsed it by using the same tactic. With such standards in force at the upper levels of thought, a superstitious populace invited to find its sole light in the half-comprehended lore of ancient Palestine could make no progress on its own part towards knowledge of nature, of man’s past, or of man’s possibilities. Religious literature meant the semblance of culture without the reality. The sole measurable gains were Æsthetic, and that mainly on the literary side; for the Biblical temper was hostile to the plastic arts, though men of religion could not but play their part in developing the instrument of language. Science was at a discount till men wearied of theological debate.

By reaction, some similar results accrued within the scope of Catholicism in France and Italy. It is significant that “the importance of the anatomical description of the heart by Vesalius was not thoroughly comprehended by investigators for seventy-three years (1543 to 1616); and the uses of the valves of the veins remained unknown for more than half a century.” This was the period of the wars of religion in France, and of the theologians in Germany. Servetus had gone far on the way to the theory of the circulation of the blood in his Christianismi Restitutio (not in his work on the Trinity, as is often asserted), but the fact remained absolutely unknown in Switzerland and Germany. Scotland, which just before the Reformation had in the works of Dunbar and Lyndsay what might have been the beginning of a great literature, fell into a theological delirium which lasted two hundred years, and from which the nation emerged with its literary and intellectual continuity destroyed, and needing new tillage from foreign thought to yield any new life. It was only after the period of devout Protestantism had been succeeded by strife-weariness, toleration and doubt, that Protestant Holland and Switzerland began to count for anything in science and scholarship; and Germany and Scandinavia had to wait still longer for a new birth.

Catholic France, with all her troubles, fared on the whole better in the mental life. Rabelais was for his country a fountain of riotous wisdom all through the worst time of the civil wars; and before they had ended Montaigne began effectually the new enlightenment. Only in England, where Shakespeare and Bacon signalized Protestant rule, was there any similar good fortune; and both in England and France the period was one of extensive though necessarily cautious skepticism. Alongside of the first stirrings of Protestantism there had arisen in France a spirit of critical unbelief, represented by the Cymbalum Mundi of Bonaventure des Periers (1537), who had set out as a Protestant; and the ferocities of the war engendered in many a temper like his. What Montaigne did was to give to practical skepticism the warrant of literary genius, and to win for it free currency by the skill of his insinuation. Without such fortunate fathering, rationalism in England made much headway in the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is deeply impregnated with its spirit;2 Bacon gave it a broad basis under cover of orthodoxy; and even before their day there were loud protests that atheism was on foot wherever continental culture came.

By such complainants the evil was early traced to Italy; and it is clear that there, after the Spanish conquest, men’s energies turned from the closed field of politics to that of religion and philosophy, despite the Inquisition, very much as men in ancient Greece had turned to philosophy after the rise of the Macedonian tyranny. From Italy came alike Deism and Unitarianism, and such atheism as there was. The Inquisition still burned all heretics alike when it could catch them; but even among the clergy, nay, among the very inquisitors themselves, there were many heretics; and the zealots had to call in lay bigots to help them. Heretical books were burned by the thousand, most being absolutely suppressed; and when there was established (about 1550) the famous Index Expurgatorius, in imitation of the example already set at Louvain and Paris, it was soon found that some works by cardinals, and by the framer of the first Italian list, had to be included. Protestantism was thus crushed out in Italy, with due bloodshed to boot; and the heretical Franciscans were forced in mass to recant; but in the end there was no gain to faith. Heresy became more elusive and more pervasive; and when in the year 1600 the papacy put to death Giordano Bruno, his work as the herald of a new philosophy was already done. In the next generation appeared Galileo, the pioneer of a new era of practical science. Thus even in her time of downfall did Italy begin for Europe a second renascence.

Thenceforth, in the sphere of the Church of Rome, unbelief persisted either audaciously or secretly alongside of the faith. Within the Church the long battle with Protestantism had evolved fresh energies of propaganda, and even a measure of ascetic reformation. In particular, the new Order of Jesuits (founded in 1534), which we have seen completing the recapture of Poland, strove everywhere by every available means, fair and foul, for the Church’s supremacy. Where treachery and cruelty could not be used, as they were in Poland, the Jesuits made play with a system of education which realized the ideals of the time; and besides thus training the young as adherents, the Church developed within itself a revival of ecclesiastical learning that made a formidable resistance to the learning of French and English Protestantism. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the combatants thus wrought by their literary warfare what they had previously done by their physical strife—a gain to the spirit of unbelief. Neither side convinced the other; and while the Protestants discredited many of the old Catholic beliefs, their opponents more subtly discredited the faculty of theological reason, putting all human judgments in doubt as such. The outcome was a strengthening of the anti-theological bias. Jesuit education, where it became at all scientific, armed the born skeptics; and where it was limited to belles lettres it failed in the long run to make either earnest believers or able disputants.

Thus the Reformation, in the act of giving Christianity a new intensity of life among certain populations, where it fostered and was fostered by a growth of intolerant democracy, unwittingly promoted at once fanaticism and freethinking both in its own and in its enemy’s sphere. Deepened superstition forced a deepening of skepticism; fanaticism drove moderate men to science; and theological learning discredited theology. In papal and downtrodden Italy, in monarchic and military France, in the England of the Restoration, and in semi-democratic Holland, there worked in the seventeenth century the same divergent forces.

In both Holland and England, by help of the spirit of fanatical democracy, the multiplication of sects and heresies in the second generation of the seventeenth century was so great—180 being specified in England alone—that no repressive policy could deal with them; and under cover of their political freedom there arose some Unitarian doctrine among the common people, even as anti-Scriptural Deism spread among the educated. Devoutly religious men, such as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, by the very thoroughness of their loyalty to the doctrine of the inward light, helped to shake among sincere people the old docility of belief in revelation, though in some cases they reinforced it, and in many more evoked, by reaction, the spirit of persecution.

The net gain from Protestantism thus lay in the fortuitous disruption of centralized spiritual tyranny. The rents in the structure made openings for air and light at a time when new currents were beginning to blow and new light to shine. Twenty years before Luther’s schism, Columbus had found the New World. Copernicus, dying in 1543, left his teaching to the world in which Protestantism had just established itself. Early in the next century Kepler and Galileo began to roll back for men the old dream-boundaries of the universe. The modern era was at its dawn; and with it Christianity had begun its era of reconsideration, revision, and slow decline.