QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the difference in the effect, on the scholars of the time, of the Revival of Learning in Italy and in northern lands?
2. How do you explain the serious church opposition to the different attempts of northern scholars to try to turn the Church back to the simpler religious ideals and practices of early Christianity?
3. Explain how opposition to the practices of the Church could be organized into a political force.
4. Explain the analogy of a heretic in the fifteenth century and an anarchist of to-day.
5. Assuming that the Church had encouraged progressive evolution as a policy, and thus warded off revolution and disruption, in what ways might history have been different?
6. How can the bitter opposition to the reading and study of the Bible be explained?
7. Show the analogy between the freedom of thinking demanded by Luther, and that obtained three centuries earlier by the scholars in the rising universities. Why were the universities not opposed?
8. Enumerate the changes which had taken place in western Europe between the days of Wycliffe and Huss and the time of Luther, which enabled him to succeed where they had failed.
9. Explain in what ways the Protestant Revolt was essentially a revolution in thinking, and that, once started, certain other consequences must inevitably follow in time.
10. Was it perfectly natural that the reformers should refuse to their followers the same right to revolt, and separate off into smaller and still different sects, which they had contended for for themselves? Why?
11. On what basis could Catholic and Protestant wage war on one another to try to enforce their own particular belief?
12. Compare the individualism of the Greek Sophists with that of the Protestant reformers. Did Greece attempt to deal with them in the same way?