The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

CHAPTER XII

MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT

Were we reading the biography of a wayward genius, we should find the significance of the book neither in the account of his quarrels and of his sins nor in the calculation of his financial difficulties and successes, but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty and wisdom of the world. Something the same is true about the history of a race or of a period; the political and economic events are but the outward framework; the intellectual achievement is both the most attractive and the most repaying object of our study. In this respect the sixteenth century was one of the most brilliant; it produced works of science that outstripped all its predecessors; it poured forth masterpieces of art and literature that are all but matchless.

SECTION 1. BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP

[Sidenote: Position of Bible in 16th century]

It is naturally impossible to give a full account of all the products of sixteenth century genius. In so vast a panorama only the mountain peaks can be pointed out. One of these peaks is assuredly the Bible. Never before nor since has that book been so popular; never has its study absorbed so large a part of the energies of men. It is true that the elucidation of the text was not proportional to the amount of labor spent on it. For the most part it was approached not in a scientific but in a dogmatic spirit. Men did not read it historically and critically but to find their own dogmas in it. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for both the textual and the higher criticism.

{564} [Sidenote: The Greek Text]

The Greek text of the New Testament was first published by Erasmus in March, 1516. Revised, but not always improved, editions were brought out by him in 1519, 1522 and 1527. For the first edition he had before him ten manuscripts, all of them minuscules, the oldest of which, though he believed it might have come from the apostolic age, is assigned by modern criticism to the twelfth century. In the course of printing, some bad errors were introduced, and the last six verses of the Apocalypse, wanting in all the manuscripts, were supplied by an extremely faulty translation from the Latin. The results were such as might have been anticipated. Though the text has been vastly purified by modern critics, the edition of Erasmus was of great service and was thoroughly honest. He noted that the last verses of Mark were doubtful and that the passage on the adulteress (John vii, 53 to viii, 11) was lacking in the best authorities, and he omitted the text on the three heavenly witnesses (I John v, 7) as wanting in all his manuscripts.

For this omission he was violently attacked. To support his position he asked his friend Bombasius to consult the Codex Vaticanus, and dared to assert that were a single manuscript found with the verse in Greek, he would include it in subsequent editions. Though there were at the time no codices with the verse in question—which was a Latin forgery of the fourth century, possibly due to Priscillian—one was promptly manufactured. Though Erasmus suspected the truth, that the verse had been interpolated from the Latin text, he added it in his third edition "that no occasion for calumny be given." This one sample must serve to show how Erasmus's work was received. For every deviation from the Vulgate, whether in the Greek text or in the new Latin translation with which he accompanied it, he was ferociously assailed. His {565} own anecdote of the old priest who, having the misprint "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in his missal, refused to correct the error when it was pointed out, is perfectly typical of the position of his critics. New truth must ever struggle hard against old prejudice.

While Erasmus was working, a much more ambitious scheme for publishing the Scriptures was maturing under the direction of Cardinal Ximénez at Alcalá or, as the town was called in Latin, Complutum. The Complutensian Polyglot, as it was thence named, was published in six volumes, four devoted to the Old Testament, one to the New Testament, and one to a Hebrew lexicon and grammar. The New Testament volume has the earliest date, 1514, but was withheld from the public for several years after this. The manuscripts from which the Greek texts were taken are unknown, but they were better than those used by Erasmus. The later editors of the Greek text in the sixteenth century, Robert Estienne (Stephanus) and Theodore Beza, did little to castigate it, although one of the codices used by Beza, and now known by his name, is of great value.

[Sidenote: Hebrew text]

The Hebrew Massoretic text of the Old Testament was printed by Gerson Ben Mosheh at Brescia in 1494, and far more elaborately in the first four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglot. With the Hebrew text the Spanish editors offered the Septuagint Greek, the Syriac, and the Vulgate, the Hebrew, Syriac and Greek having Latin translations. The manuscripts for the Hebrew were procured from Rome. A critical revision was undertaken by Sebastian Münster and published with a new Latin version at Basle 1534-5. Later recensions do not call for special notice here. An incomplete text of the Syriac New Testament was published at Antwerp in 1569.

[Sidenote: Latin versions]

The numerous new Latin translations made during {566} this period testify to the general discontent with the Vulgate. Not only humanists like Valla, Lefèvre and Erasmus, but perfectly orthodox theologians like Pope Nicholas V, Cajetan and Sadoletus, saw that the common version could be much improved. In the new Latin translation by Erasmus many of the errors of the Vulgate were corrected. Thus, in Matthew iii, 2, he offers "resipiscite" or "ad mentem redite" instead of "poenitentiam agite." This, as well as his substitution of "sermo" for "verbum" in John i, 1, was fiercely assailed. Indeed, when it was seen what use was made by the Protestants of the new Greek texts and of the new Latin versions, of which there were many, a strong reaction followed in favor of the traditional text. Even by the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot the Vulgate was regarded with such favor that, being printed between the Hebrew and Greek, it was compared by them to Christ crucified between the two thieves. [Sidenote: 1530] The Sorbonne condemned as "Lutheran" the assertion that the Bible could not be properly understood or expounded without knowledge of the original languages. [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] In the decree of Trent the Vulgate was declared to be the authentic form of the Scriptures. The preface to the English Catholic version printed at Rheims [Sidenote: 1582] defends the thesis, now generally held by Catholics, that the Latin text is superior in accuracy to the Greek, having been corrected by Jerome, preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1592] In order to have this text in its utmost purity an official edition was issued.

[Sidenote: Biblical scholarship]

Modern critics, having far surpassed the results achieved by their predecessors, are inclined to underestimate their debts to these pioneers in the field. The manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries, concordances, special lexicons, all that make an introduction to biblical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or {567} were supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The professors at Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, were unable to find a map of Palestine. The first Hebrew concordance was printed, with many errors, at Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 1546, at Basle. To find a parallel passage or illustrative material or ancient comment on a given text, the critic then had to search through dusty tomes and manuscripts, instead of finding them accumulated for him in ready reference books. That all this has been done is the work of ten generations of scholars, among whom the pioneers of the Renaissance should not lack their due meed of honor. The early critics were hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical (or didactic).

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to a more fruitful method. It is true that his main object was a moral one, the overthrow of superstition and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or chiefly, to explain away as fables stories that would seem silly or obscene as history. In the New Testament he sought the man Jesus and not the deified Christ. He preferred the New Testament, with its "simple, plain and gentle truth, without savor of superstition or cruelty" to the Old Testament. He discriminated nicely even among the books of the New Testament, considering the chief ones the gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles (except Hebrews), I Peter and I John. He hinted that many did not consider the Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in thought but not in style; he believed Hebrews to have {568} been written by Clement of Rome; and he called James lacking in apostolic dignity.

[Sidenote: Luther]

By far the best biblical criticism of the century was the mature work of Martin Luther. It is a remarkable fact that a man whose doctrine of the binding authority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his disciples permission to interpret the text with the least shade of independence, should himself have shown a freedom in the treatment of the inspired writers unequaled in any Christian for the next three centuries. It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were mere matters of taste; that he took what he liked and rejected what he disliked, and this is true to a certain extent. "What treats well of Christ, that is Scripture, even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he averred, and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against Christ, we must urge Christ against the Bible." His wish to exclude the epistle of James from the canon, on the ground that its doctrine of justification contradicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and excited wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir Thomas More, but also from many Protestants, beginning with Bullinger.

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of the Bible were usually far more than would be implied by a merely dogmatic interest. Together with the best scholarship of the age he had a strong intuitive feeling for style that guided him aright in many cases. In denying the Mosaic authorship of a part of the Pentateuch, in asserting that Job and Jonah were fables, in finding that the books of Kings were more credible than Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes had received their final form from later editors, he but advanced theses now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply {569} confirmed. Some modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry. Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty volumes in deserved neglect.

[Sidenote: German version]

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of the Bible that of Luther stands first in every sense of the word. Long he had meditated on it before his enforced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the leisure to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had much help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg professors, was a life-long labor. Only recently have the minutes of the meetings of these scholars come to light, and they testify to the endless trouble taken by the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. He wrote no dialect, but a common, standard German which he believed to have been introduced by the Saxon chancery. But he also modelled his style not only on the few good German authors then extant, but on the speech of the market-place. From the mouths of the people he took the sweet, common words that he gave back to them again, "so that they may note that we are speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put into the German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, lofty eloquence, poetry.

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the Bible. To make Moses "so German that no one would know that he was a Jew" insured a noble style, but involved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. Thus the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite plainly, and of German May-festivals; and the passover is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there not even {570} an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the translation of Micah iv, 8?—"Und du Thurm Eder, eine Feste der Tochter Zion, es wird deine goldene Rose kommen." Luther declared his intention of "simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the rest of Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of fact the greatest change that he actually made was the introduction of the word "alone" after "faith" in the passage (Romans iii, 28) "A man is justified by faith without works of the law." Luther never used the word "church" (Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it by "congregation" (Gemeinde). Following Erasmus he turned [Greek] metanoieite (Matthew iii, 2, 8) into "bessert euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" ("do penance") as in the older German versions. Also, following the Erasmian text, he omitted the "comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7); this was first insinuated into the German Bible in 1575.

[Sidenote: English Bible]

None of the other vernacular versions, not even the French translation of Lefèvre and Olivetan can compare with the German save one, the English. How William Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed the work in 1535, has been told on another page. Many revisions followed: the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops' Bible of 1568. Then came the Catholic, or Douai version of 1582, the only one completely differing from the others, with its foundation on the Vulgate and its numerous barbarisms: "parasceue" for "preparation," "feast of Azymes" for "feast of unleavened bread," "imposing of hands," "what to me and thee, woman" (John ii, 4), "penance," "chalice," "host," "against the spirituals of wickedness in the celestials" (Ephesians vi, 12), "supersubstantial bread" in the Lord's prayer, "he exinanited himself" (Philippians ii, 7).

We are accustomed to speak of the Authorized Version {571} of 1610 as if it were a new product of the literary genius of Shakespeare's age. In fact, it was a mere revision, and a rather light one, of previous work. Its rare perfection of form is due to the labors of many men manipulating and polishing the same material. Like the Homeric poems, like the Greek gospels themselves probably, the greatest English classic is the product of the genius of a race and not of one man.

Even from the very beginning it was such to some extent. Tyndale could hardly have known Wyclif's version, which was never printed and was rare in manuscript, but his use of certain words, such as "mote," "beam," and "strait gate," also found in the earlier version, prove that he was already working in a literary tradition, one generation handing down to another certain Scriptural phrases first heard in the mouths of the Lollards.

Both Tyndale and Coverdale borrowed largely from the German interpreters, as was acknowledged on the title-page and in the prologue to the Bible of 1535. Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the marginal notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, "this is once bone of my bone," "they offered unto field-devils" (Luther, "Felt-teuffem"), "Blessed is the room-maker, Gad" (Luther, "Raum-macher"). The English translators also followed the German in using "elder" frequently for "priest," "congregation" for "church," and "love" for "charity." By counting every instance of this and similar renderings, Sir Thomas More claimed to have found one thousand errors in the New Testament alone.

[Sidenote: Popularity of Bible]

The astounding popularity of the Bible, chiefly but not only in Protestant countries, is witnessed by a myriad voices. Probably in all Christian countries in every age it has been the most read book, but in the sixteenth century it added to an unequaled reputation {572} for infallibility the zest of a new discovery. Edward VI demanding the Bible at his coronation, Elizabeth passionately kissing it at hers, were but types of the time. That joyous princess of the Renaissance, Isabella d'Este, ordered a new translation of the Psalms for her own perusal. Margaret of Navarre, in the Introduction to her frivolous Heptameron, expresses the pious hope that all present have read the Scripture. Hundreds of editions of the German and English translations were called for. The people, wrote an Englishman in 1539, "have now in every church and place, almost every man, the Bible and New Testament in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round . . . and such other whose impure filth and vain fabulosity the light of God hath abolished there utterly." In Protestant lands it became almost a matter of good form to own the Bible, and reading it has been called, not ineptly, "the opus operatum of the Evangelicals." Even the Catholics bore witness to the demand, which they tried to check. While they admonished the laity that it was unnecessary and dangerous to taste of this tree of knowledge, while they even curtailed the reading of the Scripture by the clergy, they were forced to supply vernacular versions of their own.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

Along with unbounded popularity the Bible then enjoyed a much higher reputation for infallibility than it bears today. The one point on which all Protestant churches were agreed was the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. The Word, said Calvin, flowed from the very mouth of God himself; it was the sole foundation of faith and the one fountain of all wisdom. "What Christ says must be true whether I or any other man can understand it," preached Luther. "Scripture is fully to be believed," wrote an English theologian, "as a thing necessary to salvation, though {573} the thing contained in Scripture pertain not merely to the faith, as that Aaron had a beard." The Swiss and the Anabaptists added their voices to this chorus of bibliolatry.

[Sidenote: Abeunt studia in mores]

Since studies pass into character, it is natural to find a marked effect from this turning loose of a new source of spiritual authority. That thousands were made privately better, wiser and happier from the reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that standards of morality were raised and ethical tastes purified thereby, is certain. But the same cause had several effects that were either morally indifferent or positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by contemporaries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, as Luther complained, interpreted the Holy Book according to his own brain and crazy reason. The old saying that the Bible was the book of heretics, came true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that none but the ministers (i.e. themselves) had the right to interpret Scripture. It was in vain for the governments to forbid, as the Scotch statute expressed it, "any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible"; [Sidenote: 1550] discordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig-headed and intolerant.

There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion to the amount of inerrancy attributed to it, became a stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism was regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, as a cause of vehement suspicion of atheism. Some texts buttressed the horrible and cruel superstition of witchcraft. The examples of the wars of Israel and the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to support the duty of intolerance. Social reformers, like {574} Vives, in their struggle to abolish poverty, were confronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal verity, that the poor are always with us. Finally the great moral lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission of polygamy, was supported by biblical texts.

[Sidenote: The classics]

Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the classics. Most of the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most important exception being the Annals of Tacitus, of which the editio princeps was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates of the editiones principes of the other principal Greek writers:

1502: Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus. 1503: Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's Hellenica. 1504: Demosthenes. 1509: Plutarch's Moralia. 1513: Pindar, Plato. 1516: Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pausanias, Strabo. 1517: Plutarch's Lives. 1518: Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays. 1525: Galen, Xenophon's complete works. 1528: Epictetus. 1530: Polybius. 1532: Aristophanes, eleven plays. 1533: Euclid, Ptolemy. 1544: Josephus. 1552: Aeschylus, seven plays. 1558: Marcus Aurelius. 1559: Diodorus. 1565: Bion and Moschus. 1572: Plutarch's complete works.

Naturally the first editions were not usually the best. {575} [Sidenote: Scholarship] The labor of successive generations has made the text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not exclusively, in editing the fathers of the church, was done by Erasmus. But a really new school of historical criticism was created by Joseph Justus Scaliger, [Sidenote: J. J. Scaliger, 1540-1609] the greatest of scholars. His editions of the Latin poets first laid down and applied sound rules of textual emendation, besides elucidating the authors with a wealth of learned comment.

The editing of the texts was but a small portion of the labor that went to the cultivation of the classics. The foundations of our modern lexicons were laid in the great Thesaurus linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in three volumes 1543) and the Thesauris linguae Graecae by Henry Estienne the younger, published in five volumes in 1572. This latter is still used, the best edition being that in nine volumes 1829-63.

So much of ancient learning has become a matter of course to the modern student that he does not always realize the amount of ground covered in the last four centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani: [Sidenote: November 13, 1517] "The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient poets vainly promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that its very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the greatest scholars then was ignorant of a site now visited by every tourist in the Eternal City, how much must there not have been to learn in other respects? Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and successors of Erasmus labored to supply the knowledge then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammars were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epigraphy, on ancient religion, on chronology, on comparative philology, on Roman law, laid deep and strong the foundations of the consummate scholarship of modern times.

{576} [Sidenote: Idolatry of ancients]

The classics were not only studied in the sixteenth century, they were loved, they were even worshipped. "Every elegant study, every science worthy of the attention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there is of polite learning," wrote the French savant Muret, [Sidenote: 1573] "is contained nowhere save in the literature of the Greeks." Joachim du Bellay wrote a cycle of sonnets on the antiquities of Rome, in the spirit:

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

"The Latin allureth me by its gracious dignity," wrote Montaigne, "and the writings of the Greeks not only fill and satisfy me, but transfix me with admiration. . . . What glory can compare with that of Homer?" Machiavelli tells how he dressed each evening in his best attire to be worthy to converse with the spirits of the ancients, and how, while reading them, he forgot all the woes of life and the terror of death. Almost all learned works, and a great many not learned, were written in Latin. For those who could not read the classics for themselves translations were supplied. Perhaps the best of these were the Lives of Famous Men by Plutarch, first rendered into French by Amyot and thence into English by Sir Thomas North.

[Sidenote: Value of classics in 16th century]

Strong, buoyant, self-confident as was the spirit of the age, it bore plainly upon it the impress of its zealous schooling in the lore of the ancients. In supplying the imperious need of cultured men for good literature the Romans and Greeks had, in the year 1500, but few rivals—save in Italy, hardly any. To an age that had much to learn they had much to teach; to men as greedy for the things of the mind as they were for luxury and wealth the classics offered a new world as rich in spoils of wisdom and beauty as were the East Indies and {577} Peru in spices and gold. The supreme value of the Greek and Latin books is that which they have in common with all literature; they furnished, for the mass of reading men, the best and most copious supply of food for the intellectual and spiritual life. "Books," says Erasmus, "are both cheering and wholesome. In prosperity they steady one, in affliction console, do not vary with fortune and follow one through all dangers even to the grave. . . . What wealth or what scepters would I exchange for my tranquil reading?" "From my earliest childhood," Montaigne confides, "poetry has had the power to pierce me through and transport me."

In the best sense of the word, books are popular philosophy. All cannot study the deepest problems of life or of science for themselves, but all can absorb the quintessence of thought in the pleasant and stimulating form in which it is served up in the best literature. Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to cultivate a high and noble inward life. This, their supreme value for the moulding of character, was appreciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink the spirit of the classics," observes Montaigne, "rather than learn their precepts," and again, "the use to which I put my studies is a practical one—the formation of character for the exigencies of life."

[Sidenote: Ancient masters of literary style]

This is the service by which the ancients have put the moderns in their debt. Another gift of distinct, though lesser value, was that of literary style. So close is the correspondence between expression and thought that it is no small advantage to any man or to any age to sit at the feet of those supreme masters of the art of saying things well, the Greeks. The danger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years in constructing sentences that might have been written {578} by his master, who speaks of Jehovah as Jupiter and of Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who transmutes the world around him into a Roman empire with tribunes and augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant that the English word "pedant" was coined in the sixteenth century.

What the classics had to teach directly was not only of less value than their indirect influence, but was often positively harmful. Those who, intoxicated with the pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by the moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, though into the opposite vices, as those who deified the letter of the Bible. Like the Bible the classics were, and are, to some extent obstacles to the march of science, and this not only because they take men's interest from the study of nature, but because most ancient philosophers from the time of Socrates spoke contemptuously of natural experiment and discovery as things of little or no value to the soul.

If for the finer spirits of the age a classical education furnished a noble instrument of culture, for all too many it was prized simply as a badge of superiority. Among a people that stands in awe of learning—and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century—a classical education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing inferiors with their crudity.

[Sidenote: Vernaculars]

The period that marked high water in the estimation of the classics, also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded the classics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's Défence et Illustration de la langue française published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics. This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus formally introduced.

SECTION 2. HISTORY

For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents, of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and church history, the child of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]

The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what has just been said about the influence of the classics. Their supreme interest was style, generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods, to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a few antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted the Book of Articles, came to write the history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the New Testament was written by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few other passing references are all of the Reformation that comes into a bulky volume dealing with the reigns of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in political liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not so plainly rooted in antique soil.

The prevailing vice of the humanists—to see in the story of a people nothing but a political lesson—is carried to its extreme by Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the point of composing historical romances. His Life of Castruccio is as fictitious and as didactic as Xenophon's Cyropaedia; his Commentary on Livy is as much a treatise on politics as is The Prince; the History of Florence is but slightly hampered by the events.

[Sidenote: Guicciardini]

If Guicciardini's interest in politics is not less exclusive than that of his compatriot, he is vastly superior as a historian to the older man in that, whereas Machiavelli deduced history a priori from theory, Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive method of deriving his theory from an accurate mastery of the facts. With superb analytical reasoning he presents his data, marshals them and draws from them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation that vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into account only low and selfish motives. Before idealists he stands helpless; he leaves the reader uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely astute politician.

[Sidenote: Jovius]

The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the Florentines lies in the appeal that he made to the {581} interests of the general public. History had hitherto been written for the greater glory of a patron or at most of a city; Jovius saw that the most generous patron of genius must henceforth be the average reader. It is true that he despised the public for whom he wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as the first great interviewer and reporter for the history of his own times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy by assuming an air of virtue not natural to him, he anticipated the modern journalist.

[Sidenote: Polydore Vergil]

So much more modern in point of view than his contemporaries was Polydore Vergil—whose English History appeared in 1534—that the generalizations about humanist historiography are only partially true of him. Though his description of land and people is perhaps modelled on Herodotus, it shows a genuine interest in the life of the common man, even of the poor. He noted the geography, climate and fauna of the island; his eyes saw London Bridge with its rows of shops on either side, and they admired the parks full of game, the apple orchards, the fat hens and pheasants, the ploughs drawn by mixed teams of horses and oxen; he even observed the silver salt-cellars, spoons and cups used by the poor, and their meals of meat. His description of the people as brave, hospitable and very religious is as true now as it was then. With an antiquary's interest in old manuscripts Vergil combined a philosopher's skepticism of old legends. This Italian, though his patron was Henry VIII, balanced English and French authorities and told the truth even in such delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of Arc. Political history was for him still the most important, although to one branch of it, constitutional history, he was totally blind. So were almost all Englishmen then, even Shakespeare, whose King John contains no allusion to Magna Charta. In his work On the Inventors {582} of Things Vergil showed the depth of his insight into the importance in history of culture and ideas. While his treatment of such subjects as the origin of myths, man, marriage, religion, language, poetry, drama, music, sciences and laws is unequal to his purpose, the intention itself bears witness to a new and fruitful spirit.

[Sidenote: French Memoirs]

Neither France nor England nor Germany produced historians equal to those of Italian or of Scottish birth. France was the home of the memoir, personal, chatty, spicy and unphilosophic. Those of Blaise de Montluc are purely military, those of Brantôme are mostly scandalous. Martin du Bellay tried to impart a higher tone to his reminiscences, while with Hotman a school of pamphleteers arose to yoke history with political theory. John Bodin attempted without much success the difficult task of writing a philosophy of history. His chief contribution was the theory of geography and climate as determinant influences.

[Sidenote: English chronicles]

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as sources, in the popular English chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John Stow. Full of court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist, conservative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the middle-class cockney as faithfully as does a certain type of newspaper and magazine today.

[Sidenote: Biographies]

The biography and autobiography were cultivated with considerable success. Jovius and Brantôme both wrote series of lives of eminent men and women. Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are both few and brief, they are notable as among the most exquisite pen-portraits in literature. More ambitious and more notable were the Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects by George Vasari, in which the whole interest was personal and practical, with no attempt to write a history or a philosophy of art. Even criticism was confined almost entirely to {583} variations of praise. In the realm of autobiography Benvenuto Cellini attained to the non plus ultra of self-revelation. If he discloses the springs of a rare artistic genius, with equal naïvete he lays bare a ruffianly character and a colossal egotism.

[Sidenote: Church history]

One immense field of human thought and action had been all but totally ignored by the humanist historians—that of religion. To cultivate this field a new genre, church history, sprang into being, though the felt want was not then for a rational explanation of important and neglected phenomena, but for material which each side in the religious controversy might forge into weapons to use against the other. The natural result of so practical a purpose was that history was studied through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with strong tendency. In the most honest hands, such as those of Sleidan, the scale was unconsciously weighted on one side; by more passionate or less honorable advocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression of the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of the false on the other.

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history, their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient Judaism, was set apart as divinely revealed over against all other faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been pitiful.

In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of God over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which God and the devil pulled the strings. Institutions of which they disapproved, such as the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses passed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.

[Sidenote: Magdeburg Centuries, 1559-74]

Among the most industrious and the most biassed must certainly be numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing the Magdeburg Centuries, a vast history of the church to the year 1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic sources. Save for the accumulation of much material it deserves no praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as such, but are divided into two classes, those tending to prove an accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal institution which are branded as "first-class lies." The correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.

[Sidenote: Annales of Baronius, 1583-1607]

However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries, they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose Annales Ecclesiastici was the official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy, unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him, found the work difficult.

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the Reformation itself. A certain class of Protestant works, of which Crespin's Book of Martyrs, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's Ecclesiastical History [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (first English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the passions of the multitude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated facts has a certain "thickness" of reality—if I may borrow William James's phrase—that is found by more complex minds only in the deduction of general causes. Passionate, partisan and sometimes ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues. When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into a general history, he plagiarized the Magdeburg Centuries. The reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some success, though it has not been fully or impartially investigated. Much of it being drawn from personal recollection or from unpublished records, its solo value consists for us in its accuracy. I have compared a small section of the work with the manuscript source used by Foxe and have made the rather surprising discovery that though there are wide variations, none of them can be referred to partisan bias or to any other conceivable motive. In this instance, which is too small to generalize, it is possible that Foxe either had supplementary information, or that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his work must be used with caution.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox's History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland (written 1559-71). In style it is rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the essential and a no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its intention to be "a faithful rehearsal of such personages as God has made instruments of his glory," though thus equivocally stated, is carried out in an honorable sense. It is true that the writer never harbored a doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instrument of God's glory, nor that "the Roman Kirk is the synagogue of Satan and the head thereof, called the pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh." If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get impartiality, {587} neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphleteer, he did not falsify or suppress essential facts as he understood them himself.

[Sidenote: Bullinger]

In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the fair appearance of impartiality presented in Henry Bullinger's History of the Reformation 1519-32. Here, too, we meet with excellent composition, but with a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that the author's professions of fairness are sincere, though at times the temptation to omit recording unedifying facts, such as the sacramentarian schism, is too strong for him.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

Before passing judgment on anything it is necessary to know it at its best. Probably John Sleidan's Religious and political History of the reign of Charles V [Sidenote: 1555] was the best work on the German Reformation written before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more eloquent and acute, Seckendorf more learned, Gilbert Burnet had better perspective, but, none of these writers was better informed than Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was he above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses and in monsters. He cited documents broadly and on the whole fairly, but not with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588} Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his public, and temperately.

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of notable histories than had the Protestants. A succès de scandale was won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] Origin and Progress of the English Schism. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr. Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he gave rein to his imagination.

[Sidenote: Loyola]

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness, such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius, lag far in the dusty rear.

SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY

[Sidenote: Premises]

The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought. Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced. From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new entities, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the shift of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few egalitarians who claimed for all classes a democratic régime. And, thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the relationship of church and state. It was on premises gathered from these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling structure of political thought.

[Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1527]

It was chiefly the first of these problems that absorbed the attention of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most brilliant, the most studied and the most abused of political theorists. As between monarchy and a republic he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely to be the stronger, but he clearly saw that where economic equality prevailed political equality was natural and inevitable. The masses, he thought, desired only security of person and property, and would adhere to either form of government that offered them the best chance of these. For republic and monarchy alike Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft, those for the former embodied in his Discourses on Livy, those for the latter in his Prince. In erecting a new science of statecraft, by which a people might {590} arrive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli's great merit is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect is that he set before his mind as a premise an abstract "political man" as far divorced from living, breathing, complex reality as the "economic man" of Ricardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, governed by calculable motives of self-interest. In general, he thought, men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by an appeal to their greed, but chiefly by fear.

[Sidenote: Politics divorced from morality]

Realist as he professed to be, Machiavelli divorced politics from morality. Whereas for Aristotle[1] and Aquinas alike the science of politics is a branch of ethics, for Machiavelli it is an abstract science as totally dissociated from morality as is mathematics or surgery. The prince, according to Machiavelli, should appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, but should be able to act otherwise without the least scruple when it is to his advantage to do so. His heroes are Ferdinand of Aragon, "a prince who always preaches good faith but never practises it," and Caesar Borgia, "who did everything that can be done by a prudent and virtuous man; so that no better precepts can be offered to a new prince than those suggested by the example of his actions." What the Florentine publicist especially admired in Caesar's statecraft were some examples of consummate perfidy and violence which he had the opportunity of observing at first hand. Machiavelli made a sharp distinction between private and public virtue. The former he professed to regard as binding on the individual, as it was necessary to the public good. It is noteworthy that this advocate of all hypocrisy and guile {591} and violence on the part of the government was in his own life gentle, affectionate and true to trust. [Sidenote: Public vs. private life] Religion Machiavelli regarded as a valuable instrument of tyranny, but he did not hold the view, attributed by Gibbon to Roman publicists, that all religions, though to the philosopher equally false, were to the statesman equally useful. Christianity he detested, not so much as an exploded superstition, as because he saw in it theoretically the negation of those patriotic, military virtues of ancient Rome, and because practically the papacy had prevented the union of Italy. Naturally Machiavelli cherished the army as the prime interest of the state. In advocating a national militia with universal training of citizens he anticipated the conscript armies of the nineteenth century.

This writer, speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the Florentine—and there were very many such allusions to him on the Elizabethan stage—to be sure of a round of applause from the audience. While Machiavelli found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works were written by the evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang amen and the church put his writings on the Index. The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition. Among them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his morals but his talent, saying that his maxims were drawn from an observation of small states only, and that his judgment of the policy suitable to large nations was of the poorest.

{592} It is fair to try The Prince by the author's own standards. He did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose, "for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin succeeded where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points out, because he put the moral ideal first.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not forthcoming from the camp of the Reformers, but from that of the northern humanists, Erasmus and More. The Institution of a Christian Prince, by the Dutch scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Virtue is inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, who can be considered good only in proportion as he fosters the wealth and the education of his people. He should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live parsimoniously off his own estate. He should never make war, save when absolutely necessary, even against the Infidel, and should negotiate only such treaties as have for their principal object the prevention of armed conflict.

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is Erasmus's preference for the republican form of government. In the Christian Prince, dedicated as it was to the emperor, he spoke as if kings might and perhaps ought to be elected, but in his Adages he interpreted the spirit of the ancients in a way most disparaging to monarchy. Considering how carefully this work was studied by promising youths at the impressionable age, it is not too much to regard it as one of the main sources of the marked republican current of thought throughout the century. Under the heading, "Fools {593} and kings are born such," he wrote: "In all history, ancient and recent, you will scarcely find in the course of several centuries one or two princes, who, by their signal folly, did not bring ruin on humanity." In another place, after a similar remark, he continues:

I know not whether much of this is not to be imputed to ourselves. We trust the rudder of a vessel, where a few sailors and some goods alone are in jeopardy, to none but skilful pilots; but the state, wherein is comprised the safety of so many thousands, we leave to the guidance of any chance hands. A charioteer must learn, reflect upon and practice his art; a prince needs only to be born. Yet government is the most difficult, as it is the most honorable, of sciences. Shall we choose the master of a ship and not choose him who is to have the care of so many cities and so many souls? . . . Do we not see that noble cities are erected by the people and destroyed by princes? that a state grows rich by the industry of its citizens and is plundered by the rapacity of its princes? that good laws are enacted by elected magistrates and violated by kings? that the people love peace and the princes foment war?

There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, which in all makes a polemic against monarchy not exceeded by the fiercest republicans of the next two generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this in 1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. "Princes must be endured," he then thought, "lest tyranny give place to anarchy, a still greater evil."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

As one of the principal causes of the Reformation was the strengthening of national self-consciousness, so conversely one of the most marked results of the movement was the exaltation of the state. The Reformation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the separation of church and state, and it endowed the latter with much wealth, with many privileges and with high prerogatives and duties up to that time {594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of enforcing orthodoxy and punishing sinners, Hobbes drew the logical inference that the state was the final authority for determining religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the reductio ad absurdum of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable religious truth.

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was. Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Luther]

While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants' War and the extravagance of Münzer, he came to believe that "Herr Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this world are gods," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through whom God sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly through Satan, i.e., makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely ordained "powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in 1530.

That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine majesty in the state is due not only to Scriptural authority but to the fact that there was no material for any other form of government to be found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he any illusions as to the character of hereditary monarchs. In his Treatise on Civil Authority, [Sidenote: 1523] dedicated to his own sovereign, Duke John of Saxony, he wrote: "Since the foundation of the world a wise prince has been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They are generally the biggest fools and worst knaves on earth, wherefore one must always expect the worst of them and not much good, especially in divine matters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to decide spiritual things, but only to enforce the decisions of the Christian community.

Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth of the emperor and finding no warrant for the people to curb him, Luther groped for the notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word "constitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea was present is certain. The German Empire had a constitution, largely unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507] When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of the German states to resist by force {597} imperial acts of injustice contrary to positive laws. Moreover, he always maintained that no subject should obey an order directly contravening the law of God. In these limitations on the government's power, slight as they were, were contained the germs of the later Calvinistic constitutionalism.

[Sidenote: Reformed Church]

While many of the Reformers—Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndale—were completely in accord with Luther's earlier doctrine of passive obedience, the Swiss, French and Scotch developed a consistent body of constitutional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance in the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran church, was the form of ecclesiastical government. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism are practical object-lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly pointed out in the case of America the influence of the vestry in the evolution of the town meeting. In other countries the same cause operated in the same way, giving the British and French Protestants ample practice in representative government. [Sidenote: Zwingli] Zwingli asserted that the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the identity of spiritual and civil authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were republican through and through.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of {597} France seemed on the point of anticipating the great Revolution by two centuries.

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and honorable of all merely human institutions. The form he preferred was an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at Luther's idea of constitutional, or contractual, limitations on the royal power, he asserted that the king should be resisted, when he violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to whom the guardianship of the people's rights should be particularly entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular sovereignty.

[Sidenote: French republicans]

The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that the members of the house of Lorraine and the Chancellor L'Hôpital be removed from all offices as not having been appointed by the Estates. In August {598} of the same year, thirty-nine representatives of the three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contemporaneously with the religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pontoise, and there voiced with great boldness the claims of constitutional government. They demanded the right of the Estates to govern during the minority of the king; they claimed that the Estates should be summoned at least biennially; they forbade taxation, alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war without their consent. The further resolution that the persecution of the Huguenots should cease, betrayed the quarter from which the popular party drew its strength.

But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried beyond the senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, following hard upon the great massacre, trumpeted the sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore Beza [Sidenote: Beza] published anonymously his Rights of Magistrates, developing Calvin's theory that the representatives of the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the king. The pact between the people and king is said to be abrogated if the king violates it.

[Sidenote: Hotman, 1573]

At the same time another French Protestant, Francis Hotman, published his Franco-Gallia, to show that France had an ancient and inviolable constitution. This unwritten law regulates the succession to the throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the Estates General; by it the laws, binding even on the king, are made. The right of the people can be shown, in Hotman's opinion, to extend even to deposing the monarch and electing his successor.

[Sidenote: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 1577]

A higher and more general view was taken in the Rights against Tyrants published under the pseudonym of Stephen Junius Brutus the Celt, and written by Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but comprehensive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Protestants, {599} and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief supporter of tyranny, advanced four theses: 1. Subjects are bound to obey God rather than the king. This is regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates the church and violates God's law, he may be resisted at least passively as far as private men are concerned, but actively by magistrates and cities. The author, who quotes from the Bible and ancient history, evidently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The people may resist a tyrant who is oppressing or ruining the state. Originally, in the author's view, the people either elected the king, or confirmed him, and if they have not exercised this right for a long time it is a legal maxim that no prescription can run against the public claims. Laws derive their sanction from the people, and should be made by them; taxes may only be levied by their representatives, and the king who exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different from an enemy. The kings are not even the owners of public property, but only its administrators, are bound by the contract with the governed, and may be rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth thesis advanced by Mornay is that foreign aid may justly be called in against a tyrant.

[Sidenote: La Boétie, 1530-63]

Not relying exclusively on their own talents the Huguenots were able to press into the ranks of their army of pamphleteers some notable Catholics. In 1574 they published as a fragment, and in 1577 entire, The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, commonly called the Contr'un, by Stephen de la Boétie. This gentleman, dying at the age of thirty-three, had left all his manuscripts to his bosom friend Montaigne. The latter says that La Boétie composed the work as a prize declamation at the age of sixteen or eighteen. [Sidenote: 1546-8] But along with many passages in the pamphlet, which might have been suggested by Erasmus, are several {600} allusions that seem to point to the character of Henry III—in 1574 king of Poland and in 1577 king of France—and to events just prior to the time of publication. According to an attractive hypothesis, not fully proved, these passages were added by Montaigne himself before he gave the work to one of his several Huguenot friends or kinsmen. La Boétie, at any rate, appealed to the passions aroused by St. Bartholomew in bidding the people no longer to submit to one man, "the most wretched and effeminate of the nation," who has only two hands, two eyes, and who will fall if unsupported. And yet, he goes on rhetorically, "you sow the fruits of the earth that he may waste them; you furnish your houses for him to pillage them; you rear your daughters to glut his lust and your sons to perish in his wars; . . . you exhaust your bodies in labor that he may wallow in vile pleasures."

As Montaigne and La Boétie were Catholics, it is pertinent here to remark that tyranny produced much the same effect on its victims, whatever their religion. The Sorbonne, [Sidenote: The Sorbonne] consulted by the League, unanimously decided that the people of France were freed from their oath of allegiance to Henry III and could with a good conscience take arms against him. One of the doctors, Boucher, wrote to prove that the church and the people had the right to depose an assassin, a perjurer, an impious or heretical prince, or one guilty of sacrilege or witchcraft. A tyrant, he concluded, was a wild beast, whom it was lawful for the state as a whole or even for private individuals, to kill.

So firmly established did the doctrine of the contract between prince and people become that towards the end of the century one finds it taken for granted. The Mémoires of the Huguenot soldier, poet and historian Agrippa d'Aubigné are full of republican sentiments, as, for example, "There is a binding obligation {601} between the king and his subjects," and "The power of the prince proceeds from the people."

But it must not be imagined that such doctrines passed without challenge. The most important writer on political science after Machiavelli, John Bodin, [Sidenote: Bodin, 1530-96] was on the whole a conservative. In his writings acute and sometimes profound remarks jostle quaint and abject superstitions. He hounded the government and the mob on witches with the vile zeal of the authors of the Witches' Hammer; and he examined all existing religions with the coolness of a philosopher. He urged on the attention of the world that history was determined in general by natural causes, such as climate, but that revolutions were caused partly by the inscrutable will of God and partly by the more ascertainable influence of planets.

His most famous work, The Republic, [Sidenote: 1576] is a criticism of Machiavelli and an attempt to bring politics back into the domain of morality. He defines a state as a company of men united for the purpose of living well and happily; he thinks it arose from natural right and social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates the state from the government, defining sovereignty (majestas) as the attribute of the former. He classifies governments in the usual three categories, and refuses to believe in mixed governments. Though England puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute monarchy. This is the form that he decidedly prefers, for he calls the people a many-headed monster and says that the majority of men are incompetent and bad. Preaching passive obedience to the king, he finds no check on him, either by tyrannicide or by constitutional magistrates, save only in the judgment of God.

It is singular that after Bodin had removed all effective checks on the tyrant in this world, he should lay it down as a principle that no king should levy {602} taxes without his subjects' consent. Another contradiction is that whereas he frees the subject from the duty of obedience in case the monarch commands aught against God's law, he treats religion almost as a matter of policy, advising that, whatever it be, the statesman should not disturb it. Apart from the streak of superstition in his mind, his inconsistencies are due to the attempt to reconcile opposites—Machiavelli and Calvin. For with all his denunciation of the former's atheism and immorality, he, with his chauvinism, his defence of absolutism, his practical opportunism, is not so far removed from the Florentine as he would have us believe.

[Sidenote: Dutch republicans]

The revolution that failed in France succeeded in the Netherlands, and some contribution to political theory can be found in the constitution drawn up by the States General in 1580, when they recognized Anjou as their prince, and in the document deposing Philip in 1581. Both assume fully the sovereignty of the people and the omnicompetence of their elected representatives. As Oldenbarnevelt commented, "The cities and nobles together represent the whole state and the whole people." The deposition of Philip is justified by an appeal to the law of nature, and to the example of other tortured states, and by a recital of Philip's breaches of the laws and customs of the land.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Scotland, in the course of her revolution, produced almost as brilliant an array of pamphleteers as had France. John Knox maintained that, "If men, in the fear of God, oppose themselves to the fury and blind rage of princes, in doing so they do not resist God, but the devil, who abuses the sword and authority of God," and again, he asked, "What harm should the commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of ignorant rulers were moderated and bridled by the {603} wisdom and discretion of godly subjects?" But the duty, he thought, to curb princes in free kingdoms and realms, does not belong to every private man, but "appertains to the nobility, sworn and born counsellors of the same." Carrying such doctrines to the logical result, Knox hinted to Mary that Daniel might have resisted Nebuchadnezzar and Paul might have resisted Nero with the sword, had God given them the power.

Another Scotch Protestant, John Craig, in support of the prosecution of Mary, said that it had been determined and concluded at the University of Bologna [Sidenote: 1554] that "all rulers, be they supreme or inferior, may be and ought to be reformed or deposed by them by whom they were chosen, confirmed and admitted to their office, as often as they break that promise made by oath to their subjects." Knox and Craig both argued for the execution of Mary on the ground that "it was a public speech among all peoples and among all estates, that the queen had no more liberty to commit murder nor adultery than any other private person." Knollys also told Mary that a monarch ought to be deposed for madness or murder.

To the zeal for religion animating Knox, George Buchanan [Sidenote: Buchanan] joined a more rational spirit of liberty and a stronger consciousness of positive right. His great work On the Constitution of Scotland derived all power from the people, asserted the responsibility of kings to their subjects and pleaded for the popular election of the chief magistrate. In extreme cases execution of the monarch was defended, though by what precise machinery he was to be arraigned was left uncertain; probably constitutional resistance was thought of, as far as practicable, and tyrannicide was considered as a last resort. "If you ask anyone," says our author, "what he thinks of the punishment of {604} Caligula, Nero or Domitian, I think no one will be so devoted to the royal name as not to confess that they rightly paid the penalty of their crimes."

[Sidenote: English monarchists]

In England the two tendencies, the one to favor the divine right of kings, the other for constitutional restraint, existed side by side. The latter opinion was attributed by courtly divines to the influence of Calvin. Matthew Hutton blamed the Reformer because "he thought not so well of a kingdom as of a popular state." "God save us," wrote Archbishop Parker, "from such a visitation as Knox has attempted in Scotland, the people to be orderers of things." This distinguished prelate preached that disobedience to the queen was a greater crime than sacrilege or adultery, for obedience is the root of all virtues and the cause of all felicity, and "rebellion is not a single fault, like theft or murder, but the cesspool and swamp of all possible sins against God and man." Bonner was charged by the government of Mary to preach that all rebels incurred damnation. Much later Richard Hooker warned his countrymen that Puritanism endangered the prerogatives of crown and nobility.

[Sidenote: and republicans]

But there were not wanting champions of the people. Reginald Pole asserted the responsibility of the sovereign, though in moderate language. Bishop John Ponet wrote A Treatise on Politic Power to show that men had the right to depose a bad king and to assassinate a tyrant. The haughty Elizabeth herself often had to listen to drastic advice. When she visited Cambridge she was entertained by a debate on tyrannicide, in which one bold clerk asserted that God might incite a regicide; and by a discussion of the respective advantages of elective and hereditary monarchy, one speaker offering to maintain the former with his life and, if need be, with his death. When Elizabeth, after hearing a refractory Parliament, complained to the {605} Spanish ambassador that "she could not tell what those devils were after" his excellency replied, "They want liberty, madam, and if princes do not look to themselves" they will soon find that they are drifting to revolution and anarchy. Significant, indeed, was the silent work of Parliament in building up the constitutional doctrine of its own omnicompetence and of its own supremacy.

[Sidenote: Tyrannicide]

One striking aberration in the political theory of that time was the prominence in it of the appeal to tyrannicide. Schooled by the ancients who sang the praises of Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the biblical example of Ehud and Eglon, and by various medieval publicists, and taught the value of murder by the princes and popes who set prices on each other's heads, an extraordinary number of sixteenth century divines approved of the dagger as the best remedy for tyranny. Melanchthon wished that God would raise up an able man to slay Henry VIII; John Ponet and Cajetan and the French theologian Boucher admitted the possible virtue of assassination. But the most elaborate statement of the same doctrine was put by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana, in a book On the King and his Education published in 1599, with an official imprimatur, a dedication to the reigning monarch and an assertion that it was approved by learned and grave men of the Society of Jesus. It taught that the prince holds sway solely by the consent of the people and by ancient law, and that, though his vices are to be borne up to a certain point, yet when he ruins the state he is a public enemy, to slay whom is not only permissible but glorious for any man brave enough to despise his own safety for the public good.

If one may gather the official theory of the Catholic church from the contradictory statements of her doctors, she advocated despotism tempered by {606} assassination. No Lutheran ever preached the duty of passive obedience more strongly than did the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

[Sidenote: Radicals]

A word must be said about the more radical thought of the time. All the writers just analysed saw things from the standpoint of the governing and propertied classes. But the voice of the poor came to be heard now and then, not only from their own mouths but from that of the few authors who had enough imagination to sympathize with them. The idea that men might sometime live without any government at all is found in such widely different writers as Richard Hooker and Francis Rabelais. But socialism was then, as ever, more commonly advocated than anarchy. The Anabaptists, particularly, believed in a community of goods, and even tried to practice it when they got the chance. Though they failed in this, the contributions to democracy latent in their egalitarian spirit must not be forgotten. They brought down on themselves the severest animadversions from defenders of the existing order, by whatever confession they were bound. [Sidenote: 1535] Vives wrote a special tract to refute the arguments of the Anabaptists on communism. Luther said that the example of the early Christians did not authorize communism for, though the first disciples pooled their own goods, they did not try to seize the property of Pilate and Herod. Even the French Calvinists, in their books dedicated to liberty, referred to the Anabaptists as seditious rebels worthy of the severest repression.

[Sidenote: Utopia, 1516]

A nobler work than any produced by the Anabaptists, and one that may have influenced them not a little, was the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. He drew partly on Plato, on Tacitus's Germania, on Augustine and on Pico della Mirandola, and for the outward framework of his book on the Four Voyages of Americus Vespuccius. {607} But he relied mostly on his own observation of what was rotten in the English state where he was a judge and a ruler of men. He imagined an ideal country, Utopia, a place of perfect equality economically as well as politically. It was by government an elective monarchy with inferior magistrates and representative assembly also elected. The people changed houses every ten years by lot; they considered luxury and wealth a reproach. "In other places they speak still of the common wealth but every man procureth his private wealth. Here where nothing is private the common affairs be earnestly looked upon." "What justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living either by idleness or by unnecessary occupation, when in the meantime poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters and plowmen by so great and continual toil . . . do yet get so hard and so poor a living and live so wretched a life that the condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and wealthier?" "When I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, [Sidenote: The commonwealth] so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth." More was convinced that a short day's labor shared by everyone would produce quite sufficient wealth to keep all in comfort. He protests explicitly against those who pretend that there are two sorts of justice, one for governments and one for private men. He repudiates the doctrine that bad faith is necessary to the prosperity of a state; the Utopians form no alliances and carry out faithfully the few and necessary treaties that they ratify. Moreover they dishonor war above all things.

In the realm of pure economic and social theory {608} something, though not much, was done. Machiavelli believed that the growth of population in the north and its migration southwards was a constant law, an idea derived from Paulus Diaconus and handed on to Milton. He even derived "Germany" from "germinare." A more acute remark, anticipating Malthus, was made by the Spanish Jesuit John Botero [Sidenote: Botero, 1589] who, in his Reason of State, pointed out that population was absolutely dependent on means of subsistence. He concluded a priori that the population of the world had remained stationary for three thousand years.

[Sidenote: Mercantile economics]

Statesmen then labored under the vicious error, drawn from the analogy of a private man and a state, that national wealth consisted in the precious metals. The stringent and universal laws against the export of specie and intended to encourage its import, proved a considerable burden on trade, though as a matter of fact they only retarded and did not stop the flow of coin. The striking rise in prices during the century attracted some attention. Various causes were assigned for it, among others the growth of population and the increase of luxury. Hardly anyone saw that the increase in the precious metals was the fundamental cause, but several writers, among them Bodin, John Hales and Copernicus, saw that a debased currency was responsible for the acute dearness of certain local markets.

[Sidenote: Usury]

The lawfulness of the taking of usury greatly exercised the minds of men of that day. The church on traditional grounds had forbidden it, and her doctors stood fast by her precept, though an occasional individual, like John Eck, could be found to argue for it. Luther was in principle against allowing a man "to sit behind his stove and let his money work for him," but he weakened enough to allow moderate interest in given circumstances. Zwingli would allow interest to {609} be taken only as a form of profit-sharing. Calvin said: "If we forbid usury wholly we bind consciences by a bond straiter than that of God himself. But if we allow it the least in the world, under cover of our permission someone will immediately make a general and unbridled licence." The laws against the taking of interest were gradually relaxed throughout the century, but even at its close Bacon could only regard usury as a concession made on account of the hardness of men's hearts.

[1] In Greek the words "politics" and "ethics" both have a wider meaning than they have in English.

[2] Lord Morley.