The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be classified in a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our present purpose it will be convenient to classify them, according to their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most, historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When different philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and Darwinians began to assert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS. (SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based on the analogy of Scripture. God, it was thought, had chosen a peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance, particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a {700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs. God's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation">[

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies par éminence, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he incorporated it in the title of his greatest German pamphlet. The other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive away the foggy mists of superstition and to restore the purity of the primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply ad libitum quotations showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to the impertinent but more assiduous activity of the devil. It is interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes. Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such as Münzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary, natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the "first push and assault" given by the ungodly humanists. Burnet followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many documents he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf, was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student for the documents it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced, prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, written without that odious defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions. Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth, but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors. Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged, as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original sin and his latitudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed was written on the Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion. Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou passes over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his History of Italy mentions Luther merely to show how the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini [Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther, carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party. The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantôme says that he leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther won over a good many of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin Du Bellay found the cause of the English schism in Henry's divorce and the small respect the pope had for his majesty. Davila, de Mézeray and Daniel, writing the history of the French civil wars, treated the Huguenots merely as a political party. So they were, but they were something more. Even Hugo Grotius could not sound the deeper causes of the Dutch revolt and of the religious revolution.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

The first of all the histories of the German Reformation {705} was also, for at least two centuries, the best. Though surpassed in some particulars by others, Sleidan united more of the qualities of a great historian than anyone else who wrote extensively on church history in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: fairness, accuracy, learning, skill in presentation. In words that recall Ranke's motto he declared that, though a Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth simply "rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing religious affairs," he continues, "I was not able to omit politics, for, as I said before, they almost always interact, and in our age least of all can they be separated." Withal, he regards the Reformation as a great victory for God's word, and Luther as a notable champion of the true religion. In plain, straightforward narrative, without much philosophic reflection, he sets forth,—none better,—the diplomatic and theological side of the movement without probing its causes or inquiring into the popular support on which all the rest was based.

[Sidenote: Sarpi]

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration than Sleidan compassed is found in the writings of Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the Tridentine Council," as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose book could only be published on Protestant soil, this historian admired by Macaulay as the best of modern times and denounced by Acton as fit for Newgate prison, has furnished students with one of the most curious of psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion of his learning and accuracy, which have recently been severely attacked and perhaps discredited, let us ask what was his attitude in regard to his subject? It is difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explanation of his attacks on the creed in which he believed and of his favorable presentation of the acts of the {706} heretics he must have anathematized, is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of their own church; one may also find in Döllinger a parallel to him. Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant anticipation of the modern economic school of historical thought is found in the Oceana of Harrington, who suggested that the causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social. When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and noble into the hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed the ancient balance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more dangerous enemy.

SECTION 2. THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE. (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and to point out instructive analogies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed. The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican because of the circumstances in which each arose. The suppression of church festivals in Protestant countries he thought due to the greater need and zest for labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by saying that their unadorned cult naturally aroused a less warm attachment than the sensuous ritual of Romanism.

[Sidenote: Voltaire]

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. None other has made history so nearly universal as did he, peering into every side of life and into every corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, no fact was admitted to be inexplicable by natural laws. It is true that he was not very learned and that he had strong prejudices against what he called "the most infamous superstition that ever brutalized man." But with it all he brought more freedom and life into the story of mankind than had any of his predecessors.

For his history of the Reformation he was dependent on Bossuet, Sarpi, and a few other general works; there is no evidence that he perused any of the sources. But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. {708} Beginning with an enthusiastic account of the greatness of the Renaissance, its discoveries, its opulence, its roll of mighty names, he proceeds to compare the Reformation with the two contemporaneous religious revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the other in Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one else had even thought of looking to comparative religion [Sidenote: Comparative religion] for light. In tracing the course of events he is more conventional, finding rather small causes for large effects. The whole thing started, he assures us, in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the spoils of indulgence-sales, "and this little squabble of monks in a corner of Saxony, produced more than a hundred years of discord, fury, and misfortune for thirty nations." "England separated from the pope because King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted because of the painful impression produced by the Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in Voltaire's opinion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal to the passions of the mob. The dogmas of the Reformers are considered no whit more rational than those of their opponents, save that Zwingli is praised for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for Christianity. Of course he erred," wittily comments our author, "but how humane it is to err thus!" The influence of Montesquieu is found in the following early economic interpretation in the Philosophic Dictionary:

There are some nations whose religion is the result of neither climate nor government. What cause detached North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences . . . were sold too dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion.

[Sidenote: Scotch historians]

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote: Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity." Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone to superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther for his violence, but praised him—and here speaks the middle-class advocate of law and order—for his firm stand against the peasants in their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the spell of the supernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical establishments, with which he begins his account of the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and passions of the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delusion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore incumbent on the civil power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to {710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted "those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his great history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their merit [i.e. of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers." They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did {711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism." Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing] apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German Protestant could then be.

{713}

SECTION 3. THE LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION. (CIRCA 1794-c. 1860)

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic Döllinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution]

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

[Sidenote: Condorcet]

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was Condorcet in his noble essay on The Advance of the Human Spirit, written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he, punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring political enfranchisement, banded together against the {714} revolt. He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to political science and that it purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced as the subject for a prize competition, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general philosophical enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to think and judge freely and independently of all ideas and opinions, which until then Europe had received or been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason and to call things by their right names. It was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the limits of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite, to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Staël]

All this is reflected in Mme. de Staël's enthusiastic appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and brain.

[Sidenote: Heine]

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature, Heine points out that the place taken in France by belles lettres is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet, [Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His History of France is like the biography of some loved and worshipped genius; he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question, "What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us, were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude. Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard, once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent Speeches to the German Nation, called the Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its "perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once national and liberal. In his Pictures from the German Past, largely painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on "Deutschtum" and "Bürgertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F. Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to sink into the background, and that of other influences to be preponderant.

[Sidenote: Hegel]

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel, pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable "time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit, or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720} Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show that the cause of the Protestant revolt in the corruption of the church was not accidental but necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of progress, that which is adored must necessarily be sensuous, but at the lofty German level the worshipper must look for God in the spirit and heart, that is, in faith. The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity manifesting the self-consciousness of the world-spirit; his doctrine of the eucharist, conservative as it seems to the rationalist, is in reality a manifestation of the same spirituality, in the assertion of an immediate relation of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of the Reformation is said to be that man in his very nature is destined to be free, and all history since Luther's time is but a working out of the implications of his position. If only the Germanic nations have adopted Protestantism, it is because only they have reached the highest state of spiritual development.

[Sidenote: Baur]

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of whom it has been said that he rather deduced history than narrated it. With much detail he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far as the subject of church history was concerned. He showed that the Reformation (a term to which he objected, apparently preferring Division, or Schism) was bound to come from antecedents already in full operation before Luther. At most, he admitted, the {721} personal factor was decisive of the time and place of the inevitable revolution, but said that the most powerful personality would have been helpless but for the popularity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he deduced the causes of the movement from the corruption of the medieval church, and like him he regarded all later history as but the tide of which the first wave broke in 1517. The true principle of the movement, religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he believed, had been achieved only for states in the sixteenth century, but thereafter logically and necessarily came to be applied to individuals.

[Sidenote: Ranke]

From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"—coined in 1770 and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution." The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722} rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective. Would he have thought so after 1919?

[Sidenote: Buckle]

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment, and a democratic rebellion.

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best classified as a member of the new school. His History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done more than any other movement to emancipate the mind from superstition and to secularize society.

[Sidenote: Protestants]

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short space at my command, the principal Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old "truths," Merle d'Aubigné won an enormous and unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won its enormous circulation.[1]

[Sidenote: Döllinger]

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by the Catholic Döllinger, the most theological of historians, the most historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really {724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.

[1] The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 were sold in England and America.

SECTION 4. THE ECONOMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY INTERPRETATIONS. (1859 TO THE PRESENT)

The year 1859 saw the launching of two new theories of the utmost importance. These, together with the political developments of the next twelve years, completely altered the view-point of the intellectual class, as well as of the peoples. In relation to the subject under discussion this meant a reversal of historical judgment as radical as that which occurred at the time of the French Revolution. The three new influences, in the order of their immediate importance for historiography, were the following: 1. The publication of Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie in 1859, containing the germ of the economic interpretation of history later developed in Das Kapital (1867) and in other works. 2. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, giving rise to an evolutionary treatment of history. 3. The Bismarckian wars (1864-71), followed by German intellectual and material hegemony, and the defeat of the old liberalism. This lasted only until the Great War (1914-18), when Germany was cast down and liberalism rose in more radical guise than ever.

[Sidenote: Marx]

Karl Marx not only viewed history for the first time from the point of view of the proletariat, or working class, but he directly asserted that in the march of mankind the economic factors had always been, in the last analysis, decisive; that the material basis of life, {725} particularly the system of production, determined, in general, the social, political and religious ideas of every epoch and of every locality. Revolutions follow as the necessary consequence of economic change. In the scramble for sustenance and wealth class war is postulated as natural and ceaseless. The old Hegelian antithesis of idea versus personality took the new form of "the masses" versus "the great man," both of whom were but puppets in the hands of overmastering determinism. As often interpreted, Marx's theory replaced the Hegelian "spirits of the time" by the classes, conceived as entities struggling for mastery.

This brilliant theory suffered at first in its application, which was often hasty, or fantastic. As the economic factor had once been completely ignored, so now it was overworked. Its major premise of an "economic man," all greed and calculation, is obviously false, or rather, only half true. Men's motives are mixed, and so are those of aggregates of men. There are other elements in progress besides the economic ones. The only effective criticism of the theory of economic determination is that well expressed by Dr. Shailer Mathews, that it is too simple. Self-interest is one factor in history, but not the only one.

[Sidenote: Bax]

Exception can be more justly taken to the way in which the theory has sometimes been applied than to its formulation. Belfort Bax, maintaining that the revolt from Rome was largely economic in its causes, gave as one of these "the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obviously due to its increasing exactions." Luther would have produced no result had not the economic soil been ready for his seed, and with that soil prepared he achieved a world-historical result even though, in Bax's opinion, his character and intellect were below those of the average English village grocer-deacon who sold sand for sugar. Luther, {726} in fact, did no more than give a flag to those discontented with the existing political and industrial life. Strange to say, Bax found even the most radical party, that of the communistic Anabaptists, retrograde, with its program of return to a golden age of gild and common land.

A somewhat better grounded, but still inadequate, solution of the problem was offered by Karl Kautsky. [Sidenote: Kautsky] He, too, found the chief cause of the revolt in the spoliation of Germany by Rome. In addition to this was the new rivalry of commercial classes. Unlike Bax, Kautsky finds in the Anabaptists Socialists of whom he can thoroughly approve.

The criticism that must be made of these and similar attempts, is that the causes picked out by them are too trivial. To say that the men who, by the thousands and tens of thousands suffered martyrdom for their faith, changed that faith simply because they objected to pay a tithe, reminds one of the ancient Catholic derivation of the whole movement from Luther's desire to marry. The effect is out of proportion to the cause. But some theorists were even more fantastic than trivial. When Professor S. N. Patten traces the origins of revolutions to either over-nutrition or under-nutrition, and that of the Reformation to "the growth of frugalistic concepts"; when Mr. Brooks Adams asserts that it was all due to the desire of the people for a cheaper religion, exchanging an expensive offering for justification by faith and mental anguish, which cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible—we feel that the dish of theory has run away with the spoon of fact. The climax was capped by the German sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the Reformation by the law of the operation of force along the line of least resistance. The Reformers, by sending the soul straight to God, spared it the detour via the {727} priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it were, and saving energy.

[Sidenote: Lamprecht]

The genius who first and most fully worked out a tenable economic interpretation of the Lutheran movement was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in much the same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, that of an independent, eclectic and better informed student. Lamprecht, as it is well known, divides history into periods according to their psychological character—perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism—but he maintains, and on the whole successfully, that the temper of each of these epochs is determined by their economic institutions. Thus, says he, the condition of the transition from medieval to modern times was the development of a system of "money economy" from a system of "natural economy," which took place slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. "The complete emergence of capitalistic tendencies, with their consequent effects on the social, and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual sphere, must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht shows how the rise of capitalism was followed by the growth of the cities and of the culture of the Renaissance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in large part as a natural consequence of the increased power and scope given to the ego by the possession of wealth. This individualism, he thinks, strengthened by and strengthening humanism, was made forever safe by the Reformation.

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points out, to suppose that we are living in the same era of civilization, psychologically considered, as that of Luther. Our subjectivism is as different from his individualism as his modernity was from medievalism. The eighteenth century was a transitional period from the one to the other.

{728} One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, continues Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, was the change from "polydynamism," or the worship of many saints, and the mediation of manifold religious agencies, to "monodynamism" or the direct and single intercourse of the soul with God. Still more different was the world-view of the nineteenth century, built on "an extra-Christian, though not yet anti-Christian foundation."

In the very same year in which Lamprecht's volume on the German Reformation appeared, another interpretation, though less profound and less in the economic school of thought, was put forth by A. E. Berger. [Sidenote: Berger] He found the four principal causes of the Reformation in the growth of national self-consciousness, the overthrow of an ascetic for a secular culture, individualism, and the growth of a lay religion. The Reformation itself was a triumph of conscience and of "German inwardness," and its success was due to the fact that it made of the church a purely spiritual entity.

The most brilliant essay in the economic interpretation of the origins of Protestantism, though an essay in a very narrow field, was that of Max Weber [Sidenote: Weber] which has made "Capitalism and Calvinism" one of the watchwords of contemporary thought. The intimate connection of the Reformation and the merchant class had long been noticed, e.g. by Froude and by Thorold Rogers. But Weber was the first to ask, and to answer, the question what it was that made Protestantism particularly congenial to the industrial type of civilization. In the first place, Calvinism stimulated just those ethical qualities of rugged strength and self-confidence needful for worldly success. In the second place, Protestantism abolished the old ascetic ideal of labor for the sake of the next world, and substituted for it the conception of a calling, that is, of doing {729} faithfully the work appointed to each man in this world. Indeed, the word "calling'" or "Beruf," meaning God-given work, is found only in Germanic languages, and is wanting in all those of the Latin group. The ethical idea expressed by Luther and more strongly by Calvin was that of faithfully performing the daily task; in fact, such labor was inculcated as a duty to the point of pain; in other words it was "a worldly asceticism." Finally, Calvin looked upon thrift as a duty, and regarded prosperity, in the Old Testament style, as a sign of God's favor. "You may labor in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain," said the Protestant divine Richard Baxter, "for you are bound to improve all your talents." And again, "If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward."

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the controversy caused by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, like Knodt, denied its validity, tracing capitalism back of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin; but most accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it were offered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky and Ashley. So commonly has it been received that it has finally been summed up in a brilliant but superficial epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been coined by him—though it is not, I believe, from his mint—that the Reformation was "the Revolution of the rich against the poor."

[Sidenote: Darwinism]

Contemporary with the economic historiography, there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers" had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching than had been that of the old deism.

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that the Reformation was the child, or sister, of the Renaissance, and the parent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We are in the midst of a gigantic movement," wrote Huxley, "greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only a continuation of that movement." "The Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude, incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving after the liberation of man from the darkness." "The truth is," according to Symonds, "that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important, indeed, in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than was the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same grand influence." William Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the essence of the Reformation was the same in the religious fields as that of the best thought contemporary to it in other lines.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche]

But these ideas were already obsolescent since Friedrich Nietzsche had worked out, with some care, the thought that "the Reformation was a re-action of old-fashioned minds, against the Italian Renaissance." One might suppose that this furious Antichrist, as he wished to be, would have thought well of Luther because of his opinion that the Saxon first taught the Germans to be unchristian, and because "Luther's merit is greater in nothing than that he had the courage of his sensuality—then called, gently enough, 'evangelic liberty.'" But no! With frantic passion Nietzsche charged: "The Reformation, a duplication {731} of the medieval spirit at a time when this spirit no longer had a good conscience, pullulated sects, and superstitions like the witchcraft craze." German culture was just ready to burst into full bloom, only one night more was needed, but that night brought the storm that ruined all. The Reformation was the peasants' revolt of the human spirit, a rising full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. It was "the rage of the simple against the complex, a rough, honest misunderstanding, in which (to speak mildly) much must be forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore apart a culture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not relish. Behind the formula "every man his own priest" lurked nothing but the abysmal hatred of the low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at its worst.

[Sidenote: Acceptance of Nietzsche's opinion]

Quite slowly but surely Nietzsche's opinion gained ground until one may say that it was, not long ago, generally accepted. "Our sympathies are more in unison, our reason less shocked by the arguments and doctrines of Sadolet than by those of Calvin," wrote R. C. Christie. Andrew D. White's popular study of The Warfare of Science and Theology proved that Protestant churches had been no less hostile to intellectual progress than had the Catholic church. "The Reformation, in fact," opined J. M. Robertson, "speedily overclouded with fanaticism what new light of free thought had been glimmering before, turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries and forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance of their age." "Before the Lutheran revolt," said Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought and speech was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after." Similar opinions might be collected in large number; I {732} mention only the works of Bezold and the brief but admirably expressed articles of Professor George L. Burr, and that of Lemonnier, who places in a strong light the battle of the Renaissance, intellectual, indifferent in religion and politics, but aristocratic in temper, and the Reformation, reactionary, religious, preoccupied with medieval questions and turning, in its hostility to the governing orders, to popular politics.

The reaction of the Reformation on religion was noticed by the critics, who thus came to agree with the conservative estimate, though they deplored what the others had rejoiced in. Long before Nietzsche, J. Burckhardt had pointed out that the greatest danger to the papacy, secularization, had been adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. It was this that roused the papacy from the soulless debasement in which it lay; it was thus that the moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies.

[Sidenote: Troeltsch]

The twentieth century has seen two brilliant critiques of the Reformation from the intellectual side by scholars of consummate ability, Ernst Troeltsch and George Santayana. The former begins by pointing out, with a fineness never surpassed, the essential oneness and slight differences between early Protestantism and Catholicism. The Reformers asked the same questions as did the medieval schoolmen and, though they gave these questions somewhat different answers, their minds, like those of other men, revealed themselves far more characteristically in the asking than in the reply. "Genuine early Protestantism . . . was an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization (kirchliche Zwangskultur), a claim to regulate state and society, science and education, law, commerce, and industry, according to the supernatural standpoint of revelation." The Reformers separated early and with cruel violence from the humanistic, philological, and philosophical {733} theology of Erasmus because they were conscious of an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was with assurance of salvation, and this could only be won at the cost of a miracle, not any longer the old, outward magic of saints and priestcraft, but the wonder of faith occurring in the inmost center of personal life. "The sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its stead appears the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and confidently assent to such a thought." Thus it came about that the way of salvation became more important than the goal, and the tyranny of dogma became at last unbearable. Troeltsch characterizes both his own position and that of the Reformers when he enumerates among the ancient dogmas taken over naïvely by Luther, that of the existence of a personal, ethical God. Finely contrasting the ideals of Renaissance and Reformation, [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] he shows that the former was naturalism, the latter an intensification of religion and of a convinced other-worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was based on "affirmation of life," that of the latter was based on "calling." Even as compared with Catholicism, Troeltsch thinks, supererogatory works were abolished because each Protestant Christian was bound to exert himself to the utmost at all times. The learned professor hazards the further opinion that the spirit of the Renaissance amalgamated better with Catholicism and, after a period of quiescence, burst forth in the "frightful explosion" of the Enlightenment and Revolution, both more radical in Catholic countries than in Protestant. But Troeltsch is too historically-minded to see in the Reformation only a reaction. He believes that it contributed to the formation of the modern world by the development of nationalism, individualism (qualified by the objectively conceived sanction of Bible and Christian community), moral health, and, {734} indirectly, by the introduction of the ideas of tolerance, criticism, and religious progress. Moreover, it enriched the world with the story of great personalities. Protestantism was better able to absorb modern elements of political, social, scientific, artistic and economic content, not because it was professedly more open to them, but because it was weakened by the memory of one great revolt from authority. But the great change in religion as in other matters came, Troeltsch is fully convinced, in the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: Santayana]

If Troeltsch has the head of a skeptic with the heart of a Protestant, Santayana's equally irreligious brain is biased by a sentimental sympathy for the Catholicism in which he was trained. The essence of his criticism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully remarked, no one could be more unintelligent, is that he moved away from the ideal of the gospel. Saint Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for it is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity, abominates the disreputable, thinks of contemplation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of poverty as a punishment, and of married and industrial life as typically godly. In short, it is a reversion to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for there would have been, he affirms, a Catholic revival without him. With all its old-fashioned insistence that dogma was scientifically true and that salvation was urgent and fearfully doubtful, Protestantism broke down the authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking the other part." It is the beauty and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism. Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both disappear, and only "consecrated worldliness" remains.

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote: Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the latter left much open. "The Reformation," according to H. A. L. Fisher, "was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive communities of the West."

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form, has been expressed by Salomon Reinach. "Instead of freedom of faith and thought the Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} thanks to the breach made by Luther in the ancient edifice of Rome."

[Sidenote: German nationalists]

A judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, to the effect that, though the logical result of some of Luther's premises would have been individual religion and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out, "his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no resemblance whatever to our subjectivism." His true originality was his personality which imposed on an optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true that the revolution was profound and yet it was not modern: "the classic spirit, free institutions, democratic ideals, all these great forces by which we live are not the heritage of Luther."

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept over Europe with the Bismarckian wars, men began to judge the Reformation as everything else by its relation, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. Even in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to exactly what this relation was. Paul de Lagarde idealized the Middle Ages as showing the perfect expression of German character and he detested "the coarse, scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two hobnailed shoes, and who by his demagogy, brought in barbarism and split Germany into fragments." Nevertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it significant that the Basques, who were not a nation, should have produced, in Loyola and Xavier, the two greatest champions of the anti-national church.

The tide soon started flowing the other way and scholars began to see clearly that in some sort the Reformation was a triumph of "Deutschtum" against the "Romanitas" of Latin religion and culture. Treitschke, as the representative of this school, trumpeted forth that "the Reformation arose from the good {737} German conscience," and that, "the Reformer of our church was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the road to a freer civilization." The dogma that might makes right was adopted at Berlin—as Acton wrote in 1886—and the mere fact that the Reformation was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historians like Waitz and Kurtz.

Naturally, all was not as bad as this. A rather attractive form of the thesis was presented by Karl Sell. Whereas, he thinks, Protestantism has died, or is dying, as a religion, it still exists as a mood, as bibliolatry, as a national and political cult, as a scientific and technical motive-power, and, last but not least, as the ethos and pathos of the Germanic peoples.

[Sidenote: The Great War]

In the Great War Luther was mobilized as one of the German national assets. Professor Gustav Kawerau and many others appealed to the Reformer's writings for inspiration and justification of their cause; and the German infantry sang "Ein' feste Burg" while marching to battle.

Even outside of Germany the war of 1870 meant, in many quarters, the defeat of the old liberalism and the rise of a new school inclined, even in America—witness Mahan—to see in armed force rather than in intellectual and moral ideas the decisive factors in history. Many scholars noticed, in this connection, the shift of power from the Catholic nations, led by France, to the Protestant peoples, Germany, England and America. Some, like Acton, though impressed by it, did not draw the conclusion ably presented by a Belgian, Emile de Laveleye, that the cause of national superiority lay in Protestantism, but it doubtless had a wide influence, partly unconscious, on the verdict of history.

[Sidenote: Reaction against German ideals]

But the recoil was far greater than the first movement. Paul Sabatier wrote (in 1913) that until 1870 Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of thoughtful {738} men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic virtues and its openness to science and literary criticism. This high opinion, strengthened by the prestige of German thought, was shattered, says our authority, by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train of horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved of their superiority and attributed to Luther the result of Sedan.

The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of Luther. "Literary and philosophic Germany," said Denys Cochin in an interview, "prepared the evolution of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty and aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and seconded the aberration."

[Sidenote: Paquier]

Paquier has written a book around the thesis: "Nothing in the present war would have been alien to Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was violent and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, but it is the logical conclusion of the religious revolution accomplished by Luther and of the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant." He finds the causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two important doctrines and several corollaries. First, the doctrine of justification by faith meant the disparagement of morality and the exaltation of the end at the expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the state. Finally, in his narrow patriotism, Luther is thought to have inspired the reckless deeds of his posterity.

On the other hand some French Protestants, notably Weiss, have sought to show that the modern doctrines of Prussia were not due to Luther but were an apostasy from him.

Practically all the older methods of interpreting the Reformation have survived to the present; to save space they must be noticed with the utmost brevity.

{739} [Sidenote: Protestants]

The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have all, as far as they are worthy of serious notice, escaped from the crudely supernaturalistic point of view. Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are conservative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their own. Harnack [Sidenote: Harnack] sees in Luther, as he does in Christ and Paul and all other of his heroes, exactly his own German liberal Evangelical mind. He is inclined to admit that Luther was little help to the progress of science and enlightenment, that he did not absorb the cultural elements of his time nor recognize the right and duty of free research, but yet he thinks the Reformation more important than any other revolution since Paul simply because it restored the true, i.e. Pauline and Harnackian theology. Loisy's criticism of him is brilliant: "What would Luther have thought had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to him with the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or with this amendment, 'faith in the merciful Father, for faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus'?" The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that accorded by Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy remarks, deduce from it the same humanitarian deism as that now fashionable at Berlin.

I should like to speak of the work of Below and Wernle, of Böhmer and Köhler, of Fisher and Walker and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant scholars, by which I have profited. But I can only mention one other Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who find the Reformation (quite naturally) too conservative for them. Laurent wrote in this sense in 1862-70, and he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of Protestant apologists, Charles Beard. [Sidenote: Beard] Beard saw in the Reformation the subjective form of religion over against the objectivity of Catholicism, and also, "the first great triumph of the scientific spirit"—the {740} Renaissance, in fact, applied to theology. And yet he found its work so imperfect and even hampering at the time he wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his book was to advocate a new Reformation to bring Christianity in complete harmony with science.

[Sidenote: Philosophers]

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than creed, adopted the Protestant standpoint. Eucken thinks that "the Reformation became the animating soul of the modern world, the principle motive-force of its progress. . . . In truth, every phase of modern life not directly or indirectly connected with the Reformation has something insipid and paltry about it." Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, and that the stamp of the conflict between the inner grace and the outward support is of the esse of Protestanism. William James was also in warm sympathy with Luther who, he thought, "in his immense, manly way . . . stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility." James added that the Reformer also invented a morality, as new as romantic love in literature, founded on a religious experience of despair breaking through the old, pagan pride.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher and Gasquet, labored fruitfully in the field of the Reformation by uncovering new facts, few or none of them had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the period. Janssen [Sidenote: Janssen] brought to its perfection a new method applied to a new field; the field was that of Kulturgeschichte, the method that of letting the sources speak for themselves, but naturally only those sources agreeable to the author's bias. In this way he represented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of the German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting frost to both culture and morality. Pastor's [Sidenote: Pastor] work, though dense with fresh knowledge, offers no connected {741} theory. The Reformation, he thinks, was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned classes and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat. From the learned uproar of Denifle's school emerges the explanation of the revolt as the "great sewer" which carried off from the church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's far finer psychology—characteristically Jesuit—tries to cast on Luther the origin of the present destructive subjectivism. Grisar's proof that "the modern infidel theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated way on the Luther of the first period, is suggestive.

[Sidenote: Acton]

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's favorite topics, I cannot find on that subject any new or fruitful thought at all in proportion to his vast learning. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the old Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it was merely the product of the wickedness and vagaries of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost equally blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the English Bishop Creighton too easy in his judgment of the popes, adding, "My dogma is not the special wickedness of my own spiritual superiors, but the general wickedness of men in authority—of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Cranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart and Henry VIII, of Philip II and Elizabeth, of Cromwell and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bossuet and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, believing that the fundamental characteristic of the period is the belief in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that "Luther at Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," but he confesses himself baffled by the problem, which is, to his mind, why Luther did not return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up {742} all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, then or later, dropped predestination, and admitted the necessity of good works, the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Acton, the one bar to his return to the church was his belief that the pope was Antichrist.

It is notable that none of the free minds starting from Catholicism have been attracted to the Protestant camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul and Protestantism were coming to the end of their reign. Paul Sabatier carefully proved that the Modernists owed nothing to Luther, and their greatest scholar, Loisy, succinctly put the case in the remark, "We are done with partial heresies."

[Sidenote: Anglicans]

The Anglicans have joined the Romanists to denounce as heretics those who rebelled against the church which still calls Anglicans heretics. Neville Figgis, having snatched from Treitschke the juxtaposition "Luther and Machiavelli," has labored to build up around it a theory by which these two men shall appear as the chief supports of absolutism and "divine right of kings." Figgis thinks that with the Reformation religion was merely the "performance for passing entertainment," but that the state was the "eternal treasure." A far more judicious and unprejudiced discussion of the same thesis is offered in the works of Professor A. F. Pollard. He sees both sides of the medal for, if religion had become a subject of politics, politics had become matter of religion. He thinks the English Reformation was primarily a revolt of the laity against the clergy.

[Sidenote: Other schools]

The liberal estimate of the Reformation fashionable a hundred years ago has also been revived in an elaborate work of Mackinnon, and is assumed in obiter dicta by such eminent historians as A. W. Benn, {743} E. P. Cheyney, C. Borgeaud, H. L. Osgood and Woodrow Wilson. Finally, Professor J. H. Robinson has improved the old political interpretation current among the secular historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essence of the Lutheran movement he finds in the revolt from the Roman ecclesiastical state.

SECTION 5. CONCLUDING ESTIMATE

The reader will expect me, after having given some account of the estimates of others, to make an evaluation of my own. Of course no view can be final; mine, like that of everyone else, is the expression of an age and an environment as well as that of an individual.

[Sidenote: Causes of the Reformation]

The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Social Revolution, was but the consequence of the operation of antecedent changes in environment and habit, intellectual and economic. There was the widening and deepening of knowledge, due in one aspect to the invention of printing, in the other to the geographical and historical discoveries of the fifteenth century and the consequent adumbration of the idea of natural law. Even in the later schoolmen, like Biel and Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages. The general economic antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change in the system of production from gild and barter to that of money and wages. This produced three secondary results, which in turn operated as causes: the rise of the moneyed class, individualism, and nationalism.

All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the religious, the political and the intellectual, produced the Reformation and its sisters, the Renaissance and the Social Revolution of the sixteenth century. The Reformation—including in that term both the Protestant movement and the Catholic reaction—partly occupied {744} all these fields, but did not monopolize any of them. There were some religious, or anti-religious, movements outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran impulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the intellectual and political fields, primarily occupied by Renaissance and Revolution.

[Sidenote: Religious aspect]

(1) The gêne felt by many secular historians in the treatment of religion is now giving way to the double conviction of the importance of the subject and of its susceptibility to scientific study. Religion in human life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard all theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rationalist[1] has remarked, it is usually priests who have freed mankind from taboos and superstitions. Indeed, in a religious age, no effective attack on the existing church is possible save one inspired by piety.

[Sidenote: Parallels to the Reformation]

Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be found both in Christian history and in that of other religions; they all markedly show the same consequences of the same causes. The publication of Christianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the Roman world and its accentuation of faith against the ceremonialism of the Jewish church, resembled that of Luther's "gospel." Marcion with his message of Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a second-century Reformer. The iconoclasm and nationalism of the Emperor Leo furnish striking similarities to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started by the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics Wyclif and Huss, rehearsed the religious drama of the sixteenth century. Many revivals in the Protestant church, such as Methodism, were, like the original movement, returns to personal piety and biblicism. The Old Catholic schism in its repudiation of the papal supremacy, and even Modernism, notwithstanding its {745} disclaimers, are animated in part by the same motives as those inspiring the Reformers. In Judaism the Sadducees, in their bibliolatry and in their opposition to the traditions dear to the Pharisees, were Protestants; a later counterpart of the same thing is found in the reform the Karaites by Anan ben David. Mohammed has been a favorite subject for comparison with Luther by the Catholics, but in truth, in no disparaging sense, the proclamation of Islam, with its monotheism, emphasis on faith and predestination, was very like the Reformation, and so were several later reforms within Mohammedanism, including two in the sixteenth century. Many parallels could doubtless be adduced from the heathen religions, perhaps the most striking is the foundation of Sikhism by Luther's contemporary Nanak, who preached monotheism and revolted from the ancient ceremonial and hierarchy of caste.

What is the etiology of religious revolution? The principal law governing it is that any marked change either in scientific knowledge or in ethical feeling necessitates a corresponding alteration in the faith. All the great religious innovations of Luther and his followers can be explained as an attempt to readjust faith to the new culture, partly intellectual, partly social, that had gradually developed during the later Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Faith vs. works]

The first shift, and the most important, was that from salvation by works to salvation by faith only. The Catholic dogma is that salvation is dependent on certain sacraments, grace being bestowed automatically (ex opere operato) on all who participate in the celebration of the rite without actively opposing its effect. Luther not only reduced the number of sacraments but he entirely changed their character. Not they, but the faith of the participant mattered, and {746} this faith was bestowed freely by God, or not at all. In this innovation one primary cause was the individualism of the age; the sense of the worth of the soul or, if one pleases, of the ego. This did not mean subjectivism, or religious autonomy, for the Reformers held passionately to an ideal of objective truth, but it did mean that every soul had the right to make its personal account with God, without mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and credit balance of outward work and merit was done away, and for it was substituted the nobler, or at least more spiritual and less mechanical, idea of disinterested morality and unconditioned salvation. The God of Calvin may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by bribes.

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the esse of religion that it is hard for us to do justice to the importance of this change. Really, it is not dogma so much as rite and custom that is fundamental. The sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval Christianity and to most primitive religions. For the first time Luther substituted for the sacramental habit, or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely ethical criterion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and the categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous sola fide.

[Sidenote: Monism]

The second great change made by Protestantism was more intellectual, that from a pluralistic to a monistic {747} standpoint. Far from the conception of natural law, the early Protestants did little or nothing to rationalize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but they had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy to find scandal in the worship of the saints, with its attendant train of daily and trivial miracles. To sweep away the vast hierarchy of angels and canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to preach pure monotheism was in the spirit of the time and is a phenomenon for which many parallels can be found. Instructive is the analogy of the contemporary trend to absolutism; neither God nor king any longer needed intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Political and economic aspects]

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the religious expression of the current political and economic change. In the first place it reflected and reacted upon the growing national self-consciousness, particularly of the Teutonic peoples. [Sidenote: Nationalism and Teutonism] The revolt from Rome was in the interests of the state church, and also of Germanic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at the hands of the Northern peoples is strikingly like the break-up of the Roman Empire under pressure from their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman church practically coincided with the boundaries of the Empire. The apparent exception of England proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman civilization was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth and following centuries.

That the Reformation strengthened the state was inevitable, for there was no practical alternative to putting the final authority in spiritual matters, after the pope had been ejected, into the hands of the civil government. Congregationalism was tried and failed as tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation was really responsible for the new despotism and the divine right of kings, is clear from a comparison with {748} the Greek church and the Turkish Empire. In both, the same forces which produced the state churches of Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, a bigoted Sunnite, after putting down the Shi'ite heresy, induced the last caliph of the Abbasid dynasty to surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet; thereafter he and his successors were caliphs as well as sultans. In Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, in 1547, head of the national church.

[Sidenote: Capitalism]

Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic revolution in that its ethics are, far more than those of Catholicism, oriented by a reference to this world. The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude, mortification of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under the sun of a new prosperity. In its light men began to realize the ethical value of this life, of marriage, of children, of daily labor and of success and prosperity. It was just in this work that Protestantism came to see its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. The man at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.

Moreover, the accentuation of the virtues of thrift and industry, which made capitalism and Calvinism allies, but reflected the standards natural to the bourgeois class. It was by the might of the merchants and their money that the Reformation triumphed; conversely they benefited both by the spoils of the church and by the abolition of a privileged class. Luther stated that there was no difference between priest and layman; some men were called to preach, others to make shoes, but—and this is his own illustration—the one vocation is no more spiritual than the other. No longer necessary as a mediator and dispenser of sacramental grace, the Protestant clergyman sank inevitably to the same level as his neighbors.

{749} [Sidenote: Intellectual aspect]

(3) In its relation to the Renaissance and to modern thought the Reformation solved, in its way, two problems, or one problem, that of authority, in two forms. Though anything but consciously rational in their purpose, the innovating leaders did assert, at least for themselves, the right of private judgment. Appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, from pope to council, from council to the Bible and (in Luther's own words) from the Bible to Christ, [Sidenote: Individualism] the Reformers finally came to their own conscience as the supreme court. Trying to deny to others the very rights they had fought to secure for themselves, yet their example operated more powerfully than their arguments, even when these were made of ropes and of thumb-screws. The delicate balance of faith was overthrown and it was put into a condition of unstable equilibrium; the avalanche, started by ever so gentle a push, swept onward until it buried the men who tried to stop it half way. Dogma slowly narrowing down from precedent to precedent had its logical, though unintended, outcome in complete religious autonomy, yes, in infidelity and skepticism.

[Sidenote: Vulgarization of the Renaissance]

Protestantism has been represented now as the ally, now as the enemy of humanism. Consciously it was neither. Rather, it was the vulgarization of the Renaissance; it transformed, adapted, and popularized many of the ideas originated by its rival. It is easy to see now that the future lay rather outside of both churches than in either of them, if we look only for direct descent. Columbus burst the bounds of the world, Copernicus those of the universe; Luther only broke his vows. But the point is that the repudiation of religious vows was the hardest to do at that time, a feat infinitely more impressive to the masses than either of the former. It was just here that the religious movement became a great solvent of conservatism; it made the masses think, passionately if not {750} deeply, on their own beliefs. It broke the cake of custom and made way for greater emancipations than its own. It was the logic of events that, whereas the Renaissance gave freedom of thought to the cultivated few, the Reformation finally resulted in tolerance for the masses. Logically also, even while it feared and hated philosophy in the great thinkers and scientists, it advocated education, up to a certain point, for the masses.

[Sidenote: The Reformation a step forward]

In summary, if the Reformation is judged with historical imagination, it docs not appear to be primarily a reaction. That it should be such is both a priori improbable and unsupported by the facts. The Reformation did not give our answer to the many problems it was called upon to face; nevertheless it gave the solution demanded and accepted by the time, and therefore historically the valid solution. With all its limitations it was, fundamentally, a step forward and not the return to an earlier standpoint, either to that of primitive Christianity, as the Reformers themselves claimed, or to the dark ages, as has been latterly asserted.

[1] S. Reinach: Cultes, Mythes et Religions, iv, 467.

{751}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRELIMINARY

1. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES.

The amount of important unpublished documents on the Reformation, though still large, is much smaller than that of printed sources, and the value of these manuscripts is less than that of those which have been published. It is no purpose of this bibliography to furnish a guide to archives.

Though the quantity of unpublished material that I have used has been small, it has proved unexpectedly rich. In order to avoid repetition in each following chapter, I will here summarize manuscript material used (most of it for the first time), which is either still unpublished or is in course of publication by myself. See Luther's Correspondence, transl. and ed. by Preserved Smith and C. M. Jacobs, 1913 ff; English Historical Review, July 1919; Scottish Historical Review, Jan. 1919; Harvard Theological Review, April 1919; The N. Y. Nation, various dates 1919.

From the Bodleian Library, I have secured a copy of an unpublished letter and other fragments of Luther, press mark, Montagu d. 20, fol. 225, and Auct. Z. ii, 2.

From the British Museum I have had diplomatic correspondence of Robert Barnes, Cotton MSS., Vitellius B XXI, foil. 120 ff.; a letter of Albinianus Tretius to Luther, Add. MS. 19, 959, fol. 4b ff; and a portion of John Foxe's Collection of Letters and Papers, Harleian MS 419, fol. 125.

From the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, collection of autographs made by Ferdinand J. Dreer, unpublished and hitherto unused letters of Erasmus, James VI of Scotland (2), Leo X, Hedio, Farel to Calvin, Forster, Melanchthon, Charles V, Albrecht of Mansfeld, Henry VIII, Francis I (3), Catherine de' Medici, Grynaeus, Viglius van Zuichem, Alphonso d'Este, Philip Marnix, Camden, Tasso, Machiavelli, Pius IV, Vassari, Borromeo, Alesandro Ottavio de' Medici (afterwards Leo XI), Clement VIII, Sarpi, Emperor Ferdinand, William of Nassau (1559), Maximilian III, Paul Eber (2), Rudolph II, Henry III, Philip II, Emanuel Philibert, Henry IV, Scaliger, Mary Queen of Scots, Robert Dudley (Leicester), Filippo Strozzi, and others.

From Wellesley College a patent of Charles V., dated Worms, March 6, 1521, granting mining rights to the Count of Belalcazar. Unpublished.

Prom the American Hispanic Society of New York unpublished letter of
Henry IV of France to Du Font, on his conversion, and letter of Henry
VII of England to Ferdinand of Aragon.

2. GENERAL WORKS

Encyclopaedia Britannica.[11] 1910-1. (Many valuable articles of a thoroughly scientific character).

The New International Encyclopaedia, 1915f. (Equally valuable).

Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche.[3] 24 vols. Leipzig. 1896-1913. (Indispensable to the student of Church History; The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religions Knowledge, 12 vols., 1908 ff, though in part based on this, is far less valuable for the present subject).

Wetzer und Welte: Kirchenlexikon oder Encyclopädie der katholischen
Theologie und ihrer Hülfswissenschaften. Zweite Auflage von J. Card.
Hergenröther und F. Kaulen. Freiburg im Breisgau. 1880-1901. 12
vols. (Valuable).

Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, hg. von H. Gunkel, O. Scheel, F. M. Schiele. 5 vols. 1909-13.

The Cambridge Modern History, planned by Lord Acton, edited by A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes. London and New York. 1902 ff. Vol. 1. The Renaissance. 1902. Vol. 2. The Reformation. 1904. Vol. 3. The Wars of Religion. 1905. Vol. 13. Tables and Index. 1911. Vol. 14. Maps. 1912. (A standard co-operative work, with full bibliographies).

Weltgeschichte, hg.v.J. von Pflugk-Harttung: Das Religiöse Zeitalter, 1500-1650. Berlin. 1907. (A co-operative work, written by masters of their subjects in popular style. Profusely illustrated).

E. Lavisse et A. Rambaud: Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours.
Tome IV Renaissance et réforme, les nouveaux mondes 1492-1559. 1894.
Tome V. Les guerres de religion 1559-1648. 1895.

R. L. Poole: Historical Atlas of Modern Europe. 1902.

W. R. Shepherd: Historical Atlas. 1911.

Ramsay Muir: Hammond's New Historical Atlas for Students. 1914.

A list of general histories of the Reformation will be found in the bibliography to the last chapter.

An excellent introduction to the bibliography of the public documents of all countries will be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Record."

CHAPTER I. THE OLD AND THE NEW

SECTION 1. The World

On economic changes see bibliography to chapter xi; on exploration, chapter ix; on universities, chapter xiii, 3. On printing:

J. Janssen: A History of the German People from the Close of the Middle Ages, transl. by M. A. Mitchell and A. M. Christie. 2d English ed. 16 volumes. 1905-10.

A. W. Pollard: Fine Books. 1912.

T. L. De Vinne: The Invention of Printing. 1878.

Veröffentlichungen der Gutenberg-Gesellschaft. 1901 ff.

H. Meisner und J. Luther: Die Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst. 1900.

Article "Typography" in Encyclopedia Britannica. (The author defends the now untenable thesis that printing originated in Holland, though the numerous and valuable data given by himself point clearly to Mayence as the cradle of the art).

SECTIONS 2 and 3. The Church, Causes of the Reformation

SOURCES.

C. Mirbt: Quellen sur Geschichte des Papsttums und der römischen Katholizismus.[3] 1911. (Convenient and scholarly; indispensable to any one who has not a large library at command).

The Missal, compiled from the Missale Romanum. 1913.

The Priest's New Ritual, compiled by P. Griffith. 1902. (The rites of the Roman Church, except the Mass, partly in Latin, partly in English).

The Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated into English by J. Donovan. 1829.

Corpus Juris Canonici, post curas A. L. Richteri instruxit Aemilius Friedberg. 2 vols. 1879-81.

Codex Juris Canonici, Pii X jussu digestus, Benedicti XV auctoritate promulgatus. 1918.

Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae. Many editions; the best, with a commentary by Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534) in Opera Omnia, iussu impensaque Leonis XIII PP. vols. 4-10. 1882 ff.

The Summa theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1911 ff. (In course of publication, as yet, 6 vols).

Von der Hardt: Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiense Concilium. 6 vols. 1700.

D. Mansi: Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio. Vols. 27-32.
Venice. 1784 ff. (Identical reprint, Paris, 1902).

Most of the best literature of the 14th and 15th centuries, e.g., the works of Chaucer, Langland, Boccaccio and Petrach [Transcriber's note: Petrarch?].

Special works of ecclesiastical writers, humanists, nationalists and heretics quoted below.

V. Hasak: Der christliche Glaube des deutschen Volkes beim Schlusse des Mittelalters. 1868. (A collection of works of popular edification prior to Luther).

G. Berbig: "Die erste kursächsische Visitation im Ortland Franken." Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, iii. 336-402; iv. 370-408. 1905-6.

TREATISES.

E. Friedberg: Lehrbuch des katholischen und evangelischen
Kirchenrechts.[5] Leipzig. 1903.

L. Pastor: History of the Popes from the close of the Middle Ages. English translation,[2] vols. 1-6 edited by Antrobus, vols. 7-12 edited by R. Kerr. 1899 ff. (Exhaustive, brilliantly written, Catholic, a little one-sided).

Mandel Creighton: A History of the Papacy 1378-1527. 6 vols. 1892 ff. (Good, but in large part superseded by Pastor).

F. Gregorovius: A History of Rome in the Middle Ages, translated by
A. Hamilton. vols 7 and 8. 1900. (Brilliant).

Schaff's History of the Christian Church. Vol. 5, part 2. The Middle Ages. 1294-1517, by D. S. Schaff. 1910. (A scholarly summary, warmly Protestant).

J. Schnitzer: Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Savonarolas. 3 vols. 1902-4.

J. Schnitzer: Savonarola im Streite mit seinem Orden und seinem
Kloster. 1914.

H. Lucas: Fra Girolamo Savonarola.[2] 1906.

H. C. Lea: An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy.[3] 2 vols. 1907. (Lea's valuable works evince a marvelously wide reading in the sources, but are slightly marred by an insufficient use of modern scholarship).

H. C. Lea: A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the
Latin Church. 3 vols. 1896.

Aloys Schulte: Die Fugger in Rom, 1495-1523. 2 vols. Leipzig. 1904. (Describes the financial methods of the church. The second volume consists of documents).

E. Rodocanachi: Rome au temps de Jules II et de Léon X. 1912.

H. Böhmer: Luthers Romfahrt. 1914. (The latter part of this work gives a dark picture of the corruption of Rome at the beginning of the 16th century).

SECTION 4. The Mystics

SOURCES.

W. R. Inge: Life, Light and Love. 1904. (Selections from Eckart,
Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck, etc.).

H. Denifle: "M. Eckeharts lateinische Schriften und die
Grundanschauung seiner Lehre." Archiv für Literaturund
Sprachgeschichte. ii. 416-652.

Meister Eckeharts Schriften und Predigten aus dem Mittelhochdeutschen übersetzt von H. Buttner. 2 vols. 1912.

H. Seuses Deutsche Schriften übertragen von W. Lehmann. 2 vols. 1914.

J. Taulers Predigten, übertragen von W. Lehmann. 2 vols. 1914.

Thomas à Kempis: imitatio Christi. (So many editions and translations of this celebrated work that it is hardly necessary to specify one).

The German Theology, translated by Susannah Winkworth. 1854.

TREATISES.

Kuno Francke: "Medieval German Mysticism." Harvard Theological
Review, Jan., 1912.

G. Siedel: Die Mystik Taulers. 1911.

M. Windstosser: Étude sur la 'Théologie germanique.' 1912.

W. Preger: Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter. 3 vols. 1874-93.

History and Life of the Rev. John Tauler, with 25 sermons, translated by Susannah Winkworth. 1858.

M. Maeterlinck: Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, with selections from
Ruysbroeck, translated by J. T. Stoddard. 1894.

J. E. G. de Montmorency: Thomas à Kempis, his Age and his Book. 1906.

A. R. Burr: Religious Confessions and Confessants. 1914. (The best psychological study of mysticism).

SECTION 5. Pre-Reformers

SOURCES.

J. Wyclif's Select English Works, ed. by T. Arnold. 1869-71. 3 vols.

J. Wyclif's English Works hitherto unprinted, ed. F. Matthew. 1880.

F. Palacky: Documenta Magistri J. Hus. 1869.

The Letters of John Huss, translated by H. B. Workman and R. M. Pope. 1904.

Wyclif's Latin Works have been edited in many volumes by the Wyclif
Society of London, the last volume being the Opera minora, 1913.

John Huss: The Church, translated by D. S. Schaff. 1915.

TREATISES.

H. C. Lea: A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. 3 vols. 1888.

G. M. Trevelyan: England in the Age of Wyclif[2]. 1899.

F. A. Gasquet: The Eve of the Reformation[2]. 1905.

F. Palacky: Geschichte von Böhmen.[3] 1864 ff. 5 vols.

J. H. Wylie: The Council of Constance to the Death of John Hus. 1900.

H. B. Workman: The Dawn of the Reformation. The Age of Hus. 1902.

Count F. Lützow: The Hussite Wars. 1914.

Count F. Lützow: The Life and Times of Master John Hus. 1909.

D. S. Schaff: The Life of John Hus. 1915.

SECTION 6. Nationalizing the Churches

Most of the bibliography in this chapter is given below, in the chapters on Germany, England and France.

Freher et Struvius. Rerum German icarum Scriptores. (1717.) pp. 676-1704: "Gravamina Germanicae Nationis . . . ad Caesarem Maximilianum contra Sedem Romanam."

C. G. F. Walch: Monumenta medii aevi. (1757.) pp. 101-110.
"Gravamina nationis Germanicae adversus curiam Romanam, tempore Nicolai
V Papae."

B. Gebhardt: Die Gravamina der deutschen Nation gegen den römischen
Hof. 1895.

Documents illustrative of English Church History, compiled by Henry Gee and W. J. Hardy. 1896.

A. Werminghoff: Geschichte der Kirchenverfassung Deutschlands im
Mittelalter. Band I.[2] 1913.

A. Störmann: Die Städtischen Gravamina gegen den Klerus. 1916.

SECTION 7. The Humanists

SOURCES.

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Ralph Robinson's translation, with
Roper's Life of More and some of his letters. Edited by G. Sampson and
A. Guthkelch. With Latin Text of the Utopia. 1910. (Bohn's
Libraries).

Der Briefwechsel des Mutianus Rufus, bearbeitet von C. Krause. 1885.

J. Reuchlins Briefwechsel, hg. von L. Geiger. 1875.

E. Böcking: Hutteni Opera. 1859-66. 5 vols.

Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum: The Latin Text with an English translation, Notes and an Historical Introduction by F. G. Stokes. 1909.

Des. Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, curavit J. Clericus. 1703-6. 10 vols.

Des. Erasmi Roterodami Opus Epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen. 1906 ff. (A wonderful edition of the letters, in course of publication. As yet 3 vols).

The Colloquies of Des. Erasmus, translated by N. Bailey, ed. by E. Johnson. 1900. 3 vols.

The Praise of Folly. Written by Erasmus 1509 and translated by John Wilson 1668, edited by Mrs. P. S. Allen. 1913.

The Epistles of Erasmus, translated by F. M. Nichols. 1901-18. 3 vols. (To 1519).

The Ship of Fools, translated by Alexander Barclay. 2 vols. 1874. (Sebastian Brandt's Narrenschiff in the old translation).

TREATISES.

P. Monnier: Le Quattrocento. 2 vols. 1908. (Work of a high order).

L. Geiger: Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland. 1882. (In Oncken's Series). 2d ed. 1899.

J. Burckhardt: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. 20. Auflage von L. Geiger. Berlin. 1919. (Almost a classic).

P. Villari: Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, translated by Mrs.
Villari[2]. 4 vols. 1891.

W. H. Hutten: Sir Thomas More. 1900.

J. A. Froude: The Life and Letters of Erasmus. London. 1895.
(Charmingly written, but marred by gross carelessness).

E. Emerton: Erasmus. New York. 1900.

G. V. Jourdan: The Movement towards Catholic Reform in the early XVI
Century. 1914.

A. Humbert: Les Origines de la Théologie moderne. Paris. 1911.
(Brilliant).

A. Renaudet: Préréforme et Humanisme à Paris 1494-1517. 1916.

CHAPTER II. GERMANY

GENERAL

List of References on the History of the Reformation in Germany, ed. by G. L. Kieffer, W. W. Rockwell and O. H. Pannkoke, 1917.

Dahlmann-Waitz: Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte.[8] 1912.

G. Wolf: Quellenkunde der deutschen Reformationsgeschichte. 2 vols. 1915-16.

A. Morel-Fatio: Historiographie de Charles-Quint. Pt. 1 1913.

B. J. Kidd: Documents illustrative of the Continental Reformation. 1911.

T. M. Lindsay: A History of the Reformation. Vol. 1, In Germany. 1906.

J. Janssen: op. cit.

K. Lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte, vols. 4 and 5. 1894.

T. Brieger: Die Reformation. (In Pflugk-Harttung's Weltgeschichte: Das religiöse Zeitalter 1300-1650. 1907; also printed separately in enlarged form).

G. Mentz: Deutsche Geschichte 1493-1648. 1913. (The best purely political summary).

M. de Foronda y Aguilera: Estancias y viajes del Emperador Carlos V, desde el dia de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte. 1914.

SECTION 1. Luther

Bibliography in Catalogue of the British Museum.

Dr. Martin Luther's Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, von Knaake und Andern. Weimar. 1883 ff. (The standard edition of the Reformer's writings, in course of publication, approaching completion. As yet have appeared more than fifty volumes of the Works, and, separately numbered: Die Deutsche Bibel, 4 vols., and Tischreden, 4 vols.).

Dr. Martin Luther's Briefwechsel, bearbeitet von E. L. Enders (vols. 12 ff. fortgesetzt von G. Kawerau). 1884 ff. (In course of publication; as yet 17 volumes).

Luther's Briefe, herausgegeben von W. L. M. de Wette. 6 vols. 1825-56.

Luther's Primary Works, translated by H. Wace and C. A. Buchheim. 1896.

The Works of Martin Luther, translated and edited by W. A. Lambert, T. J. Schindel, A. T. W. Steinhaeuser, A. L. Steimle and C. M. Jacobs. 1915 ff. (To be complete in ten volumes; as yet 2).

Luther's Correspondence and other Contemporary Letters, translated and edited by Preserved Smith. Vol. 1, 1913. Vol. II, in collaboration with C. M. Jacobs, 1918.

Conversations with Luther, Selections from the Table Talk, translated and edited by Preserved Smith and H. P. Gallinger. 1915.

Melanchthonis Opera, ed. Bretschneider und Bindseil. 1834 ff. In Corpus Reformatorum vols. i-xxviii.

J. Köstlin: Martin Luther, fünfte Auflage besorgt von G. Kawerau. 2 vols. 1903. (The standard biography. The English translation made from the edition of 1883 in no wise represents the scholarship of the last edition).

A. Hausrath: Luther's Leben, neue Auflage von H. von Schubert. 1914.
(Excellent).

H. Grisar: Luther. English translation by F. M. Lamond. 1913 ff. (Six volumes, representing the German three. A learned, somewhat amorphous work, from the Catholic standpoint, but not unfair).

H. Denifle: Luther und Lutherthum in der ersten Entwicklung[2]. 3 vols. 1904 ff. (G. P. Gooch calls "Denifle's eight hundred pages hurled at the memory of the Reformer among the most repulsive books in historical literature"; nevertheless the author is so wonderfully learned that much may be acquired from him).

A. C. McGiffert: Martin Luther, the Man and his Work. 1911.

Preserved Smith: The Life and Letters of Martin Luther[2]. 1914.

O. Scheel: Martin Luther, vom Katholizismus zur Reformation.[2] 2 vols. 1917. (Detailed study of Luther until 1517. Warmly Protestant).

W. W. Rockwell: Die Doppelehe des Landgrafen Philipp von Hessen. 1904. (Work of a high order).

SECTIONS 2-5. The Revolution

Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Karl V, herausgegeben von A. Kluckhohn and A. Wrede. 1893 ff. (Four volumes to 1524 have appeared).

Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Aktenstücken, herausgegeben durch das Königliche Preussische Institut in Rom. Erste Abtheilung 1533-59. 1892 ff. (As yet have appeared vols. 1-6, 8-12).

Emil Sehling: Die Evangelischen Kirchenordungen des XVI Jahrhunderts. 5 vols. 1902-13.

E. Armstrong: The Emperor Charles V[2]. 2 vols. 1910.

Christopher Hare: A Great Emperor. 1917. (Popular).

O. Clemen: Flugschriften aus der Reformationszeit. 4 vols. 1904-10.

O. Schade: Satiren und Pasquille aus der Reformationszeit.[2] 3 vols. 1863.

H. Barge: Der deutsche Bauernkrieg in zeitgenossischen, Quellenzeugnissen. 2 vols. (No date, published about 1914. A small and cheap selection from the sources turned into modern German).

J. S. Schapiro: Social Reform and the Reformation. 1909. (Gives some of the texts and a good treatment of the popular movement).

E. Belfort Bax: The Peasants' War in Germany. 1889. (Based chiefly on Janssen, and unscholarly, but worth mentioning considering the paucity of English works). See also articles Carlstadt, Karlstadt, T. Münzer, Sickingen, etc. in the Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge and other works of reference.

W. Stolze: Der deutsche Bauermkrieg. 1908.

P. Wappler: Die Täuferbewegung in Thüringen 1526-84. 1913.

B. Bax: Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists. 1903.

P. Wappler: Die Stellung Kursuchsens und Landgraf Philipps von Hefssen zur Täuferbewegung. 1910.

F. W. Schirrmacher: Briefe und Akten zur Geschicte des Religionsgespräches zu Marburg 1529 und des reichstages zu Ausburg, 1530. 1876.

H. von Schubert: Bekenntnisbildung und Religionspolitik 1529-30. 1910.

W. Gussmann: Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Augsburgischen Glaubensbekenntnises. Die Ratschläge der evangelischen Reichsstände zum Reichstag zu Augsburg. 3 vols. 1911.

Politische Korrespondenz des Herzog und Kurfürst Moritz von Sachsen, hg. v. E. Brandenburg. 2 vols. (as yet), 1900, 1904.

S. Cardauns: Zur Geschichte der Kirchlichen Unions—und
Reformbestrebungen 1538-42. 1910.

P. Heidrich: Karl V und die deutschen Protestanten am Vorabend des
Schmalkaldischen Krieges. 2 vols. 1911-12.

G. Mentz: Johann Friedrich, vol. 3, 1908.

See also the works cited above by Armstrong, Pflugk-Harttung, Janssen,
Pastor, The Cambridge Modern History, and documents in Kidd.

SECTION 6. Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary

Documents in Kidd, and treatment in The Cambridge Modern History.

Ada Pontificum Danica, Band VI 1513-36. Udgivet af A. Krarup og J. Lindbaek. 1915.

C. F. Allen; Histoire de Danemark, traduite par E. Beauvois, 2 vols. 1878.

P. B. Watson: The Swedish Revolution under Gustavus Vasa. 1889.

Specimen diplomatarii norvagici . . . ab vetustioribus inde temporibus usque ad finem seculi XVI. Ved Gr. Fougner Lundh. 1828.

J. Lund: Histoire de Norvège . . . traduite par G. Moch. 1899.

Norges historie, fremstillet for det norske folk af A. Bugge, E. Hertzberg, O. A. Johnsen, Yngvar Nielsen, J. E. Sars, A. Taranger. 1912.

C. Zivier: Neuere Geschichte Polens. Band I. 1506-72. 1915.

T. Wotschke: Geschichte der Reformation in Polen. 1911.

A. Berga. Pierre Skarga 1536-1612. Étude sur la Pologne du XVIe siècle et le Protestantisme polonais. 1916.

F. E. Whitton: A History of Poland. 1917. (Popular).

CHAPTER III.

SWITZERLAND

SECTION 1. Zwingli

Ulrichi Zwinglii opera ed. Schuler und Schulthess, 8 vols. 1828-42.

Ulrich Zwinglis Werke, hg. von Egli, Finsler und Köhler, 1904 ff. (Corpus Reformatorum, vols. 88 ff). As yet, vols. i, ii, iii, vii, viii.

Ulrich Zwingli's Selected Works, translated and edited by S. M. Jackson. 1901.

The Latin Works and Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli, ed. S. M. Jackson, vol. i, 1912.

Vadianische Briefsammlung, hg. von E. Arbenz und H. Wartmann, 1890-1913. 7 vols. and 6 supplements.

Der Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas Blaurer, hg. von T. Schiess, 3 vols. 1908-12.

Johannes Kesslers Sabbata, hg. von E. Egli and R. Schoch. 1902. (Reliable source for the Swiss Reformation 1519-39).

Documents in Kidd.

S. M. Jackson: Huldreich Zwingli. 1900.

W. Köhler: "Zwingli" in Pflugk-Harttung's Im Morgenrot der
Reformation, 1912.

E. Egli: Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte. Band I, 1519-25. 1910.

F. Humbel: Ulrich Zwingli und seine Reformation im Spiegel der gleichzeitigen Schweizerischen volkstümlichen Literatur. 1913.

Cambridge Modern History, Lindsay, etc.

H. Barth: Bibliographie der Schweizer Geschichte. 3 vols. 1914 f.

Bibliography in G. Wolf, Quellenkunde, vol. 2.

On Jetzer see Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, s.v. "Jetzer Prozess," and R. Reuss: "Le Procès des Dominicains de Berne," Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, 1905, 237 ff.

P. Burckhardt: H. Zwingli. 1918.

W. Köhler: Ulrich Zwingli.[2] 1917.

Ulrich Zwingli: Zum Gedächtnis der Zürcher Reformation, 1519-1919, ed. H. Escher, 1919. (Sumptuous and valuable).

Amtliche Sammlung der älteren eidgenössischen Abschiede, Abt. 3 und 4. 1861 ff.

J. Strickler: Aktensammlung zur Schweizer Reformationsgeschichte. 1878.

J. Dierauer: Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft. Band
III. 1907.

Hadorn: Kirchengeschichte der reform. Schweiz. 1907.

G. Tobler: Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Berner Reformation. 1918.

E. Egli: Analecta Reformatoria. 2 vols. 1899-1901.

SECTION 2. Calvin

Bibliography in Wolf: Quellenkunde, ii.

Correspondance des Réformateurs dans les Pays de langue française[2], pub. par A. L. Herminjard. 9 vols. 1878 ff.

Calvini Opera omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, E. Reuss, 59 vols. 1866 ff. (Corpus Reformatorum vols. 29-87).

John Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by
J. Allen. Ed. by B. B. Warfield. 2 vols. 1909.

The Letters of John Calvin, compiled by J. Bonnet, translated from the original Latin and French. 4 vols. 1858.

J. Calvin: Institution de la religion chrestienne, réimprimée, sous la direction d' A. Lefranc par H. Chatelain et J. Pannir. 1911.

The Life of John Calvin by Theodore Beza, translated by H. Beveridge. 1909.

A. Lang: Johann Calvin. 1909.

W. Walker: J. Calvin. 1906. (Best biography).

H. Y. Reyburn: John Calvin. 1914.

J. Doumergue: Jean Calvin. As yet 5 vols. 1899-1917.

E. Knodt: Die Bedeutung Calvins und Calvinismus für die protestantische Welt. 1913. (Extensive bibliography and review of recent works).

E. Troeltsch: "Calvin," Hibbert Journal, viii, 102 ff.

T. C. Hall: "Was Calvin a Reformer or a Reactionary?" Hibbert
Journal, vi, 171 ff.

Étienne Giran: Sébastien Castellion. 1913. (Severe judgment of
Calvin from the liberal Protestant standpoint).

Allan Menzies: The Theology of Calvin. 1915.

H. D. Foster: Calvin's programme for a Puritan State in Geneva 1536-41. 1908.

F. Brunetière: "L'oeuvre littéraire de Calvin." Revue des Deux
Mondes, 4 série, clxi, pp. 898 ff. (1900).

E. Lobstein: Kalvin und Montaigne. 1909.