A revolution it undoubtedly was, but a revolution in thinking much more than a political revolution. It was but a further manifestation of the inquiring and questioning tendency awakened by the Revival of Learning. It might in a sense be dated from Wycliffe and Huss, as well as from Erasmus and Luther. Luther did not create the Reformation. He rather popularized the work of preceding protesters, giving the impress of his powerful personality to the movement, and directing and moulding its form.
[Illustration: FIG. 89. HULDREICH ZWINGLI (1487-1531)]
REVOLTS IN OTHER LANDS. The outbreak in Germany soon spread to other lands. Lutheranism made rapid headway in Denmark, where the German grievances against Italian rule were equally familiar, and in 1537 the Danish Diet severed all connection with Rome and established Lutheranism as the religion of the country. Norway, being then a part of Denmark, was carried for Lutheranism also. In Sweden the Church was shorn of some of its powers and property in 1527, and in 1592 Lutheranism was definitely adopted as the religion for the nation. This included Finland, then a part of Sweden. An independent reform movement, closely akin to Lutheranism in its aims, made considerable headway in German Switzerland contemporaneously with the reform work of Luther in Germany. This was under the leadership of a popular humanist preacher in Zurich by the name of Huldreich Zwingli. In 1519 he began a series of sermons on real religion, as he had learned it from a study of the New Testament writings. Zwingli, being supported by the people, made many changes in church practices and worship, eventually even abolishing the mass. Many other towns took up this reform movement, and civil war was the result. Zwingli was killed in battle between Swiss partisans of the old regime and reformers, in 1531, but his work though checked persisted, and German Switzerland became mixed Catholic and Protestant. [11]
In England the struggle came nominally over the divorce (1533) of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, though the independence of the English Church had been asserted from time to time for two centuries, and a free National Church had for long been a growing ideal with English statesmen. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) which severed England from Rome. By it the King was made head of the English National Church. The change was in no sense a profound one, such as had taken place in Lutheran Germany. The priests who took the new oath of allegiance to the King instead of the Pope as the head of the Church, as most of them did, continued in the churches, the service was changed to English, some reforms were instituted, but the people did not experience any great change in religious feeling or ideas. This new National Church became known as the English or Anglican Church.
So far as the early history of America is concerned, the most important reform movement was neither Lutheranism nor Anglicanism, but Calvinism. In 1537 John Calvin, a French Protestant who had fled to Switzerland, [12] was invited to submit a plan for the educational and religious reorganization of the city of Geneva, and in 1541 he was entrusted with the task of organizing there a little religious City-Republic. For this he established a combined church and city government, in which religious affairs and the civil government were as closely connected as they had ever been in any Catholic country. During the twenty-three years that Calvin dominated Geneva it became the Rome of Protestantism. Calvin's The Institutes of Christianity, published in Latin in 1536, and in French in 1541, was the first orderly presentation of the principles of Christian faith from the Protestant standpoint, [13] while his French Catechism (1537) was extensively used [14] in Calvinistic lands as a basis for elementary religious instruction.
[Illustration: FIG. 90. JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564)
(Drawn from a contemporary painting)]
From Geneva a reformed Calvinistic religion spread over northern France, [15] where its followers became known as Huguenots; to Scotland (1560), where they were known as Scotch Presbyterians; to the Netherlands (1572), where originated the Dutch Reformed Church; and to portions of central England, where those who embraced it became known as Puritans. Through the Puritans who settled New England, and later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presbyterians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American education. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anglican Church, known in America as the Episcopalian, came in through the landed aristocracy in Virginia and the later settlers in New York. The early settlement of America was thus a Protestant settlement, while the migration to America of large numbers of peoples from Catholic lands is a relatively recent movement.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS WARFARE. Of course the revolt against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be extended to others. This the Protestants were not much more willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious toleration, [16] though established in principle by the revolt, was an idea to which the world has required a long time to become accustomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, during which Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western Europe were willing to stop fighting and begin to recognize for others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When religious tolerance finally became established by law, civilization had made a tremendous advance.
The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civilization of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of religious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devastation of these religious wars left neither the energy for nor the interest in educational or political progress.
The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was postponed for twenty- five years—due to outside pressure, chiefly that of the Turks in southeastern Europe—from the time that the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (1521). Finally, in 1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty years, when religious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the period known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Though fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so reduced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth century that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. More than half the population and two thirds of the movable property were swept away. The people were so reduced by starvation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of the inhabitants of the Duchy of Würtemberg were left alive. Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the generation which survived the war came to manhood without knowing education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able to make any significant contribution to education or civilization, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did parts of Germany come to have as many people or cattle as before this devastating religious war broke out.