Their demand for Reform, though listened to, refused.
And if ever any reformers had a fair chance of a hearing in influential quarters, surely it was they. They had direct access to the ears of Leo X., of Henry VIII., of Charles V., of Francis I.; not to mention multitudes of minor potentates, lay and ecclesiastical, as well as ambassadors and statesmen, whose influence upon the politics of Europe was scarcely less than that of princes. But though they were courted and patronised by the potentates of Europe, their reform was refused.
The destinies of Christendom, by a remarkable concurrence of circumstances, were thrown very much into the hands of the young Emperor Charles V.; and, unfortunately for Christendom, Charles V. turned out to be the opposite of the ‘Christian Prince’ which Erasmus had done his best to induce him to become. Leo X. also had bitterly disappointed the hopes of Erasmus. When the time for final decision came, in the Diet of Worms the Emperor and the Pope were found banded together in the determination to refuse reform.
Reform of Luther.
In the meantime the leadership of the Reform movement had passed into other and sterner hands. Luther, concentrating his energies upon a narrower point, had already, in making his attack upon the abuse of Indulgences, raised a definite quarrel with the Pope. Within fifteen months of the death of Colet, he had astonished Europe by defiantly burning the Bull issued against him from Rome. And summoned by the Emperor to Worms, to answer for his life, he still more startled the world by boldly demanding, in the name of the German nation from the Emperor and Princes, that Germany should throw off the Papal yoke from her neck. For this was practically what Luther did at Worms.[790]
Luther’s battle-cry at the Diet of Worms.
The Emperor and Princes had to make up their minds, whether they would side with the Pope or with the nation, and they decided to side with the Pope. They thought they were siding with the stronger party, but they were grievously mistaken. Their defiance of Luther was engrossed on parchment. Luther’s defiance of them, and assertion of the rights of conscience against Pope and Emperor, rang through the ages. It stands out even now as a watershed in history dividing the old era from the new.
The refusal of Reform followed by a period of Revolution.
In the history of the next three centuries, it is impossible not to trace the onward swell, as it were, of a great revolutionary wave, which, commencing with the Peasant War and the Sack of Rome, swept on through the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War, the Puritan Revolution in England, and the foundation of the great American Republic, until it culminated and broke in the French Revolution. It is impossible not to see, in the whole course of the events of this remarkable period, an onward movement as irresistible and certain in its ultimate progress as that of the great geological changes which have passed over the physical world.
It is in vain to speculate upon what might have been the result of the concession of broad measures of reform whilst yet there was time; but in view of the bloodshed and misery, which, humanly speaking, might have been spared, who can fail to be impressed with the terrible responsibility, in the eye of History, resting upon those by whom, in the sixteenth century, the reform was refused? They were utterly powerless, indeed, to stop the ultimate flow of the tide, but they had the terrible power to turn, what might otherwise have been a steady and peaceful stream, into a turbulent and devastating flood. They had the terrible power, and they used it, of involving their own and ten succeeding generations in the turmoils of revolution.