Mr. Carlyle, in his own rousing way and on a subject which deeply interests him—Luther and the Reformation—mingles fine literary vigour with an indifference to physiological teaching which is by no means habitual with him. The heaven-born hero tells us what has become false and unreal, and shows us—it is his special business—how we may go back to truth and reality. The humbler student believes that we are constantly journeying towards truth and reality—these lie not behind but in front of us. The school of prophets tells us that the hero alights in front of us and stands apart. The student declares that we all move together; that we partly make our heroes, and partly they make us; that we have grades of heroes; that they are not at all supernatural—we touch them, see them, know them, send them to the front, keep them and dismiss them at our will, or what seems our will. Carlyle affirms that modern civilisation took its rise from the great scene at Worms. The truths of organisation, of body, of brain, of race, of parentage would rather say that civilisation itself was not born of but in reality gave rise to Luther and the scene at Worms. The Reformation did not give private judgment; private judgment gave the Reformation.
In all revolutions there is a mixture of the essential and the accidental. During the long succession of the ordinary efforts of growing peoples there are also from time to time unusual efforts to bring to an end whatever of accident is most at variance with essential truth and reason and sanity and honour. In the reformations of a growing people, whatever the age in which they happen, whatever the religion or policy or conduct of the age, leading spirits rebel against what is most oppressive and resent what is most arrogant in that age; they reject what is most false and laugh out of court what is most ridiculous. In the sixteenth century men felt no special or inherent resentment to arrogance because it lifted its head in Rome; they looked on the so-called miracle of transubstantiation with no special or peculiar incredulity; their sense of humour was not necessarily tickled by the idea that a soul leaped out of purgatory when a coin clinked in Tetzel’s box. Those were matters of accident and circumstance; they were simply the most intolerable or incredible or preposterous items of the century. Given other preceding accidents—another Deity, or one appearing in another century or arising in another people; another emperor than Constantine; other soldiers than Constantine’s—and the sixteenth-century items of oppression and falsehood would have been there, it is true, but they would have been other than they were.
We are often told that great movements come quickly, and are the peculiar work of heroes. We are told, indeed, that from time to time mankind degenerates into a mass of dry fuel, and that at the fitting moment a hero descends, as a torch, and sets the mass on fire. Nay, moreover, if we doubt this teaching we are dead to poetic feeling and have lost our spiritual ideals. Happily, however, if phantasy dies, poetry still lives. Leaders and led, teachers and taught, are all changing and always changing; but no change brings a lessened poetic susceptibility or a lessened poetic impulse. If, in future, historians and critics come to see that the organisation and bodily proclivity and parentage of men have really much to do with men, let us nevertheless be comforted—the ether men breathe will be no less ample, the air no less divine. Every age is transitional—not this or that—and the ages are bound together by unbroken sequence. As with the movements so is it with the leaders: they are in touch with each other as well as in touch with their followers. All ages have some men who are bolder than others, or more reflective than others, or more courageous, or more active. At certain epochs in history there have been men who combined many high qualities, and who in several ways stood in front of their time. Wyclif was not separated from his fellows by any deep gulf, neither was he, as regards time, the first in his movement, but no leader ever sprang so far in front of the led. General leaders appear first, and afterwards, when the lines of cleavage are clearer, special leaders arise. Wyclif was a general leader, and therefore had many things to do. He did them all well. He was a scholar, a theologian, a writer, a preacher. It is his attitude to his age and to all ages, and to national growth, which interests us—not his particular writing, or his preaching, or his detailed views. He propounded, he defined, he lighted up, he animated, he fought. In one capacity or in two Wyclif might have soared to a loftier height and have shone a grander figure. But he did what was most needed to be done then and there. The time was not ripe, and it did not lie in Wyclif to make it ripe, for the Reformation, but he showed the way to the Reformation; he introduced its introducers and led its leaders. The special leaders appeared in due time, and they also were the product of their time. An Erasmus shed more light than others on burning problems; a Calvin formulated more incisively than his fellows; a Luther fought more defiantly; and, a little later, a Knox roused the laggards with fiercer speech. It is interesting to note that the fighters and the speakers in all movements and at all times come most quickly to the front; it is for them that the multitude shouts its loudest huzzas and the historian writes his brightest pages. But let us not forget this one lesson from history and physiology: it is not given—or but rarely given—to any one man to do all these things, to innovate, to illuminate, to formulate, to fight, to rouse; it is certainly not given to any one man to do all with equal power, and certainly not all at once. For there is a sum-total of brain-force, not in the individual only, but in the community and in the epoch. In one stream it is powerful; if it be divided in several streams each stream is weaker. It was a theological torrent at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a literary torrent at the century’s close. We have (perhaps it is for our good) several streams, we have however, we all hope, a good total to divide. Curiously, too, the most clear-sighted of leaders never see the end, never indeed see far into the future of their movement. The matters and forces which go to form a revolution are many and complex, reformers when striving to improve a world often end in forming a party. If the leaders are clear-sighted, the party will be continuous, large, long-lived; dim-sighted enthusiasts, even when for the moment successful, lead a discontinuous, short-lived, spasmodic crowd. Sometimes a leader steps forth clear and capable, but the multitude continues to sleep. Wyclif, for example, called on his generation to follow him in a new and better path. He seemed to call in vain. In the sixteenth century men were awake, stirring, resolved; but no leaders were ready. Fortunately the people marched well although they had no captains to speak of. The age was heroic although it had no conspicuous heroes.
Although in its forms, its beliefs, its opinions, its policy, its conduct, there was much that was accidental, it was nevertheless inevitable and essential that the Reformation should come. It mattered not whether this thing had been done or that; whether this particular leader led or that; whether this or that concession had been made at Rome. If Erasmus could not fight Luther could. If Rome could concede nothing, much could be torn from her. There is, indeed, much fighting and tearing in history: complacent persons, loftily indifferent to organisation, and race, and long antecedent, are astonished that men should fight, or should fight with their bodies, or that, when fighting they should actually kill each other. In all times, alas, the fittest, not the wisest, has prevailed—and the fittest, alas, has been cruel. In the seventeenth century Parliament and Charles Stuart fought each other by roughest bodily methods, and Parliament, proving victorious, killed Charles. Had Charles conquered, and could Parliament have been reduced to one neck or a dozen, we may be quite sure that the one neck or the dozen would have been severed on the block.
When the thousand fermenting elements came together in the sixteenth century cauldron, no number of men, certainly no one man, certainly not Henry, could do much to hinder or to help on the seething process. This of course was not Henry’s view. He believed himself to be—gave himself out to be—the fountain of truth. We know that he and an admiring (not an abject) Parliament proposed an Act to abolish diversity of opinion on religious matters. We know too, that while he graciously permitted his subjects to read the Word of God, he commanded them to adopt the opinions of the king. It was indeed cheap compulsion, for he and the vast mass of his subjects held similar opinions. Nevertheless, it is true that Henry, with characteristic sagacity, turned to the right spot and at the right moment when the cauldron threatened to boil over, or possibly to explode. At a critical epoch he helped to avert bloodshed; for in this island there was no war of peasants, or princes, or theologians.
Those who say that the great divorce question brought about or even accelerated the Reformation, are those who see or wish to see the bubbles only, and cannot, or will not see the stream—its depth and strength,—on which the bubbles float. For the six-wives matter was in reality a bubble, large it is true, prismatic, many-coloured, interesting, visible throughout Europe, minutely gossiped over on every hearth. If King Henry, however, had had no wife at all, the Reformation would have come no more slowly than it did; if he had had, like King Solomon, seven hundred wives, it would have come no more quickly. Henry was not himself a reformer, and but little likely to lead reformers. Under a fitful and petulant exterior the king was a cold, calculating, self-remembering man. The reformers were a self-forgetting, passionate, often a frenzied party, and as a rule, firebrands do not follow icebergs. If imperious circumstance loosened Henry’s moorings to Rome, he had no more notion of drifting towards Augsburg or Geneva, than, a little later, his daughter Elizabeth had of drifting to Edinburgh and Knox. Henry had no deep attachment, but he clung to the old religion, chiefly perhaps because it was old, as much as he could cling to anything; he had no deep hatreds, but, as heartily as his nature permitted, he detested the new. He would have disliked it all the more, had that been possible, could he have looked with interpretative glance backward to the seed-time of Wyclif’s era, or forward to the ripe harvest of the seventeenth century. Could it have been made plain to Henry that he was helping to put a sword into a Puritan’s hand and bring a King’s head to the block, he would have had himself whipped at the tomb of Catharine of Aragon, and would have thrown his crown at the Pope’s feet.
He assumed the headship of the English Church, it is true; but even good Catholics throughout Europe did not then so completely as now accept the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, and central ideas had not then so completely swallowed up the territorial. If Henry had not taken the headship of the English Church when he did, the Church would probably have had no head at all, and religious teaching in this country would have fared much as it fared in Switzerland and Scotland and North Germany. As it was, Henry simply believed himself to be another Pope, and London to be another Rome. He, the English Pope, and the Pope at Rome would, for the most part, work together like brothers—work for the diffusion of the one truth (which all sorts and conditions of Popes believe they possess), and work therefore for the good of all people.
Had the great European religious movement reached our island in any other reign than Henry’s it would not have run quite the same course it did. Of all the Kings who have ruled over us Henry VIII. was the only King who was at the same time willing enough, able enough, educated enough (he had been trained to be an Archbishop), and pious enough to be, at any rate, the first head of a great Church.
But it is said: “Look at the destruction of the religious houses; surely that was the work of heresy and greed.” Henry had no heresy in his nature, but he was not without greed, and as he was certainly extravagant, he had therefore the stronger incentives to exaction. But in our history the foible of a King avails but little when it clashes with the conscience, the ideal, the will of a people. Henry’s greed, moreover, whatever its strength, was less strong than his conservatism, less strong than his piety. Stronger, too, than all these combined was his boundless love of popularity—a love which alone would have preserved the monasteries could the monasteries have been preserved by any single man. But new ideas and new religious ideals had come in, and the new religious ideals and the old religious houses could not flourish together. The existence of those houses had long been threatened. One hundred years before, Parliament had more than once seriously discussed the appropriation of ecclesiastical funds to military purposes. Cardinal Morton, after impartial inquiry, contemplated sweeping changes. Wolsey, a good Catholic, had suppressed numerous houses. It is interesting to know that at one period of his life Sir Thomas More thought of retiring into a religious house, but after carefully studying monastic life he gave up the project. It is not necessary to sift and resift the evidence touching the morality of the monasteries. Probably those institutions were not so black as their enemies, new or old, have painted them, nor so white as they appear in the eyes of their modern friends. But whether they were fragments of Hades thrust up from below, or fragments of the celestial regions let down from above, or whatever else they were, their end was come. Many causes were at work. They were coming into collision with the rapidly growing modern social life—a life more complex than at any time before, more complex in its roots, its growths, its products, and its needs. The newer social life had developed a passionate love of knowledge; it had formed a loftier ideal of domestic life. It pondered too over our economic problems, and disliked the ceaseless accumulation of land and wealth in ecclesiastical hands. Does any one imagine that a close network of institutions, which were at any rate not models of virtue; institutions which hated knowledge and thrust it out of doors; which directly or indirectly cast a slur on the growing domestic ideal; which told the awakening descendants of Scandinavian and Norseman and Saxon, that their women were unclean—that their mothers and daughters were “snares;” does anyone imagine that such a network could be permitted to entangle and strangle modern life? It has already been said that the newer social ideas were destined to arise, and that therefore the older religious houses were doomed to fall. It mattered little the particular year in which they fell; it mattered little who seemed to deal the final blow. Many centuries before, human nature being what it was, and social conditions what they were, quiet retreats had met a want—they were fittest to live and they lived. But a succession of centuries brought change—a little in human nature, much in social conditions, very much in thought and opinion, and the retreats, the inner life and opinions of which had not kept pace with life outside, were no longer needed, no longer fittest, and they fell. Henry did not destroy them. Catholicism, which neither made them pure nor made them impure, was unable to preserve them. Could the long buried bones of their founders have come to life again and have put on the newer flesh, thought, with newer brain, the newer thought, they would have found quite other outlets for their energy, leisure and wealth. It is so with all founders and all institutions. It is so at this moment with the institutions which were born of the Reformation itself. Naturalists tell us that the jelly-like mass, the amæba, embraces everything, both the useful and the useless, that comes in its way, but that in time it relaxes its embrace on the useless. So the civilisation of a growing people is like a huge amæba, which slowly enfolds men and ideas, and incidents, and systems, and then sooner or later it disenfolds the unsuitable and the worn-out.