His alienation from the reformers increases. 11. In every succeeding year the letters of Erasmus betray increasing animosity against the reformers. He had long been on good terms with Zwingle and Œcolampadius, but became so estranged by these party differences, that he speaks of their death with a sort of triumph.[688] He still however kept up some intercourse with Melanchthon. The latter years of Erasmus could not have been happy; he lived in a perpetual irritation from the attacks of adversaries on every side; his avowed dislike of the reformers by no means assuaging the virulence of his original foes in the church, or removing the suspicion of lukewarmness in the orthodox cause. Part of this should fairly be ascribed to the real independence of his mind in the formation of his opinions, though not always in their expression, and to their incompatibility with the extreme doctrines of either side. But an habitual indiscretion, the besetting sin of literary men, who seldom restrain their wit, rendered this hostility far more general than it need have been, and, accompanied as it was with a real timidity of character, exposed him to the charge of insincerity, which he could better palliate by the example of others than deny to have some foundation. Erasmus died in 1536, having returned to Basle, which, on pretence of the alterations in religion, he had quitted for Friburg in Brisgau a few years before. No differences of opinion had abated the pride of the citizens of Basle in their illustrious visitor. Erasmus lies interred in their cathedral, the earliest, except Œcolampadius, in the long list of the literary dead, which has rendered that cemetery conspicuous in Europe.
[688] Bene habet, quod duo Coryphæi perierint, Zuinglius in acie, Œcolampadius paulo post febri et apostemate. Quod si illis favisset ενυαλιορ, actum fuisset de nobis. Epist. Mccv. It is of course to be regretted, that Erasmus allowed this passage to escape him, even in a letter. With Œcolampadius he had long carried on a correspondence. In some book the latter had said, Magnus Erasmus noster. This was at a time when much suspicion was entertained of Erasmus, who writes rather amusingly, in Feb. 1525, to complain, telling Œcolampadius that it was best neither to be praised nor blamed by his party; but if they must speak of him, he would prefer their censure to being styled noster. Epist. Dccxxviii. Milner quotes this, leaving poor Erasmus to his reader’s indignation for what he would insinuate to be a piece of the greatest baseness. But in good truth, what right had Œcolampadius to use the word noster, if it could be interpreted as claiming Erasmus to his ownside? He was not theirs as Œcolampadius well knew, in exterior profession nor theirs in the course they had seen fit to pursue.
It is just towards Erasmus to mention, that he never dissembled his affection for Lewis Berquin, the first martyr to protestantism in France, who was burned in 1528, even in the time of his danger. Epist. Dcccclxxvi. Erasmus had no more inveterate enemies than in the university of Paris.
Appeal of the reformers to the ignorant. 12. The most striking effect of the first preaching of the Reformation was that it appealed to the ignorant; and though political liberty, in the sense we use the word, cannot be reckoned the aim of those who introduced it, yet there predominated that revolutionary spirit which loves to witness destruction for its own sake, and that intoxicated self-confidence which renders folly mischievous. Women took an active part in religious dispute; and though in many respects the Roman catholic religion is very congenial to the female sex, we cannot be surprised that many ladies might be good protestants against the right of any to judge better than themselves. The translation of the New Testament by Luther in 1522, and of the Old a few years later, gave weapons to all disputants; it was common to hold conferences before the burgomasters of German and Swiss towns, who settled the points in controversy, one way or other, perhaps as well as the learned would have done.
Parallel of those times with the present. 13. We cannot give any attention to the story of the Reformation, without being struck by the extraordinary analogy it bears to that of the last fifty years. He who would study the spirit of this mighty age may see it reflected as in a mirror from the days of Luther and Erasmus. Man, who, speaking of him collectively, has never reasoned for himself, is the puppet of impulses and prejudices, be they for good or for evil. These are, in the usual course of things, traditional notions and sentiments, strengthened by repetition, and running into habitual trains of thought. Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive any thing as true, or seek its own interest in any manner, but as its forefathers have opined or acted. Change in these respects has been, even in Europe, where there is most of flexibility, very gradual; the work, not of argument or instruction, but of exterior circumstances slowly operating through a long lapse of time. There have been, however, some remarkable exceptions to this law of uniformity, or, if I may use the term, of secular variation. The introduction of Christianity seems to have produced a very rapid subversion of ancient prejudices, a very conspicuous alteration of the whole channel through which moral sentiments flow, in nations that have at once received it. This has also not unfrequently happened through the influence of Mohammedism in the East. Next to these great revolutions in extent and degree, stand the two periods we have begun by comparing; that of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and that of political innovation wherein we have long lived. In each, the characteristic features are a contempt for antiquity, a shifting of prejudices, an inward sense of self-esteem leading to an assertion of private judgment in the most uninformed, a sanguine confidence in the amelioration of human affairs, a fixing of the heart on great ends with a comparative disregard of all things intermediate. In each there has been so much of alloy in the motives, and, still more, so much of danger and suffering in the means, that the cautious and moderate have shrunk back, and sometimes retraced their own steps, rather than encounter evils which at a distance they had not seen in their full magnitude. Hence we may pronounce with certainty what Luther, Hutten, Carlostadt, what again More, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Cassander, would have been in the nineteenth century, and what our own contemporaries would have been in their times. But we are too apt to judge others, not as the individualities of personal character and the varying aspects of circumstances rendered them, and would have rendered us, but according to our opinion of the consequences, which, even if estimated by us rightly, were such as they could not determinately have foreseen.
Calvin. 14. In 1531, Zwingle lost his life on the field of battle. It was the custom of the Swiss that their pastors should attend the citizens in war to exhort the combatants, and console the dying. But the reformers soon acquired a new chief in a young man superior in learning and probably in genius, John Calvin, a native of Noyon in Picardy. |His Institutes.| His Institutions, published in 1536, became the text-book of a powerful body, who deviated in some few points from the Helvetic school of Zwingle. They are dedicated to Francis I., in language, good, though not perhaps as choice as would have been written in Italy, temperate, judicious, and likely to prevail upon the general reader, if not upon the king. This treatise was the most systematic and extensive defence and exposition of the protestant doctrine which had appeared. Without the over-strained phrases and wilful paradoxes of Luther’s earlier writings, the Institutes of Calvin seem to contain most of his predecessor’s theological doctrine, except as to the corporal presence. He adopted a middle course as to this, and endeavoured to distinguish himself from the Helvetic divines. It is well known that he brought forward the predestinarian tenets of Augustin more fully than Luther, who seems however to have maintained them with equal confidence. They appeared to Calvin, as doubtless they are, clearly deducible from their common doctrine as to the sinfulness of all natural actions, and the arbitrary irresistible conversion of the passive soul by the power of God. The city of Geneva, throwing off subjection to its bishop, and embracing the reformed religion in 1536, invited Calvin to an asylum, where he soon became the guide and legislator, though never the ostensible magistrate, of the new republic.
Increased differences among reformers. 15. The Helvetian reformers at Zurich and Bern were now more and more separated from the Lutherans; and in spite of frequent endeavours to reconcile their differences, each party, but especially the latter, became as exclusive and nearly as intolerant as the church which they had quitted. Among the Lutherans themselves, those who rigidly adhered to the spirit of their founder’s doctrine, grew estranged, not externally, but in language and affection, from the followers of Melanchthon.[689] Luther himself, who never withdrew his friendship from the latter, seems to have been alternately under his influence, and that of inferior men. The Anabaptists, in their well-known occupation of Munster, gave such proof of the tremendous consequences of fanaticism, generated, in great measure, by the Lutheran tenet of assurance, that the paramount necessity of maintaining human society tended more to silence these theological subtilties, than any arguments of the same class. And from this time that sect, if it did not lose all its enthusiasm, learned how to regulate it in subordination to legal and moral duties.
[689] Amsdorfius Luthero scripsit, viperam eum in sinu alere, me significans, omitto alia multa. Epist. Melanchthon, p. 450 (edit. 1647). Luther’s temper seems to have grown more impracticable as he advanced in life. Melanchthon threatened to leave him. Amsdorf and that class of men flattered his pride. See the following letters. In one, written about 1549, he says: Tuli etiam antea servitutem pæne deformem, cum sæpe Lutherus magis suæ naturæ, in qua φιλονεικια erat haud exigua, quam vel personæ suæ, vel utilitati communi serviret, p. 21. This letter is too apologetical and temporising. Nec movi has controversias quæ distraxerunt rempublicam; sed incidi in motas, quæ cum et multæ essent et inexplicatæ, quodam simplici studio quaerendæ veritatis, præsertim cum multi docti et sapientes initio applauderent, considerare eas cœpi. Et quamquam materias quasdam horridiores autor initio miscuerat, tamen alia vera et necessaria non putavi rejicienda esse. Hæc cum excerpta amplecterer, paulatim aliquas absurdas opiniones vel sustuli vel lenii. Melanchthon should have remembered, that no one had laid down these opinions with more unreserve, or in a more “horrid” way of disputation than himself in the first edition of his Loci Communes. In these and other passages, he endeavours to strike at Luther for faults which were equally his own, though doubtless not so long persisted in.
Melanchthon, in the first edition of the Loci Communes, which will scarcely be found except in Von der Hardt, sums up the free-will question thus:
Si ad prædestinationem referas humanum voluntatem, nec in externis, nec in internis operibus ulla est libertas, sed eveniunt omnia juxta destinationem divinam.