[709] Sarpi and Fleury, passim.
This literature nearly forgotten. 30. These elder champions of a long war, especially the Romish, are, with a very few exceptions, known only by their names and lives. These are they, and many more there were down to the middle of the seventeenth century, at whom, along the shelves of an ancient library, we look and pass by. They belong no more to man, but to the worm, the moth, and the spider. Their dark and ribbed backs, their yellow leaves, their thousand folio pages, do not more repel us than the unprofitableness of their substance. Their prolixity, their barbarous style, the perpetual recurrence, in many, of syllogistic forms, the reliance, by way of proof, on authorities that have been abjured, the temporary and partial disputes, which can be neither interesting nor always intelligible at present, must soon put an end to the activity of the most industrious scholar.[710] Even the coryphæi of the Reformation are probably more quoted than read, more praised than appreciated; their works, though not scarce, are voluminous and expensive; and it may not be invidious to surmise, that Luther and Melanchthon serve little other purpose, at least in England, than to give an occasional air of erudition to a theological paragraph, or to supply its margin with a reference that few readers will verify. It will be unnecessary to repeat this remark hereafter; but it must be understood as applicable, with such few exceptions as will from time to time appear, throughout at least the remainder of the sixteenth century.
[710] Eichhorn.
Sermons. 31. No English treatise on a theological subject, published before the end of 1550, seems to deserve notice in the general literature of Europe, though some may be reckoned interesting in the history of our Reformation. The sermons of Latimer, however, published in 1548, are read for their honest zeal and lively delineation of manners. They are probably the best specimens of a style then prevalent in the pulpit, and which is still not lost in Italy, nor among some of our own sectaries; a style that came at once home to the vulgar, animated and effective, picturesque and intelligible, but too unsparing both of ludicrous associations and commonplace invective. The French have some preachers, earlier than Latimer, whose great fame was obtained in this manner, Maillard and Menot. They belong to the reign of Louis XII. I am but slightly acquainted with the former, whose sermons, printed if not preached in Latin, with sometimes a sort of almost macaronic intermixture of French, appeared to me very much inferior to those of Latimer. Henry Stephens, in his Apologie pour Herodote, has culled many passages from these preachers, in proof of the depravity of morals in the age before the Reformation. In the little I have read of Maillard, I did not find many ridiculous, though some injudicious passages; but those who refer to the extracts of Niceron, both from him and Menot, will have as much gratification, as consummate impropriety and bad taste can furnish.[711]
[711] Niceron, vols. xxiii. and xxiv. If these are the original sermons, it must have been the practice in France, as it was in Italy, to preach in Latin; but Eichhorn tells us that the sermons of the fifteenth century, published in Germany, were chiefly translated from the mother tongue.vi. 113. Tauler certainly preached in German, yet Eichhorn in another place (iii. 282), seems to represent Luther and his protestant associates as the first who used that language in the pulpit.
Spirit of the Reformation. 32. The vital spirit of the Reformation, as a great working in the public mind, will be inadequately discerned in the theological writings of this age. Two controversies overspread their pages, and almost efface more important and more obvious differences between the old and the new religions. Among the Lutherans, the tenet of justification or salvation by faith alone, called, in the barbarous jargon of polemics, solifidianism, was always prominent: it was from that point their founder began; it was there that, long afterwards, and when its original crudeness had been mellowed, Melanchthon himself thought the whole principle of the contest was grounded.[712] In the disputes again of the Lutherans with the Helvetic reformers, as well as in those of the latter school, including the church of England, with that of Rome, the corporal or real presence (which are synonymous with the writers of that century) in the Lord’s supper was the leading topic of debate. But in the former of these doctrines, after it had been purged from the Antinomian extravagances of Luther, there was found, if not absolutely a verbal, yet rather a subtle, and by no means practical, difference between themselves and the church of Rome;[713] while, in the Eucharistic controversy, many of the reformers bewildered themselves, and strove to perplex their antagonists, with incompatible and unintelligible propositions, to which the mass of the people paid as little regard as they deserved. It was not for these trials of metaphysical acuteness that the ancient cathedrals shook in their inmost shrines; and though it would be very erroneous to deny, that many not merely of the learned laity, but of the inferior ranks, were apt to tread in such thorny paths, we must look to what came closer to the apprehension of plain men for their zeal in the cause of reformed religion, and for the success of that zeal. The abolition of saint-worship, the destruction of images, the sweeping away of ceremonies, of absolutions, of fasts and penances, the free circulation of the Scriptures, the communion in prayer by the native tongue, the introduction, if not of a good, yet of a more energetic and attractive style of preaching than had existed before; and besides this, the eradication of monkery which they despised, the humiliation of ecclesiastical power which they hated, the immunity from exactions which they resented, these are what the north of Europe deemed its gain by the public establishment of the Reformation, and to which the common name of protestantism was given. But it is rather in the history, than in the strictly theological literature of this period, that we are to seek for the character of that revolution in religious sentiment, which ought to interest us from its own importance, and from its analogy to other changes in human opinion.
[712] Melanchth. Epist. p. 290. ed. Peucer, 1570.
[713] Burnet on eleventh article.
Limits of private judgment. 33. It is often said, that the essential principle of protestantism, and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned, a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of the right of private judgment. But, to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a change of masters; a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any choice; and in this sense, an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the confession of Augsburg, or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify those creeds at his pleasure. He might of course become an Anabaptist or an Arian; but he was not the less a heretic in doing so, than if he had continued in the church of Rome. By what light a protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide; but in practice, the law of the land, which established one exclusive mode of faith was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.
Passions instrumental in Reformation. 34. The adherents to the church of Rome have never failed to cast two reproaches on those who left them: one, that the reform was brought about by intemperate and calumnious abuse, by outrages of an excited populace, or by the tyranny of princes; the other, that after stimulating the most ignorant to reject the authority of their church, it instantly withdrew this liberty of judgment, and devoted all who presumed to swerve from the line drawn by law, to virulent obloquy, or sometimes to bonds and death. These reproaches, it may be a shame for us to own, “can be uttered, and cannot be refuted.” But, without extenuating what is morally wrong, it is permitted to observe that the protestant religion could, in our human view of consequences, have been established by no other means. Those who act by calm reason are always so few in number, and often so undeterminate in purpose, that without the aid of passion and folly, no great revolution can be brought about. A persuasion of some entire falsehood, in which every circumstance converges to the same effect on the mind; an exaggerated belief of good or evil disposition in others; a universal inference peremptorily derived from some particular case; these are what sway mankind, not the simple truth, with all its limits and explanations, the fair partition of praise and blame, or the measured assent to probability that excludes not hesitation. That condition of the heart and understanding which renders men cautious in their judgment, and scrupulous in their dealings, unfits them for revolutionary seasons. But of this temper there is never much in the public. The people love to be told that they can judge; but they are conscious that they can act. Whether a saint in sculpture ought to stand in the niches of their cathedrals, it was equally tedious and difficult to inquire; that he could be defaced, was certain; and this was achieved. It is easy to censure this as precipitancy; but it was not a mere act of the moment; it was, and much more was of the same kind, the share that fell naturally to the multitude in a work which they were called to fulfil, and for which they sometimes encountered no slight danger.