And even in England, the result of plunging an ignorant population into the turmoil of theological strife was markedly evil, whatever countervailing force there was in the freer play of mental life on other lines. Were it only in respect of the new ecclesiastical quarrels, the fierce and scurrilous wrangles between prelatists and anti-prelatists, the intensities of malice set up by questions of vestments, the insoluble disputes over the meaning of the eucharist—all heading towards the great Civil War of the seventeenth century—the Reformation was a letting out of the waters of enmity. But all intellectual life was bound to suffer from the erection of a historic delusion into a popular code of moral and social law. Men assured that the ethical and ceremonial law of the ancient Hebrews was the beginning and end of all civic wisdom and righteousness could not lead a sane civic life. The sermons of the Reformers were vain asseverations of a non-existent moral order. All social evil, all individual misfortune, was declared, in the Hebraic manner, to be God’s vengeance for sin; when all the while the infliction of evil by persecutors was denounced as in itself sin against God. The most popular preachers made the wildest promises of material welfare to the faithful as the due reward of faith; and every failure of fulfilment was as confidently explained in terms alternately of divine benevolence and divine chastening. The most repellent teachings of the Hebrew books were erected into infallible canons and commands; and every contemporary problem was put on the rack of Hebrew precedent. On all sides, the human soul was bewildered by unreason.
No mode of mental activity could escape the play of perversion. Hooker’s appeal to reason in Church policy was forever clouded by unreasoning resort to ancient texts. Bacon, complaining of the theological mortmain on all mental life, tacitly endorsed it by using the same tactic. With such standards in force at the upper levels of thought, a superstitious populace invited to find its sole light in the half-comprehended lore of ancient Palestine could make no progress on its own part towards knowledge of nature, of man’s past, or of man’s possibilities. Religious literature meant the semblance of culture without the reality. The sole measurable gains were æsthetic, and that mainly on the literary side; for the Biblical temper was hostile to the plastic arts, though men of religion could not but play their part in developing the instrument of language. Science was at a discount till men wearied of theological debate.
By reaction, some similar results accrued within the scope of Catholicism in France and Italy. It is significant that “the importance of the anatomical description of the heart by Vesalius was not thoroughly comprehended by investigators for seventy-three years (1543 to 1616); and the uses of the valves of the veins remained unknown for more than half a century.” This was the period of the wars of religion in France, and of the theologians in Germany. Servetus had gone far on the way to the theory of the circulation of the blood in his Christianismi Restitutio (not in his work on the Trinity, as is often asserted), but the fact remained absolutely unknown in Switzerland and Germany. Scotland, which just before the Reformation had in the works of Dunbar and Lyndsay what might have been the beginning of a great literature, fell into a theological delirium which lasted two hundred years, and from which the nation emerged with its literary and intellectual continuity destroyed, and needing new tillage from foreign thought to yield any new life. It was only after the period of devout Protestantism had been succeeded by strife-weariness, toleration and doubt, that Protestant Holland and Switzerland began to count for anything in science and scholarship; and Germany and Scandinavia had to wait still longer for a new birth.
Catholic France, with all her troubles, fared on the whole better in the mental life. Rabelais was for his country a fountain of riotous wisdom all through the worst time of the civil wars; and before they had ended Montaigne began effectually the new enlightenment. Only in England, where Shakespeare and Bacon signalized Protestant rule, was there any similar good fortune; and both in England and France the period was one of extensive though necessarily cautious skepticism. Alongside of the first stirrings of Protestantism there had arisen in France a spirit of critical unbelief, represented by the Cymbalum Mundi of Bonaventure des Periers (1537), who had set out as a Protestant; and the ferocities of the war engendered in many a temper like his. What Montaigne did was to give to practical skepticism the warrant of literary genius, and to win for it free currency by the skill of his insinuation. Without such fortunate fathering, rationalism in England made much headway in the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is deeply impregnated with its spirit;[2] Bacon gave it a broad basis under cover of orthodoxy; and even before their day there were loud protests that atheism was on foot wherever continental culture came.
By such complainants the evil was early traced to Italy; and it is clear that there, after the Spanish conquest, men’s energies turned from the closed field of politics to that of religion and philosophy, despite the Inquisition, very much as men in ancient Greece had turned to philosophy after the rise of the Macedonian tyranny. From Italy came alike Deism and Unitarianism, and such atheism as there was. The Inquisition still burned all heretics alike when it could catch them; but even among the clergy, nay, among the very inquisitors themselves, there were many heretics; and the zealots had to call in lay bigots to help them. Heretical books were burned by the thousand, most being absolutely suppressed; and when there was established (about 1550) the famous Index Expurgatorius, in imitation of the example already set at Louvain and Paris, it was soon found that some works by cardinals, and by the framer of the first Italian list, had to be included. Protestantism was thus crushed out in Italy, with due bloodshed to boot; and the heretical Franciscans were forced in mass to recant; but in the end there was no gain to faith. Heresy became more elusive and more pervasive; and when in the year 1600 the papacy put to death Giordano Bruno, his work as the herald of a new philosophy was already done. In the next generation appeared Galileo, the pioneer of a new era of practical science. Thus even in her time of downfall did Italy begin for Europe a second renascence.
Thenceforth, in the sphere of the Church of Rome, unbelief persisted either audaciously or secretly alongside of the faith. Within the Church the long battle with Protestantism had evolved fresh energies of propaganda, and even a measure of ascetic reformation. In particular, the new Order of Jesuits (founded in 1534), which we have seen completing the recapture of Poland, strove everywhere by every available means, fair and foul, for the Church’s supremacy. Where treachery and cruelty could not be used, as they were in Poland, the Jesuits made play with a system of education which realized the ideals of the time; and besides thus training the young as adherents, the Church developed within itself a revival of ecclesiastical learning that made a formidable resistance to the learning of French and English Protestantism. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the combatants thus wrought by their literary warfare what they had previously done by their physical strife—a gain to the spirit of unbelief. Neither side convinced the other; and while the Protestants discredited many of the old Catholic beliefs, their opponents more subtly discredited the faculty of theological reason, putting all human judgments in doubt as such. The outcome was a strengthening of the anti-theological bias. Jesuit education, where it became at all scientific, armed the born skeptics; and where it was limited to belles lettres it failed in the long run to make either earnest believers or able disputants.
Thus the Reformation, in the act of giving Christianity a new intensity of life among certain populations, where it fostered and was fostered by a growth of intolerant democracy, unwittingly promoted at once fanaticism and freethinking both in its own and in its enemy’s sphere. Deepened superstition forced a deepening of skepticism; fanaticism drove moderate men to science; and theological learning discredited theology. In papal and downtrodden Italy, in monarchic and military France, in the England of the Restoration, and in semi-democratic Holland, there worked in the seventeenth century the same divergent forces.
In both Holland and England, by help of the spirit of fanatical democracy, the multiplication of sects and heresies in the second generation of the seventeenth century was so great—180 being specified in England alone—that no repressive policy could deal with them; and under cover of their political freedom there arose some Unitarian doctrine among the common people, even as anti-Scriptural Deism spread among the educated. Devoutly religious men, such as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, by the very thoroughness of their loyalty to the doctrine of the inward light, helped to shake among sincere people the old docility of belief in revelation, though in some cases they reinforced it, and in many more evoked, by reaction, the spirit of persecution.
The net gain from Protestantism thus lay in the fortuitous disruption of centralized spiritual tyranny. The rents in the structure made openings for air and light at a time when new currents were beginning to blow and new light to shine. Twenty years before Luther’s schism, Columbus had found the New World. Copernicus, dying in 1543, left his teaching to the world in which Protestantism had just established itself. Early in the next century Kepler and Galileo began to roll back for men the old dream-boundaries of the universe. The modern era was at its dawn; and with it Christianity had begun its era of reconsideration, revision, and slow decline.