On the other hand, there was great ill feeling between the various classes—the petty princes, the townspeople, the knights, and the peasants. It was generally believed by the other classes that the wealth of the merchants could only be accounted for by deceit, usury, and sharp dealing. Never was begging more prevalent, superstition more rife, vulgarity and coarseness more apparent. Attempts to reform the government and stop neighborhood war met with little success. Moreover, the Turks were advancing steadily upon Christendom. The people were commanded by the pope to send up a prayer each day as the noon bell rang, that God might deliver them from the on-coming infidel.
Yet we need not be astonished by these contradictions, for history teaches that all periods of progress are full of them. Any newspaper will show how true this is to-day: we are, as a nation, good and bad, rich and poor, peaceful and warlike, learned and ignorant, satisfied and discontented, civilized and barbarous, all at once.
Four important characteristics of the time which serve to explain the Protestant revolt.
In considering the condition of the Church and of religion in Germany, four things are particularly important as explaining the origin and character of the Protestant revolt. First, there was an extraordinary enthusiasm for all the pomp and ceremony of the old religion, and a great confidence in pilgrimages, relics, miracles, and all those things which the Protestants were soon to discard. Secondly, there was a tendency to read the Bible and to dwell upon the attitude of the sinner toward God, rather than upon the external acts of religion. Thirdly, there was a conviction, especially among scholars, that the theologians had made religion needlessly complicated with their fine-spun logical distinctions. And lastly, there was the old and very general belief that the Italian prelates, including the pope, were always inventing new plans for getting money out of the Germans, whom they regarded as a stupid people, easily hoodwinked. These four matters we shall consider in turn.
Enthusiasm for religious ceremonies and observances.
136. Never had the many ceremonies and observances of the mediæval Church attracted more attention or been carried out on a more prodigious scale than during the latter part of the fifteenth, and the opening years of the sixteenth century. It seemed as if all Germany agreed to join in one last celebration of the old religion, unprecedented in magnificence, before its people parted into two irreconcilable parties. Great numbers of new churches were erected, and adorned with the richest productions of German art. Tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to the various sacred places, and gorgeous ecclesiastical processions moved through the streets of the prosperous imperial towns.
Relics.
The princes rivaled each other in collecting the relics of saints, which were venerated as an aid to salvation. The elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, who was later to become Luther's protector, had accumulated no less than five thousand of these sacred objects. In a catalogue of them we find the rod of Moses, a bit of the burning bush, thread spun by the Virgin, etc. The elector of Mayence possessed even a larger collection, which included forty-two whole bodies of saints and some of the earth from a field near Damascus out of which God was supposed to have created man.
The treasury of 'good works.'