Under art is, of course, included sculpture and architecture, as well as many of the artistic crafts. It is easy to understand that under the influence of the carping spirit of the Reformation all of these became decadent. Men gave up old-time faith for individual judgment of religious truth. The sterilizing influence of the controversial period which followed can be readily understood. Gerhard Hauptmann, the German dramatic poet, to whom the Nobel Prize for literature was recently awarded, characterized this decadence of art under the reformers in a very striking passage.

"I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of personal life we destroyed a whole garden of fancy, and hewed down a virgin forest of esthetic ideas. We went even so far [{559}] in the insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls the fruitful soil that had been accumulating for thousands of years, or else we ploughed it under sterile clay.
"We have to-day, then, an intellectual culture that is well protected by a hedge of our personality, but within this hedge we have only delicate dwarf trees and unworthy plants, the poor progeny of great predecessors. We have telegraph lines, bridges and railroads, but there grow no churches and cathedrals, only sentry boxes and barracks. We need gardeners who will cause the present sterilizing process of the soil to stop and will enrich the surface by working up into it the rich layers beneath. In my workroom there is ever before me the photograph of St. Sebald's tomb. This rich German symbol arose from the invisible in the most luxurious developmental period of German art. As a formal product of that art, it is very difficult to appreciate it as it deserves. It seems to me as one of the most wonderful bits of work in the whole field of artistic accomplishment. The soul of all the great medieval period enwraps this silver coffin, giving to it a noble unity, and enthrones on the very summit of Death, Life as a growing child. Such a work could only have come to its perfection in the protected spaces of the old Mother Church."

All the arts of decoration suffered similarly and no art failed to be affected unfavorably. Music, which had had one great period of development in the old Plain Chant in the later Middle Ages under ecclesiastical influence, was just entering on another and glorious development under the patronage of the Church when the reform movement began. Plain song had given such masterpieces as the Lamentations, of which Rockstro said that no sadder succession of single notes had ever been put together, and the Exultet sung in the Mass on Holy Saturday, which he declares represents a similarly high expression of joy. Now figured and harmonic music was about to have its place. Palestrina's Masses and St. Philip Neri's Oratorios were just beginning. The reformers, however, would have nothing to do with music. Congregational singing was adopted from the old Church, but for music as an art to uplift religion and add its tribute of devotion there was no place. Part song had originated in Church ceremonials, as dramatic literature originated in the ceremonies connected with the celebration of the various mysteries. Like every other human and natural aspiration, music was under suspicion in the new religion, and the consequence was a serious detriment to the development of the art. It was not until the gradual loosening of the bonds of the Puritanic elements in the Protestant religion that music began to come to her own again.

DECLINE OF CHARITY

In humanitarianism and the solution of social problems, the Reformation was particularly backward. The leaders in the new religions were so intent upon explaining their own doctrines and modes of thinking and gathering disciples and having other people [{560}] think as they did, that charitable works suffered severely. The destruction of the monasteries and convents left many needy, but there were but few to care for them. Above all, the new doctrine of justification by faith alone, which declared that good works were of no import so long as men believed in a particular way, took away the motive for much of the charitable work that had been done before. It is not surprising, then, that hospitals and the care of the ailing and the old reached a depth of degradation that is rather hard to understand. We in the twentieth century know how low hospital care and nursing had sunk in the early nineteenth century, and we have been inclined to think that it must have been much worse in the generations preceding. It is a surprise, then, to find that the first half of the nineteenth century represents what has been well called by Miss Nutting and Miss Dock, in their "History of Nursing," the Dark Period of Nursing, during which "the condition of the nursing art, the well-being of the patient and the status of the nurse all sank to an indescribable level of degradation."

Jacobson, in his Essays on "The History of Care for the Ailing," [Footnote 51] traces just when this decadence began, not long after the reform movement succeeded in gaining a firm foothold, and he outlines in detail just how the descent came about. He says:

[Footnote 51: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Krankencomforts, Deutsche Krankenpflege Zeitung, 1898, in 4 parts.]

"It is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the sick, improvements in hospitals and institutions generally and to details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians took any interest in the elevation of nursing or in improving the condition of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, he proceeds to say, nothing was done to bring either construction or nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did nursing remain an interest, and some remnants of technique survive. The result was that in this period the general level of nursing fell far below that of earlier periods. The hospitals of cities were like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms, small rooms where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all comforts and even of necessaries. In the municipal and state institutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls, and springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly interiors."

The more careful study of the guilds, particularly, has served to show what an immense social wrong was done by this confiscation of what for the moment, strictly for government purposes, was called Church property. At the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, [{561}] it has been calculated by Toulmin Smith that there were some 30,000 guilds in England. These had very large sums in their treasuries. They responded to all the social needs that we are now only just waking up to once more. They provided old age and disability pensions, insurance against fire and flood, against loss by robbery, by imprisonment, and against the loss of cattle and farm products; there were forms of insurance against the loss of sight, against the loss of a limb or any other form of crippling. The amount of money confiscated from the treasuries of these guilds has been calculated at a value in our money of several hundred millions of dollars. When it is recalled that the census of England made in Elizabeth's time, just before the Great Armada was expected, showed a total population of less than five million, the amount of good that could be accomplished by this vast sum of money, not in the hands of a few, but distributed in 30,000 treasuries and used for social purposes, can be readily understood. After the reform in England, practically no more was heard of the guilds, and social wrongs began to be multiplied.

SUPERSTITION AND TORTURE