The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

It is often said that with the Reformation came the end of superstition and of that exaggerated faith in religion which keeps people from using their reason and that over-attention to the things of the other world instead of this which keeps them from being practical and prosperous. The subsequent history, however, of the countries most affected by the German religious revolt, far from bearing out this declaration, shows how much harm came from the absence of a strong central religious authority and how much of loss to idealism there was in the diminution of the childlike faith which had meant so much, not only for religion, but for literature and for art in the preceding centuries.

There was no obliteration of superstition, but superstition changed its object, and now, instead of being poetic, often became cruel and intolerant. The witchcraft delusion, for instance, which represented the worst manifestation of superstition which mankind has perhaps ever suffered from, affected the Protestant countries much more than the Catholic countries. Thousands and thousands of people were put to death as witches in Germany, and it was from the Protestant countries that the delusion spread, by psychic contagion, to the Catholic countries of Europe. Catholic countries not in intimate relations with Protestant countries, like Ireland, were not affected by it. Though Ireland has been the most Catholic of countries, not a witch has been put to death there, by any formal process of law, for over five hundred years. Here in America the witchcraft delusion is one of the sad blots on our history. Many other forms of superstition manifested themselves, and when there [{562}] were not religious motives there were other reasons. Men apparently cannot keep from being influenced by things they do not understand. Healers of all kinds take the place of the religious healing of the medieval period, and medical and scientific superstitions replace religious supercredulity. Electric belts and pads replace relics. Over-estimated remedies and utterly inefficient cures of all kinds are believed in much more now without reason than ever medieval folk allowed themselves to be carried away by religious superstitions.

A similar historical error proclaims that torture and suffering for opinions and cruel punishment went out with the Reformation, or at least wherever that movement gained a firm foothold. This is absolutely untrue, for the trials of the witches everywhere were accompanied by torture, and cruel punishments were the rule, particularly in the Protestant countries. It is rather amusing sometimes to read, in newspaper and magazine articles, descriptions of the torture of the Inquisition and the heartlessness of medieval people, ecclesiastics in the same breath with the mention of the Iron Maiden and the famous torture boots of Nuremberg. These, however, were inventions not made for the Inquisition nor for the Middle Ages, but for the post-reformation period in Protestant Nuremberg. And it must not be forgotten that Nuremberg was one of the most cultivated cities of Germany and that its people were highly educated, and that it was exactly in such a reform city that torture and cruel punishments were invented and developed. Torture was one of the modes of getting at truth for legal purposes under the Roman law. It continued almost until our own time to be a legal mode of procedure. Even at the present time it has not entirely gone out, and while the means of physical torture are removed, the "third degree" and various phases of mental torment replace them.

POLITICAL DECADENCE

Above all, the political import of this movement, so often thought to be purely religious, must not be forgotten. The nobility lost at this time, to a great extent, their independence. The king became supreme, and the new nationalism which developed in Europe knit countries and peoples very close together which had only been very loosely connected before. Ferdinand was King of Aragon and Isabella Queen of Castile when their marriage brought these kingdoms together. Subsequent developments at this time made the Spanish peninsula a unit. Practically the same thing happened in France. Pope Julius II planned a united Italy. It was scarcely half a century after the close of Columbus' Century that the Scotch and English crowns became united. Many of the great nobles of these countries lost their prestige. The foolish extravagance of [{563}] the Field of the Cloth of Gold is said to have cost many a nobleman of France and England his estates, or at least made him absolutely independent in the favor of the king.

In the midst of this political revolution a change in the prevailing religion made a very valuable asset for monarchs whose position was not over-secure or whose treasury was exhausted, for it handed over to them the care of the Church and its property as well as of the State and its revenues. This enabled them to confiscate large sums of money, to confer Church estates on noble favorites; but, above all, it left them without any strong organized ethical factor within the State to oppose any acts of injustice that they might do. Their Lord Chancellors had been bishops before, but now they were political favorites and often the veriest of time-servers. Lord Campbell's characterization of some of the English post-reformation chancellors is illuminating for this. The amount of political injustice that resulted is easy to understand, though it is not easy to comprehend how the people stood it.

The constitution of the English House of Lords since the Reformation represents, by contrast, in a very striking way the difference between the old and the new in political matters. At the present time the House of Lords is almost exclusively hereditary. About one-seventh of its members are there by appointment or election, and a large part of even this moiety is chosen from the descendants of the hereditary nobility. Before the Reformation sixty per cent of the House of Lords consisted of the Lords Spiritual. Many of these were Bishops, but more of them were Abbots and Priors of Religious Houses, Masters and Generals of Religious Orders and other officials representing the monasteries as large landholders, who at the same time represented considerable bodies of peasantry, tillers of the soil of monasteries, who were so happy, as was often said, to be under the cross. Not a few of the bishops were the self-made sons of the middle class, or even the poor. A great many of the abbots and representatives of religious orders came from even the lower orders. They were men who had been chosen by their fellow-religious to rule over them because they were considered to have the best qualities of heart and soul for such positions. In the course of centuries a great many of these men were saints, that is, represented that character and disposition which made the men of the after-time declare that they had lived heroic lives of unselfishness and care for others.

It is true that at times some of the Lords Spiritual were the sons of the nobility, favorites of kings, men who used political influence in order to secure Church preferment; but the proportion of these was never very large, and while many are known, it is because the history of many centuries is gone over for them. Probably no better second chamber for conservative legislation could [{564}] possibly be organized than this one of the House of Lords before the Reformation actually was. The majority of the men in it were representatives, not of one class, but of all the classes of England. There were always many peasants' sons and the sons of little tradesmen, and these men had often risen by merit and yet only under such circumstances as precluded family ambition at least, and usually their advancement was due to their known lack of personal ambition. As a rule, their unselfishness had been the principal trait by which they secured preferment. They had the best interests of the poor classes particularly at heart. Without any chance for ambition for themselves, without any desires for the enrichment of a family which did not exist for them, there were as many safeguards around their fulfilment of their duty as representatives of the people as can possibly be drawn. Even such safeguards will not prevent all abuses, but they come as near doing it as is possible. Nothing is more illuminating, as regards political conditions from a social standpoint, than this comparative study of the pre-reformation House of Lords with that of the present.

In political freedom, the times after the Reformation represent decadence mainly because of the placing in the hands of the civil government the authority in both political and religious matters. As a consequence of the elimination of the Church authorities as independent factors in the life of the people instead of subservient to government officials, there was a serious inroad upon the rights as citizens that had been obtained by hard striving during preceding centuries. Modern political developments are not so much a new assertion of modern democracy as a reversion to the democratic principles of the Middle Ages. That will seem to many people profoundly paradoxical. It is only a paradox, however, to those who do not know the political life of the Middle Ages. Magna Charta was drawn up and signed, the fundamental laws of Spain and France adopted, the Golden Bull in Hungary promulgated, and the Swiss declaration of independence issued all in a single century of the preceding time--the thirteenth. Such principles as that there shall be no taxation without representation were then formulated, and the free cities acquired rights for their citizens and laid the foundation of that government of the people, by the people and for the people which is the basis of modern democracy. All this was seriously disturbed at the time of the reform movement, and a decadence similar to that which took place in humanitarianism and the hospital and nursing movement may be traced with regard to political liberty. It culminated at the end of the eighteenth century in that awful cataclysm of the French Revolution which tried to reassert all the old principles of political freedom and correct all the abuses at once and right the cumulated wrongs of centuries that was doomed to failure. The series of revolutions of the early [{565}] nineteenth century were needed to give people back something like the rights that they had had in the Middle Ages and to create a public sentiment once more favorable to democratic institutions. Hilaire Belloc, who probably knows the French Revolution as well as any in our generation, declared not long since that it represented an effort to bring the world back to those ideals of democracy which had developed in the Middle Ages. Our period represents exactly the end of the Middle Ages, and it is after the Reformation that the decadence of the fine old democratic spirit which had been fostered within the bounds of the old Church may be noted.

Above all, popular happiness decreased and indeed almost disappeared throughout Europe as the result of the reform movement. Before that, the Church holy days, nearly twoscore in number in the year, provided ample opportunities for leisure and recreation, and the Church societies, by the giving of the mystery and morality plays, and the guilds by their banquets and outdoor meetings, the various "ales," as they were called, had furnished frequent occasions for hearty, healthy amusement. All this stopped with the Reformation. Puritanical conceptions of religion rubbed the holy days, that were also holidays, out of the year. We are now engaged in putting them back as anniversaries of national events and of the births of national heroes instead of the celebrations of Christian feasts and saints' days, as bank holidays and memorial days of various kinds. The sects became so much occupied with discussions of dogma that they took almost no interest in the amusements of the people. Now men met to dispute over doctrines that they could not understand, and instead of the beautiful ceremonies of the old religion, with their satisfying appeal to all the senses and their charm and teaching quality, even as mere spectacles, they listened to long-winded, dry-as-dust sermons as a matter of duty, and went home to sit gloomily in darkened rooms for the observance of what they called the Sabbath. Before the Reformation, the people, after the Church services, used to meet for games and recreation upon the green in front of the Church, and the young folks had had opportunities for their Sunday pleasures of all kinds. Only in recent years, with the breaking up of the bonds of Protestantism, have we gone back to revive medieval ways.