The influence of the spirit generated in the medieval towns is seen in that important reform, the abolition of the judicial duel, which was one of the most noteworthy matters in the moral history of the Middle Ages.[713]
It was the military spirit of the German barbarians which, as we have seen, was a chief agency in the introduction of the wager of battle or trial by combat in the jurisprudence of the European peoples.[714] Besides the influence of the towns, a number of other causes concurred in gradually effecting the abrogation of this method of settling disputes, among which the most efficient were the opposition of the Church, the revival of the Roman law in the eleventh century, and the advance in general intelligence. Into every one of these agencies there entered an ethical element, so that we may regard this great reform, in its causes as well as in its effects, as distinctively a moral reform. Thus the influence of the towns was essentially ethical, for the rise of these communities, as we have just seen, meant the superseding of the ethics of aristocracy and war by the ethics of democracy and industry. Consequently the influence exerted by the towns was largely that of a new ideal of character.
The opposition of the Church was motived chiefly by moral feeling, the pontiffs and the bishops who opposed the practice doing so on the ground that the ordeal by battle was “brutal, unchristian, and unrighteous.”
The advocates of the civil law opposed the practice not only because it interfered with the royal and imperial administration of justice, but because it was a practice based on ignorance and superstition and “incompatible with every notion of equity and justice,” since brutal force was allowed to usurp the place of testimony and reason. Thus the Roman law, as the embodiment of right reason, was here as everywhere else a moral force making for what is reasonable and just.
The influence of the general progress in enlightenment was also profoundly ethical, since this movement resulted, as intellectual advance always normally does, in a growing refinement of the moral feelings, in progress in moral ideas, and in truer ethical judgments.
By the opening of the modern age trial by combat, acted on by these various influences, had become obsolete or obsolescent in most of the countries of Europe.[715] Strangely enough, the international duel or public war, resting on substantially the same basis as the private judicial duel, has held its place as the instituted and legalized method of settling controversies between nations down to the present time, without, till just yesterday, being seriously challenged by the awakening conscience of the world as equally repugnant to the moral law and incompatible with every principle of reason, humanity, and justice.
CHAPTER XVII
ETHICS OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION
I. Principles of the Reformation of Ethical Import
Principle of the self-sovereignty of the individual as the ultimate authority in morals
In its essential principle the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the principle of authority in the realm of the spirit. It proclaimed the right of individual judgment in matters of religion and morals. There was in this proclamation an ethical implication of revolutionary significance. It was a recognition of the truth “that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual ... by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man’s rational conviction of what is best.”[716]