If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history, their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient Judaism, was set apart as divinely revealed over against all other faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been pitiful.
In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of God over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which God and the devil pulled the strings. Institutions of which they disapproved, such as the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses passed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.
Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.
[Sidenote: Magdeburg Centuries, 1559-74]
Among the most industrious and the most biassed must certainly be numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing the Magdeburg Centuries, a vast history of the church to the year 1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic sources. Save for the accumulation of much material it deserves no praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as such, but are divided into two classes, those tending to prove an accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal institution which are branded as "first-class lies." The correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.
[Sidenote: Annales of Baronius, 1583-1607]
However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries, they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose Annales Ecclesiastici was the official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy, unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him, found the work difficult.
Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the Reformation itself. A certain class of Protestant works, of which Crespin's Book of Martyrs, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's Ecclesiastical History [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (first English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the passions of the multitude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated facts has a certain "thickness" of reality—if I may borrow William James's phrase—that is found by more complex minds only in the deduction of general causes. Passionate, partisan and sometimes ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues. When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into a general history, he plagiarized the Magdeburg Centuries. The reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some success, though it has not been fully or impartially investigated. Much of it being drawn from personal recollection or from unpublished records, its solo value consists for us in its accuracy. I have compared a small section of the work with the manuscript source used by Foxe and have made the rather surprising discovery that though there are wide variations, none of them can be referred to partisan bias or to any other conceivable motive. In this instance, which is too small to generalize, it is possible that Foxe either had supplementary information, or that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his work must be used with caution.
[Sidenote: Knox]
Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox's History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland (written 1559-71). In style it is rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the essential and a no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its intention to be "a faithful rehearsal of such personages as God has made instruments of his glory," though thus equivocally stated, is carried out in an honorable sense. It is true that the writer never harbored a doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instrument of God's glory, nor that "the Roman Kirk is the synagogue of Satan and the head thereof, called the pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh." If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get impartiality, {587} neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphleteer, he did not falsify or suppress essential facts as he understood them himself.