[Sidenote: Bullinger]
In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the fair appearance of impartiality presented in Henry Bullinger's History of the Reformation 1519-32. Here, too, we meet with excellent composition, but with a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that the author's professions of fairness are sincere, though at times the temptation to omit recording unedifying facts, such as the sacramentarian schism, is too strong for him.
[Sidenote: Sleidan]
Before passing judgment on anything it is necessary to know it at its best. Probably John Sleidan's Religious and political History of the reign of Charles V [Sidenote: 1555] was the best work on the German Reformation written before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more eloquent and acute, Seckendorf more learned, Gilbert Burnet had better perspective, but, none of these writers was better informed than Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was he above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses and in monsters. He cited documents broadly and on the whole fairly, but not with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588} Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his public, and temperately.
On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of notable histories than had the Protestants. A succès de scandale was won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] Origin and Progress of the English Schism. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr. Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he gave rein to his imagination.
[Sidenote: Loyola]
The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness, such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius, lag far in the dusty rear.
SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY
[Sidenote: Premises]
The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought. Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced. From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new entities, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the shift of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few egalitarians who claimed for all classes a democratic régime. And, thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the relationship of church and state. It was on premises gathered from these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling structure of political thought.