There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, which in all makes a polemic against monarchy not exceeded by the fiercest republicans of the next two generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this in 1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. "Princes must be endured," he then thought, "lest tyranny give place to anarchy, a still greater evil."
[Sidenote: Reformation]
As one of the principal causes of the Reformation was the strengthening of national self-consciousness, so conversely one of the most marked results of the movement was the exaltation of the state. The Reformation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the separation of church and state, and it endowed the latter with much wealth, with many privileges and with high prerogatives and duties up to that time {594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of enforcing orthodoxy and punishing sinners, Hobbes drew the logical inference that the state was the final authority for determining religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the reductio ad absurdum of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable religious truth.
The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was. Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the Commonwealth.
[Sidenote: Luther]
While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants' War and the extravagance of Münzer, he came to believe that "Herr Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this world are gods," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through whom God sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly through Satan, i.e., makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely ordained "powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in 1530.
That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine majesty in the state is due not only to Scriptural authority but to the fact that there was no material for any other form of government to be found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he any illusions as to the character of hereditary monarchs. In his Treatise on Civil Authority, [Sidenote: 1523] dedicated to his own sovereign, Duke John of Saxony, he wrote: "Since the foundation of the world a wise prince has been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They are generally the biggest fools and worst knaves on earth, wherefore one must always expect the worst of them and not much good, especially in divine matters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to decide spiritual things, but only to enforce the decisions of the Christian community.
Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth of the emperor and finding no warrant for the people to curb him, Luther groped for the notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word "constitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea was present is certain. The German Empire had a constitution, largely unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507] When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of the German states to resist by force {597} imperial acts of injustice contrary to positive laws. Moreover, he always maintained that no subject should obey an order directly contravening the law of God. In these limitations on the government's power, slight as they were, were contained the germs of the later Calvinistic constitutionalism.
[Sidenote: Reformed Church]
While many of the Reformers—Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndale—were completely in accord with Luther's earlier doctrine of passive obedience, the Swiss, French and Scotch developed a consistent body of constitutional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance in the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran church, was the form of ecclesiastical government. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism are practical object-lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly pointed out in the case of America the influence of the vestry in the evolution of the town meeting. In other countries the same cause operated in the same way, giving the British and French Protestants ample practice in representative government. [Sidenote: Zwingli] Zwingli asserted that the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the identity of spiritual and civil authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were republican through and through.