The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote: Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity." Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone to superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther for his violence, but praised him—and here speaks the middle-class advocate of law and order—for his firm stand against the peasants in their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the spell of the supernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical establishments, with which he begins his account of the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and passions of the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delusion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore incumbent on the civil power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to {710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted "those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his great history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their merit [i.e. of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers." They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did {711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism." Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing] apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German Protestant could then be.