[Sidenote: Ranke]
From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"—coined in 1770 and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution." The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722} rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective. Would he have thought so after 1919?
[Sidenote: Buckle]
A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment, and a democratic rebellion.
Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best classified as a member of the new school. His History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done more than any other movement to emancipate the mind from superstition and to secularize society.
[Sidenote: Protestants]
It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short space at my command, the principal Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old "truths," Merle d'Aubigné won an enormous and unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won its enormous circulation.[1]
[Sidenote: Döllinger]
An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by the Catholic Döllinger, the most theological of historians, the most historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really {724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.
[1] The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 were sold in England and America.