In this one thought they were equally far apart from the circle of mediæval and of Reformation theological thinking. In most of their other theological conceptions their opinions were inherited from mediæval theology. They had little or no connection with Reformation theology or with what that represents—the piety of the mediæval Church.
[BOOK VI.]
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION.
CHAPTER I.
THE NECESSITY OF A REFORMATION OF SOME SORT UNIVERSALLY ADMITTED.[642]
In the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the urgent need for a Reformation of the Church was recognised by all thoughtful men everywhere throughout western Europe, and was loudly expressed by almost everyone outside the circle of the influence of the Roman Curia. Statesmen and men of letters, nobles and burghers, great Churchmen as well as monks and parish priests—all bewailed the condition of the organised Christian life, and most of them recognised that the unreformed Papacy was the running sore of Europe. The protest against the state of religion was not confined to individual outcries; it found expression in the States-General of France, in Diet of Germany, and in the Parliament of England.
The complaints took many forms. One of the most universal was that the clergy, especially those of higher rank, busied themselves with everything save the one thing which specially belonged to them—the cure of souls. They took undue share in the government of the countries of Europe, and ousted the nobles from their legitimate places of rule. Clerical law-courts interfered constantly with the lives of burghers; and the clergy protested that they were not bound to obey the ordinary laws of the land. A brawling priest could plead the “benefit of clergy”; but a layman who struck a priest, no matter what the provocation, was liable to the dread penalty of excommunication. Their “right of sanctuary” was a perpetual encouragement to crime.[643] They and their claims menaced the quiet life of civilised towns and States. Constitutional lawyers, trained by Humanism to know the old imperial law codes of Theodosius and Justinian, traced these evils back to the interference of Canon Law with Civil, and that to the universal and absolute dominion of a papal absolutism. The Reformation desired, floated before the minds of statesmen as a reduction more or less thorough of the papal absolutism, and of the control exercised by the Pope and the clergy over the internal affairs of the State, even its national ecclesiastical regulations. The historical fact that the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages were being slowly transformed into modern States, perhaps furnished unconsciously the basis for this idea of a Reformation.