The same thought took another and more purely ecclesiastical form. The papal absolutism meant frequently that Italians received preferments all over western Europe, and supplanted the native clergy in the more important and richer benefices. Why should the Churches of Spain, England, or France be ruled by Italian prelates, whether resident or non-resident? It was universally felt that Roman rule meant a lack of spirituality, and was a source of religious as well as of national degradation. Men longed for a change, clergy as well as laity; and the thought of National Churches really independent of Rome, if still nominally under the Western Obedience, filled the minds of many Reformers.[644]
The early mediæval Church had been a stern preacher of righteousness, had taught the barbarous invaders of Europe lessons of pure living, honesty, sobriety; it had insisted that the clergy ought to be examples as well as preachers; Canon Law was full of penalties ordained to check clerical vices. But it was notorious that the higher clergy, whose duty it was to put the laws in execution, were themselves the worst offenders. How could English Bishops enforce laws against incontinence, when Wolsey, Archbishop, Cardinal, and Legate, had made his illegitimate daughter the Abbess of Salisbury? What hope was there for strict discipline when no inconsiderable portion of a Bishop’s annual income came from money paid in order to practise clerical incontinence in security? Reformers demanded a reformation of clerical morals, beginning with the Bishops and descending through all grades to monks and nuns.[645]
Humanism brought forward yet another conception of reform. It demanded either a thorough repudiation of the whole of Scholastic Theology and a return to the pure and simple “Christian Philosophy” of the Church of the first six centuries, or such a relaxation of that Scholastic as would afford room for the encouragement of the New Learning.
Lastly, a few pious souls, with the clear vision of God which purity and simplicity of heart and mind give, declared that the Church had lost religion itself, and that the one reformation needed was the rediscovery of religion and the gracious enlightenment of the individual heart and conscience.[646]
The first conception of a reformation which looked for a cure of the evils which all acknowledged to the supremacy of the secular over ecclesiastical rule, may be seen in the reformation of the local Churches of Brandenburg and Saxony under Frederick of Brandenburg and William of Saxony. Archbishop Cranmer believed that the only way of removing the evils under which the Church of the later Middle Ages was groaning was to subordinate the ecclesiastical to the secular powers. The reformation of the Church of England under Henry VIII. carried out this idea to practical issue, but involved with it a nominal as well as a real destruction of the political unity of the mediæval Church. His actions were carefully watched and admired by many of the German Romanist Princes, who made more than one attempt, about the year 1540, to create a National Church in Germany under secular guidance, and remaining true to mediæval doctrine, hierarchy, and ritual.[647] The thought of a reformation of this kind was so familiar to men of the sixteenth century, that the probability of Henry VIII.’s separation from Rome was matter of discussion long before it had entered into the mind of that monarch.[648]