The first demand does not in the least surprise us, coming, as it does, from a crude and undigested assumption of the principles of European radicalism. We have seen its consistency illustrated by madmen chasing, robbing, and killing one another to the cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” We understand what it is to be assaulted by this party, which knows not how to act except in the way of destruction, which is never at rest except in the midst of agitation, and never at peace, so to speak, except when at war.
Nor is it strange to see an attempt against Catholics made outside the field of theological controversy, inasmuch as the result of controversy for the past two centuries has tended rather to the disintegration of Protestantism than to the conversion of Catholics to the new faith. Nor is it surprising to find this assault directed against the equal rights of Catholics in education; for here some earnest but short-sighted men imagine that there is not simply ground to be gained, but that the present system is a stronghold not to be given up. It is a stronghold, truly, but rather of infidelity than of Protestantism.
But educated Protestants and heathen will marvel with us that the attack has been made on the theory that Protestantism is the born friend, and Catholicity the natural enemy of education, knowing as well as we the fatal evidence of history.
The contempt for education which, until more recent times, has always existed, to a certain extent, among the orthodox Protestants, was founded upon their erroneous doctrines of the total depravity of human nature, the consequent invalidity of human reason, and the principle of private illumination.
When Luther said, “The god Moloch, to whom the Jews immolated their children, is to-day represented by the universities” (Wider den Missbrauch der Messe), it was not simply on the ground of the universities being centres of association for boisterous and disorderly youth, or fortresses of the ancient faith, but because of that “pagan and impious science” which was taught in them.
In his furious onslaught against them Luther was sustained by his well-known hatred of anything which tended to assert the prerogatives of human nature or the dignity of reason. No man was ever more intemperate in denunciation than this so-called “liberator of humanity and emancipator of human reason.” “True believers strangle reason,” said he; and he never alluded to it except in terms of most outrageous abuse. The last sermon of his at Wittenberg[253] is monumental in this respect; and his well-known reply to the Anabaptists is one of the most startling examples of his intensely idiomatic style.[254]
The feelings of the master were fully communicated to the disciples. The results were fearful. The free schools which existed in every city were overturned by the very men whom they had educated; the gymnasia were in many places wholly destroyed, in others so reduced as never to recover their former position.
At Wittenberg itself the two preachers, Spohr and Gabriel Didymus, announced from the pulpit that the study of science was not simply useless but noxious, and that it was best to do away with the colleges and schools. The upshot was to change the academy of that city into a bakery. Similar measures were carried into effect throughout the entire duchy of Anspach. The history of the Reformation by Dr. Döllinger gives a long list of the numerous scholars, rectors of high schools and colleges, who were driven into exile, and also details a minute account of many of the institutions which were destroyed.
The statements of Erasmus, as to the disastrous results of the Reformation on studies, are constant and numberless. They may be formulated in a sentence of one of his letters to Pirkheimer (1538): “Ubicumque regnat Lutheranismus, ibi litterarum est interitus”—“Wherever Lutheranism reigns, there is the destruction of letters.”
The testimony of Sturm, Schickfuss, Bucer, and others is no less forcible. Luther and Melancthon in later days seem to have been appalled by their own work, and George Major thus sums up the melancholy condition of things in his own day: “Thanks to the wickedness of men and the contempt which we ourselves have shown for studies, the schools have more than ever need of patrons and protectors to save them from ruin, and to prevent us from falling into a state of barbarism worse than that of Turks and Muscovites.”