Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/372

 362 Reviews of Books often actually seductive bearing, the lively interest in scholarship and art, and the hearty, sunny fashion in which the Pope enjoyed the crea- tions laid before him by the highly developed culture of the time— these could not but captivate all. But the most striking quality of the book is its fairness. There was room for fear that on the hotly fought field of the Reformation even eyes so clear as Professor Pastor's might be blinded by the smoke ; but of this there is no sign. He nowhere belies his sympathy with the cause of the Church; but he nowhere lets his sympathy color his facts. A long chapter is devoted to the dealings of the Curia with the case of Martin Luther. It is a theme which during these last years, especially since the opening of the archives of the Vatican, has busied some of the keenest of non-Catholic scholars. The labors of Karl Miiller, of Aloys Schulte, of Paul KalkofT, he has used to the full. Everywhere he has verified, at many points he has enriched them. But, to their honor, as to his, and to the encouragement of all honest research, there is between his results and theirs not a shadow of partizan variance. That in his book they recognize a like acumen and find as little ground for dissent, we know already from at least the pen of Kalkoff. That Leo X., as has so often been assumed, failed to recognize the importance of the Lutheran schism and to take prompt measures for its suppression seems disproved. Such delays as there were must be as- cribed rather to the dilatoriness of ecclesiastical procedure and to the political crisis brought by the death of Maximilian. What Leo failed to recognize was the pressing need of a reform. On this point no Protestant could be more explicit than is Professor Pastor (p. 4) : Ever more threatening became the signs of the times. It could not escape the attentive observer that at the accession of the Medicean a severe tempest was gathering over the Church. It was a stern trial which God suffered to come upon Christendom that in a moment of such peril there was raised to the chair of St. Peter a man who was not equal to the earnest tasks of his lofty office, aye who for the most part was wholly oblivious of them. With unexampled optimism Leo X. looked unconcernedly into the future, and, lost in his sport, deceived himself as to the seriousness of the times. Of a reform on the great scale which had grown a necessity he never thought. And in the brilliant pages which describe the political successes of Leo and the bloom under his patronage of literature, of scholarship, and of art, the historian never obscures this fundamental defect. Yet, while thus maintaining the austerity of his standards and discriminating still between a Christian and a Pagan Renaissance, there is in these pages of Dr. Pastor hardly a trace of that somewhat unctuous censori- ousness which gave so clerical a tone to his earliest volumes; and this but illustrates the ripening judgment and the mellowing temper which increasingly mark his work. George L. Burr.