Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/137

 church his childish imagination was inflamed by the stained-glass picture of Jesâs, not the Saviour, but the Judge, of a fierce countenance, seated on a rainbow, and carrying a flaming sword in His hand. This idea prevented pious people who held it from approaching Jesus as an intercessor. He Himself needed to be interceded with on behalf of the poor sinners He was coming to judge. And this thought in turn gave to the adoration of the Virgin Mother a strength and intensity hitherto unknown in medieval religion. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had strenuous advocates; men and women formed themselves into confraternities that they might beseech her intercession with the strength that numbers give; and these confraternities spread all over Germany. The intercessory powers of the Virgin Mother became a more and more important element in the popular religion, and little books of devotion were in circulation-the Little Gospel, the Pearl of the Passion-which related with many a comment the words of Christ on the Cross to St John and to the Virgin. Then the idea grew up that the Virgin herself had to be interceded with in order to become an intercessor; and her mother, St Anne, became the object of a cult which may almost be called new. This "Cult of the Blessed Anna" rapidly extended itself in ever-widening circles until there were few districts in Germany which had not their confraternities devoted to her service. Such was the prevailing enthusiastic popular religion of the last decades of the fifteenth century-the religion which met and surrounded a sensitive boy when he left his quiet home and entered the world. It had small connexion, save in the one point of the increased reverence paid to the Virgin, with the theology of the Schools, but it was the religious force among the people.

Side by side with this flamboyant popular religion can be discerned another spiritual movement so unlike it, so utterly divergent from it in character and in aim, that it is surprising to detect its presence within the same areas and at the same period, and that we need scarcely wonder that it has been so largely overlooked. Its great characteristic was that laymen began to take into their own hands matters which had hitherto been supposed to be the exclusive property of churchmen. We can discern the impulse setting in motion at the same time princes, burghers, and artisans, each class in its own way.

The Great Council of Constance had pledged the Church to a large number of practical reforms, aiming at the reinvigoration of the various local ecclesiastical institutions. These pledges had never been fulfilled, and their non-fulfilment accounts for one side of the German opposition to Rome. During the last decades of the fifteenth century some of the German Princes assumed the right to see that within their lands proper discipline was exercised over the clergy as well as over the laity. To give instances would need more space than this chapter affords. It is enough to say that the jus episcopale which Luther claimed in later