Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/376

 might organise their respective Churches by means of the civil power and in dependence on it; but the civil powers were not the same, the reigning forces being in the one case the law and the princely will, and in the other case the reason and the free choice of men trained in self-government by the usages of centuries. The Lutheran Church was thus more monarchical, the Zwinglian more republican in constitution; the one was constructed by Princes, the other organised by the genius and built by the hands of a free people.

The Reformation, then, could not possibly be expressed in a single homogeneous form. Organisation was a necessity, if the liberty achieved by the movement was to be preserved; but it is a much harder thing to establish an order agreeable to liberty than an order suitable to bondage. When a revolution once begins, authorities, personal or political, may retard or deflect it, but they cannot stop or turn it back. And no revolution leaves man exactly where it found him; the wheel may accomplish its full round, but it never returns to the point whence it started. If, then, man could not go back and must preserve what he had gained, he needed a system that would serve his new mind as Catholicism had served his old. Out of Luther's Reformation came the Church which bears his name; out of Zwingli's the Church which is specially termed the Reformed. This Church was born in Switzerland, but named in France; and the name signified that while it was a Church Protestant and Evangelical like the Lutheran, it was yet ancient and continuous like the Roman, able to change its form or accidents without losing its essence. Being Swiss by birth it was republican in polity and democratic in spirit, a Church freely chosen by a free people and capable of living amid free institutions. But France, in adopting and naming it, made it less national and more cosmopolitan, helping it to realise a character at once more comprehensive and aggressive. Now, the causes of this action may be described as at once general and particular, or national and personal. Of the more general, or national, causes three may here be specified.

French Protestantism was more a lay than a clerical revolt; the men who led and who formed it were without the mental habits or the associations of the priest. At first indeed it was termed, just as if it had been imported from Germany, "the Lutheran heresy"; but the most notable of the early French martyrs, Louis de Berquin, was a pupil of Erasmus rather than of Luther. The men who made the psalms which the French Protestants loved to sing, were not of the priestly order, while their two most illustrious teachers were both jurists and scholars. It was then but characteristic that the Reformed Church of France should more emphasise moral character and temper than custom or formulated beliefs, and that John Calvin, who was its most creative personality, should not think like a schoolman or appeal to the