Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/745

 loses the sense of personal distinctness and identity in the joy, not of absolute possession, but of being possessed. Boehme says that the processes of nature conceal God, but the spirit of man reveals Him; and how can it reveal a God it does not know? But the spirit that has never seen and touched Deity has never known Him or been so one with Him as to know Him as he knows himself. Here lives the very soul of Luther and the essence of all his thought. Boehme's friend and biographer describes him as a little man of mean aspect, thin voice, snub nose, but eyes blue as heaven, bright and gleaming like the windows of Solomon's temple. And he lived in harmony with lines which he wrote with his own toil-stained hand:

"Wem Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit Und Ewigkeit wie Zeit, Der ist befreit Von allem Streit."

Of course, such a change as Luther instituted could not but powerfully affect the minds of men. But certain concomitants must not be set down as effects; and the Peasants' War had its causes in centuries of German history, though among its occasions must be reckoned the ideas which the Reformation had thrown as it were into the air. But quite otherwise was it with the Anabaptist movement. While it sprang up and flourished in provinces and cities where Zwingli was potent as well as in places more expressly Lutheran, yet it belonged more specifically to the Lutheran than to the Reformed Church. To discuss its causes and forms would carry us far beyond our available space. It is enough to say the principle of parity which it emphasised was more antagonistic to the one Church than to the other. Luther created his Church by the help of Princes; Calvin founded his on the goodwill of the people. The system that claimed fullest freedom for the individual could find less fault with the latter than with the former. And it is significant that the heresies which troubled the Lutherans were largely political and social, while those that afflicted the Reformed were mainly intellectual and moral. In nothing is the character of a Society more revealed than in the heresies to which it is most liable.

Zwingli and Calvin alike conceived God under the category of will, and construed man and history through it. Both held faith to be a consequence of, rather than a condition for, election; man believed because God had so decreed, and into His will every step in their upward or downward progress was resolved. Now, this emphasis on the will of God necessarily threw into prominence the ideas of God and will, with the result that the main varieties of opinion in the Reformed Church concerned these two ideas. If the will of God was the supreme and sole causality in all human affairs, and if the will always was as the nature was, it became a matter of primary consequence to know what kind of being God was, and what His nature and character. This question was