Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 07.djvu/558

LEFT REFORMATION 472 REFORMATION stamped out of the country, and France thus deprived of the most divaricating elements in its society. The religious revolution in Switzerland is second only to that of Germany in its direct influence on the subsequent for- tunes of the European nations. In Switzerland we have the case of a double revolt from Rome springing from the same conditions, yet each having a char- acter and an animating soul of its own. At Zurich, as early as 1519, and inde- pendently of Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, who, according to Ranke, combined in himself the best elements of renaissance and reform, gave rise to a movement ivhich split the Swiss cantons into two hostile sections, and issued in the peace of Cappel (1531), which permitted to each canton the choice of its own form of faith. More important than the move- ment of Zwingli at Zurich is that asso- ciated with Calvin and Geneva. As in almost every other case of revolt, polit- ical considerations wrought with reli- gious zeal in the breach of Geneva with Rome. Before 1530 the town had re- ceived the new religion from French refugees, who thus gave its peculiar character to the creed eventually asso- ciated with Calvin and Geneva. But it was in the successful effort of the town in throwing off the yoke of the Catholic Dukes of Savoy (1534) that it found itself forced to join the great Protestant schism, and to fashion a civil and re- ligious polity compatible with an inde- pendent corporate life. It was in the accomplishment of this task that Calvin proved himself the great consolidator of the tendencies that underlay the Prot- estant movement. Inspired by Calvin, it was the pre-eminent destiny of Geneva at once to produce a reasoned civil and religious creed and a type of Christian believer that offered a solid front against the vast powers still at the command of the Roman see, and assured to Protestantism its own independent course in the history of mankind. In 1532 the schism of England from Rome also becazne an accomplished fact. In this result had issued the negotiations of Henry VIII. with Pope Clement VII. for his divorce from Catharine of Aragon. But the view summed up in Gray's line, "And gospel light first dawned from Bul- len's eyes," implies a totally inadequate recognition of the many forces that went to produce the English Reformation. The king's divorce was the mere occa- sion of what must sooner or later have been the only solution of England's rela- tions with the papacy. In England all the forces, in greater or less degree, were at work which had produced the religious revolutions in Germany. As in Ger- many, the Church alike in its teaching and practice no longer represented the highest consciousness of the nation. It has of late been shown that its degrada- tion was far from being so general or so complete as the official reports of Henry had seemed to prove; yet the state to which it had come was clearly such as to lend some countenance to the most drastic measure against it. By the end of the 15th century, also, the Renais- sance, which was everywhere the solvent of tradition, had found its representa- tives in England. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and Sir Thomas More were all men more or less emancipated from medisevalism, though none of them broke communion with Rome. Both More and Colet spoke their minds freely on the unworthy lives of the clergy; and the latter by his foundation of St. Paul's School in 1510, and by his placing it under lay super- vision, took a step of the highest impor- tance in the direction of the new order. But it is in the political development of England that we find the adequate ex- planation of her final breach with Rome. For centuries the Pope had come to be more and more regarded as a foreign prince, whose powers, as he claimed the right to exercise them over Englishmen and English property, were incompatible with English interests and English liberty. When Clement VII., therefore, declared against the divorce from Cath- arine, Henry regarded the decision not ag the oracle of Christendom, but as the counsel of an earthly prince whose own interests left him no other alternative. The breach with Rome was thus in- evitable. Henry himself to the close of his life professed to have broken with the old only in the one point of the head- ship of the Church. In the reign of Edward VI. a clear departure was made from the doctrinal system of the ancient Church; but the temporary reaction under Mary showed how strong a hold that system still possessed on the hearts of the people. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 it was only her prudent policy that saved the country from the internecine divisions of France and Germany. Three parties were equally bent on realizing their own con- ceptions of a religious settlement. The adherents of the old religion, who still probably made a half of the people, had not lost hope of a return to the old spiritual allegiance. Those who had re- nounced the papacy themselves made two distinct parties, each bent on ends so con- flicting, that it was evident from the first that they could never work in common. The governing principle of the one party, from which eventually sprang the Church of England, was to minimize