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 a superficial account of the traffic in indulgences, and a rough and ready assumption, which even Kostlin makes, that the darkness was greatest just before the dawn. Unfortunately this crude solution of the problem proved too much; for conditions were no worse immediately before the revolt than they had been for centuries, and German complaints of papal tyranny go back to Hildegard of Bingen and Walther von der Vogelweide, who antedated Luther by more than three centuries. So a new theory is logically demanded to explain why these conditions, which were chronic, failed to produce a change long before it actually occurred. Singularly enough it is the modern Catholic scholars, Johannes Janssen above all, who, in their efforts further to discredit the Protestant revolt by rehabilitating the institutions which the reformers attacked, have done most to explain the success of the Reformation. A humble, patient Bohemian priest, Hasak, set to work toward half a century ago to bring together the devotional works published during the seventy years immediately succeeding the invention of printing. Every one knows that one at least of these older books, The German Theology, was a great favourite of Luther’s; but there are many more in Hasak’s collection which breathe the same spirit of piety and spiritual emulation. Building upon the foundations laid by Hasak and other Catholic writers who have been too much neglected by Protestant historians, Janssen produced a monumental work in defence of the German Church before Luther’s defection. He exhibits the great achievements of the latter part of the 15th and the early portion of the 16th centuries; the art and literature, the material prosperity of the towns and the fostering of the spiritual life of the people. It may well be that his picture is too bright, and that in his obvious anxiety to prove the needlessness of an ecclesiastical revolution he has gone to the opposite extreme from the Protestants. Yet this rehabilitation of pre-Reformation Germany cannot but make a strong appeal to the unbiased historical student who looks to a conscientious study of the antecedents of the revolt as furnishing the true key to the movement.

Outwardly the Reformation would seem to have begun when, on the 10th of December 1520, a professor in the university of Wittenberg invited all the friends of evangelical truth among his students to assemble outside the wall at the ninth hour to witness a pious spectacle—the burning of the “godless book of the papal

decrees.” He committed to the flames the whole body of the canon law, together with an edict of the head of the Church which had recently been issued against his teachings. In this manner Martin Luther, with the hearty sympathy of a considerable number of his countrymen, publicly proclaimed and illustrated his repudiation of the papal government under which western Europe had lived for centuries.” Within a generation after this event the states of north Germany and Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands and portions of Switzerland, had each, in its particular manner permanently seceded from the papal monarchy. France, after a long period of uncertainty and disorder, remained faithful to the bishop of Rome. Poland, after a defection of years, was ultimately recovered for the papacy by the zeal and devotion of the jesuit missionaries. In the Habsburg hereditary dominions the traditional policy and Catholic fervour of the ruling house resulted, after a long struggle, in the restoration of the supremacy of Rome; while in Hungary the national spirit of independence kept Calvinism alive to divide the religious allegiance of the people. In Italy and Spain, on the other hand, the rulers, who continued loyal to the pope, found little difficulty in suppressing any tendencies of revolt on the part of the few converts to the new doctrines. Individuals, often large groups, and even whole districts, had indeed earlier rejected some portions of the Roman Catholic faith, or refused obedience to the ecclesiastical government; but previously to the burning of the canon law by Luther no prince had openly and permanently cast off his allegiance to the international ecclesiastical state of which the bishop of Rome was head. Now, a prince or legislative assembly that accepted the doctrine of Luther, that the temporal power had been “ordained by God for the chastisement of the wicked and the protection of the good” and must be permitted to exercise its functions “unhampered throughout the whole Christian body, without respect to persons, whether it strikes popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or whoever else”—such as government could proceed to ratify such modifications of the Christian faith as appealed to it in a particular religious confession; it could order its subject to conform to the innovations, and could expel, persecute or tolerate dissenters, as seemed good to it. A “reformed” prince could seize the property of the monasteries, and appropriate such ecclesiastical foundations as he desired. He could make rules for the selection of the clergy, disregarding the ancient canons of the Church and the claims of the pope to the right of ratification. He could cut off entirely all forms of papal taxation and put an end to papal jurisdiction. The personnel, revenue, jurisdiction, ritual, even the faith of the Church, were in this way placed under the complete control of the territorial governments. This is the central and significant fact of the so-called Reformation. Wholly novel and distinctive it is not, for the rulers of Catholic countries, like Spain and France, and of England (before the publication of the Act of Supremacy) could and did limit the pope’s claims to unlimited jurisdiction, patronage and taxation, and they introduced the placet forbidding the publication within their realms of papal edicts, decisions and orders, without the express sanction of the government—in short, in many ways tended to approach the conditions in Protestant lands. The Reformation was thus essentially a stage in the disengaging of the modern state from that medieval, international ecclesiastical state which had its beginning in the ecclesia of the Acts of the Apostles. An appreciation of the issues of the Reformation—or Protestant revolt, as it might be more exactly called—depends therefore upon an understanding of the development of the papal monarchy, the nature of its claims, the relations it established with the civil powers, the abuses which developed in it and the attempts to rectify them, the sources of friction between the Church and the government, and finally the process by which certain of the European states threw off their allegiance to the Christian commonwealth, of which they had so long formed a part.

It is surprising to observe how early the Christian Church assumed the form of a state, and how speedily upon entering into its momentous alliance with the Roman imperial government under Constantine it acquired the chief privileges and prerogatives it was so long to retain. In the twelfth book of the Theodosian Code we see

the foundations of the medieval Church already laid; for it was the 4th, not the 13th century that established the principle that defection from the Church was a crime in the eyes of the State, and raised the clergy to a privileged class, exempted from the ordinary taxes, permitted under restrictions to try its own members and to administer the wealth which flowed into its coffers from the gifts of the faithful. The bishop of Rome, who had from the first probably enjoyed a leading position in the Church as “the successor of the two most glorious of the apostles,” elaborated his claims to be the divinely appointed head of the ecclesiastical organization. Siricius (384–389), Leo the Great (440–461), and Gelasius I. (492–496) left little for their successors to add to the arguments in favour of the papal supremacy. In short, if we recall the characteristics of the Church in the West from the times of Constantine to those of Theodoric—its reliance upon the civil power for favours and protection, combined with its assumption of a natural superiority over the civil power and its innate tendency to monarchical unity—it becomes clear that Gregory VII. in his effort in the latter half of the 11th century to establish the papacy as the great central power of western Europe was in the main only reaffirming and developing old claims in a new world. His brief statement of the papal powers as he