Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/340

Rh REFORMATION Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, may be looked upon as the ancestors in faith of the Huguenots and the Puritans of after-times, and were all more or less characterized by an aversion to the Roman ritual, to splendid churches, to crosses and crucifixes, combined with a more definite denial of such doctrines as that of baptismal regeneration, of transubstantiation, of masses for the dead, and of the obligation to observe Lent. The ultimate fate of these different sects was singularly similar. Of their earlier history, indeed, we have but few memo- rials, for their records, if any existed, have mostly perished ; and, as with their prototypes in the earlier Christian centuries, it became almost necessarily their policy to avoid all external demonstrations which would be likely to arrest the attention of the world. An inquisitor of the 13th century, when describing the Leonists (c. 1250), whom he speaks of as both the most ancient and the most widely spread of the sects then existing, represents them as by no means guilty, to all external appearance, of practices which could fairly be stigmatized as blasphemous, but as wearing a great semblance of piety, as being of good repute among their neighbours, and chiefly blamable as given to speaking against the Eoman Church and its clergy and thus gaining, only too easily, the ears of the laity at large. 1 To such characteristics, however, the Albi- genses in the 12th century had presented a remarkable exception. At the commencement of the pontificate of Innocent III. (1198) his legates had found nearly the whole of the rich and prosperous territory extending from Carcassonne to Bordeaux dominated by this powerful heresy, a form of doctrine associated, moreover, not with austerity but with voluptuousness of life, with a profound contempt for the priestly profession, and with a warm admiration for the conceptions of chivalry and the poetry of the troubadour, a heresy enriched by the devotion of its adherents to an extent which made it far wealthier than the church itself in those regions, and before which the representatives of the Roman orthodoxy seemed threatened almost with extinction. The suppression of this heresy by Simon de Montfort is a well-known episode, and would seem to have formed the point of departure for a new and more rigorous policy on the part of the church in its dealings with like manifestations of dis- obedience. In the year 1229 the statutes of the council of Toulouse formulated, as it were, the code of persecution, and, aided by the Inquisition, which probably took its rise about the same time, supplied a new machinery for the detection and suppression of heresy. To the terrorism thus established, after the sword of De Montfort had done its work, we may fairly refer the changed characteristics of the adherents of the heresies in France, as above de- scribed, in the middle of the 13th century. Influence But, the suspicions of the church having once been of poll- thoroughly roused and the secular power incited and motives S^ed to lts tas ^> external conformity and inoffensive life, the mountain hamlet and the secluded valley, proved alike unavailing to avert the cruelty of the persecutor. The Cathari in Italy did not long survive the fall of the Hohen- staufens, from whom they had received effective protection and support ; and it added not a little to the offence of the doctrines proclaimed by the Spiritual Franciscans, whose tenets were condemned by the council of Vienne in 1311, that, while the order had taken its rise in a spirit of protest against the corruptions of the Curia, its members were known to be ready to favour and aid by all the means in their power the restoration of the imperial ascendency in Italy. The Spiritual Franciscans were the forerunners of the Apostolic Brethren, one of the most widely spread of the new sects, and must also be looked 1 Max. Bibl. Patrum (1676), vol. xxv. p. 264. upon as the precursors of the Lollards. The intimate nexion between theological doctrine and political opinion that existed among the latter sect is well known. Wo find, accordingly, that heresy, long before Reformation times, was regarded by the papal power as associated -with hostile political interests, and that a new incentive to its rigorous suppression was thus supplied. On the other hand, the popedom itself, during the long sojourn of the pontiffs at Avignon (1309-78), became involved in a political alliance, whereby it alienated the sympathies of Europe at large to an extent which it was never afterwards able to regain. During that long and humiliating episode in its history the office was filled almost exclusively by Frenchmen, whose policy was con- ceived in complete subservience to that of the reigning French monarch ; and the pontiff at Avignon thus came to be regarded both by the empire and in England as the pliant ally of a hostile p9wer. During the following century it recovered much of its influence in Germany, where its pretensions were sometimes regarded not un- favourably by the electors as an equipoise to the too despotic sway of the emperor. Somewhat later we find it receiving the most efficient support from Spain. But it could never again command the same universal defer- ence in Western Christendom ; and the apparently genuine devotion to its interests which may from time to time be discerned manifesting itself, now in one nation and now in another, was largely inspired by political considerations, and often dearly purchased at the expense of a corre- sponding hostility provoked among another people. To the manner in which theological tenets, often purely speculative in their origin and innocuous in their bearing upon practice, thus came to be regarded as identified with secular questions of grave import and pressing for an immediate solution, we must partly attribute the jealousy with which the first symptoms of heresy were now watched for by Rome. Early in the 14th century the Fraticelli and the Apostolic Brethren, with other heretical sects, were anathematized. In the year 1324 Pope John XXII. demanded of the emperor the suppression of the Waldenses, 2 who had reappeared in Lombardy ; and, ably as Marsilius of Padua assailed the pretensions of the papacy, his pro- test seemed ineffectual amid the supreme humiliation of his patron, Louis of Bavaria. Driven alike from Italy and from France, the persecuted sect took refuge in Savoy and in Switzerland, and in the year 1489 the papal legate reported that their numbers were not less than 50,000. Lollardism was suppressed with unsparing hand in England; and John Sawtrey, the first of Wikliffe's followers to suffer martyrdom, was burnt to death in 1401, for refusing to worship the cross and for denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Fifteen years later John Huss and Jerome of Prague suffered the same fate at Constance, and the indignation excited among their fellow-countrymen, intensified as this feeling was by differences of race, gave rise to a memorable resistance, which eventually won religious freedom for the land. At the diet of Kutna Hora (Kuttenberg) in 1485 a truce was made between the Utraquists and the Catholics for thirty-two years, and the complete religious equality then established was made permanent at the diet of 1512. In England, on the other hand, the Lollard movement was almost completely extinguished. The political doctrines with which it had become associated made it the object of suspicion alike to the ecclesiastical and to the civil power ; and Sir John 2 They were not, however, known under this name ; in the 1 5th and at the commencement of the 16th century they never so styled them- selves, and were rarely so styled by others. The name by which they were known among themselves was that of "The Brethren." See Ludwig Keller, Die Reformation und die tilteren Jie/ormparleien (1885), p. 206.