Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/779

Rh CHURCH HISTORY 765 itself, however, which gave the impetus to the new movement in the construction of church history. As Protestantism had everywhere broken more or less completely with tradition, it was for its interest to show that Catholicism had de parted from primitive purity, and that the history of the church had been a steady course of declension, while Catholicism was equally interested in proving the contrary. This polemical animus, if it was prejudicial to impartiality of investigation, added to its keenness and thoroughness ; and as the spirit of sectarianism developed, within Catholi cism, between Ultramontanism and Gallicanism, Jesuitism and Jansenism, and, within Protestantism, between Luther- anism and Philippism, Calvinism and Arminianism, Pres- byterianism and Episcopacy, the zeal of each party to vin dicate for itself an exclusive apostolical pedigree, led to an unflinching, if one-sided, sifting of history, especially of primitive antiquity. The way was led in this direction by the M .i jdelurg Centuries, so called from the place of first publication in 1559. This was a work written by a staff of Lutheran scholars, in the interest of their phase of Pro testantism, under the superintendence of Matthias Flacius, and was, from its own point of view, a performance of great ability and learning, continuing for a century to be the store-house of general Protestant polemics. As its name implies, it adopts the artificial division into centuries, discussing the doctrine, heresies, councils, ceremonies, church rulers, &c., in each. The published portion stops with the 1 3th century. The Centuries evoked on the Catholic side, in 1588, the Ecclesiastical Annals of Csesar Baronius, afterwards cardinal, bringing the history down to the end of the 12th century; and this, with the con tinuations of Raynaldus and others, and the critical com mentary of Pagi, forms, from its richness in documents that would otherwise have remained inaccessible, a very valuable contribution to general church history, although written avowedly to present Catholicism in the most favourable light. These great polemical histories led the way for a train of successors on both sides. Kortholt, Spanheim, Casaubon, and Basnage criticized with learning and vigour the one-sidedness of Baronius. On the Catholic side, a bril liant French school of church history arose, whose chief ornaments were Alexander Natalis (Noel), whose history (1676), valuable for its learned excursuses, though placed in the Index on account of its Gallicanism, continues under the corrective commentaries of Noncaglia and Mansi to hold a deservedly high place even in Catholic esteem ; Bossuet, w r hose History of the Variations of Protestantism (1688) exhibits the dexterous controversialist not less than his Discourse on Universal History, displays the philoso phical historian ; Fleury, who narrates, with a tinge of Gal licanism, the story of fourteen Christian centuries in a style as popular and flowing as Natalis, is crowded with erudite discussion ; and Tillemont, the Jansenist, who in his Ilis- tary of the Emperors (to Anastasius) (1690), and his Me moirs for the Church History of the six first centuries (1693), has ransacked the whole field of available materials, and presented, with much skill and fidelity, his narrative in the exact words of his authorities. In the meantime a school of history had developed itself in England, also in answer to controversial wants, of which Jewel (Apology, 1562), Pearson, (Vindicice, 1672), Beveridge (Synodicon, 1672), Cave (Primitive Christianity, Lives of the Apostles and Fathers, 1672-77), and Bingham (Antiquities, 1708-22) may be mentioned as leaders in the defence, on historical grounds, of the position of the Anglican Church both against Catholicism and Puritanism. The Scientific period of church history may be said to commence with the great work of Mosheim in 1755, based on an earlier but inferior performance. Isolated attempts had indeed been made before his time to rise above the heated polemical atmosphere of the reformation struggle and its results, into a region of calmer contemplation. The celebrated Calixtus of Helmstiidt had, during the earlier part of the 17th century, laboured hard to show that the tendency to the multiplication of dogma characteristic of his time is foreign to the genius of Christianity, whose essence, in his view, may be reduced to a very few points of faith ; and Gottfried Arnold, sometime professor at Giessen, had, in 1699, published his Impartial History of tlie Church and the Heretics, the practical issue of which was to show that the heretics were quite as often in the right as the church ; but the only immediate result of their efforts was to raise a violent storm of opposition and abuse against themselves, proving that the time was not ripe for applying the maxim of audi alterant partem to ecclesiastical questions. But by the middle of the 18th century, a different state of things had arisen. The living fire had died out of theological and ecclesiastical controversy, leaving behind only confused piles of dogma, charred and cold, to which none thought of repairing for heat. The speculations of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Wolf, etc., had given the world something deeper to think about than the disputes of ecclesiastics, and had engendered that spirit of thorough inquiry after reality, which in the theological sphere came to be called rationalism, and in physics the inductive or Baconian method. In the latter form it had exploded the conception of continued arbitrary supernatural interference in the course of events, and established the belief in the reign of law, the statutes against witchcraft having been abolished even in England by 1736, a few years after the last execution there for that imaginary crime. Mosheim may bs called the first fruits of this spirit in the region of church history. His Institutes of Ecclesi astical History is constructed avowedly in the interests of science and not of party, with the sole view of stating the facts, fully and exactly as they occurred ascertaining and declaring the objective reality, independently of subjective partialities or wishes. His fidelity to his principle is con spicuous, and his success in overturning many previous misrepresentations arising from the neglect of it is un doubted. His conception of Christian history as a growth under the law of cause and effect is also unmistakable, although he leaves it to be inferred, not so much from the presence of any avowed pragmatic treatment in his pages, as from the absence of everything else. Although he retains the artificial division into centuries out of deference to custom, he acknowledges its objectionableness, and com bines with it a natural division &quot; bounded by great revolu tions and changes in the state of the church.&quot; Mosheim has had a train of successors on his own line of investigation, whose name is legion, and in whose hands the scientific method has been steadily developed, and has yielded an in creasing harvest of results. Only a few can be mentioned. Schrockh, an ornament of the Gottirigen school of history, second only to Mosheim himself, whose pupil he was, laboured for forty-one years (1768-1809) at a Universal History of the Church, and brought it down well through the period of the Reformation, two supplementary volumes by Tzschirner, not unworthy of their place, completing the period. This work, in 45 volumes, a huge monument of erudition, clearness, and fairness, is still the quarry of compilers. Gieseler, improving on the method of Tillemont, which had already been partially followed by Schmidt and Danz, in 1824 began his Uni versal History of the Church on the plan of exhibiting in his text merely such an outline of the results of his re searches as should, without discussion, present a rapid and succinct view of the march and evolution of events, giving in ample, notes the evidence from the sources on which