Page:French Calvinism, German Lutheranism and the War.pdf/6

- 5 - what was first called into being by the fiat of Luther, remained also very large heathen and was inhabited by a slav population. In the Middle Ages, the Hohenstaufen had waged a continuous fight against the Papacy and against institutional religion. The German mind never understood that in a larger and deeper sense the old Roman Catholic Church as a political institution and as a moral discipline was the synthesis of thousands of years of civilisation. Catholicism had slowly assimilated the religions of the East, the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, the laws and the politics of Rome, the moral discipiine of the Stoics, the chivalry of Spain, of France and of Great Britain, the political freedom of the city states of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 16th century, that process was still going on. The Roman Catholic Church at that time was just passing through a crisis of growth, it was trying once more to assimilate as it had so often done in the past new phenomena of tremendous import, the Renaissance and the New Learning. The Germans did not understand what was implied in the glories of the Renaissance. In the most creative age perhaps of all human civilisation which/