Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/10

 go out to the suffering people, it is possible to see, with the wisdom that comes after the event, that httle could have been hoped front their complete triun^h in arms. Their pro- grams, such as the Twelvs.Article8, were moderate and silto- gether reasonable, but they neither could nor would have stof^d at the realization of these demands. Nor, on the other hand, could they have established a democracy, as the Swiss had done before them and as the French were to do after them. Had this been possible our sympathies would have been wholly with them. But, as it turned out, the p^sants lost all that they had striven for. From the time that Luther turned against them, the greater part of them lost faith in the Luth- eran Reformation. From this time, more than ever, the Ana- baptists became the religious leaders of the lower classes, while the Lutheran Church became more and more an Estab- lished, Naticmal Church, like that of England, tending to con- servatism and aristocratic or middle-class privilege.

Next to the loss of the support of the poorer classes, the Reformation suffered by the secession from its ranks of the intellectuals, or many of them. Repelled by the dogmatism and intolerance of the new Church, in which they had hoped for better things, many of the leading writers and professional men withdrew, some, like Erasmus and Pirckheimer, to re- turn to the bosom of the old Church ; some, like the Nurem- berg painters, George Penz and the brothers John Sebald and Bartholomew Beham, to a complete and avowed skepticism. In the letters here translated the alienation of Erasmus from the Reformation is fully portrayed. It seems that by a more liberal policy Erasmus might have been completely won. The failure of Protestantism to adopt then a policy of hospitality to science and philosophy, was a terrible blow both to the new Church and to the cause of world progress.

It was also in the years now under review that there arose within the bosom of the Protestant Church that terribly bitter schism over the Real Presence in the Eucharist which effected a breach between the two main branches of Protestantism that has not even yet been entirely healed. This cannot be counted as a part of the struggle of Lutheranism with radical- ism, for both Saxon and Swiss Reformers were at one on

�� �