Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/244

 only just a century before the Church had passed through a most dangerous schism, which threatened its substantial organisation as well as its doctrine. The desired reformation in head and members had been familiar all this time. But it did not come till now; till the stage had, as we have seen, been cleared for the new actors. We might conjecture that whilst the concentration of the new powers gave them in themselves greater vitality and more manageable force, it would exhaust the vitality of the older organisation, which had kept them together whilst the divisions were smaller and the common action less vivid. Whilst all the powers of Christendom were busy with their own internal rights and border quarrels, a languid acquiescence in the undivided supremacy of Rome was more a powerful influence than it could be when two or three new and well girt combatants were ready to assert their own αὐτάρκεια; still more, when the new combatants saw the truth that they must be lords in their own houses. As we saw, the concentration of power in Spain, France, and Germany meant more than the absorption of weaker states; it meant the absorption of inferior powers in the state. The strong actors in the new drama must be strong governors at home as well. as strong combatants abroad. Great designs, great rivalries, demanded concentrated energies, determined wills. Strong government came in with the sixteenth century, and strong government was a very strong element in reformation history, for it weakened the solidarity of the Catholic Church and prepared the way for the formida 'cujus regio ejus religio,' the disruption of national churches as well.

But neither these causes, religious disaffection and the disintegration of the weak church organisation by the growing strength of absolutism, nor the ideas of the new learning, nor the rivalries of political rulers fostering abroad forms of discontent which they persecuted at home, nor the lust of enlarged territory, nor the coveting of ecclesiastical wealth, nor the envy of unprivileged classes, nor the new power of the press, would alone have sufficed to do the work that was done. Who could have reckoned on the coincidence of the Indulgence agitation in Germany, the divorce agitation in England, the