Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/262

 246 REFORMATION eignty having its own separate ecclesiastical establishment and organization in close union with the state. But the next diet of Spire, in 1529, prohibited the further progress of the reformation. Against this decree of the Cath- olic majority the evangelical princes entered, on the ground of the word of God, the in- alienable rights of conscience, and the decree of the previous diet of Spire, the celebrated protest, dated April 19, 1529, which gave rise to the name of Protestants. The diet of Augs- burg in 1530, where the Lutherans offered their principal confession of faith, drawn up by Melanchthon and named after that city, threat- ened the Protestants with violent measures if they did not return shortly to the old church. Here closes the first and most eventful period of the German reformation. The second pe- riod embraces the formation of the Protestant league of Smalcald for the armed defence of Lutheranism, the various theological confer- ences of the two parties for an adjustment of the controversy, the death of Luther, the imperial interims or compromises (the Ratis- bon, Augsburg, and Leipsic interims), and the Smalcaldian war, and ends with the success of the Protestant army under Maurice of Saxony and the peace of Augsburg in 1555, which secured to the Lutheran states the free exer- cise of their religion, but with a restriction on its further progress. The third period, from 1555 to 1580, is remarkable for the violent in- ternal controversies of the Lutheran church : the Osiandrian controversy, concerning justi- fication and sanctification ; the adiaphoristic, arising originally from the fruitless compro- mises or interims ; the synergistic, concerning faith and good works ; and the crypto-Oalvin- istic or sacramentarian controversy about the real presence. These theological disputes led on the one hand to the full development of the doctrinal system of Lutheranism as laid down in the "Book of Concord" (first published in 1580), which embraces all the symbolical books of that church, namely, the three oecumenical creeds, the Augsburg confession and its "Apol- ogy" by Melanchthon, the two catechisms of Luther and the Smalcald articles drawn up by him in 1537, and the "Formula of Con- cord," composed by six Lutheran divines in 1577. But on the other hand, the fanatical intolerance of the strict Lutheran party against the Calvinists and the moderate Lutherans, called after their leader Melanchthonians or Philippists, drove a large number of the latter over to the Reformed church, especially in the Palatinate (1560), in Bremen (1561), Nassau (1582), Anhalt (1596), Hesse-Cassel (1605), and Brandenburg (1614). The German Reformed communion adopted the Heidelberg catechism, drawn up by two moderate Calvinistic divines, Zacharias Ursinus and Kaspar Olevianus, in 1562, by order of the elector Frederick III. or the Pious, as their confession of faith. The 16th century closes the theological history of the German reformation ; but its political his- tory was not brought to a final termination until after the terrible thirty years' war, by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which secured to the Lutherans and the German Reformed churches (but to no others) equal rights with the Roman Catholics within the limits of the German empire. Those two denominations, either in their separate existence or united in one organization (as in Prussia and other states since 1817), are to this day almost the only forms of Protestantism recognized and supported by the German governments, all others being small self-supporting sects, regard- ed with little sympathy by the popular mind. But within those ecclesiastical establishments Germany has bred and tolerated during the present century almost every imaginable form of theoretic belief, from the strictest old school orthodoxy to the loosest rationalism and skepti- cism. Since the third jubilee of the reforma- tion (1817), however, there has been a gradual and steady return from neology to the original evangelical Protestantism. II. THE REFOB- MATION IN SWITZERLAND. This was contem- poraneous with, but independent of, the Ger- man reformation, and resulted in the formation of the Reformed communion as distinct from the Lutheran. In all the essential principles and doctrines, except that on the mode of Christ's presence in the eucharist, the Ilelvetic reformation agreed with the German ; but it departed further from the received traditions in matters of government, discipline, and worship, and aimed at a more radical moral and practical reformation of the people. It naturally divides itself into three periods : the Zwinglian, from 1516 to 1531 ; the Calvinistic, to the death of Calvin in 1564 ; and the pe- riod of Bullinger and Beza, to the close of the 16th century. The first belongs mainly to the German cantons, the second to the French, the third to both jointly. Zwingli began his reformatory preaching against various abuses at Einsiedeln in 1516, and then with more en- ergy and effect at Zurich in 1519. His object was to "preach Christ from the fountain," and to " insert the pure Christ into the heart." At first he had the consent of the bishop of Constance, who assisted him in putting down the sale of indulgences in Switzerland, and ho stood even in high credit with the papal nuncio. But a rupture occurred in 1522, when Zwingli attacked the fasts as a human inven- tion, and many of his hearers ceased to observe them. The magistrates of Zurich arranged a public disputation in January and another in October, 1523, to settle the whole controversy. On both occasions Zwingli, backed by the au- thorities and the great majority of the people, triumphed over his papal opponents. In 1526 the churches of the city and the neighboring villages were cleared of images and shrines, and a simple, almost puritanic mode of wor- ship took henceforward the place of the Ro- man Catholic mass. The Swiss diet took a hos- tile attitude to the Reformed movement, similar