Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/265

 REFORMATION 249 Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia, opened like- wise the door to the reformation, and adopted the Augsburg confession. VII. THE REFOR- MATION IN SCANDINAVIA. The reformers of Sweden were two brothers, Olaf and Lars Peterson, or Petri, disciples of Luther, who after 1519 preached against the existing state of the church. Gustavus Vasa, who delivered the country from the Danes and became king in 1523, favored Protestantism from political and mercenary motives; the whole country, including the bishops, followed without much difficulty. He appropriated a large portion of the wealth of the church to meet the expenses of his wars and administration. The synod of Orebro in 1529 sanctioned the reform, and the synod of Upsal in 1593, after a fruitless at- tempt to reconcile the country to Rome, con- firmed and completed it. Sweden adopted the Lutheran creed, to the exclusion of every oth- er, and retained the episcopal form of govern- ment in the closest union with the state. It did great service to the cause of Protestant- ism in Europe, through its gallant king Gus- tavus Adolphus, in the thirty years' war ; and recently the intolerant laws against dissenters have been almost completely abolished. Den- mark became likewise an exclusively Lutheran country, with an episcopal form of state-church government, under Christian III. A diet at Copenhagen in 1536 destroyed the political power of the Roman clergy, and divided most of the church's property between the crown and the nobility. > The remaining third was devoted to the new ecclesiastical organization. Bugenhagen of Wittenberg was then called to complete the reform. From Denmark the ref- ormation passed over to Norway about 1536. The archbishop of Drontheim fled with the treasures of the church to Holland; another bishop resigned ; a third was imprisoned ; and the lower clergy were left the choice between exile and submission to the new order of things, which most of them preferred. Iceland, then subject to Danish rule, likewise submitted to the Danish reform. VIII. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. The struggle between the old and the new religion lasted longer and raged more fearfully in England and Scotland than on the continent, and continued in successive shocks even down to the end of the 17th cen- tury, for Puritanism was a second reforma- tion ; but it left in the end a very strong im- pression upon the character of the nation, and affected deeply its political and social in- stitutions. In theology English Protestantism was dependent upon the continental reform, especially the ideas and principles of Calvin ; but it displayed greater practical energy and power of organization. It was from the start a political as well as a religious movement, and hence it afforded a wider scope to the corrupting influence of selfish ambition and violent passion than the reformation in Ger- many and Switzerland; but it passed also through severer trials and persecutions. In the English reformation we distinguish five pe- riods. The first, from 1527 to 1547, witnessed the abolition of the authority of the Roman papacy under Henry VIII. This was merely a negative and destructive process, which re- moved the outward obstruction and prepared the way for the reform. Henry VIII. quar- relled with the pope on purely personal and selfish grounds, because the pope properly re- fused consent to his divorce from Catharine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. " The defender of the faith," a title given him by the pope for the defence of the seven sacraments against Luther, remained in doc- trine and religious sentiment a Roman Catho- lic to the end of his life ; and at his death the so-called " bloody articles," which enjoined under the severest penalties the dogma of transubstantiation, auricular confession, pri- vate masses, and the celibacy of the priesthood, were yet in full force. The only point of radical difference was the royal supremacy. He simply substituted a domestic for the foreign, and a political for an ecclesiastical papacy, and punished with equal severity Prot- estant as well as Roman Catholic dissenters who dared to doubt his supreme headship of the church of England. But while he thus destroyed the power of the pope and of mo- nasticism in England, a far deeper and more important movement went on among the peo- ple under the influence of the revived tradi- tions of Wycliffe and the Lollards, the wri- tings of the continental reformers, and the English version of the Scriptures commenced by Tyndale, carried on by Coverdale and Ro- gers, and revised by Cranmer. The second period embraces the reign of Edward VI., from 1547 to 1553, and contains the positive introduction of the reformation by the coop- eration mainly of the duke of Somerset, pro- tector and regent during the king's minority, and Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who by his pliable conduct and subserviency to the will of Henry had preserved the idea and hope of a reformation through that reign of terror. Cranmer was assisted in the work by Ridley and Latimer, and by several Reformed divines from the continent whom he called to England, especially Martin Bucer of Strasburg, now elected professor at Cambridge, and Peter Mar- tyr of Zurich (originally from Italy), for some time professor at Oxford. The most important works of this period, and in fact of the whole English reformation,next to the English version of the Bible, are the 42 articles of religion (subsequently reduced to 39), or a new and moderately Calvinistic confession of faith, and the " Book of Common Prayer," or a new di- rectory of worship in the vernacular tongue, on the basis of the old Latin service, but with essential changes. The third period is the reign of Queen Mary, from 1553 to 1558, and presents to us the unsuccessful attempt of that queen and her friend Cardinal Pole, now made archbishop of Canterbury after the deposition