Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/335

288 Christ. Slowly the ages prepared for both, for each was a point in the development of man. The Church educated men to see her faults; gave them weapons to attack her. The Reformation was long a gathering in the bosom of the Church itself. Athanasius had his Arius to contend with. There was always some Paul of Samosata, some Theodore of Mopsuestia, some Peter of Bruis, or Henry of Lausanne, to trouble the church. In the twelfth century it took all the miracles of Clairvaux and the leanness of its Abbot, to put down the heretics, who would come up again. Was there not Waldo in France, Arnold of Brescia in the papal state, John Huss at Constance, and Wicliff in England, and all of them at no great distance of time? Faustus and Gutenberg did more for the Reformation than the Diet at Worms. Luther, and Zwingle, and Calvin, and the host of great men who grew in their shadow, were only the heralds that blew the trumpet of the Reformation; its prize-fighters, not directors of the movement. It was the God of nations that moved the world's heart. The Spirit only culminated in Luther and his friends. It burned in holy souls in Bohemia and Languedoc, and the valleys of the Pyrenees, and the mountains of Tyrol; it breathed in lofty minds at Paris, Saxony, Padua, London, Rome itself. Every learned Greek the Turks frighted from Constantinople, or Italian wealth lured to the queen of cities; every manuscript of the Classics, the Fathers, the Councils, the Scriptures which found deliverance from the moles and the bats; every improvement in law, science, and art; every discovery in Alchemy or Astrology; every invention from the mariner's compass to monk Schwartz's gunpowder, was an agent of the Reformation. We find Reformers, from the time of Marcion to John Wessel. Some tried, as in the time of Jesus, to put new wine in old bottles, but losing both, looked round for new things. That long train of Mystics, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckart of Strasburg, prepared for the work which Luther built up with manly shouting.

To sum up the claim of this party; the Catholic Church