Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/885

* BEFORMATION. 781 KEFORMATION. I Reformation. The present usage is, however, established, and is to be accepted with this ex- planation of its actual significance. In its broad constitutional aspects the Reformation was a re- volt against the universal supremacy of the Pa- pacy and represented the German idea of separ- ate ecclesiastical bodies on national lines, as op- posed to a centralized Church government. In a large ethnic view it was a continuation of the old conflict between German individual- ism and Latin unity. Protestantism, indeed, the ultimate expression of the Reformation in organized sects, took root permanently only in Northern or Germanic Europe, while in Latin Europe after a sharp struggle between the ten- dencj' of individuals to the use of private judg- ment in spiritual matters and the demand of the established Church for uniformity, the old polity trimnphed and Italy, Spain, France, and Austria remained in the Papal obedience. Beginnings of the Reformation. The Ref- ormation is dated from the year 1517, when Mar- tin Luther (q.v.) challenged the Papal authority in his famous ninety-five theses, but its true meaning is to be found by referring to great cur- rents of thought and action that through the Jlid- dle Ages had been modifying society. Since the establishment of the new Western Empire by Charles the Great in 800 there had been an almost continual contest between the emperors, the temporal heads of Christendom, and the popes, the spiritual heads, over the limits of their re- spective authorities. The theory of the spiritual and the temporal powers, upon which Christian Europe was constituted, proved not to be a work- able one, and every conflict between pope and emperor over the limits of temporal and spir- itual jurisdiction sowed the seeds of future dis- cord. The exercise of control by Otho I. (q.v.), the Investiture quarrel (see Investiture), the losing battle of the Hohenstaufen emperors, all tended in this direction; and although the Church triumphed, it did so at the cost of rents in its own armor which made the Reformation possible. The rise of the spirit of nationality and its resentment of Papal control in ecclesiastical af- fairs as shown in the contests between some of the French kings and the popes, and in the re- volt against Roman influence of whioli Wic- lif was the most notable exponent in England, worked to the same end. Wiclif's religious teach- ings, with their bearing upon the great political questions that were coming to the front in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were earned from Oxford to Prague, where John Huss (q.v.) took them up and made Bohemia almost a Prot- estant country before Protestantism was known. Huss was condemned and executed at Constance in 141.5, but the work he had done in Bo- hemia made that country prepared ground for the Reformation seed. Luther's princii)les were anticipated by Wiclif and Huss. but in their day conditions we're not ripe for the great revolution. The universities were often potent factors in the spread of ideas which gradually sapped the foundation of traditional beliefs, and led to the questioning of the authority upon which the old beliefs rested. The migration of stu- dents from one university to another spread the doctrines of rationalistic teachers far beyond their own lecture rooms. Thus were the ideas and the writings of Wiclif carried to Prague. (See Univeksity.) When Dante (q.v.) headed the great revival of learning and letters, which, starting in Ital}', spread over Europe, a new and more permanent shape was given to the growing controversy as to the relations of Church and State. Dante in the De iionarchia and Marsi- lius of Padua (q.v.), a partisan of the ehiper- ors, in the Defensor Pads, attempted to find new bases for the relations of Church and State in Christendom; and the latter espe- cially advanced political theories that were distinctly modern in their nature. The Re- naissance (q.v.), by opening new fields of thought, gatliered in all these currents and gave them new power. Devoted Catholics, like Dante and later Savonarola, demanded reform within the Church, reform 'in head and members,' as the University of Paris reformers put it. Skepticism became rife ; while a few men who could not be skeptics, and would not accept a religious system of which the popes of the fifteenth centurj- were the representatives, sought for another basis of faith. Many sects in different countries, the ofi'spring of abortive attempts at a return to simpler primitive Christianity, or of mystical or heretical teaching, had also prepared the minds of the masses of the people, less accessible to the more intellectual currents of the age, for a new movement. Such were the Apostolic Brethren, Beghards, Beguins, Cathari, Flagellants, Frati- celli, and the Lollards. The earlier sects of the Albigenses (q.v.) and the Waldenses (q.v.) or Vaudois were also in a way a part of these ear- lier movements that formed the motley advance guard of the Reformation, but they lacked the intellectual strength and the political and social power that were necessary to make an abiding impression on feudal Europe. Germany. Germany with its more than three hundred States, loosely held together in the Empire, and .seeking blindly to realize German nationality, always pulling hard against the assertions" of Papal authority and of the Emperor, who represented Hapsburg rather than German interests, was in the sixteenth century in a favor- able condition for starting the new movement for which the centuries had thus been preparing. Strenuous efforts were being made by the Papacy to raise monev to complete Saint Peter's and to carry on war with the Turks. Martin Luther, then" a professor in the University of Wittenberg and a parish priest, was aroused against the sys- tem which connected the distribution of indul- gences with these efforts, as carried on by Tetzel tq.v,). On October 31. 1517, Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg the ninety-five theses in which he challenged (he abuses of the Church. He seemed unconscious of the tremen- dous revolution he was setting on foot, but events moved rapidly. He defended his po- sition on historical grounds in public dispu- tation and in writing, taking by degrees a more advanced position than at first. In hi3 scheme, which rested on salvation by faith rather than by the formal works of the sacraments, he reduced the seven sacraments to three— baptism, the Lord's Supper, and penance. On the 10th of December, 1520. he publicly burned a copv of the Papal bull of excommunica- tion which had been directed at him by Leo X. and also one of the canon law. thus symbolically hroak- ino- with the whole svstein upon which the Roman ecclesiastical structure rested. In 1521, sum-