Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/34

26 the Reformation. Henceforward it is impossible to follow its course as a whole: each country must have its own ecclesiastical as well as its own civil history. Italy … Spain … Sweden … Holland … Geneva … Scotland … the very names have each, in theological language, a peculiar pathos and significance imparted by the Reformation. In each that great event awakened a different note, as it traversed their several chords. Still there are three countries in which, beyond all others, the religious history of Europe has been specially carried on.

Germany, … the seat of the original movement, has never lost the hold which it then first acquired on the reason and imagination of mankind. But its influence, whether for good or evil, has been almost too impalpable to attach itself to any course of events or any definite outward character.

It is in France that the fortunes of Christianity during the last three centuries have been most visibly represented in the brightest and in the darkest colours. The Gallican Church, first the most brilliant in Europe, brilliant alike in its works of active mercy and in its almost Augustan age of great divines,—Vincent of Paul, Bossuet, Fenelon, Pascal,—lived to become the miserable parent, and then the victim, of the great convulsion which, whilst it shook the belief of the whole of Christendom, in France for eleven years suppressed it altogether. The French Revolution