was a Lutheran seminary, and Bugenhagen, the Apostle of northern Germany, had been Rector of the Premonstratensian school at Treptow.
From the ranks of the secular priesthood there came few Reformers of eminence, a circumstance which shows that even in their worst days the monastic Orders attracted most of the promising youth. George von Polenz was the only Bishop who openly espoused the Lutheran cause in its early years, though the Bishops of Basel and Breslau, Bamberg and Merseburg were more or less friendly. The halting attitude of the Archbishop of Mainz was due partly to fear and partly to the design he cherished of following the example of Albrecht of Brandenburg and converting his clerical principality into a secular fief.
But the movement, although led by Churchmen, was not the work of the Church or of any other organisation. It was a well-nigh universal spontaneous ebullition of lay and clerical discontent with the social, political, and moral condition of the established Catholic Church. There was no one to organise and guide this volume of passion, for Luther, although the mightiest voice that ever spoke the German language, was vox et praeterea nihil. He had none of the practical genius which characterised Calvin or Loyola; and the lack of statesmanlike direction caused the Reforming impulse to break in vain against many of the Catholic strongholds in Germany. Where it succeeded, it owed its success mainly to the fact that its control fell into the hands of a middle-class laity which had already learnt to administer such comprehensive affairs as those of the Hanseatic League. This participation of the laity made the towns the bulwark of the German Reformed faith, and the value of their co-operation was theologically expressed by the enunciation of the doctrine of the universal priesthood of man against the exclusive claims of the Church. Indeed not only were all men priests, but women as well-so declared Matthew Zell, in grateful recognition of the effective aid which women occasionally rendered to the cause of Reform.
That cause had until 1522 been identified with the attempt to remedy those national grievances against worldly priests, high-handed prelates, and a corrupt Italian Papacy, which had been variously expressed in the list of gravamina drawn up by the Diet of Worms and in the furious diatribes of popular literature. But gradually and almost imperceptibly this campaign assumed a theological aspect; Luther and his colleagues began to seek a speculative basis for their practical propaganda, and to trace the evil customs of the time to a polluted doctrinal source. Religion in that theological age consisted largely in belief and very slightly in conduct, and the conversion of a movement for practical reform into a war of creeds was inevitable. But it hindered the practical Reformation and helped to destroy the national unity of Germany. There was scarcely a conservative who did not see and admit the need for a purification of the Church; Murner and Eck and, most notably, Erasmus felt it as much as Luther, Melanchthon, and Hütten;
