the heretic and deny to his societies both divine authority and sacramental grace. Revival and reaction followed so fast on the heels of reform that, had the Lutheran Church stood alone, neither the eloquence of its founder, nor the sagacity and steadfastness of the Saxon Electors, nor the vigour of Landgrave Philip could have saved it.
But Luther did not exhaust the tendencies that worked for Reform. They were impersonated also in Zwingli. As the one was by disposition and discipline a schoolman who loved the Saints and the Sacraments of the Church, the other was a humanist who appreciated the thinkers of antiquity and the reason in whose name they spoke. Luther never escaped from the feelings of the monk and the associations of the cloister; but Zwingli studied his New Testament with a fine sense of the sanity of its thought, the combined purity and practicability of its ideals, and the majesty of its spirit; and his ambition was to realise a religion after its model, free from the traditions and superstitions of men. It was this that made him so tolerant of Luther, and Luther so intolerant of him. The differences of opinion might have been transcended, but the differences of character were insuperable. The two men stood for distinct ideals and different realities; and as they differed so did their peoples. Differences of political order, geographical situation, and climate could not but reappear in character and in belief as well as in the forms under which these were co-ordinated and expressed. Ecclesiastical order will ever reflect the civil polity prevailing in the region where it is evolved. Thus the Roman Church was built upon the ruins of the Roman Empire; the Eastern patriarchates were organised according to the methods and the offices of Byzantine rule; and the ecclesiastical institutions of the sixteenth century were shaped by the political capacities and usages of the peoples among whom and for whom they were created. Thus the Church adapted to a German kingdom was not suited to the temper and ways of an ancient republic; nor was a system fitted to a despotic State congenial to the genius of a free people. Hence there emerged a twofold difference between the Reformations accomplished by Luther and by Zwingli: one personal, which mainly affected the faith or creed of the Church, another social or civil, which mainly affected its polity. Luther, a schoolman while a Reformer, created out of his learning and experience a faith suited to his personal needs; but Zwingli, a Reformer because a humanist, came to religion through the literature which embodied the mind of Christ and the Church of the Apostles. Hence, the Lutheran Reformation is less radical and complete than the Zwinglian, while its faith is more traditional and less historical and rational. But the differences due to the political order and the civil usage were, if not deeper, yet more divisive. Luther effected his change under an empire and within a kingdom by the help of Princes and nobles; but Zwingli effected his under a republic by the aid of citizens with whom he had to argue as with consciously freeborn men. Both
