a superficial account of the traffic in indulgences, and a
rough and ready assumption, which even Kostlin makes,
that the darkness was greatest just before the dawn.
Unfortunately this crude solution of the problem proved
too much; for conditions were no worse immediately
before the revolt than they had been for centuries, and
German complaints of papal tyranny go back to Hildegard
of Bingen and Walther von der Vogelweide, who antedated
Luther by more than three centuries. So a new theory is
logically demanded to explain why these conditions, which were
chronic, failed to produce a change long before it actually
occurred. Singularly enough it is the modern Catholic scholars,
Johannes Janssen above all, who, in their efforts further to
discredit the Protestant revolt by rehabilitating the institutions
which the reformers attacked, have done most to explain the
success of the Reformation. A humble, patient Bohemian
priest, Hasak, set to work toward half a century ago to bring
together the devotional works published during the seventy
years immediately succeeding the invention of printing. Every
one knows that one at least of these older books, The German
Theology, was a great favourite of Luther’s; but there are
many more in Hasak’s collection which breathe the same spirit
of piety and spiritual emulation. Building upon the foundations
laid by Hasak and other Catholic writers who have been
too much neglected by Protestant historians, Janssen produced
a monumental work in defence of the German Church
before Luther’s defection. He exhibits the great achievements
of the latter part of the 15th and the early portion of the 16th
centuries; the art and literature, the material prosperity of
the towns and the fostering of the spiritual life of the people.
It may well be that his picture is too bright, and that in his
obvious anxiety to prove the needlessness of an ecclesiastical
revolution he has gone to the opposite extreme from the Protestants.
Yet this rehabilitation of pre-Reformation Germany
cannot but make a strong appeal to the unbiased historical
student who looks to a conscientious study of the antecedents
of the revolt as furnishing the true key to the movement.
Outwardly the Reformation would seem to have begun when,
on the 10th of December 1520, a professor in the university
of Wittenberg invited all the friends of evangelical
truth among his students to assemble outside the
wall at the ninth hour to witness a pious spectacle—the
burning of the “godless book of the papal
Revolt of
the various European governments from the papal monarchy.
decrees.” He committed to the flames the whole
body of the canon law, together with an edict of
the head of the Church which had recently been
issued against his teachings. In this manner Martin
Luther, with the hearty sympathy of a considerable number
of his countrymen, publicly proclaimed and illustrated his
repudiation of the papal government under which western
Europe had lived for centuries.” Within a generation
after this event the states of north Germany and
Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands and
portions of Switzerland, had each, in its particular manner
permanently seceded from the papal monarchy. France, after
a long period of uncertainty and disorder, remained faithful to
the bishop of Rome. Poland, after a defection of years, was
ultimately recovered for the papacy by the zeal and devotion
of the jesuit missionaries. In the Habsburg hereditary
dominions the traditional policy and Catholic fervour of the
ruling house resulted, after a long struggle, in the restoration of
the supremacy of Rome; while in Hungary the national spirit
of independence kept Calvinism alive to divide the religious
allegiance of the people. In Italy and Spain, on the other
hand, the rulers, who continued loyal to the pope, found
little difficulty in suppressing any tendencies of revolt on the
part of the few converts to the new doctrines. Individuals,
often large groups, and even whole districts, had indeed earlier
rejected some portions of the Roman Catholic faith, or refused
obedience to the ecclesiastical government; but previously to
the burning of the canon law by Luther no prince had openly
and permanently cast off his allegiance to the international
ecclesiastical state of which the bishop of Rome was head. Now,
a prince or legislative assembly that accepted the doctrine of
Luther, that the temporal power had been “ordained by God
for the chastisement of the wicked and the protection of the
good” and must be permitted to exercise its functions “unhampered
throughout the whole Christian body, without respect
to persons, whether it strikes popes, bishops, priests, monks,
nuns, or whoever else”—such as government could proceed to
ratify such modifications of the Christian faith as appealed to
it in a particular religious confession; it could order its subject
to conform to the innovations, and could expel, persecute or
tolerate dissenters, as seemed good to it. A “reformed”
prince could seize the property of the monasteries, and appropriate
such ecclesiastical foundations as he desired. He could
make rules for the selection of the clergy, disregarding the
ancient canons of the Church and the claims of the pope to the
right of ratification. He could cut off entirely all forms of
papal taxation and put an end to papal jurisdiction. The
personnel, revenue, jurisdiction, ritual, even the faith of the
Church, were in this way placed under the complete control
of the territorial governments. This is the central and significant
fact of the so-called Reformation. Wholly novel and
distinctive it is not, for the rulers of Catholic countries, like
Spain and France, and of England (before the publication of the
Act of Supremacy) could and did limit the pope’s claims to
unlimited jurisdiction, patronage and taxation, and they
introduced the placet forbidding the publication within their
realms of papal edicts, decisions and orders, without the express
sanction of the government—in short, in many ways tended
to approach the conditions in Protestant lands. The Reformation
was thus essentially a stage in the disengaging of the
modern state from that medieval, international ecclesiastical
state which had its beginning in the ecclesia of the Acts of the
Apostles. An appreciation of the issues of the Reformation—or
Protestant revolt, as it might be more exactly called—depends
therefore upon an understanding of the development of the papal
monarchy, the nature of its claims, the relations it established
with the civil powers, the abuses which developed in it and the
attempts to rectify them, the sources of friction between the
Church and the government, and finally the process by which
certain of the European states threw off their allegiance to
the Christian commonwealth, of which they had so long formed
a part.
It is surprising to observe how early the Christian Church assumed the form of a state, and how speedily upon entering into its momentous alliance with the Roman imperial government under Constantine it acquired the chief privileges and prerogatives it was so long to retain. In the twelfth book of the Theodosian Code we see Character of the papal monarchy and its claims. the foundations of the medieval Church already laid; for it was the 4th, not the 13th century that established the principle that defection from the Church was a crime in the eyes of the State, and raised the clergy to a privileged class, exempted from the ordinary taxes, permitted under restrictions to try its own members and to administer the wealth which flowed into its coffers from the gifts of the faithful. The bishop of Rome, who had from the first probably enjoyed a leading position in the Church as “the successor of the two most glorious of the apostles,” elaborated his claims to be the divinely appointed head of the ecclesiastical organization. Siricius (384–389), Leo the Great (440–461), and Gelasius I. (492–496) left little for their successors to add to the arguments in favour of the papal supremacy. In short, if we recall the characteristics of the Church in the West from the times of Constantine to those of Theodoric—its reliance upon the civil power for favours and protection, combined with its assumption of a natural superiority over the civil power and its innate tendency to monarchical unity—it becomes clear that Gregory VII. in his effort in the latter half of the 11th century to establish the papacy as the great central power of western Europe was in the main only reaffirming and developing old claims in a new world. His brief statement of the papal powers as he
