The Eighteen Christian Centuries

The first book that Guttenberg published in 1451 was the Holy Bible,—in the Latin language, to be sure, and after the Vulgate edition, but still containing, to those who could gather it, the manna of the Word. Two years after that, in 1453, the capture of Constantinople by the Turks had scattered the learning of the Greeks among all the nations of the West. The universities were soon supplied with professors, who displayed the hitherto-unexplored treasures of the language of Pericles and Demosthenes. Everywhere a spirit of inquiry began to reawaken, but limited as yet to subjects of philosophy and antiquity. Christianity, indeed, had so lost its hold on the minds of scholars that it was not considered worth inquiring into. It was looked on as a fable, and only profitable as an instrument of policy. Erasmus was alarmed at the state of feeling in 1516, and expressed his belief that, if those Grecian studies were pursued, the ancient deities would resume their sway. But the Bible was already reaping its appointed harvest. Its voice, lost in the din of speculative philosophies and the dissipation of courts, was heard in obscure places, where it never had penetrated before. In 1505, Luther was twenty-two years of age. He had made himself a scholar by attendance at schools where his poverty almost debarred him from appearing. At Eisenach he gained his bread by singing at the richer inhabitants’ doors. Afterwards he had gone to Erfurt, and, tired or afraid of the world, anxious for opportunities of self-examination, and dissatisfied with his spiritual state, he entered the convent of the Augustines, and in two years more, in 1507, became priest and monk. There was an amazing amount of goodness and simplicity of life among the brotherhood of this community. Learning and devout meditation were encouraged, holy ascetic lives were led, the body was kept under with fastings and stripes. A Bible was open to them all, but chained to its place in the chapel, and only to be studied by standing before the desk on which it lay. All these things were insufficient, and Brother Martin was miserable. His companions pitied and respected him. Staupitz, a man of great rank in the Church, a sort of inspector-general of a large district, visited the convent, and in a moment was attracted by the youthful monk. He conversed with him, soothed his agitated mind, not with anodynes from the pharmacopœia of the Church, but from the fountain-head of the faith. He painted God as the forgiver of sinners, the Father of all men; and Luther took some comfort. But, on going away, the kind-hearted Staupitz gave the young man a Bible,—a Bible all to himself, his own property, to carry in his bosom, to study in his cell. His vocation was at once fixed. The Reformer felt his future all before him, like Achilles when he grasped the sword and rejected the feminine toys. The books he had taken with him into the monastery were Plautus and Virgil; but he studied plays and epics no more. Augustin and the Bible supplied their place. Hungering for better things than the works of the law,—abstinence, prayer-repetitions, scourgings, and all the wearisome routine of mechanical devotion,—he dashed boldly into the other extreme, and preached free grace,—grace without merit, the great doctrine which is called, theologically, “justification by faith alone.” This had been the main theme of his master Augustin, and Luther now gave it practical shape. In 1510 he was sent on some business of his convent to Rome,—to Rome, the head-quarters of the Church, the earthly residence of the infallible! How holy will be its dwellings, how gracious the words of its inhabitants! The German monk saw nothing but sin and infidelity. In high places as in low, the taint of corruption was polluting all the air. In terror and dismay, he left the city of iniquity within a fortnight of his arrival, and hurried back to the peacefulness of his convent. “I would not for a hundred thousand florins have missed seeing Rome,” he said, long afterwards. “I should always have felt an uneasy doubt whether I was not, after all, doing injustice to the Pope. As it is, I am quite satisfied on the point.” The Pope was Julius the Second, whose career we followed in the League of Cambrai; and we may enter into the surprise of Luther at seeing the Father of the Faithful breathing blood and ruin to his rival neighbours. But the force of early education was still unimpaired. The Pope was Pope, and the devout German thought of him on his knees. But in the year 1517 a man of the name of Tetzel, a Dominican of the rudest manners and most brazen audacity, appeared in the market-place of Wittenberg, ringing a bell, and hawking indulgences from the Holy See to be sold to all the faithful. A new Pope was on the throne,—the voluptuous Leo the Tenth. He had resolved to carry on the building of the great Church of St. Peter, and, having exhausted his funds in riotous living, he sent round his emissaries to collect fresh treasures by the sale of these pardons for human sin. “Pour in your money,” cried Tetzel, “and whatever crimes you have committed, or may commit, are forgiven! Pour in your coin, and the souls of your friends and relations will fly out of purgatory the moment they hear the chink of your dollars at the bottom of the box.” Luther was Doctor of Divinity, Professor in the University, and pastoral visitor of two provinces of the empire. He felt it was his duty to interfere. He learned for the first time himself how far indulgences were supposed to go, and shuddered at the profanity of the notion of their being of any value whatever. On the festival of All Saints, in November, 1517, he read a series of propositions against them in the great church, and startled all Germany like a thunderbolt with a printed sermon on the same subject. The press began its work, and people no longer fought in darkness. Nationalities were at an end when so wide-embracing a subject was treated by so universal an agent. The monk’s voice was heard in all lands, even in the walls of Rome, and crossed the sea, and came in due time to England. “Tush, tush! ’tis a quarrel of monks,” said Leo the Tenth; and, with an affectation of candour, he remarked, “This Luther writes well: he is a man of fine genius.”

Gallant young Henry the Eighth thought it a good opportunity to show his talent, and meditated an assault on the heretic,—a curious duel between a pale recluse and the gayest prince in Christendom. But the recluse was none the worse when the book was published, and the prince earned from the gratitude of the Pope the name “Defender of the Faith,” which is still one of the titles of the English crown. Penniless Maximilian looked on well pleased, and wrote to a Saxon counsellor, “All the popes I have had any thing to do with have been rogues and cheats. The game with the priests is beginning. What your monk is doing is not to be despised: take care of him. It may happen that we shall have need of him.” Luther’s own prince, the Elector of Saxony, was his firm friend, and on one side or other all Europe was on the gaze. Leo at last perceived the danger, and summoned the monk to Rome. He might as well have yielded in the struggle at once, for from Rome he never could have returned alive. He consented, however, to appear before the Legate at Augsburg, attended by a strong body-guard furnished by the Elector, and held his ground against the threats and promises of the Cardinal of Cajeta. But Maximilian carried his poverty and disappointment to the grave in 1519; and when Leo saw the safe accession of his successor Charles the Fifth, the faithful servant of St. Peter, he pushed matters with a higher hand against the daring innovator. Brother Martin, however, was unmoved. He would not retreat; he even advanced in his course, and wrote to the Pope himself an account of the iniquities of Rome. “You have three or four cardinals,” he says, “of learning and faith; but what are these three or four in so vast a crowd of infidels and reprobates? The days of Rome are numbered, and the anger of God has been breathed forth upon her. She hates councils, she dreads reforms, and will not hear of a check being placed on her desperate impiety.” This was a dangerous man to meet with such devices as bulls and interdicts. Charles determined to try harsher measures, and summoned him to appear at a Diet of the States held in Worms. The emperor was now twenty-one years old. His sceptre stretched over the half of Europe, and across the great sea to the golden realm of Mexico. Martin begged a new gown from the not very lavish Elector, and went in a sort of chariot to the appointed city,—serene and confident, for he had a safe-conduct from the emperor and various princes, and trusted in the goodness of his cause. |A.D. 1521.|Such a scene never occurred in any age of the world as was presented when the assemblage met. All the peers and potentates of the German Empire, presided over by the most powerful ruler that ever had been known in Europe, were gathered to hear the trial and condemnation of a thin, wan-visaged young man, dressed in a monk’s gown and hood and worn with the fatigues and hazards of his recent life. “Yet prophet-like that lone one stood, with dauntless words and high,” and answered all questions with force and modesty. But answers were not what the Diet required, and retractation was far from Luther’s mind. So the Chancellor of Trèves came to him and said, “Martin, thou art disobedient to his Imperial Majesty: wherefore depart hence under the safe-conduct he has given thee.” And the monk departed. As he was nearing his destination, and was passing through a wood alone, some horsemen seized his person, dressed him in military garb, and put on him a false beard. They then mounted him on a led horse and rode rapidly away. His friends were anxious about his fate, for a dreadful sentence had been uttered against him by the emperor on the day when his safe-conduct expired, forbidding any one to sustain or shelter him, and ordering all persons to arrest and bring him into prison to await the judgment he deserved. People thought he had been waylaid and killed, or at all events sent into a dungeon. Meantime he was living peaceably and comfortably in the castle of Wartburg, to which he had been conveyed in this mysterious manner by his friend the Elector,—safe from the machinations of his enemies, and busily engaged in his immortal translation of the Bible.

The movement thus communicated by Luther knew no pause nor end. It soon ceased to be a merely national excitement caused by local circumstances, and became the one great overwhelming question of the time. Every thing was brought into its vortex: however distant might be its starting-point, to this great central idea it was sure to attach itself at last. Involuntarily, unconsciously, unwillingly, every government found that the Reformation formed part of its scheme and policy. One nation, and one only, had the clear eye and firm hand to make it ostensibly, and of its deliberate choice, the guide and landmark in its dangerous and finally triumphant career. This was England,—not when under the degrading domination of its Henry or the heavy hand of its Mary, but under the skilful piloting of the great Elizabeth, the first of rulers who seems to have perceived that submission to a foreign priest is a political error on the part both of kings and subjects, and that occupation by a foreign army is not more subversive of freedom and independence than the supremacy of a foreign Church. Hitherto England had been nearly divided from the whole world, and was merely one of the distant satellites that revolved on the outside of the European system, the centre of which was Rome. She was now to burn with light of her own. The Continent, indeed, at the commencement of the Reformation, seemed almost in a state of dissolution. In 1529 disunion had attained such a pitch in the Empire that the different princes were ranged on hostile sides. At the Diet of Spires, in this year, the name of Protestant had been assumed by the opponents of the excesses and errors of the Church of Rome. At the same time that the religious unity was thus finally thrown off, the Turks were thundering at the Eastern gates of Europe, and Solyman of Constantinople laid siege to Vienna. France was exhausted with her internal troubles. Spain came to the rescue of the outraged faith, and made heresy punishable with death throughout all her dominions. While the Netherlands, against which this was directed, was groaning under this new infliction, disorder seemed to extend over the solid earth itself. There were earthquakes and great storms in many lands. Lisbon was shaken into ruins, with a loss of thirty thousand inhabitants; and the dykes of Holland were overwhelmed by a prodigious rising of the sea, and four hundred thousand people were drowned.

Preparations were made in all quarters for a great and momentous struggle: nobody could tell where it would break forth or where it would end. And ever and anon Luther’s rallying-cry was heard in answer to the furious denunciations of cardinals and popes. Interests get parcelled out in so many separate portions that it is impossible to unravel the state of affairs with any clearness. We shall only notice that, in 1531, the famous league of Smalcalde first embodied Protestantism in its national and lay constitution by the banding together of nine of the sovereign princes of Germany, and eleven free cities, in armed defence, if needed, of their religious belief. Where is the fiery Henry of England, with his pen or sword? A very changed man from what we saw him only thirteen years ago. He has no pen now, and his sword is kept for his discontented subjects at home. In 1534, King and Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, threw off the supremacy of Rome, and Henry is at last a king, for his courts hold cognizance of all causes within the realm, whether ecclesiastical or civil. Everybody knows the steps by which this embodied selfishness achieved his emancipation from a dominant Church. It little concerns us now, except as a question of historic curiosity, what his motives were. Judging from the analogy of all his other actions, we should say they were bad; but by some means or other the evil deeds of this man were generally productive of benefit to his country. He cast off the Pope that he might be freed from a disagreeable wife; but as the Pope whom he rejected was the servant of Charles, (the nephew of the repudiated queen,) he found that he had freed his kingdom at the same time from its degrading vassalage to the puppet of a rival monarch. He dissolved the monasteries in England for the purpose of grasping their wealth; but the country found he had at the same time delivered it from a swarm of idle and mischievous corporations, which in no long time would have swallowed up the land. Their revenues were immense, and the extent of their domains almost incredible. Before people had recovered from their disgust at the hateful motives of their tyrant’s behaviour, the results of it became apparent in the elevation of the finest class of the English population; for the “bold peasantry, their country’s pride,” began to establish their independent holdings on the parcelled-out territories of the monks and nuns. Vast tracts of ground were thrown open to the competition of lay proprietors. Even the poorest was not without hope of becoming an owner of the soil; nay, the released estates were so plentiful that in Elizabeth’s reign an act was passed making it illegal for a man to build a cottage “unless he laid four acres of land thereto.” The cottager, therefore, became a small farmer; and small farmers were the defence of England; and the defence of England was the safety of freedom and religion throughout the world. There were some hundred thousands of those landed cottagers and smaller gentry and great proprietors established by this most respectable sacrilege of Henry the Eighth, and for the sake of these excellent consequences we forgive him his pride and cruelty and all his faults. But Henry’s work was done, and in January, 1547, he died. The rivals with whom he started on the race of life were still alive; but life was getting dark and dreary with both of them. Francis was no longer the hero of “The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold,” conqueror of Marignano, the gallant captive of Pavia, or the winner of all hearts. He was worn out with a life of great vicissitudes, and heard with ominous foreboding the news of Henry’s death. |March 11, 1547.|A fate seemed to unite them in all those years of revelry and hate and friendship, and in a few weeks the most chivalrous and generous of the Valois followed the most tyrannical of the Tudors to the tomb. A year before this, the Monk of Wittenberg, now the renowned and married Dr. Martin Luther, had left a place vacant which no man could fill; and now of all those combatants Charles was the sole survivor. Selfish as Henry, dissolute as Francis, obstinate as Martin, his race also was drawing to a close. But the play was played out before these chief performers withdrew. All Europe had changed its aspect. The England, the France, the Empire, of five-and-twenty years before had utterly passed away. New objects were filling men’s minds, new principles of policy were regulating states. Protestantism was an established fact, and the Treaty of Passau in 1552 gave liberty and equality to the professors of the new faith. Charles was sagacious though heartless as a ruler, but an unredeemed bigot as an individual man. The necessities of his condition, by which he was forced to give toleration to the enemies of the Church, weighed upon his heart. A younger hand and bloodier disposition, he thought, were needed to regain the ground he had been obliged to yield; and in Philip his son he perceived all these requirements fulfilled. When he looked round, he saw nothing to give him comfort in his declining years. War was going on in Hungary against the still advancing Turks; war was raging in Lorraine between his forces and the French; Italy, the land of volcanoes, was on the eve of outbreak and anarchy; and, thundering out defiance of the Imperial power and the Christian Cross, the guns of the Ottoman fleet were heard around the shores of Sicily and up to the Bay of Naples. The emperor was faint and weary: his armies were scattered and dispirited; his fleets were unequal to their enemy: so in 1556 he resigned his pompous title of monarch of Spain and the Indies, with all their dependencies, to his son, and the empire to his brother Ferdinand, who was already King of Hungary and Bohemia and hereditary Duke of Austria; and then, with the appearance of resignation, but his soul embittered by anger and disappointment, he retired to the Convent of St. Just, where he gorged himself into insanity with gluttonies which would have disgraced Vitellius, and amused himself by interfering in state affairs which he had forsworn, and making watches which he could not regulate, and going through the revolting farce of a rehearsal of his funeral, with his body in the coffin and the monks of the monastery for mourners. Those theatrical lamentations were probably as sincere as those which followed his real demise in 1558; for when he surrendered the power which made him respected he gave evidence only of the qualities which made him disliked.

The Reformation, you remember, is the characteristic of this century. We have traced it in Germany to its recognition as a separate and liberated faith. In England we are going to see Protestantism established and triumphant. But not yet; for we have first to notice a period when Protestantism seems at its last hour, when Mary, wife of the bigot Philip, and true and honourable daughter of the Church, is determined to restore her nation to the Romish chair, or die in the holy attempt. We are not going into the minutiæ of this dreadful time, or to excite your feelings with the accounts of the burnings and torturings of the dissenters from the queen’s belief. None of us are ignorant of the cruelty of those proceedings, or have read unmoved the sad recital of the martyrdom of the bishops and of such men as the joyous and innocent Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh. Men’s hearts did not become hardened by these sights. Rather they melted with compassion towards the dauntless sufferers; and, though the hush of terror kept the masses of the people silent, great thoughts were rising in the general mind, and toleration ripened even under the heat of the Smithfield fires. Attempts have been made to blacken Mary beyond her demerits and to whiten her beyond her deservings. Protestants have denied her the virtues she unquestionably possessed,—truthfulness, firmness, conscientiousness, and unimpeachable morals. Her panegyrists take higher ground, and claim for her the noblest qualifications both as queen and woman,—patriotism, love of her people, fulfilment of all her duties, and exquisite tenderness of disposition. It will be sufficient for us to look at her actions, and we will leave her secret sentiments alone. We shall only say that it is very doubtful whether the plea of conscientiousness is admissible in such a case. If perverted reasoning or previous education has made a Thug feel it a point of conscience to put his throttling instrument under a quiet traveller’s throat, the conscientious belief of the performer that his act is for the good of the sufferer’s soul will scarcely save him from the gallows. On the contrary, a conscientious persistence in what is manifestly wrong should be an aggravation of the crime, for it gives an appearance of respectability to atrocity, and, when punishment overtakes the wrong-doers, makes the Thug an honoured martyr to his opinions, instead of a convicted felon for his misdeeds. Let us hope that the rights of conscience will never be pleaded in defence of cruelty or persecution.

|A.D. 1554.|

The restoration of England to the obedience of the Church, the marriage of Mary, the warmest partisan of Popery, with Philip, the fanatical oppressor of the reformed,—these must have raised the hopes of Rome to an extraordinary pitch. But greater as a support, and more reliable than queens or kings, was the Society of the Jesuits, which at this time demonstrated its attachment to the Holy See, and devoted itself blindly, remorselessly, unquestioning, to the defence of the old faith. Having sketched the rise of Luther, a companion-picture is required of the fortunes of Ignatius Loyola. We hinted that a Biscayan soldier, wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in Spain, divided the notice of Europe with the poor Austin Friar of Wittenberg. Enthusiasm, rising almost into madness, was no bar, in the case of this wonderful Spaniard, to the possession of faculties for government and organization which have never been surpassed. Shut out by the lameness resulting from his wound from the struggles of worldly and soldierly ambition, he gave full way to the mystic exaltation of his Southern disposition. He devoted himself as knight and champion to the Virgin, heard with contempt and horror of the efforts made to deny the omnipotence of the Chair of Rome, and swore to be its defender. Others of similar sentiments joined him in his crusade against innovation. |A.D. 1540.|A company of self-denying, self-sacrificing men began, and, adding to the previous laws of their order a vow of unqualified submission to the Pope, they were recognised by a bull, and the Society of Jesus became the strongest and most remarkable institution of modern times. Through all varieties of fortune, in exile and imprisonment, and even in dissolution, their oath of uninquiring, unhesitating obedience to the papal command has never been broken. With Protean variety of appearance, but unvarying identity of intention, these soldiers of St. Peter are as relentless to others, and as regardless of themselves, as the body-guard of the old Assassins. No degradation is too servile, no place too distant, no action too revolting, for these unreasoning instruments of power. Wilfully surrendering the right of judgment and the feelings of conscience into the hands of their superior, there is no method by law or argument of regulating their conduct. The one principle of submission has swallowed up all the rest, and fulfilment of that duty ennobles the iniquitous deeds by which it is shown. Other societies put a clause, either by words or implication, in their promise of obedience, limiting it to things which are just and proper. This limit is ostentatiously abrogated by the followers of Loyola. The merit of obeying an order to slay an enemy of the Church more than compensates for the guilt of the murder. In other orders a homicide is looked upon with horror; in this, a Jesuit who kills a heretical king by command of his chiefs is venerated as a saint. Against practices and feelings like these you can neither reason nor be on your guard. In all kingdoms, accordingly, at some time or other, the existence of the order has been found inconsistent with the safety of the State, and it has been dissolved by the civil power. The moment, however, the Church regains its hold, the Jesuits are sure to be restored. The alliance, indeed, is indispensable, and the mutual aid of the Order and of the Papacy a necessity of their existence. Incorporated in 1540, the brothers of the Company of Jesus considered the defections of the Reformation in a fair way of being compensated when the death of our little, cold-hearted, self-willed Edward the Sixth—a Henry the Eighth in the bud—left the throne in 1553 to Mary, a Henry the Eighth full blown. |A.D. 1558.|When nearly five years of conscientious truculence had shown the earnestness of this unhappy woman’s belief, the accession of Elizabeth inaugurated a new system in this country, from which it has never departed since without a perceptible loss both of happiness and power. A strictly home and national policy was immediately established by this most remarkable of our sovereigns, and pursued through good report and evil report, sometimes at the expense of her feelings—if she was so little of a Tudor as to have any—of tenderness and compassion, sometimes at the expense—and here she was Tudor enough to have very acute sensations indeed—of her personal and official dignity, but always with the one object of establishing a great united and irresistible bulwark against foreign oppression and domestic disunion. It shows how powerful was her impression upon the course of European history, that her character is as fiercely canvassed at this day as in the speech of her contemporaries. Nobody feels as if Elizabeth was a personage removed from us by three hundred years. We discuss her actions, and even argue about her looks and manners, as if she had lived in our own time. And this is the reason why such divergent judgments are pronounced on a person who, more than any other ruler, united the opinions of her subjects during the whole of her long and agitated life. Her acts remain, but her judges are different. If we could throw ourselves with the reality of circumstance as well as the vividness of feeling into the period in which she moved and governed, we should come to truer decisions on the points submitted to our view. But if we look with the refinements of the present time, and the speculative niceties permissible in questions which have no direct bearing on our prosperity and safety, we shall see much to disapprove of, which escaped the notice, or even excited the admiration, of the people who saw what tremendous arbitraments were on the scale. If we were told that a cold-blooded individual had placed on one occasion some murderous weapons on a height, and then requested a number of his friends to stand before them, while some unsuspecting persons came up in that direction, and then, suddenly telling his companions to stand on one side, had sent bullets hissing and crashing through the gentlemen advancing to him, you would shudder with disgust at such atrocious cruelty, till you were told that the cold-blooded individual was the Duke of Wellington, and the advancing gentlemen the French Old Guard at Waterloo. And in the same way, if we read of Elizabeth interfering in Scotland, domineering at home, and bellicose abroad, let us inquire, before we condemn, whether she was in her duty during those operations,—whether, in fact, she was resisting an assault, or capriciously and unjustifiably opening her batteries on the innocent and unprepared. Fiery-hearted, strong-handed Scotchmen are ready to fight at this time for the immaculate purity and sinless martyrdom of their beautiful Mary, and sturdy Englishmen start up with as bold a countenance in defence of good Queen Bess. It is not to be doubted that a roll-call as numerous as that of Bannockburn or Flodden could be mustered on this quarrel of three centuries ago; but the fight is needless. The points of view are so different that a verdict can never be given on the merits of the two personages principally engaged; but we think an unprejudiced examination of the course of Elizabeth’s policy in Scotland, and her treatment of her rival, will establish certain facts which neither party can gainsay.