A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 1

A History of the Reformation.

Vol. 2.

by Thomas M. Lindsay.

PREFACE.

In this volume I have endeavoured to fulfil the promise made in the former one to describe the Reformed Churches, the Anabaptist and Socinian movements and the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century.

It has been based on a careful study of contemporary sources of information, and no important fact has been recorded for which there is not contemporary evidence. Full use has been made of work done by predecessors in the same field. The sources and the later books consulted have been named at the beginning of each chapter; but special reference is due to the writings of Professor Pollard on the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and to those of MM. Lemonnier and Mariejol for the history of Protestantism in France. The sources consulted are, for the most part, printed in Calendars of State Papers issued by the various Governments of Europe, or in the correspondence of prominent men and women of the sixteenth century, edited and published for Historical and Archaeological Societies; but the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, relating to the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, is little more than a brief account of the contents of the doc.u.ments, and has to be supplemented by reference to the original doc.u.ments in the Record Office.

The field covered in this volume is so extensive that the accounts of the rise and progress of the Reformation in the various countries included had to be very much condensed. I have purposely given a larger s.p.a.ce to the beginnings of each movement, believing them to be less known and more deserving of study. One omission must be noted. Nothing has been said directly about the Reformed Churches in Bohemia, Hungary, and the neighbouring lands. It would have been easy to devote a few pages to the subject: but such a brief description would have been misleading. The rise, continuance, and decline of these Churches are so inseparably connected with the peculiar social and political conditions of the countries, that no adequate or informing account of them could be given without largely exceeding the limits of s.p.a.ce at my disposal.

After the volume had been fully printed, and addition or alteration was impossible, two important doc.u.ments bearing on subjects discussed came into my hands too late for references in the text.

I have found that the Library of the Technical College in Glasgow contains a copy, probably unique, of the famous Hymn-book of the _Brethren_ published at Ulm in 1538. It is ent.i.tled: _Ein hubsch neu Gesangbuch darinnen begrieffen die Kirchenordnung und Geseng die zur Lants Kron und Fulneck in Behem, von der Christlichen Bruderschafft den Piccarden, die bishero fur Unchristen und Ketzer gehalten, gebraucht und teglich Gutt zum Ehren gesungen werden._ Gedruckt zu Ulm bey Hans Varnier. An. MDx.x.xVIII. I know of a copy of much later date in Nurnberg; but of no perfect copy of this early impression. It is sufficient to say that the book confirms what I have said of the character of the religion of the _Brethren_.

Then in December 1906, Senor Henriques published at Lisbon the authentic records of the trial of George Buchanan and two fellow professors in the Coimbra College before the Inquisition. These records show that the prosecution had not been instigated by the Jesuits, as was generally conjectured, but was due to the malice of a former Princ.i.p.al of the College. The statement made on p. 556 has therefore to be corrected.

The kindness of the publishers has provided an historical map, which I trust will be found useful. It gives, I think for the first time, a representation to the eye of the wide extent of the Anabaptist movement.

The red bars denote districts where contemporary doc.u.ments attest the existence of Anabaptist communities. At least four maps, representing successive periods, would be needed to show with exactness the s.h.i.+fting boundaries of the various confessions: one map can only give the general results.

My thanks are again due to my colleague, Dr. Denney, and to another friend, for the care they have taken in revising the proof sheets, and for many valuable suggestions.

THOMAS M. LINDSAY.

_January_, 1907.

BOOK III.

_THE REFORMED CHURCHES._

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

-- 1. _The Limitations of the Peace of Augsburg._

The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) secured the legal recognition of the Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, and consequently within European polity. Henceforward States, which declared through their responsible rulers that they meant to live after the religion described in the _Augsburg Confession_, were admitted to the comity of nations, and the Pope was legally and practically debarred from excommunicating them, from placing them under _interdict_, and from inviting obedient neighbouring potentates to conquer and dispossess their sovereigns. The Bishop of Rome could no longer, according to the recognised custom of the Holy Roman Empire, launch a Bull against a Lutheran prince and expect to have its execution enforced as in earlier days. The Popes were naturally slow to see this, and had to be reminded of the altered state of matters more than once.[1]

Of course, the exalted Romanist powers, civil and ecclesiastical, never meant this settlement to be lasting. They intrigued secretly among themselves, and fought openly, against it. The final determined effort to overthrow it was that hideous nightmare which goes by the name of the Thirty Years' War, mainly caused by the determination of the Jesuits that by the help of G.o.d _and_ the devil, for that, as Carlyle has remarked, was the peculiarity of the plan, all Germany must be brought back to the obedience of Holy Stepmother Church, and to submission to the Supreme Heads.h.i.+p of the Holy Roman Empire--the Supreme Heads.h.i.+p becoming more and more shadowy as the years pa.s.sed. The settlement lasted, however, and remains in general outline until the present.

But the Religious Peace of Augsburg did not end the revolt against Rome which was simmering in every land in Western Europe. It made no provision for the mult.i.tude of believers in the _Augsburg Confession_, whose princes, for conscience' sake or for worldly policy, remained steadfast to Rome, save that they were to be permitted to emigrate to territories where the rulers were of the same faith as theirs. These Lutherans were to be found in every part of Germany, and were very abundant in the Duchy of Austria. The statement of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, that the only good Catholics in that city were himself and the Archduke Ferdinand, was, of course, rhetorical; but it is a proof of the numbers of the followers of Luther.[2]

It chained irrevocably to the Romanist creed, by the clause called the _ecclesiastical reservation_, not merely the people, but the rulers in the numerous ecclesiastical princ.i.p.alities scattered all over Germany.

This provision secured that if an ecclesiastical prince adopted the Lutheran faith, he was to be deprived of his princ.i.p.ality. It is probable that this provision did more than anything else to secure for the Romanists the position they now have in Germany. It was partly due to the alarms excited by the fact that Albert of Brandenburg, Master of the Teutonic Knights, had secularised his land of East Prussia and had become a Lutheran, and by the narrow escape of the province of Koln from following in the same path, under its reforming archbishop, Hermann von Wied.

The Peace of Augsburg made no provision for any Protestants other than those who accepted the Augsburg Confession; and thousands in the Palatinate and all throughout South Germany preferred another type of Protestant faith. It is probable that, had Luther lived for ten or fifteen years longer, the great division between the Reformed or Calvinist and the Evangelical or Lutheran Churches would have been bridged over; but after his death his successors, intent to maintain, as they expressed it, the deposit of truth which Luther had left, actually ostracised Melanchthon for his endeavour to heal the breach. The consequence was that the Lutheran Church within Germany after 1555 lost large districts to the Reformed Church.

Under Elector Frederick III., surnamed the Pious, the territorial Church of the Palatinate separated from the circle of Lutheran Churches, and in 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism was published. This celebrated doctrinal formula at once became, and has remained, the distinctive creed of the various branches of the Reformed Church within Germany; and its influence extended even farther.

Bremen followed the example of the Palatinate in 1568. Its divines published a doctrinal _Declaration_ in 1572, and a more lengthy _Consensus Bremenensis_ in 1595. Anhalt, under its ruler John George (1587-1603), did away with the consistorial system of Church government, and abandoned the use of Luther's Catechism. Hesse-Ca.s.sel joined the circle of German Reformed Churches in 1605. These examples were followed in many smaller princ.i.p.alities, most of which, imitating all the Reformed Churches, published separate and distinctive confessions of faith, which were nevertheless supposed to contain the sum and substance of the common Reformed creed.[3]

These German princ.i.p.alities, rulers and inhabitants, placed themselves deliberately outside the protection of the Religious Peace of Augsburg.

The fundamental principles of their faith were not very different from the Lutheran, but they were important enough to make them forego the protection which the treaty afforded. Setting aside minor differences and sentiments, perhaps more powerful than doctrines, their separation from neighbouring Protestants was based on their objection to the doctrine of _Ubiquity_, essential to the Lutheran theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, and to the consistorial system of ecclesiastical government. They repudiated the two portions of the Lutheran system which were derived professedly from the mediaeval Church, and insisted on basing their exposition of doctrine and their scheme of ecclesiastical government more directly on the Word of G.o.d. They had come in contact with another reformation movement, had recognised its st.u.r.dier principles, and had become so enamoured of them that they felt compelled to leave the Lutheran Church for the Reformed.

Still confining ourselves to Germany, it is to be noticed that the Augsburg Confession ostentatiously and over and over again separated those who accepted it from protesters against the mediaeval Church, who were called Anabaptists. It repudiated views supposed to be held by them on Baptism, the Holy Scripture, the possibility of a life of sinless perfection, and the relation of Christian men to the magistracy. In some of the truces arranged between the Emperor and the evangelical princes,--truces which antic.i.p.ated the religious Peace of Augsburg,--attempts were made to induce Lutherans and Romanists to unite in suppressing those sectaries. It is needless to say that _they_ were not included in the settlement in 1555. Yet they had spread all over Germany, endured with constancy b.l.o.o.d.y persecutions, and from them have come the large and influential Baptist Churches in Europe and America.

From beginning to end they were outside the Lutheran Reformation.

-- 2. _The Reformation outside Germany._

When we go beyond Germany and survey the other countries of Western Europe, it is abundantly evident that the story of the Lutheran movement from its beginning down to its successful issue in the Religious Peace of Augsburg is only a small part of the history of the Reformation.

France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Bohemia, Hungary, even Italy, Spain, and Poland, throbbed with the religious revival of the sixteenth century, and its manifestations in these lands differed in many respects from that which belonged to Germany. All shared with Germany the common experiences, intellectual and religious, political and economic, of that period of transition which is called the Renaissance in the wider sense of the word--the transition from mediaeval to modern life.[4] They had all come to the parting of the ways. They had all emerged from Mediaevalism, and all saw the wider outlook which was the heritage of the time. All felt the same longing to shake themselves clear of the incubus of clericalism which weighed heavily on their national life, whether religious or political. Each land went forward, marching by its own path marked out for it by its past history, intellectual, religious, and civil. The movements in these various countries towards a freer and more real religious life cannot be described in the same general terms; but if Italy and Spain be excepted, their attempts at a national reformation had one thing in common which definitely separated them from the Lutheran movement.

-- 3. _The Reformed type of Doctrine._

If the type of doctrine professed by the Protestants in those countries be considered (confessedly a partial, one-sided, and imperfect standard), it may be said that they all refused to accept some of the distinctive Lutheran dogmatic conclusions, and that they all departed more widely from some of the conceptions of the Mediaeval Church. Their national confessions in their final forms borrowed more from Zurich and Geneva than from Wittenberg, and they all belong to the Reformed as distinguished from the Lutheran or Evangelical circle of creeds.[5] It was perhaps natural that differences in the ritual and theory of the Holy Supper, the very apex and crown of Christian Public Wors.h.i.+p, should be to the general eye the visible cleavage between rival forms of Christianity. In the earlier stages of the Reformation movement, the great popular distinction between the Romanists and Protestants was that the one refused and the other admitted the laity to partake of the Cup of Communion; and later, within an orthodox Protestantism, the thought of _ubiquity_ was the dividing line. The Lutherans a.s.serted and the Reformed denied or ignored the doctrine; and those confessions took the Reformed view.

-- 4. _The Reformed ideal of Ecclesiastical Government._

This similarity of published creed was the one _positive_ bond which united all those Churches; but it may also be said that all of them, with the doubtful exception of the Church of England,[6] would have nothing to do with the consistorial system of the Lutheran Churches, and that most of them accepted in theory at least Calvin's conception of ecclesiastical government. They strove to get away from the mediaeval ideas of ecclesiastical rule, and to return to the principles which they believed to be laid down for them in the New Testament, ill.u.s.trated by the conduct of the Church of the early centuries. The Church, according to Calvin, was a theocratic democracy, and the ultimate source of authority lay in the members.h.i.+p of the Christian community, inspired by the Presence of Christ promised to all His people. But in the sixteenth century this conception was confronted and largely qualified in practice, by the dread that it might lead to a return to the clerical tutelage of the mediaeval Church from which they had just escaped.

Presbyter might become priest writ large; and the leaders of the Reformation in many lands could see, as Zwingli did in Zurich and Cranmer in England, that the civil authorities might well represent the Christian democracy. Even Calvin in Geneva had to content himself with ecclesiastical ordinances which left the Church completely under the control of _les tres honnores seigneurs syndicques et conseil de Geneve_; and the Scottish Church in 1572 had to recognise that the King was the "Supreme Governor of this realm as well in things temporal as in the conservation and purgation of religion." The nations and princ.i.p.alities in Western Europe which had adopted and supported the Reformation believed that manifold abuses had arisen in the past, directly and indirectly, through the exemption of the Church and its possessions from secular control, and they were determined not to permit the possibility of a return to such a state of things. The scholars.h.i.+p of the Renaissance had discovered the true text of the old Roman Civil Code, and one of the features of that time of transition--perhaps its most important and far-reaching feature, for law enters into every relation of human life--was the subst.i.tution of civil law based on the Codes of Justinian and Theodosius, for canon law based on the Decretum of Gratian. These old Roman codes taught the lawyers and statesmen of the sixteenth century to look upon the Church as a department of the State; and the thought that the Christian community had an independent life of its own, and that its guidance and discipline ought to be in the hands of office-bearers chosen by its members.h.i.+p, was everywhere confronted, modified, largely overthrown by the imperious claim of the civilian lawyers. Ecclesiastical leaders within the Reformed Churches might strive as they liked to draw the line between the possessions of the Church, which they willingly placed under the control of civil law, and its discipline in matters of faith and morals, which they declared to be the inalienable possession of the Church; but, as a rule, the State refused to perceive the distinction, and insisted in maintaining full control over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Hence it came about that in every land where the secular authorities were favourable to the Reformation, the Church became more or less subject to the State; and this resulted in a large variety of ecclesiastical organisations in communities all belonging to the Reformed Church. While it may be said with perfect truth that the churchly ideal in the minds of the leaders in most of the Reformed Churches was to restore the theocratic democracy of the early centuries, and that this was a strong point of contrast between them and Luther, who insisted that the _jus episcopale_ belonged to the civil magistrate, in practice the secular authorities in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Palatinate, etc., kept almost as tight a hold on the Reformed national Churches as did the Lutheran princes and munic.i.p.alities. In one land only, France, the ecclesiastical ideal of Calvin had full liberty to embody itself in a const.i.tution, and that only because the French Reformed Church struggled into existence under the civil rule of a Romanist State, and, like the Christian Church of the early centuries, maintained itself in spite of the opposition of the secular authorities which persecuted it.

-- 5. _The Influence of Humanism on the Reformed Churches._

The portion of the Reformation which lay outside the Peace of Augsburg had another characteristic which distinguished it from the Lutheran Reformation included within the treaty--it owed much more to Humanism.

Erasmus and what he represented had a greater share in its birth and early progress, and his influence appeared amidst the most dissimilar surroundings. Henry VIII. and Zwingli seem to stand at opposite poles; yet the English autocrat and the Swiss democrat were alike in this, that they owed much to Erasmus, and that the reformations which they respectively led were largely prompted by the impulse of Humanism. One has only to compare the _Bishops' Book_ and the _King's Book_ of the Henrican period in England with the many statements Erasmus has made about the kind of reformation he desired to see, to recognise that they were meant to serve for a reformation in life and morals which would leave untouched the fundamental doctrinal system of the mediaeval Church and its organisation in accordance with the principles laid down by the great Humanist. The Bible, the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, with the doctrinal decisions of the first four Oec.u.menical Councils, were recognised as the standards of orthodoxy in the _Ten Articles_; and the Scholastic Theology, so derided by Erasmus, was contemptuously ignored.

The accompanying _Injunctions_ set little store by pilgrimages, relics, and indulgences, and the other superst.i.tions of the popular religious life which the great Humanist had treated sarcastically. The two books alluded to above are full of instructions for leading a wholesome life.

The whole programme of reformation is laid down on lines borrowed from Erasmus.

Zwingli was under the influence of Humanism from his boyhood. His young intellect was fed on the masterpieces of cla.s.sical antiquity--Cicero, Homer, and Pindar. His favourite teacher was Thomas Wyttenbach, who was half a Reformer and half a pure follower of Erasmus. No man influenced him more than the learned Dutchman. It was his guidance and not the example of Luther which made him study the Scriptures and the theologians of the early Church, such as Origen, Jerome, and Chrysostom.

The influence and example of Erasmus can be seen even in his attempts to create a rational theory of the Holy Supper. His reformation, in its beginning more especially, was much more an intellectual than a religious movement. It aimed at a clearer understanding of the Holy Scriptures, at the purgation of the popular religious life from idolatry and superst.i.tion, and at a clearly reasoned out scheme of intellectual belief. The deeper religious impulse which drove Luther, step by step, in his path of revolt from the mediaeval Church was lacking in Zwingli.

He owed little to Wittenberg, much to Rotterdam. It was this connection with Erasmus that created the sympathy between Zwingli and such early Dutch Reformers as Christopher Hoen, and made the Swiss Reformer a power in the earlier stages of the Reformation in the Netherlands.

The beginnings of the Reformation movement in France, Italy, and Spain were even more closely allied to Humanism.

If the preparation for reformation to be found in the work and teaching of mediaeval evangelical nonconformists like the _Picards_ be set aside, the beginnings of the Reformation in France must be traced to the small group of Christian Humanists who surrounded Marguerite d'Angouleme and Briconnet the Bishop of Meaux. Marguerite herself and Jacques Lefevre d'etaples, the real leader of the group of scholars and preachers, found solace for soul troubles in the Christian Platonism to which so many of the Humanists north and south of the Alps had given themselves. The aim of the little circle of enthusiasts was a reformation of the Church and of society on the lines laid down by Erasmus. They looked to reform without "tumult," to a reformation of the Church by the Church and within the Church, brought about by a study of the Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St. Paul, by individual Christians weaning themselves from the world while they remained in society, and by slowly leavening the people with the enlightenment which the New Learning was sure to bring. They cared little for theology, much for intimacy with Christ; little for external changes in inst.i.tutions, much for personal piety. Their efforts had little visible effect, and their _via media_ between the stubborn defenders of Scholasticism on the one hand and more thorough Reformers on the other, was found to be an impossible path to persevere in; but it must not be forgotten that they did much to prepare France for the Reformation movement which they really inaugurated; nor that William Farel, the precursor of Calvin himself in Geneva, belonged to the "group of Meaux."