66 With his fiery, positive, self-centred faith, Luther was sorely troubled at the religious dissensions and chaos of opinions that followed the course of the Reformation. Deep misgivings afflicted him, not as to the truth of the Papal doctrine, but as to the tendency of his own. Many think," said he, "that my path is on roses; but God knows how far my heart is from any such feeling." From the first, the people heard him gladly. "Where I found one for the Pope, I found three for you," said Miltitz, in the first year of the controversy. Shouts of sympathy, welcome, and good cheer greeted him in the very streets of Worms. Printers spread his tracts in vast numbers, cheaply, neatly, accurately; while those of his opponents they charged double the price for, and sent them out full of blunders. German soldiers proclaimed him Pope before Clement's own face in the streets of Rome. Theologians of free spirit looked to him as their undaunted leader. The oppressed peasantry were sure of his large-hearted sympathy in the hapless struggle for their rights against feudal chiefs. But at every hand he had cause of tumult, anxiety, and grief. "Where our Lord God builds a church," said he, "the Devil builds a chapel close behind it." More logical thinkers, like Zwingli, or dogged dogmatists like Carlstadt, would not consent to his pietistic doctrine of the Real Presence, differing only by a syllable or a shade from that of Rome. Here was a bitter quarrel, which brought one of his opponents to poverty and exile, and to another a storm of vituperation; and the first Protestant league had nearly fallen through, because it seemed impious to Luther to associate with a "Sacramentarian," even for mutual defence. There were religious radicals, Antinomian and Anabaptist, who set out with a travesty of his doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture and salvation by faith, and indulged in all frantic and licentious outrages of good morals under the fanatic Münzer and "King John of Leyden," who turned the town of Munster into a horrible den of "LatterDay Saints," till he was conquered and put to death with frightful tortures. The peasants made their demand of emancipation of the princes who had heard and befriended Luther; looked to his broad sympathy for their help; and would turn the religious reformation into a political revolution, for which the time was not yet come. Bravely and generously Luther interceded for them. To the princes he says: "You are executioners and bloodsuckers of the poor: scorn not this rebellion, I beseech you: it is not they I would have you fear; it is God, the angry Lord. You will be no losers by mercy; or if you should, peace will reward you a hundred-fold. War may ingulf and ruin you, body and soul. Some of these demands are just. Retrench all this luxury. Stop up the holes by which money runs out, so that something may be left in the peasant's pouch." Still more earnest was his exhortation to the peasants to patience and peace. But under the wild lead of Münzer broke out the terrible revolt, which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, and only added to the weight of the peasant's yoke. Luther could not pardon the violence that crippled the good cause. "These men," said he, "are under the ban of God and the Emperor, and may be hunted like mad dogs. . . . . . All the wild beasts of Germany are let loose upon me, like wolves and bears, to tear me in pieces. . . . . It is pitiful to see the vengeance that has overthrown these poor people. But it is God's will to strike terror into them, or Satan would do more than the princes do." "I, myself," said he, "often feel the raging of the Devil within me. At times I believe, at times I believe not. At times I am merry, at times I am sad. .... I hold that a great darkness will follow this gospel light, and that soon after the last day will come." So wore on his troubled and stormy life, through the conflict of those five and twenty years, till the 15th of February, 1546, when he fell asleep gently, with his last breath commending his spirit to the "Lord of Truth," and testifying in death his reliance on the faith whereby he had lived. ..... For a century longer that battle must be waged, and peace, when it came at length, found the world all changed. What had been a simple protest in the name of conscience and the Gospel against a monstrous abuse of spiritual power, had become, reluctantly, a fierce adversary, striking that power at the root. It had become the motive force of a long and terrible struggle, that matched nation against nation, and class against class. It had gone from step to step, spite of the 5TH S. VOL. X. NO. II. VOL. LXXII. 23 unwillingness and remonstrance of its early champions, till it had put on its banner a new name, and found itself battling for emancipation of thought, political and religious liberty, social justice, and human rights. Its course was not so designed, but it was foreordained and providential. The process was long and slow, before all that was implied in Luther's brave protest could be seen or understood. We have still long to wait, before the Reformation has done its perfect work. No increase of political liberty was either its intention or its direct result. But its emancipation of the mind from fetters of priestly authority, its challenge of falsehood in the name of the free conscience, was final and complete. The spell of that great despotism was broken. The shadow of its fear no longer barred the way for the human race towards liberty and truth. When we speak of the great Catholic organization of Western Europe, let us clearly understand, then, that we speak of what is past, forever past. It is gone, and has left no rival or inheritor of its greatness. At its summit of power, its catholic pretensions were belied by the independence which the Eastern Church maintained from the first; and its dream of universal empire was hopelessly broken by the rise and the swift conquests of Mohammedanism. In the decline of its vigor, it found itself unable to rule down heresies by its merciless police, or to control by spiritual diplomacy the policy of kings; and so, from being the first, it became the second in its own dominion. In the crisis of its fate it was met by an antagonist of far inferior subtlety and skill, but of resolution, courage, and obstinate conviction which it could not match; and then its sceptre was broken. The Catholic Empire of the West was sundered. The proud name Universal no longer had a meaning, even within the limits that had owned its sublime and awful spell. The South and the North, the Latin and the Teuton, the crafty and imposing fascination of the Old, the fresh vigor and enterprise of the New, were set at variance, and have continued ever since divided, unreconciled, less and less able to conceive even the possibility of ever meeting again on the ancient terms. The change of fact requires a change of name. The Catholic Christendom of the Middle Age is shared between the two powers which we may call modern Romanism and modern Protestantism, together with a third, which (under whatever title) may yet prove stronger than both. A rapid and summary view of the change more directly wrought in the period we have been considering will close what we have to say on the present topic. The first thing that strikes us in the aspect of Christian Europe since the great battle of the Reformation is that the division line it drew parts two marked groups of nations or races, as well as two hostile forms of faith. Modern Romanism occupies almost precisely the well-defined limits of the Roman Empire of the West. Italy, Spain, and Gaul, with the provinces of the Danube, are what we now call Romanist, just as they once were Roman. Something may be due to the imperial rule embodied in the Civil Code, which stamped itself so powerfully on the institutions, manners, and life of whole populations, that their after history was compelled into conformity with that type. But it is easiest to represent the fact as ethnographers have laid it down for us. The free spirit of the North, in which Julius Cæsar found his equal match,which crushed, under Hermann, the legions of Augustus, which plunged in a wild series of invasions upon the very walls of Rome, which was scarce held in check by the converted Franks under Charles Martel and Charlemagne, which asserted itself so long in the barbarian theology in the form of Arianism, and was only with difficulty subdued, by the spiritual weapons of an heroic army of monks and martyrs, to fealty under the vast empire of Christian Rome,- broke out in fresh revolt under Martin Luther, in the Peasants' War, in the struggle for liberty in Holland, in the sturdy Puritan republicanism of England, in the victorious march of the Scandinavian host under Gustavus Adolphus, the last defence of the perishing liberties of Central Europe. It was a war of races as much as creeds. And, waver as the boundaries might for a hundred and thirty years, they were fixed at last, to correspond with the boundaries of the moral and political geography of Europe. The second thing we note is, that, while claiming the name, lineage, and sanction of the Catholic Church, while inheriting - - its ritual and organization, while guarding its tradition, and wielding the forged and tempered keenness of its policy, modern Romanism has failed disastrously and ignominiously failed in every enterprise for the recovery of its ancient ground. Beginning with its hand-to-hand conflict with Luther, continuing with the long effort of Charles the Fifth to reinstate the league of Imperial and Papal absolutism, in which his craft was foiled by Maurice's deeper craft, then that amazing contest in which Maurice's greater son-in-law, William of Orange, fought single-handed, as it were, for thirty years against the shrouded, subtle malignity of Philip, or the cold, devilish ferocity of Alva, the long battle of King and Parliament in England, and the Huguenot wars of France, in each open and declared attempt to crush its antagonist, or regain its old dominion, the Church self-styled infallible and invincible has lost ground at every step. Its tone may be arrogant as of old; and it may here and there accomplish by secret machinery what it could not by open force. But as a power dealing in the world's affairs, on the wide stage of history, it is helpless, whether before its protectors or its foes. France is its cynical and jealous protector at Rome, and Austria, its spiritual vassal, gives it a dubious authority beyond the Alps; while the young kingdom of Italy waits impatient to set its constitutional throne in the city of the seven hills, and seal the final doom of the Papacy as a secular power among the nations. So humbled and cast down is the once proud temporal dominion of the Church. Still another thing we observe, that, along with this decay of outward power, there has been a deeper interior decay. The faith, the conviction, the earnest conscience, and the enlightened thought, that, embodied in an institution, give it victory and strength, are no longer the inheritance of Rome. She has ceased in any sense to be a guide to the intellect and conscience of mankind. So far from making fresh conquests in the realm of thought, or winning larger provinces of the world's moral life, it is with a feeble and wavering grasp she holds her own. The dogma of infallibility, on which her existence itself is staked, hangs like a drag upon her march. Science, which once she repudiated and condemned, avenges |