theory; in the new construction the Pope was at once Pontiff and Caesar. Dispute as Guelf and Ghibelline might over terminology, the vital point was conceded in the very terms of the alliance. The spiritual sword, as such, had the pre-eminence: the function of the Imperial was to register and enforce the decrees of the Triple Crown. The intrinsic logic of the situation placed the secular power at a disadvantage in its long conflict with the ecclesiastical: given the premisses, reason was with the Pope. In stirring lines addressed to Gregory VII., Alphanus of Salerno brings out the central thought. 'Take the First Apostle's brand, Bear the old yoke for evermore. 'Thine the keys that loose and hold: Gained in battle's bloodstained hour 'Rome by thee exalted high Won, nor bloomed in ancient days Garlands better earned than thine.' It is the Latin genius lording it over lesser races, and content with nothing short of universal rule. 'If a man consider, he will easily perceive that the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, the Papacy, is no other thing than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting 'crowned upon the grave thereof.' III Whatever judgement be formed of its embodiment, the idea of the Reformation is easily grasped. The intimate and momentous alliance between Christianity and classical civilisation of which Catholicism was the expression could not come about without a certain obscuring of the original Gospel. 'What is the Reformation but the work of God, which was to set the Church free again from the bondage which had bound her to the ancient world for 1,400 years? All may be expressed in the single formula: the Reformation is the return to the pure gospel. Only what is sacred shall be held sacred; the traditions of men, though they be most fair and worthy, must be taken for what they are, viz. the traditions of men. Yet, in recognising this, let us not condemn the old Catholicism and the whole developement of the Church up to the Reformation. Everything has its time and every step in the history of the Church was needed. It was God's Providence that so guided the developement of the Roman Empire that it resulted in that wonderful covenant between Christianity and the ancient world which endured nearly 1,500 years. When it had done its work, this covenant was dissolved; and it could be dissolved because the Church in her New Testament possessed Scriptures which have nothing to do with that covenant, because they are older than it. There lies the abiding value of the New Testament.' This reminder is opportune. It is not only that not all the elements in Christianity are of equal value; but that it is possible for mischievous or even deadly germs to lodge in the organism. Not everything that comes about under Providence is providential: the expulsion of these germs may be called for at all costs. Whether this was so in the sixteenth century is the question on the answer to which our judgement of the Reformation depends. We cannot, indeed, return to the Christianity of the first days; those days, with their requirements and possibilities, are gone. But this Christianity retains its regulative value; by conformity, not indeed to its letter, but to its spirit, later developements of religion must be judged. The character of the Medieval Church was formed by her circumstances. She was at once World-State, school, and Versicherungsanstalt '†: the first in her exterior polity; the second for those who in religion as in other things were children; the third against the vague but awful possibilities of the future for men who, while desirous of the promises of the Gospel, were strangers to its power. The Church of Rome preserves these notes to-day. The first has become a source of weakness to her, because the morality of the secular State has advanced beyond that of the ecclesiastical: as polity, this Church, instead of being a purely spiritual organisation, is practically a huge political machine worked ' for mundane ends.' The second and third constitute her strength, the charm by which she retains her hold on the senses, the imagination, the fears of men. Were we all intelligence or all virtue, her day might be near its end. But intelligence and virtue are but ingredients in our + Ib. ii. 250. *Reden und Aufsätze, ii. 233. VOL. CCII. NO. CCCCXIII. nature. Now, as ever, the average man prefers tutelage to independence in religion, the latter involving an effort to which he is unable or unwilling to rise; now, as ever, the future haunts him, and he is attracted by an institution which, for a moderate present outlay, makes itself answerable for the inevitable passage into the unknown. 'O that thy creed were sound! For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome' wrote Newman before his secession. And when heart and head come into conflict, it is seldom the latter that prevails. An institution, however, which appeals to feeling and custom to the exclusion of understanding, far as it may be from dissolution, is in a state of decline. It lives on its past, assimilating no new material; gradual as may be the divergence, its path and that of mankind diverge. The Church is a static force: the dynamics of life are foreign to her; she resisted them as long as resistance was possible, and accommodates herself under protest to the new world which she anathematises and hopes against hope to destroy. No single claim of the Medieval Papacy has been, or will ever be, withdrawn. Her approximation to the new order of things is provisional-temporis ratione habita.* ἡ γλῶσσ ̓ ὀμώμοχ' ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνώμοτος. She bides her time. Pity that so much energy and perseverance should be wasted! She waits in vain; because the world does not go back. The conflict between this conception of Christianity and that held by the northern nations was in the nature of things. Not only did Catholicism remain mediæval; it became more and more exclusively Latin. Mediævalism and Latinism are its distinctive notes. As the Middle Ages, therefore, receded into the background, it became obsolete; and as civilisation ceased to be Latin it lost its universality. The practical abuses of the system would not have resulted in its break-up had not an interior fermentation been at work, a conflict of opposing sympathies and incompatible ideas. The antithesis between letter and spirit became acute. Never had the yoke of the past pressed so heavily upon Christendom as in the period that immediately preceded Luther. Beliefs and institutions live not on their defects but on their qualities: the medieval system had *Concordat with Austria, art. 13, 14. prevailed because it met the wants of men more or less satisfactorily. But, as these wants changed, its hold on the world weakened: it did not, perhaps it could not, change. It would be a mistake to attribute this impotence only, or even chiefly, to the obscurantism and cupidity of the clergy. Its roots lay deeper. Catholicism, as has been said, had taken over the inheritance of antiquity; and now this inheritance was exhausted: a new departure had to be taken by a new world. Could not this departure have been taken from within? Separation from the main body of Christendom was a loss not only to sentiment: the spaciousness, the sweep and swing of the old Church were gone. With all its merits there was something provincial about Protestantism: the schism could be justified only by the impossibility of attaining the end in view by other means. It would be rash to forecast the future of Catholicism. But men have to act for to-day, not for to-morrow; and in the sixteenth century what was obvious was that the reform movements which had been attempted from within had failed. The effort to re-establish the conciliar system had broken down under the uniform and persistent pressure of the Papacy; the Franciscan revival of evangelical religion had been absorbed in the routine of ecclesiasticism; the Renaissance had entered on its decadence before it received its death-blow from the 'brutale Hispanisierung Italiens,' for it was of its essence that it was a return to antiquitythe genuine, indeed, as opposed to the ecclesiastical counterfeit-while what was wanted was not a return to the old but a way out into the new. This threefold failure made the Reformation possible: what actually brought it about was the necessity of escape from bondage and falsehood into freedom and truth. The emancipation was obtained at a great, some may think too great, a price; but it was obtained. No Scottish or English Reformer holds the place n popular imagination occupied by Luther. Nor is this surprising; for no one man embodies the temper of the Reformation-its spiritual disquietude, its impatience of tutelage, its appeal from the periphery to the centre-as he. Then as now, many excellent persons found peace in the Church. But this is not the point. The age did not and could not do so. There was room and to spare in Catholicism for those who could be religious without thinking about religion: those were straitened who were unable to partition off their minds in watertight compartments, who were impelled by an interior necessity to co-ordinate, however provisionally, their experience as a whole. Were these to be left to oscillate between scepticism and exterior conformity? The latter alternative was, no doubt, open. It is a mistake to suppose that under ordinary circumstances Catholicism is exacting in its demands on its adherents. The axiom Ecclesia non judicat de internis is capable of, and receives, a large interpretation: conformity covers a multitude of sins. Non-religious, however, in itself it is powerless to satisfy religious needs. The experience so vividly described in the Epistle to the Romans was that of countless men and women in Christendom: the distant God, the burdened conscience, the sense of doom. And what Paul and Augustine had been, each in his generation, that Luther was: an element of ferment and disturbance; a voice proclaiming to a degenerate race the greatness of its fall, the imminence of its destruction, and the means of salvation placed within reach of all. Did he teach any new truth? The question is as idle in his case as in that of religious teachers greater than he. The fire was there, but it smouldered under the ashes: not till these were removed could it kindle into flame. The effect of the Reformation was to break down artificial barriers: it restored man and the world to God. They were His, and only by a fallacy could they be separated from Him; the three were essentially akin. The faith that saves was a recognition of this kinship: it was no submissive assent to ecclesiastical dogmas; it was neither an opinion nor a manner of life, but a personal surrender of the heart to the all-embracing 'God.'* This God manifested Himself not in the sphere of religion only, but in nature and in life. Hence a new orientation. The Weltflüchtigkeit' of mediæval religion bound men hand and foot. It is difficult to overestimate the liberation brought about by its rejection. The conscience of Christendom was distorted: non-ethical obligations-asceticism, celibacy, &c.-lay heavy upon it; the conventional stifled the moral. Luther dealt with ceremonial bondage of this kind as Christ had dealt with the old ritual law-κа0αρiwv Távта тà ẞpóμara (Mark vii. 19), and this, in particular, with regard to the central point of sexual morality. Marriage was no longer a concession granted by the Church to the weak; but the free and divinely * Reden und Aufsätze, i. 154. |