tariff as there still is; Tetzel the Dominican declares that all sins are blotted out" as soon as the money chinks in the box." Whatever be the crime, there is a quittance; even "si Dei matrem violavisset," he might go home clean and sure of heaven. Unfortunately the vendors of pardons did not know that all was changed, and that the intellect was become manly, no longer gabbling words mechanically like a catechism, but probing them auxiously like a truth. In the univerзa Renaissance, and in the mighty growth of all human ideas, the German idea of duty blooms like the rest. Now when we speak of justice, it is no longer a lifeless phrase which we repeat, but a living idea which we produce; man sees the object which it represents, and feels the emotion which summons it up; he no longer receives, but he creates it; it is his work and his tyrant; he makes it, and submits to it. "These words justus and justitia Dei," says Luther, were a thunder to my conscience. I shuddered to hear them; I told myself, if God is just, He will punish me."* For as soon as the conscience discovers again the idea of the perfect model,† the smallest failings appeared to be crimes, and man, condemned by his own scruples, fell pros 66 *Calvin, the logician of the Reformation, well explains the dependence of all the Protestant ideas in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, i. (1.) The idea of the perfect God, the stern Judge. (2.) The alarm of conscience. (3.) The impotence and corruption of nature. (4.) The advent of free grace. (5.) The rejec tion of rites and oeremonies. "In the measure in which pride is rooted within us, it always appears to us as though we were just and whole, good and holy; unless we are convinced by manifest arguments of our injustice, uncleanness, folly, and impurity. For we are not convinced of it if we turn our eyes 10 our own persons merely, and if we do not think also of God, who is the only rule by which we must shape and regulate this judgment.... And then that which had a fair appearance of virtue will be found to be nothing but weakness. "This is the source of that horror and wonder by which the Scriptures tell us the saints were afflicted and cast down, when and as often as they felt the presence of God. For we see those who were as it might be far from God, and who were confident and went about with head erect, as soon as He displayed His glory to them, they were shaken and terrified, so much so that they were overwhelmed, nay swallowed up in the horror of death, and that they fainted away.”— `alvin's Institutes, i. 66 trate, and, " as it were, swallowed up with horror. "I, who lived the life of a spotless monk," says Luther, “ yet felt within me the troubled conscience of a sinner, without managing to assure myself as to the satisfaction which I owed to God. . . Then I said to my. self: Am I then the only one who ought to be sad in my spirit? ... Oh, what horrible spectres and figures I used to see! Thus alarmed, con science believes that the terrible day is at hand. "The end of the world is near ... . . Our children will see it; perchance we ourselves." Once in this mood he had terrible dreams for six months at a time. Like the Christians of the Apocalypse he fixes the moment when the world will be destroyed: it will come at Easter, or at the conver sion of Saint Paul. One theologian, his friend, thought of giving all his goods to the poor; "but would they receive it?" he said. "To-morrow nigh. we shall be seated in heaven." Under such anguish the body gives way. For fourteen days Luther was in such a condition, that he could neither drink, eat, nor sleep. “Day and night," his eyes fixed on a text of Saint Paul, he saw the Judge, and His inevitable hand. Such is the tragedy which is enacted in all Protestant souls-the eternal tragedy of conscience; and its issue is a new religion. For nature alone and unassisted cannot rise from this abyss. "By itself it is so corrupted, that it does not feel the desire for heavenly things. There is in it before God nothing but lust." Good intentions cannot spring from it. For, terrified by the vision of his sin, man could not resolve to do good, troubled and anxious as he is; on the contrary, dejected and crushed by the weight of his sin he falls into despair and hatred of God, as it was with Cain, Saul, Judas; " so that, abandoned to himself, he can find nothing within him but the rage and the dejection of a despairing wretch or a devil. In vain he might try to redeem himself by good works: our good deeds are not pure; even though pure, they do not wipe out the stain of previous sins, and moreover they de not take away the original corruption of the heart; hey are only bougb and blossoms, the inherited poison is in the sap. Man must descend to the heart, underneath literal obedience and legal rule; from the kingdom of law he must penetrate into that of grace; from forced righteousness to spontaneous generosity; beneath his original nature which led him to selfishness and earthly things, a second nature must be developed, leading him to sacrifice and heavenly things. Neither my works, nor my justice, nor the works or justice of any creature or of all creatures, could work in me this wonderful change. One alone can do it, the pure God, the Just Victim, the Saviour, the Redeemer, Jesus, my Christ, by imputing to me His justice, by pouring upon me His merits, by drowning my sin under His sacrifice. The world is a "mass of perdition," predestined to hell. Lord Jesus, draw me back, select me from this mass. I have no claim to it; there is nothing in me that is not abominable; this very prayer is inspired and formed within me by Thee. But I weep, and my breast heaves, and my heart is broken. Lord, let me feel myself redeemed, pardoned, Thy elect one, Thy faithful one; give me grace, and give me faith! “Then," says Luther, "I felt myself born anew, and it seemed that I was entering the open gates of heaven." What remains to be done after this renovation of the heart? Nothing; all religion is in that: the rest must be reduced or suppressed; it is a personal affair, an inward dialogue between God and man, where there are only two things at work,--the very word of God as it is transmitted by Scripture, and the emotions of the heart of man, as the word of God excites and maintains them. Let us do away with the rites * Saint Augustine. + Mclancthon, preface to Luther's Works: "It is clear that the works of Thomas, Scotus, and the like, are utterly silent about the element of justification by faith, and contain many errors concerning the most important questions relating to the church. It is clear that the most thoughout the world were either fables about purgatory and the saints or else some ind of dogma of law or discipline, without a word of the gospel concerning Christ, or else discourses of the monks in their churches al were vain trifles about distinctions in the mat ter of food, about feasts, and other human traThe gospel is pure, incorruptible, and not diluted with Gentile opinions. See also Fox, Acts and Monuments, 8 vols., ed. Townsend, 1843, ii. 43. -- that appeal to the senses, wherewith men wished to replace this intercourse between the invisible soul and the visi ble judge, mortifications, fasts, corporeal penance, Lent, vows of chastity and poverty, rosaries, indulgences; rites serve only to smother living piety un derneath mechanical works. Away with the mediators by which men have attempted to impede the direct inter course between God and man, namely saints, the Virgin, the Pope, the priest; whosoever adores or obeys them is ar idolater. Neither saints nor Virgin can convert or save us; God alone by His Christ can convert and save. Neither Pope nor priest can fix our faith or for give our sins; God alone instructs us by His word, and absolves us by His pardon. No more pilgrimages or relics; no more traditions or auricular confessions. A new church appears, and therewith a new worship; ministers of religion change their tone, the worship of God its form; the authority of the clergy is diminished, and the pomp of services is reduced: they are reduced and diminished the more, because the primitive idea of the new theology is more absorbing; so much so, that in certain sects they have disappeared altogether The priest descends from the lofty posi tion in which the right of forgiving sins and of regulating faith had raised him over the heads of the laity; he returns to civil society, marries like the rest, aims to be once more an equal, is merely a more learned and pious man than others, chosen by themselves and their adviser. The church becomes a temple, void of images, decorations, ceremonies sometimes altogether bare; a simple meeting-house, where, between whitewashed walls, from a plain pulpit, a man in a black gown speaks without gesticulations, reads a passage from the Bible, begins a hymn, which the congregation takes up. There is an other place of prayer, as little adorned and not less venerated, the domestic hearth, where every night the father of the family, before his servants and his children, prays aloud and reads the Scriptures. An austere and free relig ion, purged from sensualism and obe dience, inward and personal, which, set on foot by the awakening of the conscience, could only be established among races in which each man found | had been entrusted to them, and in within his nature the conviction that he alone is responsible for his actions, and always bound to the observance of his duty. III. their hands the stern network of law It must be admitted that the Reformation entered England by a side door; but it is enough that it came in, whatever the manner: for great revolutions are not introduced by court intrigues'scandal,' and official cleverness, but by social conditions and popular instincts. When five millions of men are converted, it is because five millions of men wish to be converted. Let us therefore leave on one side the intrigues in high places, the scruples and passions of Henry VIII., the pliability and plausibility of Cranmer, the vacillations and basenesses of Parliament, the oscillation and tardiness of the Reformation, begun, then arrested, then pushed forward, then suddenly, violently pushed back, then spread over the whole nation, and hedged in by a legal establishment, built up from discordant materials, but yet solid and durable. Every great change has its root in the soul, and we have only to look close into this deep soil to discover the national inclinations and the secular irritations from which Protestantism has issued. A hundred and fifty years before, it had been on the point of bursting forth; Wycliff had appeared, the Lollards had sprung up, the Bible had been translated; the Commons had proposed the confiscation of all ecclesiastical property; then under the pressure of the Church, royalty and aristocracy combined, the growing Reformation being crushed, disappeared underground, only to reappear at distant intervals by the sufferings of its martyrs. The bishops had received the right of imprisoning without trial laymen suspected of heresy; they had burned Lord Cobham alive; the kings chose their ministers from the episcopal bench; settled in authority and pomp, they had made the nobility and people bend under 'he secular sword which See Froude, History of England, i.-vi. The conduct of Henry VIII. is there presented new light. chastity,' heresy,' or 'matter scunding *Froude, i. 191. Petition of Commons on others; and on a sudden he learns | muttered ominously, and was accumu strange things. Cardinal Wolsey lating for a revolt; priests we yelled writes to the Pope, that "both the at in the streets or "thrown into the secular and regular priests were in the kenne.; " women would not "receive habit of committing atrocious crimes, the sacrament from hands which they for which, if not in orders, they would thought polluted."* When the ap have been promptly executed; * and paritor of the ecclesiastical courts the laity were scandalized to see such came to serve a process, he was driven persons not only not degraded, but es- away with insults. "Go thy way thou caping with complete impunity." A stynkyng knave, ye are but knaves and priest convicted of incest with the brybours everych one of you.” A prioress of Kilbourn was simply con- mercer broke an apparitor's head with demned to carry a cross in a proces- his yard. "A waiter at the sign of the sion, and to pay three shillings and Cock" said "that the sight of a priest fourpence; at which rate, I fancy, he did make him sick, and that he would would renew the practice. In the pre- go sixty miles to indict a priest." ceding reign (Henry VII.) the gentle- Bishop Fitz-James wrote to Wolsey, men and farmers of Carnarvonshire that the juries in London were "so had laid a complaint accusing the maliciously set in favorem hæretica clergy of systematically seducing their pravitatis, that they will cast and con wives and daughters. There were demn any clerk, though he were as in brothels in London for the especial nocent as Abel." + Wolsey himself use of priests. As to the abuse of the spoke to the Pope of the "dangerous confessional, read in the original the spirit" which was spread abroad among familiarities to which it opened the the people, and planned a Reformation. door. The bishops gave livings to When Henry VIII. laid the axe to the their children whilst they were still tree, and slowly, with mistrust, struck young. The holy Father Prior of Mai- a blow, then a second lopping off the den Bradley hath but six children, and branches, there were a thousand, nay, but one daughter married yet of the a hundred thousand hearts which apgoods of the monastery; trusting short- proved of it, and would themselves ly to marry the rest. In the convents have struck the trunk. the monks used to drink after supper till ten or twelve next morning, and came to matins drunk. They played cards or dice. Some came to service in the afternoons, and only then for fear of corporal punishments. The royal "visitors" found concubines in the secret apartments of the abbots. At the nunnery of Sion, the confessors seduced the nuns and absolved them at the same time. There were convents, Burnet tells us, where all the recluses were found pregnant. About two-thirds " of the English monks ived in such sort, that "when their enormities were first read in the Parliament House, there was nothing but 'down with them!"" What a spectacle for a nation in whom reason and conscience were awakening! Long before the great outburst, public wrath Consider the internal state of a ciocese, that of Lincoln for instance, at this period, about 1521, and judge tv this example of the manner in whic: the ecclesiastical machinery works throughout the whole of England, multiplying martyrs, hatreds, and conver sions. Bishop Longland summons the relatives of the accused, brothers, women and children, and administers the oath; as they have already been prosecuted and have abjured, they must make oath, or they are relapsed, and the fagots await them. Then they denounce their kinsman and them. selves. One has taught the other in English the Epistle of Saint James. This man, having forgotten several words of the Pater and Credo in Latin, can only repeat them in English. A woman turned her face from the cross which was carried about on Easter | when they th.. k themselves alone; and morning. Several at church, especial- then, darkly, passionately, their brains ly at the moment of the elevation, work. For, beyond this universal symwould not say their prayers, and re-pathy which gathers mankind about the mained seated "dumb as beasts." oppressed, there is the working of the Three men, including a carpenter, religious sentiment. The crisis of conpassed a night together reading a book science has begun which is natural to of the Scriptures. A pregnant woman this race; they meditate on their sai went to mass not fasting. A brazier vation, they are alarmed at their con denied the Real Presence. A brick- dition terrified at the judgments of maker kept the Apocalypse in his God, taey ask themselves whether, liv possession. A thresher said, as he ing under imposed obedience and cers pointed to his work, that he was going monies, they do not become culpable, to make God come out of his straw. and merit damnation. Can this terrcs Others spoke lightly of pilgrimage, or be stifled by prisons and torture? Feat of the Pope, or of relics, or of con- against fear, the only question is, which tession. And then fifty of them were is the strongest! They will soon know condemned the same year to abjure, to it: for the peculiarity of these inward promise to denounce each other, and to anxieties is that they grow beneath condo penance all their lives, on pain of straint and oppression; as a welling being burnt, as relapsed heretics. They spring which we vainly try to stamp were shut up in different 66 mon- out under stones, they bubble and leap asteries; "there they were to be main-up and swell, until their surplus overtained by alms, and to work for their flows, disjointing or bursting asunder support; they were to appear with a the regular masonry under which men fagot on their shoulders at market, and endeavored to bury them. In the solin the procession on Sunday. Then in tude of the fields, or during the long a general procession, then at the winter nights, men dream: soon they punishment of a heretic; "they were fear, and become gloomy. On Sunday o fast on bread and ale only every Fri- at church, obliged to cross themselves, day during their life, and every even of to kneel before the cross, to receive the Corpus Christy on bread and water, host, they shudder, and think it a mor and carry a visible mark on their tal sin. They cease to talk to their cheek." Beyond that, six were burnt friends, remain for hours with bowed alive, and the children of one, John heads, sorrowful; at night their wives Scrivener, were obliged themselves to hear them sigh; unable to sleep they set fire to their father's wood pile. Do rise from their beds. Picture such a you think that a man, burnt or shut up, wan face, full of anguish, nourishing was altogether done with? He is under its sternness and calmness a silenced, I admit, or he is hidden; but secret ardor: it is still to be found in long memories and bitter resentments England in the poor shabby dissenter, endure under a forced silence. People who, Bible in hand, stands up suddenly saw their companion, relation, brother, to preach at a street corner; in those bound by an iron chain, with clasped long-faced men who, after the service, hands, praying amid the smoke, whilst not having had enough of prayers, sing the flame blackened his skin and de- a hymn in the street. The sombre stroyed his flesh. Such sights are not imagination has started, like a womar forgotten; the last words uttered on in labor, and its conception swells day the fagot, the last appeals to God and by day, tearing him who contains it Christ, remain in their hearts all-power- Through the long muddy winter, the ful and ineffaceable. They carry them howling of the wind sighing among the about with them, and silently ponder ill-fitting rafters, the melancholy of the over them in the fields, at their labor, sky, continually flooded with rain or covered with clouds, add to the gloom of the lugubrious dream. Thenceforth saved at all costs. Iman has made up his mind; he will be At the peril of his life, he obtains one of the books which See, passim, the prints of Fox. All the details which follow are from biographies. See those of Cromwell, by Carlyle, of Fox the Quaker, of Bunyan, and the trials reported at length by Fox. |
