THE COURSE

OF PROTESTANT THEOLOGY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

I

In the sixteenth century the chief religious forces which have since moved the world burst into action with a primal energy. It was a century during which, in a singular degree, the chief motive powers of Europe were simultaneously at work; in which German originality, and Swiss independence, and French organization, and English comprehensiveness, were all brought into action on the same supreme subject; the controversies being diffused, and the conflicts at the same time concentrated, by the use of a single learned language; so that all the various national and personal influences, which now, notwithstanding all our means of communication, it takes

years to bring face to face with one another, were in immediate contact. The presence of foreign professors, like Erasmus and Peter Martyr, at our own Universities, is but a striking illustration of the manner in which all the elements of life and thought were brought together in one long struggle at that time; only, alas! to be too much separated again, by the action of the Reformation itself in developing national churches and national impulses, and thus breaking the bonds, both of language and religion, by which Europe had become so closely united. An attempt to sketch, even in outline, this vast scene of theological convulsion would be involved in inextricable difficulties, amidst which all practical interest would too probably be lost. is proposed, therefore, in the following pages, to endeavour to illustrate, by means of the leading controversies, some of the great principles which were at work, and thus to point out, perhaps, the cardinal truths and realities which, though often unconsciously, are the real centres of our struggles at the present day. A writer of distinction spoke not long ago of "the arid theology" of the sixteenth century. The

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expression recalls a criticism of the historian Hallam on "Romeo and Juliet," which he describes as full of "frigid conceits. " are conceits, no doubt; but the man must be singularly constituted who regards them as frigid. In the same way the sixteenth century is full of theologies; but a man must have a strange view of human nature and human history who can call them arid. At all events, they split Europe into two great camps, which have been more or less at war ever since; they evoked new and momentous forces in the Roman camp as well as in the Protestant; they opened the springs of new religious ideals, new literatures, new devotions-in a word, new worlds. It is not from arid sands that such fruits spring. Let us endeavour to appreciate in some measure the influences which gave birth to such results.

Consider, in the first place, as a matter of fact, the impulse from which the whole movement started. If we look at it from the point of view of a statesman, it is obvious that the first great public act in the momentous history is the Diet of Worms of 1521. From that moment the authority, not only of the Pope,

but of the Emperor, was challenged, and was successfully held in check in one at least of the great States of the Empire, not merely by a religious reformer, but by the powerful and authoritative Prince who was at the head of that State. From that moment the Empire, and the Church within the Empire, was no longer at one, and the long series of public acts commenced by which the Protestant world was called into existence and consolidated. Upon that followed in the next ten years the memorable Diets of Augsburg and Spires, and upon them the various leagues, treaties, wars, councils, and synods in which the principles and results of the Reformation were developed and settled. But the Diet of Worms centres around Luther, and it is in the action taken with respect to him, by the Pope and the Emperor on the one side and the Elector of Saxony on the other, that its vital importance consists.

This, however, is but the political aspect of the fact that the motive ideas of the Reformation arose out of Luther's teaching and experience. No other influence had really threatened either the Pope's authority or Roman doctrine. The new learning of hu

manism, even in the keen and satirical hands of Erasmus, had not been able to effect any practicable breach in the great fortifications of antiquity, wealth, and power within which the existing ecclesiastical system was entrenched. That system had a profound hereditary hold on the minds and the spiritual apprehensions of men. They might distrust it or dislike it; but, in Butler's phrase, they were not so certain that there was nothing in it; and when any dispute with it came to the final issue, they were not prepared to defy it, with all the possible consequences. But Luther succeeded in convincing a number of strong men that it might be defied; he defied it himself, and he laid down the principles on which his supporters might stand in maintaining a similar defiance. We have to look, therefore, to the cardinal principles of Luther's teaching if we are to understand the germ from which the Reformation sprang. In a still higher degree must we look to that teaching if we are to appreciate the main currents of the reformed theology. There were other theological influences, of course, side by side with his; but until his death, in 1546, his voice was certainly