liffe, and was active in disseminating them. The Bohemian reformer had less theological acumen than the English, with whom he agreed in his advocacy of philosophical realism and predestination; nor did he go so far on the road of doctrinal innovation; since Huss, to the last, was a believer in transubstantiation. But in his conception of the functions and duties of the clergy, in his zeal for practical holiness, and in his exaltation of the Scriptures above the dogmas and ordinances of the Church, in moral excellence and heroism of character, Huss was outdone by none of the reformers before or since. Luther, when he was a monk, accidentally fell upon a volume of the sermons of Huss, in the convent library of Erfurt, and was struck with wonder that the author of such sentiments as they contained should have been put to death for heresy. In the attitude. which Huss assumed before the Council of Constance, there was involved the assertion of one of the distinctive principles of Protestantism—that of the right of private judgment. He was commanded to retract his avowals of opinion, and this he refused to do until he could be convinced by argument and by citations from Scripture that his opinions were erroneous. That is, he went behind the authority of the Council. This itself, in their eyes, amounted to flagrant heresy, and was sufficient to condemn him. It was a repudiation, on his side, of the principle of Church authority, which was a vital part of the ecclesiastical system. The cruel execution of Huss (1415) and of Jerome, especially as the former had rested on the Emperor's safe-conduct, excited a storm of wrath among their countrymen and adherents.1 Bohe

1 That there was no violation of the safe-conduct is assumed by Palacky, Gsch. Böhmens, and is maintained by Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, vii. For a review of Hefele and a discussion of this point, see New Englander, April, 1870. One of the principal offenses of Huss, in the eyes of the Council and of many writers since, was the doctrine, imputed to him, that prelates and magistrates, separated from Christ by mortal sin, really cease to be invested with their

RADICAL REFORMERS.

63 mia was long the theatre of violent agitation and of civil war. Repeated crusades were undertaken against the Hussites, but resulted in the defeat of the assailants. More pacific measures, coupled with internal conflicts in their own body, finally reduced their strength and left them a prey to their persecutors; but the Bohemian brethren, an offshoot from the more radical of the Hussite parties, continued to exist in separation from the Church; and in their confessions, drawn up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, they reject transubstantiation, purgatory, and the worship of saints.

Other names exist, less renowned than those of Wickliffe and Huss, but equally deserving to be inscribed among the heralds of the Reformation. Among them is John Wessel, who was connected at different times with the Universities of Cologne, Louvain, Paris, and Heidelberg, as a teacher of theology, and died in 1489.1 He set forth in explicit and emphatic language the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Against the alleged infallibility of bishops and pontiffs, he avers that many of the greatest popes have fallen into pestilent errors both of doctrine and practice; giving as examples, Benedict XIII., Boniface IX., John XXIII., Pius II., and Sixtus IV. It has been said that there is scarcely a fundamental tenet of the reformers which Wessel did not avow. Luther, in his preface to a collection of several of Wes

offices. This was thought to strike at the foundations of all civil and ecclesiastical authority. But Huss explained to the Council that, in his view, such persons are still to be recognized quoad officium, though not quoad meritum. They are destitute of the ethical character that forms the moral essence of the office, though still exercising its functions. See, on this important question, Palacky, III. i. 353; Krummel, p. 519; Wessenburg, ii. 171; also, Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, VII. i. 163. To Wickliffe were imputed similar opinions. Only those in a state of grace, he held, can possess property; others may occupy but not have.- Gieseler, iii., iv. c. viii. § 125, n. 18; Schröckh, Kirchengeschichte, xxxiv. 536.

1 The career of Wessel and his principles are fully described by Ullmann, vol. ii. pp. 287-642. For the reformatory opinions of John of Goch and John of Wesel, see Ullmann, and Gieseler, III. v. 5, § 153.

sel's treatises, declares him to have been a man of admirable genius, a rare and great soul, and so far in accord with him as to doctrine, that if he had read sooner the works of Wessel, it might have been plausibly said by his enemies that he had borrowed everything from them.

A man whose doctrinal position was far less diverse from the current system, but who must be ranked among the noted precursors of the Reformation, is Savonarola.1 From 1489 to his death in 1498, he lived at Florence, and for a while, by the force of his intellectual and moral character, and by his commanding eloquence, exerted a ruling influence in the affairs of the city. He was largely instrumental in the expulsion of the house of Medici from Florence. Against their tyranny and the immoralities which they fostered he directed from the pulpit his sharp invectives. On the invasion of the French under Charles VIII., which Savonarola had predicted, he was able, through the personal respect, amounting to awe, with which he inspired the king, to render important services to Florence. His position there resembled that which Calvin long maintained at

1 The two principal German biographies of Savonarola are by Rudelbach (Hamburg, 1835), and Meier (Berlin, 1836), the former of which treats principally of Savonarola's doctrine, the latter of the events of his career. From the French we have Jérome Savonarola, sa Vie, ses Prédications, ses Écrits, par F. T. Perrens (Paris, 1853). An extremely valuable life of Savonarola is that by Villari-La Storia de Girolamo Savonarola e de' suoi tempi, narrata da Pasquale Villari con l'aiuto di nuovi documenti (Firenze, 1859). Villari, in his Prefazione, criticizes the previous biographers, including the English work by Madden. He considers that Rudelbach and others have exaggerated the Protestant tendencies of the great Dominican; that he adhered substantially to the dogmatic system of the Church, though hostile to papal absolutism. Villari vindicates him against the common imputation of a demagogical temper and exhibits him as a thorough patriot. He also shows that Savonarola's vacillation under torture was only in reference to the source of his prophecies, whether natural or supernatural; a point on which he had cherished no uniform conviction. An instructive and brilliant article by Milman (written prior to the publication of Villari's Life) appeared in the Quarterly Review (1859). It is found in Milman's Essays (London, 1870). Romola, by George Eliot (Mrs. Lewes), one of the most remarkable novels of the present day, presents a striking picture of Savonarola and of Florentine life in his time.

Geneva. A Dominican, stimulated to stricter asceticism by the demoralized condition of the Church and of society, he poured out his rebukes without stint, until the political and religious elements that were combined against him, effected his destruction.1 He had pro

nounced the excommunication, which was issued against him by the flagitious Alexander VI., void, had declared that it was from the devil, and he had continued to preach against the papal prohibition. In prison he composed a tract upon the fifty-first psalm, in which he comes so near the Protestant views of justification, that Luther published it with a laudatory preface. Savonarola did not despair of the cause for which he laid down his life, but predicted a coming Reformation.

IV. We turn now to another class of men who powerfully, though indirectly, paved the way for the Protestant Revolution - the Mystics.2

Mysticism had developed itself all through the scholastic period, in individuals of profound religious feeling, to whom the exclusively dialectical tendency was repugnant. Such men were St. Bernard, Bonaventura, and the school of St. Victor. Anselm himself, the father of the schoolmen, mingled with his logical habit a mystical vein, and this combination was in fact characteristic of the best of the scholastic theologians. But with the decline of scholasticism, partly as a cause and partly as an effect, mysticism assumed a more distinct shape. The characteristic of the mystics is the life of feeling; the preference of intuition to logic, the quest for knowledge through light imparted to feeling rather than by pro

1 For an example of his denunciation of the venality and other sins of the clergy, see Villari, ii. 80: "Vendono i benefizi, vendono i sacramenti, vendono le messe dei matrimonii, vendono ogni cosa,'

etc.

2 Upon the Mystics, besides Ullmann's work, Die Reformatoren vor der Reformation, and Neander, v. 380 seq., see C. Schmidt, Études sur le Mysticisme Allemand au XIV. siècle (1847); Helfferich, Die christl. Mystik (1842); Noack, Gsch. d. Mystik (1853); R. A. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics (1856).

cesses of the intellect; the indwelling of God in the soul, elevated to a holy calm by the consciousness of His presence; absolute self-renunciation and the absorption of the human will into the divine; the ecstatic mood. The theory of the mystic may easily slide into pantheism, where the union of the human spirit with the divine is resolved into the identification of the two. This tendency is perceptible in one class of the ante-Protestant mystics, of which Master Eckart is a prominent representative. He was Provincial of the Dominicans for Saxony; the scene of his labors was in the neighborhood of the Rhine, and he died about 1329. Affiliated societies calling themselves the Friends of God, although they formed no sect, grew up in the south and west of Germany and in the Netherlands. They made religion centre in a calm devoutness, in disinterested love to God and in labors of benevolence. It was in Cologne, Strasburg, and in other places in the neighborhood of the Rhine, that the preachers of this class chiefly flourished. Of them the most eminent is John Tauler (1290-1361), Doctor sublimis et illuminatus, as he was styled, a pupil of Eckart, but an opposer of pantheism and a preacher of evangelical fervor. To him Luther erroneously ascribed the little book which emanated from some member of this mystical school, called "The German Theology," a book which Luther published anew in 1516, and from which he said that, next to the Bible and St. Augustine, he had learned more than from any other book of what God, Christ, man, and all things are. The mystics were eagerly heard by thousands who yearned

1 On the nature of mysticism, see Ritter, Gsch. d. christl. Philosophie, iv. 626 seq. Ritter explains especially the ideas of Gerson. See also, Hase, Hutterus Redivivus.

2 C. Schmidt, Johannes Tauler von Strasburg (1841); Life of Tauler, with Twenty-five of his Sermons, translated from the German by Susanna Winkworth, to which are added a preface by Rev. C. Kingsley, and an introduction by Rev. R. D. Hitchcock, D. D. (New York, 1858).