of doctrine and of the nature of the Christian life, were earnest complaints against the multitude of church ordinances contrived for the oppression of the poor and the enriching of the clergy. He would have the laity instructed; he wished that the humblest woman might read the Gospels. The judaizing customs and rites with which the Church was burdened, are pointed out in his comments on Scripture. In these publications, which the art of printing scattered in multiplied editions over Europe, the great lights of the patristic age, and the Apostles themselves, reappeared to break up the reign of superstition. Never was an alliance between author and printer more happy for both parties, or more fruitful of good to the public, than was that between Erasmus and Froben of Basel. In view of the whole career and various productions of the Chief of the Humanists, it is not exaggerated praise to say that he was "the living embodiment of almost all that which, in consequence of the revival of the study of the ancients, the mind of the Western nations for more than a hundred years had wrought out and attained. It was not only a knowledge of languages, not only cultivation of style, of taste; but therewith the whole mental cast had received a freer turn, a finer touch. In this comprehensive sense, one may say that Erasmus was the most cultivated man of his times." 1

Of the relations of Erasmus to Luther and the Protestant cause, there will be an occasion to speak hereafter. His writings and the reception accorded to them show that the European mind had outgrown the existing ecclesiastical system, and was ready to break loose from its control.

Some of the principal points in the view which has been presented in this and in the preceding lecture, respecting the causes that paved the way of the Reformation, may be briefly set forth as follows:

1 Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, p. 481.

Among the salient features characteristic of the Middle Ages were the subordination of civil to ecclesiastical society, of the State to the vast theocratical community having its centre at Rome; the government of the Church by the clergy; the union of peoples under a common ecclesiastical law and a uniform Latin ritual; an intellectual activity shaped by the clergy and subservient to the prevailing religious and ecclesiastical system.

Among the symptoms of the rise of a new order of things were:

1. The laical spirit; becoming alive to the rights and interests of civil society; developing in the towns a body of citizens bold to confront clerical authority, and with their practical understanding sharpened and invigorated by diversified industry and by commerce; a laical spirit which manifested itself, also, in the lower classes, in satires aimed at the vices of the clergy; which, likewise, gave rise to a more intense feeling of patriotism, a new sense of the national bond, a new vigor in national churches.1

2. A conscious or unconscious religious opposition to the established system; an opposition which appeared in sects like the Waldenses, who brought forward the Bible as a means of correcting the teaching, rebuking the officers, or reforming the organization of the Church; or in mystics who regarded religion as an inward life, an immediate relation of the individual to God, and preached fervently to the people in their own tongue.

3. A literary and scientific movement, following and displacing the method of culture that was peculiar to the mediæval age; a movement which enlarged the area and multiplied the subjects of thought and investigation; which drew inspiration and nutriment from the masterpieces of ancient wisdom, eloquence, and art.

1 See Hagen, Deutschland's literarische u. religiöse Verhältnisse im Reformationszeitalter, i. 1-32. But Hagen (p. 18) separates the "satyrisch volksmässige " opposition, as a distinct head, in the room of the more general rubric above. He does not omit to notice, however, the other elements involved in the lay spirit.

These three latent or open species of antagonism to the medieval spirit were often mingled with one another. The Mystic and the Humanist might be united in the same person. The laical spirit in its higher types of manifestation was reinforced by the new culture. Satirical attacks upon absurd ceremonies, upon the follies and sins of monks and priests, had a keener edge, as well as a more serious effect, when they emanated from students familiar with Plautus and Juvenal.

CHAPTER IV.

LUTHER AND THE GERMAN REFORMATION, TO THE DIET OF AUGSBURG, 1530.

GERMANY, including the Netherlands and Switzerland, was the centre, the principal theatre, of the Reformation. It is not without truth that the Germans claim, as the native characteristic of their race, a certain inwardness, or spirituality in the large sense of the term. This goes far to explain the hospitable reception which the Germanic tribes gave to Christianity, and the docility with which they embraced it. They found in the Christian religion a congenial spirit. The German spirit of independence, or love of personal liberty, is a branch of this general habit of mind. Germany began its existence as a distinct nation in a successful resistance to the attempt of the clergy to dispose of the inheritance of Charlemagne.2 It was the Germans who prevented his monarchy from being converted into an ecclesiastical State. On the field of Fontenay the forces of the Franks were separated into two hostile divisions, the one composed predominantly of

1 "Es war das Christenthum nichts was dem Deutschen fremd und widerwärtig gewesen wäre, vielmehr bekam der deutsche Charakter durch das Christenthum nur die Vollendung seiner selbst; er fand sich in der Kirche Christi selbst, nur gehoben, verklärt und geheiligt." Vilmar, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, p. 7. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they conceived it unworthy of the gods to be confined within walls, or to be represented by images; and that the head of a family exercised a priestly function. Germania, cc. ix., x. Grimm finds in the descriptions of Tacitus the complete germ of Protestantism - "den vollen keim des Protestantismus." Deutsche Mythologie, p. xliii. For like views from a French writer, see Taine, Art in the Netherlands, pp. 32. 33, 64. The Saxons resisted the Gospel, because it was forced on them by a

conqueror.

2 Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte, i. 10 seq.

the German element, which planted itself on the German traditional law for regulating the succession; the other of the Roman element that had the support of the ecclesiastics. Mysticism, the product of a craving for a religion of less show and more heart, had, as we have seen, its stronghold, in the latter part of the medieval period, in Germany. The triumph of the Papacy had been due to the division between the emperor and the great vassals; not to any deep-seated fondness for a foreign and ecclesiastical supremacy. It was natural that the Reformation, which was an uprising against clerical usurpation and in favor of a more inward and spiritual worship, should spring up in Germany. A German philosopher has dwelt with eloquence upon the fact that while the rest of the world had gone out to America, to the Indies, in quest of riches and to found an earthly empire encircling the globe, on which the sun should never set, a simple monk, turning away from the things of sense and empty forms, was finding Him whom the disciples had once sought for in a sepulchre of stone. Hegel attributes the inception and success of the Reformation to this "ancient and constantly preserved inwardness of the German people," in consequence of which they are not content to approach God by proxy, or put their religion outside of them, in sacraments and ceremonies, in sensuous, imposing spectacles.1 A German historian has made substantially the same assertion respecting the genius of the German people: "One peculiar characteristic for which the German race has ever been distinguished is their profound sense of the religious element, seated in the inmost depths of the soul; their readiness to be impelled by the discordant strifes of the external world and unfruitful human ordinances, to seek and find God in the deep recesses of their own hearts, and to experience a hidden life in God springing forth in opposition to barren conceptions of the abstract intellect

1 Hegel, Phil. der Geschichte; Werke, ix. 499 seq.