THE.: CLOSING CENTURY OF MIDDLE AGES
D.S.SCHAIT

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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

The Closing Century
of the
Middle Ages

Jtn Inaugural Jlddrtss

BY THE
REV. DAVID S. SCHAFF, D.D.
Professor of Church History
in the Western Theological Seminary, Allegheny

The Western
Theological Seminary

THE INAUGURATION OF THE
REV. DAVID S. SCHAFF, D.D.
AS
PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE
NORTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF
ALLEGHENY, PENNSYLVANIA
NOVEMBER 14, 1904

Published By Order of the
Board of Directors

The Rev. David S. Schaff, D.D., was elected to the chair of
Church History in the Western Theological Seminary July 7,
1903. The chair had become vacant by the resignation of the
Rev. William H. Jeffers, D.D., LL.D., who had filled it for more
than a quarter of a century. Dr. Schaff, at the time of his call,
was professor of Church History in Lane Theological Seminary,
Cincinnati. The action of the Board of Directors of the Semi
nary, electing Dr. Schaff, was approved by the General Assembly
in session in Buffalo, May, 1904.
The Inaugural Services were held in the North Presbyterian
Church, Allegheny, on the evening of November 14, 1904. The
professors and students entered the church in procession. The
Rev. David S. Kennedy, D.D., president of the Board of Direc
tors, presided, offered the invocation and made a statement for
the Board. Prof. Robert Christie, D.D., LL.D., read the Scripture lesson
in Ephesians, third chapter. The Rev. William S. Fulton, D.D.,
a director, and pastor of the Point Breeze Church, Pittsburgh, de
livered the charge to the professor-elect. Then followed the In
augural Address. Prof. Matthew B. Riddle, D.D., LL.D., for
many years the friend of Dr. Philip Schaff (the father of the
professor-elect) and his close, associate in literary work, offered
the prayer. The congregation sang President Dwight's hymn,
"I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord," and Luther's hymn, "A Safe
Stronghold our God is Still." The services were brought to a
close with, the benediction, pronounced by the president of the
seminary, the Rev. David Gregg, D.D., LL.D.

CHARGE TO THE PROFESSOR- ELECT.
BV REV. W. S. FULTON, D.D.
My Dear Brother: You will permit me to say first of all
that we congratulate ourselves upon having you to occupy the
chair of Ecclesiastical History in the Seminary. If the exam
ple and influence of an honored father count in the making of
a man, you ought to have a special fitness for this work. You
have also come to this office in the prime of life, with ripe
scholarship, and after years of experience in teaching church
history. We therefore feel justified in expecting from you a
strong man's share in the larger work we hope the Seminary
is to do.
It would be folly for me to pretend to instruct you in the
duties of the position you have been called upon to occupy.
But it will not, I think, be out of place, if I mention several
things you already know, and thus stir up your mind by way
of remembrance. Any teacher has a high calling and a great responsibility.
But you have a place of special honor and responsibility, for
you are to be a teacher of teachers, and from your class room
will go out influences to affect the lives and destinies of many
who have never seen that room. Through the ministers whom
you have helped to train, you will put your molding hand on
souls, not only in many parts of this country, but also in all
the mission fields to which our students may be sent. As an
author of books, and of articles in the scholarly Reviews you
may reach a somewhat different public, but you will not for
get that you are primarily a teacher of future ministers, and,
like the great Neander, your heart will be in your class-room
work, and in the students who meet you there.
You are to teach Christian history. It is conceivable that
the men "who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost"
might have been Platos, and Aristotles, and Newtons, and
God through them might have given us an inspired philoso
phy. But the writers of Scripture were not philosophers, nor

5
is our religion a philosophy. It is supposable that God might
have given us a system of doctrine, scientifically complete and
accurate in its statements. But this, evidently, is not what
God did give. In recent days brilliant writers have been try
ing to make us believe that our religion is a sentiment, in its
objective form a splendid palace built in air, and in its sub
jective form a merely mystical life. But our religion is neither
a sentiment, nor a system of doctrine, nor a philosophy. It
may include all these, but in itself it is a kingdom of God estab
lished here on earth, and this kingdom has its history, and by
its history it is revealed. Christianity is preeminently his
torical. Our Bible! Is it not largely a book of history? Our
Saviour! Is he not the supreme person of history, to whom
preceding ages were pointing forward, and to whom succeed
ing ages have been pointing backward? And those parts of
Scripture which are more didactic in their form, are they not
the inspired interpretation of the great historic facts recorded
in the book? Our God has been accustomed to reveal himself
chiefly through the medium of history. But if this be so, what
place, high or low, should be given to the study of history in
any adequate scheme of Christian education? If this be so,
what importance in the training of Christian ministers should
be attached to instruction in this history? If this be so, would
it be wrong for a teacher of church history to magnify his
office? >nw-l
But in this connection may I say another thing? If a man
may bring himself into such sympathy with the Creator of the
natural world that he will feel, as he makes discoveries in as
tronomy, that he is "thinking God's thoughts after" him, or if
he can walk in the fields and have such sense of the Creator's
presence that every common bush will be afire with God, how
much more may the student of Christian history who has
anointed eyes see the Lord as he marches through the cen
turies toward his coronation as King of kings and Lord of lords.
It is a profoundly important department in this Seminary
which the Directors have committed to you. And in this light
I charge you to habitually think of it.
With regard to the manner of teaching Church History, I
believe, for one thing, that it ought to be the constant aim of
the teacher to make that history interesting to the pupil of

average ability and attainments. This has not always been
done. And students who were asked to cram the mere facts
and dates of the history have sometimes felt like saying what
the prophet said when his attention had been called to the
bones in the valley of vision. "They were very many, and
very dry." But those facts and dates may be so brought to
gether, and so filled with life, that they will be as interesting
to the student in the Seminary, as that mighty army which
sprang from the bones was to the prophet. Even if a teacher
were successful in doing it, it would be small business to cram
a pupil with a lot of uninterpreted facts. But to make a pupil
see the great truths which lie back of the historic facts is not
small business. That is splendid work for any man to do.
Macaulay once said, "Facts are the mere dross of history. It
is from the abstract truth which penetrates them and lies latent
among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its
whole value." Good teaching of church history is helping
one's pupils to find the gold of truth imbedded in the mass of
facts. And when they see that they are gathering up this gold,
students of only average ability and attainments are inter
ested in the study.
But Church History ought really to be a delightful study
to any fairly intelligent Christian man.
Is walking by a winding river that flows through a coun
try of varied landscapes, a pleasant thing to do? The study
of Church History is following a stream more beautiful than
that. Coming from its fountain under the altar on which
atonement was made for the sins of the world, this river of salva
tion goes flowing through the centuries, becoming broader
and deeper as it flows, changing moral deserts into gardens,
healing the waters of every bitter sea of evil through which it
flows, on its banks nourishing those trees whose fruit is food,
and whose leaves are medicine for the nations, and making
all things live whithersoever the river cometh. That is the
river by which you will say to the young men of your class,
"Come, let us walk."
Men are interested in the chemistry which changes the
ore bank into many useful forms of steel and iron, or takes the
oil as it comes from the earth, and transforms it into a multi
tude of very different looking products. But the history of

God's kingdom shows a chemistry much more wonderful thari'
that. It tells of a leaven introduced by Christ which has;
changed the laws, customs, manners, and civilization of man
kind, and has been making of man himself a new creation.
Men are interested in the story of great men's lives, and
biography is the form of literature which has a perennial pop
ularity. But are there any lives of men more interesting than
those of Origen and Athanasius, and Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Jerome, and Augustine, and Chrysostom, and those other ear
lier and later heroes of Church History? When we enter the
courts of this history we find ourselves surrounded by por
traits of the epoch-making men of nineteen centuries. Surely
my brother, this ought to be an interesting study, and I am
persuaded that you will endeavor to make it that, to even the
duller minds among your pupils.
Let me mention another thing of which I need only re
mind you. The history ought to be made to bear continually
on the life of to-day. Because the tree is known by its fruit,
the exhibition of the fruits of Christianity is to some minds
the strongest proof of its divine origin, and many a student
will say with a new intensity of conviction, "This is the plant
ing of the Lord," because he has had a new vision of what
Christianity has done for the world. You will aim to bring
out this witness of history to Christ as clearly as possible.
The history of the Church also illustrates, and in illustrat
ing confirms, many of the great principles of the kingdom of
God. For example, it will show what men often need to see
as well as hear, that "As righteousness tendeth to life, so he
that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death." It will make
men see with new vision that though it be
"Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim
unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his
own."
The history of the Church is the best commentary on the
promise of its Head that the gates of hell shall not prevail
against her. You will endeavor to show your pupils how the
history illustrates these, and other principles and promises of
the kingdom.

8
Much is also gained if the Christian knows that present
enemies of the truth are merely old and vanquished foes who
have put on new faces. And when timid believers are fright
ened by the charging around of what looks like a terrible lion
of unbelief, their courage returns when some wiser observer
notices that the would-be lion's voice is merely an old and
harmless bray. You will sometimes show your students this.
And to put all that might be said on this point in a single sen
tence, you will often use the lamp of the Church's past experi
ence to throw light on its path now.
But not to prolong my remarks further, I believe I ex
press the sentiment of the whole Board of Directors when I
bid you God-speed in your work. We hope and pray that the
Maker of history who reveals himself in history will keep you
in sympathy with his mind, and enable you to correctly see
and rightly present his truth. We pray that the Great Head
of the Church may, through your teaching and influence,
honor himself and make more glorious his Church.

ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR DAVID S. SCHAFF, D.D.
Gentlemen of the Boards of Directors and Trustees of the
Western Theological Seminary, Fellow Professors, Students
and Friends : — My conception of the duties of a professor of
Church History is quickly stated. His first duty is to present
an accurate statement of the facts in the life and progress of the
church during the last nineteen hundred years. William of Tyre,
the historian of the first crusade, writing eight hundred years
ago, expressed the idea well when he said: "It is the office of
the church historian not to write about what pleases him, but the
materials the time affords."1 It is true that the principle still
prevails, in calling one to fill a chair in our theological seminaries,
that it shall be known what in general his theological views are.
For myself, I hope that this principle will not be abandoned in
America. And yet, I conceive that there is little disposition to
bind a professor to all the details of his denominational associa
tion, or to demand that he find in the past only facts which con
firm a particular exposition of Christianity. The historian does
not pursue his study, as a dogmatist, or carry with him continually
the code of a denominational apologist.
The teacher of Church History has, for his second duty, to
organize the material he finds according to general principles and
by a process of deduction to set forth the laws of progress and
decline, of development and retrogression, which the movements
of the past have followed. He is more than an annalist. The
ultimate standard, by which he judges all movements and meas
ures, is the body of principles laid down by Christ and his
Apostles. But Church History is something more than an accurate and

1 Annalium conscriptores non qualia optant ipsi sed qualia ministrant
tempora, etc. Book XXIII., Recueil des Hist, des Croisades 1 :1132. Wil
liam, it is charged, does not always follow this good rule himself, as in the
ease of his account of Peter the Hermit. It is quite possible, however, that
von Sybel's criticism has gone too far in belittling the part Peter took in
the First Crusade.

10
orderly presentation of the past. He is the perfect teacher who,
in other periods of the church's life, finds lessons and shows how
they are to be applied to the plans and activities of the church
to-day, and how the errors of other periods are to be avoided to
day. The chair of Church History is no guide-post to a mauso
leum or picture gallery. It is a living voice calling attention to
God's providential guidance of His church and to the failures of
the church when its leaders speculated and acted in defiance of
the laws established by Christ for his kingdom. And in all our
treatment, we must not forget to exercise that spirit of Christian
unity and sympathy which is so congenial to our age and which
expresses itself to those, who differ from us, in words like those of
the saintly Peter the Venerable, when he was attacked by St.
Bernard. Habe charitatem, he said, et foe quicquid vis, "Have
love and then you may do what you please."2
For the honor of the call which unexpectedly summoned me
to the chair of Church History in this seminary, I wish again to
express to the Boards of Directors and Trustees my deep ac
knowledgment, and I pledge myself, so far as I am able, to meet
your just and considerate demands. I wish also to acknowledge
the welcome which my fellow professors have extended to me as
I have joined them in the exalted work of preparing young men
to preach the Gospel.
For my address this evening I might have chosen some gen
eral theme which would have given opportunity for the free play
of personal opinion. But I prefer to present a historic study of a
distinct period of Church History. My subject is
THE CLOSING CENTURY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
The Middle Ages come to an end with Martin Luther.
Their closing century may be included between 1414, the date of
the Council of Constance, and 1517, the year when the German
Reformer nailed his Theses against the church door at Witten
berg. Next to the age of the Apostles, this century is perhaps
the subject of the most searching inquiry at the present time.
As one among the centuries, it has a conspicuous place on
account of the mighty and novel forces at work, and the lasting
value of its contributions to the progress of mankind. When its

2 Peter quoted St. Augustine.

II
years began, the Crusades were over. The great Schoolmen were
dead. Innocent III and the other constructors of the fabric of
the mediaeval papacy were no more. The cathedrals were finish
ed, or almost finished. The great universities of Paris and
Bologna and Oxford had already turned out generations of stu
dents. There were, however, lines of its own along which this
century was original.
It witnessed the splendid Reformatory councils of Pisa, Con
stance and Basel, splendid, not so much for what they accomplish
ed, as for having expressed, for the first time in centuries, in con-
ciliar form, the judgment of Christendom as distinct from the
judgment of the hierarchy. It witnessed the fall of the weary
Byzantine empire into the hands of the Turks. It looked on as
the Turks occupied the Acropolis in 1458 ; seized Otranto on the
Italian coast and advanced from point to point in their onward
march towards the walls of Vienna, and all Europe trembled.3
It saw the most notable of all attempts to heal the schism be
tween Eastern and Western Christendom, as the present age is
witnessing the most notable of all efforts to encourage the spirit
of Christian union.
It felt the first movement of the printing press, the most im
portant invention in the history of civilization since the invention
of the alphabet. It saw on its sky the bright glow of the Revival
of Letters. It followed the first tracks made across the Atlantic
to the Western world as our recent century witnessed the open
ing in the Pacific of paths to the empires of the farther West. It
may be that the historian of the future, contemplating the con
tribution which the centuries have made to the progress of man
kind, will not give to our boasted 19th century a place above the
15th. 3 The dread of the Turks was the daily misery of Europe in the 15th
century, as the dread of the Tartars had been in the 13th. At the First
Council of Lyons (1245) one of the five wounds of the Church which Inno
cent IV. exposed was the threatened invasion of Germany by the Tartars.
Nicholas V., pope at the time of the Fall of Constantinople, called Mo
hammed II. "the dragon of the Apocalypse." His successor, Calixtus III.,
in assuming the tiara, vowed to "Almighty God and the Holy Trinity, by
wars, maledictions, interdicts and excommunications and all other ways
to resist and punish the Turks." In vain did pope after pope, during the
second half of the 15th century, call upon Christian princes to unite in a
campaign against these Asiatic intruders. Luther joined with his prayer
against the pope's blasphemy a petition against the cruelty of the Turk — ¦
Von des Papstes Lasterung und des Tiirken Mord behiite uns, Herr Gott.

12
It is not to portray these remarkable forces that I am inter
ested now. I am concerned to show how the century carried
within it the signs of the passing away of the old madiseval con
ceptions of God, man and the church and was flushed with the
symptoms of new conceptions; how in this process of transition
from the old to the new, the old was reasserting itself with
mighty grip, and how the potencies which were soon to run into
the full stream of the new era had no interpreter at the time,
much less an organizing mind.
This study gains new interest from the contention of a re
cent school of Catholic historians in Germany, in whose number
are included some of the most learned and shrewd historical stu
dents of the age. Its leading representatives are Janssen, now
dead, whose work on The History of the German People at the
Close of the Middle Ages1 has passed through twenty editions in
Germany and has been one of the most stimulating and influ
ential historical books of recent times ; Ludwig Pastor5, the most
learned of Roman Catholic writers, on the last popes of the
Middle Ages ; and Father Denifle6 and Nicholas Paulus7, who are

4 Six vols., 1876-88. English Translation, 6 vols., London, 1896, The
17th German edition, 1897, was edited by Pastor, who modifies many of
Janssen's statements by presenting the dark aspects of the Church's life in
the latter part of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century. Janssen
had rare skill in manipulating his materials. It is possible to draw a con
clusion exactly the opposite to the one he draws from the materials he pre
sents. 5 Geschiehte der Papste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters. 4th ed.,
1899-1901. Pastor is an investigator of the first rank and has added much
new material to the documents first presented by Gregorovius. His pages
are crowded with interesting details and valuable notes.
6 Father Denifle has startled the scholarly world by his vehement at
tack on Luther's moral character in his work, Luther und Lutherthum in
der ersten Entwicklung quellenmassig dargestellt, Mainz, 1904. He is one
of the most learned specialists of the age in mediaeval history in some of its
phases. For his services in this department he had been held in high re
gard by Protestant scholars, and it was supposed that in leaving the period
of the Middle Ages and taking up the Reformation he would offer some new
materials for Luther's biography. This he has failed to do. Instead, he
has presented a thick volume of more than 900 pages (to which another
volume is to be added) which teems with charges against Luther's intellec
tual honesty and moral integrity. He outdoes Janssen in the manipulation
of his materials and an utter misrepresentation of the meaning of Luther's
words. The work has made a great stir in Germany and called forth re
plies from Harnack, Seeberg, Kolde, Walther and other leading scholars.
See my article on the book in Homiletical Review, June, 1904, pp. 419-424

13
devoting themselves to the effort to undermine the moral reputa
tion of Luther. The position of the school is that a wholesome
current of church reform was in progress before Luther, that
Luther and the Protestant movement checked it, and further that
Luther was responsible for a condition of affairs in church and
society, a condition of morals and industrial welfare, which shows
marked decline as compared with the century before Luther."
Their attempt is to make out that the Reformation was a great
calamity for civilization. Catholic historians do not call the
Protestant movement a Reformation, but the "Revolution of the
Sixteenth Century," or the "Innovation of the Sixteenth Century."
Investigation must be met by investigation, and the Middle
Ages must be restudied in order that we may ascertain exactly
what its main forces were. I think we shall come to the con
clusion that the Reformation followed the Middle Ages, but was
not a product of them. It was a historical necessity and a provi
dential change. It was neither by men nor of men, but of God.
The Papacy. The first of the imposing forces of the 15th
century is the papacy. Was there in that time any move
ment towards a modification of the mediaeval theory of the papal
power ? That theory asserted by Gregory VII, Innocent III and
all the great popes of the Middle Ages, and given theological
statement by Thomas Aquinas, is in irreconcilable antagonism to
the fundamental principle of Protestantism'. Innocent senten-
and Presbyterian Banner, April 7, 1904. Leo XIII. praised Janssen as a
"light of historic science and a man of profound learning." Leo X. gave to
Denifle the distinction of receiving the first copy of his book from the au
thor's hand.
7 Die devtschen Dominikaner im Kampfe gegen Luther, 1903 and
other works.
8 Dollinger laid the foundation for this view in his work on the Ref
ormation, 3 vols., 1846, sqq., and in his sketch of Luther's life, 1851. With
out recalling either work, this great scholar gave another view of the Re
former in 1872 iu Die Wiedervereinigung der christlichen Kirche. Engl.
transl., Lectures on the Reunion of Christendom. His tribute to some ele
ments of Luther's power has never been excelled. The old tale that Luther
committed suicide was dished up again by the Berlin newspaper editor
Majunke in 1890. The publication created a sensation in Germany. Pas
tor has gone through all the evidence and pronounced the tale a falsehood.
There is no higher historical authority in the Catholic Church, but the story
may again be revived to stimulate denominational passion.
9 Thomas' argument is given at its best in his de regimine principum.
He declares that "all kings ruling over Christian peoples owe subjection to

14
tiously expressed it when he declared the papacy was vested with
the fulness of power, pleniitudo potestatis. That is the papacy
was established by God, on earth, to rule over the church and over
princes. It is the interpreter of the divine will and the judge of
all human creatures, and it is itself amenable to no earthly
tribunal. The first half of our century was filled with the attempt to
reform the papacy. This was what the three Reformatory
councils of Pisa, 1409, Constance, 1414, and Basel, 1431, stand
for. The second part of the century was filled with the deliberate
attempt of the pope to counteract this movement and it witnessed
the complete triumph of the papacy.
A century before the Reformatory councils, Marsiglius of
Padua, with unheard of boldness, called in question all the ex
treme claims of the papal power." He declared no one was under
obligation to pay tithes to the pope. The pope had no authority
over other bishops, for Peter had none. He had no right to call
himself the successor of Peter, for it is doubtful whether Peter
ever was in Rome. The emperor had the right to- call councils.
Against such heretical depreciation, the theory of papal absolu
tism found ready and ardent defenders. Augustus Triumphus
and Alvarus Pelayo restated the papal theory in its baldest form,
the former expressly declaring there could be no appeal from the
pope to God, because the pope and God were in agreement, the
pope having charge of the keys and door of the kingdom of
heaven.1' Alvarus solemnly affirmed that he "who looks upon the
pope with intent and trusting eye, looks upon Christ and that
wherever the pope is there is the church."12
The continued flagrant abuse of the papal power in the
periods of the Avignon Exile and Schism produced great dis-

the Roman pontiff, even as the pope himself is subject to Jesus Christ, whose
vicar he is."
10 In his tract, Defensor pacis. The best work on this tract and the
tracts defending papal absolutism in the 14th century is Riezler : Die liter-
arischen Widersacher der Papste, Leip.. 1894. Haller in his Papstthum
und Kirchenreform, Berlin, 1903, gives a good account of their contents.
11 Quia unum eonsistorium sit ipsius papae et ipsius dei, cujus con-
sistorii clavigcr et ostiarius est ipse papa, in his Summa de potestate eccle-
siastica. ]2 Vere representat papa Christum in terris, ut qui vldet cum oculo
contemplativo et fideli videat Christum in his De planctu ecclesiae.

15
content throughout the Christian world and stirred GersonV
Nicolas of Clemanges, Dietrich of Nieheim and other writers at
the beginning of the 15th century to call for a reformation in
the church.18 The low estate of Christendom which they lament
ed was due, so they declared, to abuses of the papal prerogative,-
or, more accurately, to the abuses of the curia. These attacks
were upon the methods pusued by the papacy and not upon the
papacy itself, as a divine institution." Backed by the curia,
the pope had usurped the rights of the episcopate and reduced the"
church all over the Latin world to a servile condition.15 His
legates at the courts of princes took precedence of all the local
and national prelates.16 The right of appeal to Rome in cases cf
ecclesiastical litigation was extended to almost all cases and was
used to defy the authority of the bishops and led to great delays
and perversions of justice while it contributed to the aggrandize
ment of the Romans."
As early as 1266 pope Clement IV laid down as papal pre
rogative the right to fill all the ecclesiastical appointments, of
Christendom, high and low. The principle was reaffirmed by
Clement V. An enormous abuse of this usurped authority fol
lowed. Italians seemed to have been predestinated to fill the rich
church livings of all lands.18 The wretched practice of annates,

13 One of these tracts, the Squalores curiae romanae, is treated at
length by Haller in an appendix, pp. 483-524.
14 Baur in his D. Christ. Kirche des Mittelalters, p. 258 sqq., brings
out this contrast sharply.
15 Matthew Paris complains again and again of the disparagement
done to the authority of prelates and the hurt done to the Church in Eng
land by the abuse of the papal power, especially through legates. Grosse-
teste had fought against it, but he did not call in question the rights of the
papacy as Wyclif did in the succeeding period.
16 Bernard, in his treatise on the papacy, De consideratione, complains;
bitterly of the papal legates who used their office for their own enrichment.
He could find only two examples of honest legates. Gregory VII. inaugu
rated the legatine system.
17 Jessop, in his Coming of the Friars, gives a number of cases in which-
English convents were engaged in litigation with the bishops and worried
the bishops almost to despair by the appeal of cases to Rome. These
casus papae reservati were often indefinitely extended and used by the curia
as a means for extracting bribes. Bernard (d. 1153), in a letter to Inno
cent II., complained of the evil done to the Church by these appeals. In
his De consideratione he emphasizes the greed of "the Romans."
18 One of the first cases of the exercise of this authority was the de
mand made by Adrian IV. upon the bishop of Paris of a canonry for the

i6
expectations and reservations became general, whereby the papal
treasury was filled with the payments of levies made upon new
appointees to ecclesiastical place ; and successors to the occupants
of church dignities and livings designated before they were va
cant. The papal exchequer came to be its most conspicuous feature
and how far obsequiousness could go is attested by the words of
Augustus Triumphus, who declared that it is impossible for the
pope to commit simony, "for he is above canon lav/ and no posi
tive laws can be binding on him."19 The opening of the archives
of the Vatican by the enlightened policy of Leo XIII has brought
to view a mass of papal registers and accounts of the curia,
which confirm our former judgments of the papal court in the
14th century. The right of the pope to levy taxes upon the
church at large, asserted during the crusades, became a regular
practice employed to support a hungry horde of retainers at Rome
and the luxuries of the Avignon court. Everything at Avignon
was bought and sold.
The Reformatory Councils were the product of the outraged
opinion of Christendom. The keen tracts of the day referred
back to the golden period of the church and affirmed the time

chancellor of Louis VII. Innocent III. (d. 1216) filled episcopates when
elections were not held at the proper time or not held in a way to suit him,
as in the case when his nominee, Stephen Langton, was consecrated arch
bishop of Canterbury and the two other candidates were set aside. Mat
thew Paris (anno 1240) speaks of three hundred Italians being supplied
with livings in England, three of them bishoprics. Italian followed Italian.
Grosseteste fought against this practice. But Robert of Lincoln held to
the theory that the pope had the right to bestow all places. See Haller, p.
43. Alvarus Pelayo, in his De planctu ecclesiae, declared the pope to be
distributor et dignitatum et officiorum bene ficior unique ecclesiasticorum
omnium. At the Council of Vienne, 1311, the bishop of Angievs complained
that in twenty years thirty vacancies had occurred in his see and that the
pope had filled all but two of them.
19 Quia est super jus et jura positiva eum non ligant. Haller, p. 45,
says of the Avignon Exile, Geldsammeln war jeztt die vornehmste Sorge. In
1313 the archbishop of Canterbury paid 32,000 marks for his pallium and
the archbishop of l'ork 9,500. Cardinal Hergenrother, writing of the mid
dle of the 15th century says (Kirchengesohichte by Kirsch, II., 1003 sq.) :
"The 15th century brought changes in the details of the papal administra
tion but no change in the system. . . . Simony became more and more
frequent. The bishops were secularized and neglected their episcopal resi
dences, thought only of show and money and were at times profligate. The
illegitimate sons of the higher ecclesiastics were easily legitimated that they
might receive consecration and Church livings."

17
had come when judgment should begin at the house of God.2"
Even the college of cardinals, in 1403, announced that there was
no health from the "sole of the foot to the crown of the head."
One of the chief features of these councils was the assertion of
their own authority. In a sermon preached at the Council of
Constance, Gerson took the ground that a general council might
assemble and act without being convoked by a pope and without
his consent, that the Church as a totality is represented in such
a council and the council is the supreme authority on the earth.
The Council of Constance, by formal act at its 5th session,
solemnly affirmed these principles. The act runs that the council
was legally assembled in the Holy Spirit and had its authority
directly from Jesus Christ, that a general council is superior to
the pope and that the pope is amenable to it.21 These acts the
Council of Basel reaffirmed and at the same time it excommuni
cated the reigning pope as a perjurer and heretic as the Council
of Constance had virtually elected pope Martin V.
These decrees mark a radical dissent from the theory of the
papacy, built up in the momentous struggle between the spiritual
and civil power during three centuries or more. And yet it
would be natural to suppose, that stated as they were, by councils
so eminent and in an age of widening horizons, their decision
would prevail. But it did not prevail. The Reformatory Councils
were proved to be merely a passing episode. The popes resent
ed the decrees of Constance as an unwarranted infringement of
their power. Backed by the curia, they not only ignored them,
but secured a complete triumph for the opposing theocratic ideas
of the papacy of Innocent III and Boniface VIII.
These are the stages in the process by which this remarkable
result was secured. In closing the Council of Constance, Martin
V declared he would execute its decrees so far as thev had been

20 Nicolas of Clemanges in his de ruina ecclesiae, DBllinger (Papst-
thum, p. 81), quotes Gerson as saying in a sermon, the state of the Church
was brutal — status ecclesiae factus et totus quasi brutalis et monstruosus.
Gower said, "The Roman court has not a single sound spot from head to
foot." Wright's ed. I. 356.
21 Quod ipsa in 8. Spirito legitime congregata .... concilium
generate ecclesiam catholicam representans potestatem a Christo immediate
¦ habet cui quilibet cujusunque status vel dignitatis, etiamsi papaUs existat,
obedire tenetur, etc., Mirbft : Quellen zur Geschichte des Papstthums, 2d
ed., p. 155. von der Hardt : Magnum oeeumenicum Gonstaniienae concilium,
IV., p. 89, sq.

i8
enacted in a conciliar way.22 These words were ominous, al
though it is probable he was referring only to the case presented
by the Teutonic knights, just as the council was closing. There
could be no doubt, however, about the meaning of Eugenius IV,
Martin's successor. In 1446, that pope declared that he accepted
the decrees of the Council of Constance, so far as they were with
out prejudice to the dignity of the apostolic see.28 He had resist
ed the calling of an oecumenical council as long as he was able,
and in these words he constituted himself the interpreter and
judge of the acts of a council. A council represented the con
sensus of Christendom and was in that sense the highest voice of
Christendom, but the pope was superior, for his was the voice of
God. Pius II went further. Before being elected pope, he ad
vocated the superior authority of a general council, but once
firmly seated in the papal chair, he solemnly (1459) threatened
with excommunication all appealing from the decision of the pope
to a general council.24 The Council of Constance had decided that

22 Omnia et singula decreta in materiis fidei per praesens sacrum con
cilium generate Constantiense conciliariter tenere et inviolabiter observare
volebat. Catholic historians differ among themselves as to the moment
when the Council of Constance began to be an oecumenical council. The
Ultromantanes reject the decrees of the fifth session on the ground that the
council had no oecumenical character at that time. Pastor, Gesch. der
Pdpste, I. 153, declares them "acts of violence passed by unauthorized per
sons," eine Gewaltthat unberechtigter Personen. As for Martin's words
adjourning the council, opinions also differ. The Ultromantanes extend
their application to all the acts of the council. Some of the most eminent
Catholic historians restrict the application to the Falkenberg incident, which
evened just as the council was closing. So Funk unequivocally in his Mar
tin V. und d. Konzil von Kostnitz, in his Abhandlungen, I. 489-508. Also
Kupper in Wetzer und Welte, VII. 1004, sq. Hefele, in the second edition
of his History of the Councils (I. 51 sq.) also advocates this view and re
calls his argument for the application of Martin's words to all the acts of
the council which he had made in the first edition, VII. :104 sq., 368-373.
The Council of Constance stood for what came later to be known as Gal-
licanism. 23 During the sessions of the Council of Basel John of Turrecremata,
1439, issued his famous tract on the authority of general councils and the
apostolic see, De potestate papali et de conciliis. His work is one of the
most notable pleas for the supreme authority of the pope.
24 In the bull execrabilis, 1-159, those who presume to appeal to a
general council are said to "be imbued with the spirit of rebellion" spiritu
rebellionis imbuti. In his letter to Cologne, 1463, Pius II., referring to his
change of attitude, called upon the people to "accept Pius and reject
Mneam," his former name being JEneas Sylvius.

19
a council should be convened at stated periods, the interval be
tween them being not more than ten years. This decision the
popes deliberately treated with contempt. The demand for a
council was made again and again. We recall, for example, the
appeal of Savonarola to a general council. Conclave after con
clave passed resolutions in favor of calling one, but popes were
no sooner elected than they seem to have forgotten all about the
resolutions. Why should the pope call an assembly which was
so apt to follow the example of the Council of Basel and sit in
judgment upon his acts? Was not. the pope by divine right God's
vicar on earth and supreme ruler in the Church? Why subject
himself to the inconvenience of a convocation of ecclesiastics and
doctors ?"
At last, after more than half a century of disappointment,
Julius II, in 1511, called the Fifth Lateran Council, the eigh
teenth among the general councils recognized by the Roman
Church. He was forced to do it in order to counteract the
Council of Siena, which was then in session and claimed to be
a general council. It included many prelates and all the French
cardinals and had the support of the French king. At this Fifth
Council of the Lateran, the theory, solemnly stated by the
Council of Constance, was repudiated. The boldest claims ever
made for papal absolutism before were reasserted. The as
sembled ecclesiastics listened to the most exaggerated laudations
of the papal office. Marcello, addressing1 the council, declared
the pope must be "physician, pilot, in short all things, to the
church, even a second God on earth."25 Cardinal Cajetan claimed
for the pope the two swords. And to cap all, Leo X issued
the bull, pastor aetemus,2' which asserted that it was altogether
necessary to salvation for every Christian to be subject to
the Roman pontiff, that the pope has authority over all councils
and that to him are committed the two swords, the spiritual
sword of authority within the church and the temporal sword,

25 Hefele-HergenrSther, Hist, of the Councils, VIII. 528-531, pro
nounces this expression to be rhetorical. It was first used by Gregory
VII. 26 The text is given in Mirbt 178 and Mansi. Hefele's treatment, Vol.
VIII., 710 sqq. of his Hist, of the Councils. The bull Vnam sanctam, is
sued by Boniface VIII., 1302, is the most emphatic statement of the su
premacy of the bishop of Rome and of the doctrine that outside the Church
of which he is the head "there is no salvation or remission of sins." This
bull Leo reaffirmed.

20
which, at his wink, Christian princes were bound to unsheathe.
This famous deliverance was issued in 15 16, ten months before
Luther nailed up his 95 Theses. And the council listened to
it without a dissenting voice.
So the Middle Ages went out. Mediaeval theology, at its
highest point of sacerdotal assumption, was reaffirmed. The
pope was above canon law. He was amenable to no tribunal on
earth. The power of excommunication, the interdict and the
inquisition, the power of setting up and deposing princes, of levy
ing taxes on all Christendom, and of filling all the livings in the
church, was in the hand of the . man at Rome, and he might
exercise the power as he pleased. Does this history of the 15th
century indicate any movement in the direction of the principle of
the Reformation and of modern society, the principle of the
dignity of the individual man as the interpreter of God's will?
Another aspect of the papacy in this century shows how far
the popes were off from any concern for the spiritual things of
the Church. Their lives flagrantly contradicted our Lord's decla
ration when he said "my kingdom is not of this world." From
Pius II to Leo X, or from 1460 to the Reformation, the popes
were of the earth, earthy. They lived in shameful defiance of
the spirit of holiness.
We are not limited to Protestant historians for this sweep
ing condemnation. Here again the opening of the Vatican
archives has put within the reach of the student new documents
which confirm the worst that was ever said of these men by their
contemporaries, Infessura, Burchard, Platina and Guicciardini
(1483-1540), or has been said since. Pastor, the ultramontane
historian, joins with Gregorovius and the late Bishop Creighton,
of London, in establishing their worldliness and profligacy. These
pontiffs seemed to have abandoned themselves to all evil.
Closing his brilliant chapters on Alexander VI, Pastor pro
nounces all attempts to. rehabilitate that pope as simply ridiculous,
geradesu lacherlich? I have time to give only a few strokes.
The six or eight popes of the last half century of the Middle
Ages practiced neptoism without a blush.28 Irrespective of age

27 In view of Ollivier's attempt to do so, Pastor, I. 589 ; III. 261.
28 Ranke, Hist, of the Popes, Germ., ed. I., p. 29, says that in earlier
times the popes had before them great ideals, such as the struggle with
heathenism, the conversion of the modern barbarians, etc. Now they di-

21
or moral fitness, they appointed their relatives and the sons of
princes to the highest offices in the church. The son of the Duke
of Este was made cardinal at 15, the son of Lorenzo-, of Florence,
at the same age, a son of the king of Portugal at seven. Piety
was not the fashion in high ecclesiastical circles and not a quali
fication for high ecclesiastical preferment.
Pluralities were heaped upon cardinals and the favorites of
popes and princes and the exercise of spiritual functions was
completely forgotten in the greed for church dignities and
revenues.28 The leaders in extravagance and luxury in Rome were the
cardinals, and Rome was the most luxurious court in Europe.
Their splendid palaces and their furnishings, their lavish enter
tainments, their kennels and their stables, and their mistresses fill
the pages of the contemporary annalists who lived in Rome.
The cardinals gambled for large sums, and the sons of popes
were losers of fortunes over night at the gaming table.80
The law of celibacy was laughed at and popes conferred
dukedoms and the red hat on their own sons and arranged mar
riage alliances for their own daughters with the natural and il
legitimate sons of the chief princes of the age.81
The papal elections were the scene of open bribery and
enormous sums were paid for the spiritual crown of Christendom.
Pius II did not hesitate to detail in a letter to- his father the
measures to which he had resorted to corrupt one woman, and in
one of his books gave an account of another episode of the same
kind, in which he had figured.''

rected their attention to the development of their temporal power and glory
as never before.
29 Julian Rovere, afterwards Pope Julius II., was appointed arch
bishop of Avignon, archbishop of Bologna, bishop of Lausanne, of Viviers,
of Munde, of Ostia, abbot of several abbeys, etc. See Pastor, II. 429.
30 Cardinal Raffaele won 8,000 ducats at one sitting from Cardinal
Balue, and at another 14,000 ducats from Franceschetto, Innocent VIII.'s
son. When Innocent demanded the return of the money the gay cardinal
excused himself on the ground it had already been spent upon his new palace.
31 For example, the second husband of Alexander VI.'s daughter, Lu-
crezia Borgia, was the illegitimate son of the King of Portugal.
32 Pius II. was one of the chief literary men of his age, and one can-
Dot help but admire the vigor with which he ruled as pope. He was urgent
in his effort to arouse the Christian princes to undertake a crusade against
the Turks. He called them together in an assembly*, at Ferrara, but all to

22
Of Paul II, his contemporary says, that "he slept in the day
time and kept awake at night looking over his jewels," of which
he left drawersful at his death.38
Sixtus IV practiced nepotism as it had never been known
before and involved cities and states of Italy in wars that his
unworthy nephews might be enriched and advanced.84
Innocent VIII (1484-1492) licensed houses of ill fame and
had eight sons and as many daughters, so that the pasquinade
ran through the streets of the holy city that it was with pro
priety, the Romans called him "father."35
Of Alexander VI, what shall we say ?88 He was pope when
no purpose. With purpose undaunted, Pius went to Ancona, intending to
lead the movement in person, but he found only two ships awaiting him.
He died in 1464, with a prayer on his lips for "the holy expedition." Pas
tor calls him den geistlichen liebenswiirdigen Siener. II. 22-33. Pius went
so far in the letter to his father, above referred to, as to call "wantonness
an old vice. He was no eunuch nor without passion. He could not claim
to be wiser than Solomon or holier than David." Pius wrote to the young
Duke of Tyrol, Sigismund, not to resist the blandishments of Venus.
33 So Platina in his Hist, of the Popes. Paul's successor found 54 silver
chests filled with pearls worth 300,000 ducats and a drawer containing
seven large sapphires and other precious stones. Of the popes who followed
Paul the Catholic historian Hefele-Knopfler, Kirchengeschwhte, p. 483, says,
"The tiara seemed to them to be first of all a means for the enrichment and
elevation of their families. To accomplish this end all the papal power was
made subservient in the most unscrupulous manner."
34 His nephew, Riario, was made cardinal at 17, two other nephews
at the ages of 23 and 28. Pastor, II. :425, speaks of Sixtus' numerous and
worthless relatives zahlreiehe and univiirdige Verwandten. He created a
commission for the disposal of Church livings. Dollinger, The Church, p.
364. 35 Funk, Kirchengeschichte, 373, says, "Everything seemed to be set up
for sale." Under this pope the pasqunade ran :
Ocro nocens pueros, gennit totidem puellas
Hunc merito potuit dicere Roma Patrem.
These children were born to Innocent before he was made pope. Infessura,
a Roman contemporary, in his Diarium urbis Romae says : "In darkness
Innocent was elected, in darkness he lives and in darkness he will disap
pear." The nuptials of one of his daughters was celebrated in the Vatican
and also the nuptials of one of his granddaughters, in 1488, with a member
of the house of the Medici. Infessura is our authority for Innocent's decree
licensing houses of ill repute.
36 Infessura says that as soon as Alexander was elected he began "to
distribute his goods among the poor." In a dispatch to the Duke of Este,
published for the first time by Pastor, Giovanni Boccaccio, bishop of Modena,
gives a list of the bribes which Alexander paid for his election. The Catholic
historians, Hefele, Hergenrother and Pastor make no pretense of concealing
his vices and crimes.

23
Columbus reached these shores and his office gave him the power,
by one stroke of his pen, to divide the Americas between Portugal
and Spain. Borgia was his family name, and that name has a
place among the most infamous that history knows. His chil
dren filled Rome with their intrigues and scandals. His son
Caesar, he allowed to fence in the square in front of St. Peter's
and use it for a bull fight in which Caesar himself killed five
bulls. And this was in the sacred Jubilee Year of 1500! Alex
ander freely gave entertainments in the Vatican and at one of
them 50 courtezans were present.37 Children were born to him
there and at least one of these was legitimated in two bulls re
cently discovered in Modena and pronounced by Pastor as well
as Gregorovius, to be of undoubted genuineness.
Alexander's son Caesar, a virtuoso in crime, but cardinal and
archbishop, the father dispensed from his sacred vows, that he
might marry a relative of the king of France. Alexander made
him duke of the Romagna and allowed him to use all the weapons
at the pope's control to harry and plunder families and to re
duce towns for his enrichment and pleasures. The most holy
things were desecrated that this son might be gratified. On each
of two occasions, when cardinals were appointed, he received
more than 100,000 ducats in bribes. It was this Alexander who
declared Savonarola should be put to death, even if he were
another John the Baptist. He died in 1503 and the evidence is
very strong that he died of the poisonous cup which he and his
son had prepared for a rich cardinal and which the pope took
by mistake.38 Alexander is a terrible weight for the good papist
to carry and we might easily suppose that his pontificate would
be a final refutation of the dogma of papal infallibility. But not
so. Pastor declares him to have "been a sensualist to the end"
and yet, ultramontane as he is, he still holds on to the ultramon
tane theory of the infallibility of the pope,30 for was not Alexander
kept from announcing any heretical doctrine !

37 So Burchard, a contemporary, III. 167.
38 Guicciardini, Ranke, I. 35 and Hase (Kirchengeschichle, III. 353)
adopt this view. Pastor, III. 471, Creighton, IV. 43, Hergenrother, II. 752
are against it. Gregorovius, Eng. ed., VII. 516, regards the evidence as
evenly balanced and comes to no positive decision.
39 He says, "Yet the Church's teaching continued unharmed. It was
as if Providence wanted to show that men may injure the Church but that
it is not in their power to destroy it. As a bad setting does not diminish

24
Julius II and Leo X close the list of the popes of the Middle
Ages. Julius was a warrior.40 He went to the camp, clad in a
coat of mail. Michel Angelo, showing Julius the model of the
statute he was preparing of him, represented his right hand as
uplifted. "What are you going to put into it?" said the pope.
The artist suggested a book. "No," replied Julius, "a sword. I
am no scholar."
The Medicis were lovers of ease, luxury and art. And Leo
X was a Medici. "Let us enjoy the papacy, now that God has
given it to us." So he wrote to his brother. He wore boots
and spurs, loved the chase and fishing and played cards. Were
these things vices? No, but Leo might have shown some in
terest in higher things. Was he not the supreme priest of
Christendom? And yet he looked on at the performance of
meretricious plays, one of them la Calandra, performed in the
Vatican Sunday evening.41 "He would have been a perfect pope,"
wrote Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent, "if he had
combined with his other qualities some appearance of religion."
For sixty years the pope had been living in defiance of the
simplest precepts of religion. Is it surprising that Leo X, this
votary of pleasure, on hearing the news from Wittenberg should
have exclaimed, "It is a brawl of Saxon monks. When they get
sober, they will think differently."
Such was the papacy in these closing years of the Middle
Ages. It reaffirmed the theory that the pope stands in the place
of God on earth. At the same time it was sunken in profligacy
and trafficked in holy things as if they were common objects of
barter. There was no other period in the history of the Roman

the value of the precious stone, so the sinfulness of a priest cannot do any
essential hurt to his dispensation of the sacraments and the doctrine com
mitted to him. Gold remains gold, whether dispensed by a clean hand or
an unclean. The papal office is exalted far above its occupants and cannot
lose its dignity or gain by the essential worthiness or unworthiness of its
occupants. Peter sinned, and yet the supreme pastoral office was commit
ted to him. It was from this standpoint Leo I. declared that the dignity
of St. Peter is not lost even in an unworthy successor." III. 475.
40 Julius had three children, but the domestic scandals of the Vatican
ceased in his reign. He was a man of great ability and was in a sense the
founder of the modern papal state. He drove the French out of Northern
Italy and was contemplating a campaign against the Spaniards in Naples
when he died.
41 Among the first cardinals whom he appointed was the grandson of
Innocent VIII., then 21.

25
priesthood but one, when it seemed to have abandoned all
spiritual conceptions of Christianity. That other period was the
ioth century and then the Ottos from the North went down and
purged Rome and the church of the intolerable scandal present
ed by the papacy. There was no disposition within the papacy
to reform itself and perhaps it is true, as a great historian of the
Renaissance has remarked, "the Reformation) saved the papacy."12
The power which again cleansed proceeded from the North.
Popular Piety and Education. In the popular piety and
education of the age, we meet a second great force of the 15th
century, but here we are confronted with opposing tides. A fair
statement of the case seems to be that among the people, in Ger
many at least, there was some longing for a better state of affairs
than that which existed in the church. But there was less of
conscious alienation from the church or open attack upon its in
stitutions than in some of the preceding centuries. It is true
the Hussites of Bohemia remained, but they were scattered. Lol-
lardism in England was effaced, or almost entirely effaced. In
France the heretical sects had been a prominent feature of her
history in the 13th century, but the Albigenses were now a
memory. It would be a mistake to suppose that in the last century of
the Middle Ages, there was a decline of religion.43 As for wor
ship, the cult of Mary flourished and received a great impulse
from the commendation of the rosary. The worship of relics
continued. As late as 1509 no less a personage than Albrecht, of
Brandenburg, had gathered 8,933 relics and 42 whole bodies of
saints, all of which were supposed to have religious potency.
And Frederick the Wise, soon to become the defender of Luther,
brought back with him, from the East, 5,005 sacred relics, all of
• them giving 100 days absolution.44 In Rome, even, under the
42 Burckhardt. Reumont, in his Geschichtc der Stadt Rom, III., pt.
2, page 128, says of Leo X. : "He did not apprehend the duty of regener
ating the papacy and himself and with these Christendom." Gerhard
Ficker, in his Das ausgehende Mittelalter, etc., Leipzig, 1903, speaks of "the
incalculable advantage which accrued to the Catholic Church from the Ref
ormation," p. 13.
43 Karl Miiller, Kirchengeschichte, II. 159, says, "It would be quite
wrong to imagine that at the close of the Middle Ages the Church was only
in a process of decline."
44 See Bezold, Geschichtc d. Reformation, p. 99, sq. Ficker, p. 7, sqq.,
gives prominence to the interest in pilgrimages in the latter years of the
¦century in Germany.

26
unsavory popes of the latter half of the century, relics were
received by processions of cardinals. In 1462 St. Andrew's head
was received by Bessarion and two other cardinals at-Narni, and
by Pius II and all the cardinals at the Ponte Molle.
In a Latin address, Pius felicitated St. Andrew upon find
ing at last his appropriate place at the side of the other Apostles,.
from whom he had been separated so long. And so it was with
the Holy Lance. It was received with great honors and Inno
cent VIII said mass over it in St. Peters. And this instrument
was the gift of no less a personage than the sultan of Turkey .
St. Anna, the mother of Mary, was placed among the saints by
Alexander VI, the saint to whom Luther, before becoming a
monk appealed.
In the years 1478 and 1485 three documents were issued
from Rome, which imply the strong hold religion had upon the
hearts of men. In the first, Sixtus IV, formally announced that
indulgences inure to the good of souls in purgatory and people
believed it, and the traffic in indulgences got a new impulse. In
the second, the bull of Innocent VIII against witches, the pope
sanctioned the wildest tales about witches, even to their inter
course with demons, and great numbers of these unfortunate peo
ple were tortured and burned in Germany and Northern Italy.45
The third, issued by Sixtus IV, established the inquisition in its

45 Innocent's bull, Summis desiderantcs, is given entire by Hansen in
his Quellen und Vntersuchungen zur Geschichtc des Hexenwalins, pp. 25-27
(Bonn, 1901). Also Mirbt, p. 171, sq. Hansen has offered in the volume
referred to a most valuable collection of documents bearing on witches and
their persecution. Nothing- at all equal to it exists. It was preceded by
his very valuable history of the subject, Munich, 1900. He has put it be
yond question that the Inquisition was the invention of the popes. Inno
cent's bull against witches would seem to be of itself a final blow against
the doctrine of papal infallibility. But the advocate of that theory easily
finds an explanation and saves the theory. Innocent, he says, was acting
upon information he received of the supposed activity of witches in Ger
many. The information may have been false, but Innocent cannot be
blamed for that or. for basing his bull calling for the torture and execution
of witches upon it. In 1487 the notorious Witches Hammer, Malleus male-
ficarum, was published, a manual for the use of the inquisitors, and started
on its nefarious crusade. Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine before him, be
lieved in witchcraft. Alexander VI., Julius II., Leo X. and Adrian VI.
(1523) urged on the prosecution of the unfortunate creatures. Hansen
gives the documents of these popes, pp. 30-35. Hans Sachs, of Nurnberg,
breathed a better spirit when he wrote, 1521 :
Des Teufels Eh und Reuterei
1st nur Gespenst und Fantasey.

27
Spanish form and the bloody work of the Torquemadas in Spain
and the Duke of Alva, in the lowlands began.48 Thus far we
certainly find anything but a movement toward a purer form of
Christian worship and practice.
In England, the 15th century passed away with scarcely an
event of historic importance in its ecclesiastical annals. There
was no vigorous protest against Rome. Grosseteste and Wyclif
were gone and had no successors. The universities had run down
to one-fifth of their former attendance. The monasteries were
no longer seats of learning. The explanation of this state of
affairs is that England was distracted by the wars of the Roses.
In their book on the collection of the ecclesiastical acts and
charters of England down to 1700, Gee and Hardy give 124 such
acts, and only two belong to this century.47
There was another side to the popular religion of the century.
In the quiet places along the Rhine and in the Lowlands, rills of
a purer piety were running. Tauler, an honored name, belongs
to the century before this one. So do Suso and Gerhard de
Groot and Ruysbroeck and Radewyns and other mystics, who
from out their own experience called for a closer life of com
munion with God. Tauler had said "wisdom is not learned in
Paris but in the sufferings of the Lord." These leaders were
dead but they had pupils and the Brothers of the Common Life
at Zwolle and many other convents lived a quiet life of peaceful
communion with God and taught it. The Imitation of Christ was
penned by one of their number ; the little book called The German
Theology, which Luther praised, by another.48 The Franciscans
complained bitterly of the Brothers of the Common Life, but they
toiled on and from their schools went Erasmus John of Goch,
John of Wesel and a long list of school teachers beginning with
Hegius and von Plangen. These mystics, however, did not at
tack the sacramental system of the church ; and their convents at
the opening of the sixteenth century were in a state of decline.
We honor them, for they walked with God in silent pathways and

46 The contention of Hefele, in his Cardinal Ximenes, that the Span
ish Inquisition owed its origin to the Spanish king, Pastor has effectually
refuted. Sixtus IV. was its author.
47 The act for burning heretics was passed in 1401.
48 From this school proceeded other manuals of devotion, such as
the Selemvurzgdrtlein, Selenschatz, 1491, etc., upon which Janssen lays so
much stress.

28
left on the pages of the history of their time the fragrance of
spiritual habits, but they did not have any permanent effect upon
the religious habits of Europe.
There was another group of men, university teachers, scat
tered in the region about Cologne but agreeing in expressing dis
sent from this or that mediaeval belief. John of Goch, John of
Wesel and Wessel spoke of the invisible church and of the Scrip
tures as the final seat of authority. But they gathered no school
around them and it is probable that their utterances, still in part
imprinted, would not now arrest any attention had the move
ment, started by Luther, not called attention to them.
In one more locality there seemed to be some promise of
better things. The sky of Italy was suddenly aflame with the
descriptions of the monk of Florence, the preacher who made the
duomo ring with his expositions of the prophets and his predic
tion of coming judgments. But Savonarola never included in his
movement doctrinal or ecclesiastical reforms, and what there was
of his movement died with him, though his name lives on as an in
spiration and a rebuke.
A good deal has been made of the eighteen editions of the
German Bible which left the press before Luther's New Testa
ment appeared in 1522. Men were no doubt beginning to look
into the Scriptures for themselves, but the Church authorities did
not encourage the practice. The notorious edict of Bertholdt,
archbishop of Mainz, effectually checked any movement for the
free distribution of the Scriptures in the vernacular.43 That pre
late declared the rude German to be an unfit vehicle for the di
vine writings. The Bible was not to be put into the hands of
private and unlearned men or to be given to women, femineo
sexui.™ And after the promulgation of this edict in 1485 only three
editions appeared as against fifteen before. As for the translation
of the Bible into English, we know that, long after Luther ap
peared, there was no place in all England where that book might
be translated, and when Tyndale's New Testament appeared from
the printing presses along the Rhine in 1526, all the copies the

49 See the document in Mirbt, p. 173.
50 The disparagement of women even in the closing years of the Mid
dle Ages has a remarkable illustration in the statements of the Witches
Hammer.

29
bishop of London could lay his hands upon were cast into the
flames. There was some preaching in Germany. Preachers were
scarce but there was a demand for them, which Luther found
and satisfied. A book of devotion, the Selentrost, 1483, tells this
story: A holy man met the devil carrying a bag. "What have
you got there ?" he said. The devil replied : "I am carrying boxes
filled with different kinds of ointment. In this black box is a
salve with which I close men's eyes during sermons, for the
preachers are too clever in getting men away from me. One ser
mon will rob me of souls I have had in my power for thirty or
forty years."51
Society in Europe was still closely bound to the church and
did not think of any separation. But there was religious unrest
in Germany and also beyond.52 This can be proved by chance
statements predicting the coming of a better time and by the
reception given to Luther and the other Reformers when they
spake, as well as by the audience given to the ridicule of priestly
obscurantism by Erasmus and Ulrich von Hutten. The geo
graphical discoveries of the age helped to develop this unrest and
give men hope of better things. The forecast of Lefevre d'Etaples
the teacher of Farel, is perhaps the most remarkable of its kind.
The signs of the time, he wrote, "announce that a reformation of
the Church is near at hand and, while God is opening new ways
for the preaching of the Gospel by the Spanish and Portuguese,
we must hope that he will also visit his Church and raise her from
the basement into which she has fallen."53 These words were
written five years before Luther's protest against the traffic in in
dulgences.64

51 Quoted by Janssen, I. :37. Geiler of Kaisersberg said, It is dan
gerous to give children a knife to cut bread for themselves, for they are
likely to cut their own hands. So with the Scriptures, which contain the
bread of God. They must be read and expounded by those more advanced
in knowledge and experience and who can make doubtful meanings clear.
52 Ficker, p. 78, says the people at large were not alienated from the
Church. 53 Janssen, II. 300, quotes Hassenstein, who wrote from Prag in 1502,
"Nobody is hindered from professing here whatever pleases him. Some
think one way of salvation as good as another, and some think hell a fabri
cation. They preach their views openly. Men and women, old and young,
dispute on matters of faith and expound the Holy Scriptures according to
their lights." Prag had not forgotten the lessons taught by Huss.
54 I have not set forth the moral decline of conventual life which
some writers emphasize. See Ficker, pp. 27-29, who speaks of the "extra-

30
Commerce. The third potent force of this century was con
nected with its commerce. The industrial change then going on
deserves a larger treatment than it has received as a movement
preparing the mind, at least of the German people, for the Refor
mation. Exploration and the extension of commerce have in more
periods than one preceded a revival of missionary enterprise.55
The fifteenth century was a time of revolution in the methods
of trade and the comforts and prices of living. The world would
never be again just what it had been before. There was marked
restlessness among the artizan and peasant classes. This indus
trial unrest was adapted to encourage, if not to beget, unrest in
things ecclesiastical and to accustom the mind to the thought of
change there.
The center of trade had shifted from Italy to the cities
north of the Alps and to the Portuguese coast.58 Niirnberg, Ulm
and Augsburg in Southern Germany, Bruges, Antwerp and other
cities along the lower Rhine and in Flanders and the cities of
the Hanseatic League were bustling marts, turning out new and
wonderful products of manufacture and drawing the products
of the outside world through London, Lisbon, Lyons and Venice.
Energy and enterprise were making Germany rich and her mer
cantile houses had their permanent representatives and depots in
Venice, Antwerp and other ports.57
ordinary immorality of priests and nuns," and Capes : Hist, of Engl. Church
in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, p. 301, sqq. The evidences of
moral degeneracy in monastic life are not so glaring in the beginning of the
16th century as in some other periods of the Church. Nicolas of Clemanges
early in the 15th century declared the monasteries of nuns to be nothing
else than "houses of prostitution of Venus."
55 As, for example, in the 18th century, when Carey and the modern
missionary era followed hard upon the voyages of Captain Cook and La
Perouse. The same was the case with the missions to China, started dur
ing the Crusades and in consequence of them, etc.
56 For the transfer of the centre of the Levantine trade from Venice
to Lisbon at the beginning of the 16th century, see Heyd: Geschichte des
Levantenhandels im Mittelalter, II. 505-540. He says that the discovery
of the route to India around the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese
hatte ivie ein Donnerschlag am heiteren Himmel die Genviither der Vene-
tianer beriihrt. II. 514. To counteract the turn of the stream of trade
in the direction of Lisbon, the Venetians proposed a scheme for cutting
a canal through the Isthmus of Suez in 1500, and in the same interest
the Turks actually began that enterprise in 1529. Manuel, king of Portu
gal, in 1505 stationed a fleet at Calicut to prevent the Venetians from in
terfering with the export of Indian goods to Portugal.
57 For the German Board of Trade at Venice, the fondaco dei Tedeschi,
see Heyd, II. 520, etc.

31
Methods of business, such as to-day are suggesting grave
problems to the political economist and moralist, were introduced
in the fifteenth century. Trading companies and monopolies came
upon the stage and startled the advocates of the old regime by
the extent and boldness of their operations. Trusts flourished in
Augsburg and other German cities. Individuals and companies
cornered the import trade, the grain crop, the wine harvest, the
silver, copper and iron product, sugar, linen, leather, pepper, even
soap, for they used soap also in those days. The Hochstetters,
the Ebners and the Fuggers were among the great speculative
and trading firms of the age.58 They carried things with a high
hand. Ambrose Hochstetter of Augsburg, for example, one sea
son bought up all the ash wood, another all the grain and another
all the wine. Nor was the art of adulteration left for these later
and, perhaps more degenerate, times to practice. They conde
scended to small things, even to the mixing of brick dust with
pepper.5' Commodities rose suddenly in price. In Germany,
wine rose in 15 10 49 per cent., and grain 32 per cent. Imperial
diets took cognizance of these conditions and tried to correct the
evils complained of by regulating the prices of goods."' Munici
palities did the same. Preachers like Geiler of Kaisersberg made
the charge that the monopolists feared neither God nor man and
called upon the cities to banish them. Professors of jurispru
dence, for there was at that time no department of social science,

58 Writing in 1458, Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II.), one of the most ob
servant of travelers, said, "The German nation takes the lead of all others
in wealth and power." He spoke of Cologne as unexcelled in magnificence
among the cities of Europe. At Nurnberg he found simple burghers living
in houses, the like of which the kings of Scotland would gladly have had to
house in. Froissart, writing in 1497, was amazed at the wealth and pros
perity of the German cities. For other testimonies see Janssen, II. 58, sqq.
59 In 1504 Lisbon controlled two-thirds of the pepper trade. In that
year the Portuguese ships carried 380 tons of pepper to England. Heyd,
II. 526. 60 So the Diet of Cologne, 1512. It declared, however, at the same
time that its acts were not designed to prevent the association of merchants
in trading companies. The Diet of Innsbruck, 1518, did the same, and
complained of the trading companies for driving out the small dealers and
fixing prices arbitrarily. Trithemius argued for laws protecting the people
from the overreachings of avarice, and declared that whosoever bought up
meat, grain and other articles of diet to force up prices is no better than a
common criminal. See Janssen, II. 102, sq. Janssen himself applauds
the sumptuary legislation of the 15th century as an evidence of the Chris
tian spirit of that period.

32
inveighed against monopolies as spiders' webs to ensnare the in
nocent.81 It as a fast age. There was no precedent for what
was going on. Men sighed for the good old times. Speculation
was rampant and the prospect of quick gains easily captivated the
people.62 They took shares in the investment companies and often
lost everything.03 It was noticed at the time that the directors of
the companies were able, from their full knowledge of the con
cerns, to avoid losses which the common and unsuspecting in
vestor had to bear. The confusion was increased by the fact that
town aldermen and city councillors often took stock in the con
cerns. It also happened that the great traders whose ventures
involved others in loss were conspicuous in church affairs, and
the complaint was made that the leaders in the speculative world
were not called by appropriate names but denominated "clever
folk." To the wealth arising from manufactures and foreign com
merce were added the riches which were being dug up from the
newly opened mines of silver, copper and iron in Bohemia and
Saxony.84 Avarice was cried down as the besetting sin of the
age and commerce was in some quarters looked upon as carried
on in defiance of the simplest precepts of the Gospel.65
With wealth came extravagance in dress and at the table.
Municipalities legislated against it and imperial parliaments

61 So Christopher Kuppner of Leipzig, in his tract on usury, 1508.
He insists that magistrates should proceed against trading companies and
rich merchants who through agents in other lands bought up saffron, pepper,
corn and what not and sold them at whatsoever price they chose. Janssen,
II. 82. 62 The capital of the Fuggers increased in seven years 13,000,000
florins. This was according to the testimony of the secretary to the house.
Conrad Meyer. Rem of Augsburg, between 1511-1517, realized from an in
vestment of 500 florins, placed in the hands of Ambrose Hochstetter, no
less than 24,500 florins.
63 See Janssen, II. 87. A preacher in 1515 declared the spirit of
speculation then prevailing to be of recent growth, only ten years old, and
that it had not existed in former times.
64 In 1452 the king of England sent for miners from Bohemia and
Austria. 65 Thomas Aquinas and the Mediaeval Church condemned all taking of
interest as usury and unlawful, and the feeling was that the new methods
of merchandise came under the head of usury. See Janssen, II. 98, sqq.
The montes pietatis, the loaning institutions conducted by the Franciscans,
are well set forth by Holzapfel : Die Anfange der Montes Pietatis, 1462-
1516, Munich, 1903.

33
sought to check it by arbitrary rules. Wimpheling says services
of gold were not unusual and that he himself had eaten from
golden plates at Cologne. Complaint was frequently made at
the diets that men were being1 brought to poverty by their ex
penditures for dress upon themselves and the expenditures of the
female members of their households.
Peasants were limited to a certain kind of cloth for their
outer garments and to a maximum price.00 The women had
their share in making the disturbance and dignified town councils
sat in judgment upon the number of gowns and other articles
of apparel and ornament the ladies of the day might possess with
out detriment to the community or hurt to the solvency of their
indulgent husbands. The council of Ratisbon, for example, in
1485 made it a rule that the wives and daughters of distinguished
burghers should be limited to eight dresses, six long cloaks, three
dancing gowns, one plaited mantle with not more than three sets
of sleeves of silk velvet and brocade, two pearl hair bands not to
cost more than 12 florins, one tiara of gold set with pearls, not
more than three veils costing 8 florins each, etc.07 But why enu
merate the whole list of articles ? Perhaps the women conformed,
as they sometimes do. And perhaps they ventured the sugges
tion that the councillors had municipal business enough to en
gage their full attention without stepping aside into departments
with which they were not so familiar. Geiler of Kaisersberg, the
great preacher of his day, had his word to say for these innova
tions of an extravagant age, the women with two dresses for
each day and others for dancing, the long trains trailing in the
dust, the cocks' feathers worn in the women's hats and the long
hair falling down over their shoulders.08 The times were bad. It
is, however, pleasant to recall that a contemporary annalist com
mended as praiseworthy the habit of bathing at least "once every
two weeks." I have spoken of the commercial class. Among the artisans

66 The Diets of 1498 and 1500 forbade artizans to wear gold, silver,
pearls, velvet and embroidered stuffs. They were forbidden to pay more
than one-half a florin a yard for the cloth of their coats and mantles.
67 Janssen, II., 63, sq.
68 The Narrenschiff said, "There is no more simplicity anywhere in the
world."

34
and the peasants the unrest asserted itself in strikes and upris
ings, strikes for shorter hours, for better food and for better
wages. Sometimes a municipality and" a gild were at strife for
years. Sometimes a city was bereft at one stroke of all the
workers of a given craft as was Nurnberg of her tin men in 1475.
The gilds of tailors are said to have been most given to strikes.
The new order involved the peasant class in more hardship
than any other. The peasants were made the victims of the inso
lence and violence of the land-owners, who encroached upon their
fields and their traditional but unwritten rights, and deprived them
of the right to fish and hunt and gather wood in the forests.
Their unrest found expression in threats of popular leaders and
uprisings. The church came in for its share of condemnation.
One-fifth of the soil of Germany was in the possession of con
vents and other religious establishments and the peasant leaders
called upon the monks and priests to divide and distribute their
lands. In their marching songs they appealed to Christ to keep
them from putting the priests to death. The Peasant War of 1525
was not the product of the abuse of the principle of personal
freedom introduced by the Reformation. It was one of a long
series of uprisings and it has been said that if the Reformation
had not come and diverted the attention of the people, it is likely
Germany would have been shaken by such a social revolution in
the sixteenth century as the world has seldom seen.08
In England the restlessness was not so demonstrative, but
the condition of the laboring classes was deplorable. Their hard
ships in a previous century had called forth the rebellion of Watt
Tyler. More's Utopia gives some idea of what they were, on the-
eve of the Reformation. The acts of Parliament fixing wages as
late as 15 15™ seemed to More to be "nothing else than a conspir-
69 Ficker, p. 107, sq. Miiller: Kirchengeschichte, II., p. 196, sq.
Among these peasant leaders the Piper of Niklashausen was one of the most
prominent. In the last quarter of the 15th century a number of tracts
were circulated among the peasants, calling upon them to resist the oppres
sions on the ruling classes and to demand the secularization of Church
lands. In spite of such testimonies Janssen declares that the condition of
the laboring man in 1450 was much better than it was a century later,
after the Reformation had divided Germany.
70 More says: "The rich are ever striving to pare away something
more from the daily wages of the poor by private fraud and even by public
law. They devise every means to secure to themselves what they have
amassed by wrong, and then take to their own use and profit at the lowest
possible price the work and labor of the poor." See Green, Hist, of the

35
acy of the rich against the poor," and according to him "the labor
ing man was doomed to a life so wretched that even a beast's life
in comparison seemed to be enviable."
Enough has been said to show what a mighty change was
going on in the industrial and social conditions of Europe. And
I have not spoken of the discoveries of the New World and the
effects they must have had upon the minds of men in enlarging
their horizon. The intellect could not remain inert in regard to
matters spiritual at a time when it was moved by the bustle and
enterprise of the new trade. A new order of things had set in.
When the Reformation came, the chief centers of business in Ger
many became for the most part citidels of the new religious
movement, Niirnberg, Ulm, Strassburg, Augsburg, Frankfurt,
Liibeck. The free atmosphere of the new period was being felt
and intellectual emancipation was longed for. Men were musing
in their hearts.
The Renaissance. The last of the mighty forces of the
closing century of the Middle Ages was the Renaissance, as it
was called in Italy, or Humanism, as it was called in northern
lands. This movement forms one of the most picturesque chap
ters in all civilization. The study of Greek was once more pur
sued in the West. The collection of ancient manuscripts became
a passion. The classic world of Greece and Rome lived again.71
Europe arose as out of a long sleep. Men opened their eyes and
saw, as Mr. Taine put it. A like movement has occurred in our
time with the recovery of the Sinaitic manuscript, the Didache,
the Hammurabi code and other priceless documents and the
uncovering of the mounds along the Nile and in Mesopotamia.
The Renaissance made the discovery of man and the world. The
Schoolmen had forgotten both. The world wanted something
more intelligible and human than theological dialetics had offered.
Popes and princes vied with each other in cultivating the arts
and founding libraries. Italian sculptors and painters created a

English People, I. 101, sq. The famous statute of laborers of 1350 fixed
the wages of reapers at threepence a day. The statute of 1444 raised it to
fivepence a day.
71 To Greek and Roman culture was also added the revival of Hebrew
scholarship in the Christian Church. Poggio made collections of Hebrew
MSS. for the Vatican. Nicholas V. offered 5,000 florins for a copy of the
Hebrew Matthew.

36
new world of artistic productions which are the glory of Italy and
the admiration of the earth. The laity now asserted its rights in
the domain of learning and culture.
But in Italy the Renaissance had paganism in its heart72 and
Italy has remained bound in ecclesiasticism. Providence seems
to have had the design of showing again that intellectual and
artistic culture may flourish while the process of moral and so
cial decline goes on. No regenerating wave passed over her
society or cleansed her palaces. The outward forms of civiliza
tion did not check the inward decline. The Italian character,
says Gregorovius,'3 "in the last thirty years of the fifteenth century
displays a trait of diabolical passion. Tyrannicide, conspiracies
and deeds of treachery were universal." Astrologers flourished
and popes regulated their movements by the horoscope. In the
period of Athenian greatness the process of the intellectual sub
limation of the few was accompanied by the process of moral
decay in the many. So now the glorious art of Raphael and
Lionardo da Vinci did not purify. The Renaissance loved color.
It discarded repentance. The outward forms of art were per
fect. The inward soul was burning with the fever of levity and
lust. The patrons of pictured beauty and sculptored proportion
were sunken in self-indulgence and not seldom adepts in crime.
Italy's priestcraft admired Madonnas and had no preacher but
one and him they burnt. Savonarola's admiring disciple, Pico della
Mirandola, presented a memorial to the Fifth Lateran which de
clared that if they should "delay to heal the wounds of the Church,
Christ would cut off the corrupted members with fire and sword.
Christ had cast out the money changers, why should not Leo exile
the worshippers of the many golden calves ?" But Italy and
southern Europe chose to retain the pope and rejected the Bible.
The North had no Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio or
Thomas Aquinas, but it had its Tauler and Thomas a Kempis.
72 See for some good remarks Sohm : Kirchengeschichte, section
33. Peter Pomponazzo seriously uttered the absurdity that a thing may at
the same time be true in theology and false in philosophy.
73 VIII., 282. Pastor, III., 255, says the state of morals which pre
vailed in Rome and the Vatican prevailed in all the Italian cities, Burck-
hardt, in his Hist, of the Renaissance, p. 491, says that in Italy the sense of
sin with men of culture had passed away. The Fifth Lateran Council felt
itself called upon to reassert the doctrine of immortality. Ranke, Hist.
of the Popes, I. 49, says "that one did not count for a cultured person in
Italy who did not cherish some erroneous views about Christianity."

37
There the Renaissance movement was met by a serious religious
concern. German Humanism had conscience. In England, led
by Grocyn, Colet and others, it introduced Greek into Oxford as
a means of unlocking the New Testament and established gram
mar schools like St. Paul's. In Germany Reuchlin became the
father of modern Hebrew study'4 and Erasmus conferred an in
estimable blessing upon the Christian world by his Greek edition
of the New Testament. In his preface to that wonderful little
volume, which had been hid for ages, the great scholar advocated
the free distribution of the Scriptures, the principle the Reformers
afterwards urged with such ardor and constancy. He advocated
their translation into all languages so that they might be "acces
sible to women of lowest station and be understood by Scots and
Irishmen, yea by Saracens and Turks."
Here indeed was a providential preparation for the Reforma
tion. And a second, and one of more importance, was the in
vention of the printing press in 1450 ; the invention which cleaves
all the centuries in two and yet binds all the centuries together.
Before the year 1500 Augsburg had twenty presses, Cologne
twenty-one. German printers went as far as Barcelona. In his
work on the new invention, 1507, Wimpheling75 declared "that as
the apostles went forth of old, so now the disciples of the sacred
art go forth from Germany into all lands and their printed books
become heralds of the Gospel, preachers of the truth and wisdom."
Germany became the intellectual market of Europe and in the
last quarter of our century the lay aristocracy of culture greatly
increased.70 The printing press and the Greek edition of the New Testa
ment were the two chief providential instruments made ready
for Martin Luther. But he had to find them. They did not make
him a reformer, the leader of the new age. Erasmus, whom
Janssen mercilessly condemns, remained a moralizer. He lacked
both the passion and the heroism of the religious reformer. The
religious reformer must be touched from above. Reuchlin, Eras
mus and Gutenberg prepared the outward form of the Greek

74 His Hebrew Grammar appeared in 1505. Reuchlin regarded Hebrew
as the language in which God spake to man, and declared all the other lan
guages poor in comparison with it.
75 De Arte Impressoria.
76 See Muller : Kirchengeschichte, II. 202.

38
and Hebrew Bible. Luther discovered their contents, and made
them known.
These, then, were the complex forces at work in this closing
century of the Middle Ages. The absolute power of the papacy
was reaffirmed, that mediaeval institution whose nature it is for
ever to hold in bondage the free judgment of the individual, and
to check progress of thought. The popular piety of the age re
mained strong and bound in the old forms and the refreshing
rills, flowing with the water of life from convents along the
Rhine, did not join in a stream or give any signs of so doing.
They were in fact drying up. On the other hand the commercial
unrest had a strong tendency to communicate itself to the do
main of religion and to prepare the mind for changes there. The
Revival of Letters aroused men's minds and sent them. moving in
new channels. In Italy it had no message of repentance and the
old ecclesiasticism went on. In German}', where conscience laid
hold of the movement, it prepared instruments which the leader
of the new age found and wielded. There were men who sniffed
the atmosphere of the coming age but they remained bound to
the old institutions and forms. Driftwood, as from a new theo
logical continent, was drifting about, but men did not appreciate
in it the signs of a new religious age or see beyond in dim outline
the new spiritual world.
In vain do we look for any power in the old to beget the forces
of the new age. Providence had to intervene by selecting an
agent who was to prove himself mightier than the wisdom of
theology and wiser than the rulers of the visible church. The
angel of God had to come down and trouble the waters into new
life. When Luther came, no man expected him. He was the
child of the old and yet he was more the child of God. If ever
a mortal man was not the product of a process of development,
Luther was that man. He came at the nick of time. Everything
had been made ready, and yet when the voice spake which called
into being the modern age, it was as the voice of a stranger whose
message the rulers of this world did not understand. In a sermon
preached at the twelfth session of the fifth Lateran Council, the
bishop of Isernia said "The Gospel is the fountain of true wis
dom, of all knowledge. All the higher virtue has flowed from it.
The Gospel, I say the Gospel." He spoke better than he knew. In
that council the scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the corpo-

39
rate powers of the church had spoken again for sacerdotalism,
for papal absolutism.77 Seven months later a single man raised
his voice, moved in the depths of his religious being, and the
new age sprang into life, the age of individual sovereignty, of the
reexaltation of Christ, of the free distribution and the supremacy
of the Scriptures. Who knows what is to come after the social
unrest and scientific research of the present time, and whether or
not God is making preparation for another personage to anew
interpret His will and speak a message which shall call Christen
dom to a more ardent devotion to Christ and to which all parts of
Christendom shall pay heed. If He should choose to send such a
messenger, let us pray that unto us He may grant to be among
those who listen, and who obey His message.

77 Its decree, limiting the freedom of the printing press and authorship
was another illustration of the assumption of papal despotism.