Chapter XVI: I. Erasmus Does Not Die (1518) (2)

‘In my opinion’ (he wrote) ‘many might be reconciled to the Church of Rome if, instead of everything being defined, we were contented with what is evidently set forth in the Scriptures or necessary to salvation. And these things are _few_ in number, and the _fewer_ the easier for _many_ to accept. Nowadays out of one article we make six hundred, some of which are such that men might be ignorant of them or doubt them without injury to piety. It is in human nature to cling by tooth and nail to what has once been defined. The sum of the philosophy of Christ’ (he continued) ‘lies in this--that we should know that all our hope is placed in God, who freely gives us all things through his son Jesus; that by his death we are redeemed; that we are united to his body in baptism in order that, dead to the desires of the world, we may so follow his teaching and example as not only not to admit of evil, but also to deserve well of all; that if adversity comes upon us we should bear it in the hope of the future reward which is in store for all good men at the advent of Christ. Thus we should always be progressing from virtue to virtue, and whilst assuming nothing to ourselves, ascribe all that is good to God. If there should be anyone who would inquire into the Divine nature, or the nature (_hypostasis_) of Christ, or abstruse points about the sacraments, let him do so; only let him not try to force his views upon others. In the same way as very verbose instruments lead to controversies, so too many definitions lead to differences. Nor should we be ashamed to reply on some questions: “God knows how this should be so, it is enough for me to believe that it is.” I know that the pure blood and body of Christ are to be taken purely by the pure, and that he wished it to be a most sacred sign and pledge both of his love to us and of the fellowship of Christians amongst themselves. Let me, therefore, examine myself whether there be anything in me inconsistent with Christ, whether there be any difference between me and my neighbour. As to the rest, _how_ the same body can exist in so small a form and in so many places at once, in my opinion such questions can hardly tend to the increase of piety. I know that I shall rise again, for this was promised to all by Christ, who was the first who rose from the dead. As to the questions, with what body, and how it can be the same after having gone through so many changes, though I do not disapprove of these things being inquired into in moderation on suitable occasions, yet it conduces very little to piety to spend too much labour upon them. Nowadays men’s minds are diverted, by these and other innumerable subtleties, from things of vital importance. Lastly it would tend greatly to the establishment of concord, if secular princes, and especially the Roman Pontiff, would abstain from all tyranny and avarice. For men easily revolt when they see preparations for enslaving them, when they see that they are not to be invited to piety but caught for plunder. If they saw that we were innocent and desirous to do them good, they would very readily accept our faith.’[761]

It will be seen that the point of this letter turns not _directly_ upon the difference which Luther had discerned between himself and Erasmus (viz. that the one rejected and the other accepted the doctrinal system of St. Augustine), but rather upon questions involving the duty and object of ‘_the Church_.’ From More’s delineation of the Church of Utopia, it has been seen that the notion of the Oxford Reformers was that the Church was intended to be broad and tolerant, not to define doctrine and enforce dogmas, but to afford a practical bond of union whereby Christians might be kept united in one Christian brotherhood, in spite of their differences in minor matters of creed. In full accordance with this view, Erasmus had blamed Schlechta and his party, in this letter, not for holding their peculiar views respecting the ‘Supper,’ but for making them a ground for separation from their fellow-Christians. So also he blamed Schlechta (himself a dissenter from Rome) for his harsh feelings towards the ‘Pyghards’ and his wish ‘to exterminate’ them. So, too, whilst sympathising strongly with the poor ‘Pyghards’ in many of the points in which they differed from the Church of Rome, he blamed them for jumping to the conclusion that the Church was ‘Antichrist,’ and for flying into extremes. So, too, he blamed the Church herself, as he always had blamed her, for so narrowing her boundaries as to shut out these ultra-dissenters of Bohemia from her communion.

Now it is obvious that at the foundation of the position here assumed by Erasmus, and elsewhere by the Oxford Reformers, lay the conviction that many points of doctrine were in their nature uncertain and unsettled--that many attempted definitions of doctrine, on such subjects as those involved in the Athanasian Creed, in the Augustinian system, and in scholastic additions to it, were, after all, and in spite of all the ecclesiastical authority in the world, just as unsettled and uncertain as ever; in fact, mere hypotheses, which in their nature never _can_ be verified.

[Sidenote: The point at issue between the Oxford Reformers and those who held by the Augustinian system.]

Here again, therefore, was _indirectly_ involved the point at issue between Erasmus and Luther; between the Oxford and the Wittemberg Reformers. For the latter in accepting the Augustinian system still adhered, in spirit, to the scholastic or dogmatic system of theology. To treat questions such as those above mentioned as open and unsettled seemed to them to be playing the part of the sceptic. Luther was honestly and naturally shocked when he found Erasmus hinting that the doctrine of ‘original sin’ was in some measure analogous to the epicycles of the astrologer. He was equally shocked again when Erasmus, a few years after, treated the question of the Freedom of the Will as one insoluble in its nature, involving the old philosophical questions between free-will and fate.[762] And why was he shocked? Because the Augustinian system which he had adopted, treated these questions as finally concluded. And how were they concluded? By the judgment of the church based upon a verbally inspired and infallible Bible.

Luther did not indeed assert so strongly the verbal inspiration of the Bible, much less of the Vulgate version, as Dr. Eck and other Augustinian theologians had done; yet his standing-point obliged him practically to assume the truth of this doctrine, as it obliged his successors more and more strongly to assert it as the years rolled on. And so, whilst rejecting, even more thoroughly than Erasmus ever did, the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of Rome, yet it is curious to observe that, in doing so, Luther did not reject the notion of ecclesiastical authority in itself, but rather, amidst many inconsistencies, set up the authority of what he considered to be the _true_ church against that of the church which he regarded as the _false_ one. As a consistent Augustinian he was driven to assume, in replying to the Wittemberg prophets on the one hand and the scepticism of Erasmus on the other, that there is a true church somewhere, and that somewhere in the true church there is an authority capable of establishing theological hypotheses. He was not willing that the Scriptures should be left simply to the private judgment of each individual for himself. He even allowed himself to claim for the public ministers of his own church--‘the leaders of the people and the preachers of the word’--authority ‘not only for themselves but also for others, and for the salvation of others, to judge with the greatest certainty the spirit and dogmas of all men.’[763]

Not that Luther always consistently upheld this doctrine any more than Erasmus consistently upheld its opposite. Luther was often to be found asserting and using the right of private judgment against the authority of Rome, as Erasmus was often found upholding the authority of the Catholic Church and her authorised councils against the rival authority of Luther’s schismatic and unauthorised church. In times of transition, men _are_ inconsistent; and regard must be had rather to the direction in which they are moving than the precise point to which at any particular moment they may have attained. And what I wish to impress upon the reader is this--that not only Luther, but all other Reformers, from Wickliffe down to the modern Evangelicals, who have adopted the Augustinian system and founded their reform upon it, have practically assumed as the basis of their theology, first, the plenary inspiration of each text contained in the Scriptures; and, secondly, the existence of an ecclesiastical authority of some kind capable of establishing theological hypotheses; so that, _in this respect_, Luther and other Augustinian reformers, instead of advancing beyond the Oxford Reformers, have lagged far behind, seeing that they have contentedly remained under a yoke from which the Oxford Reformers had been labouring for twenty years to set men free.

[Sidenote: The power of St. Augustine.]

In saying this I am far from overlooking the fact, that the Protestant Reformers, in reverting to a purer form of Augustinian doctrine than that held by the Schoolmen, did practically by it bring Christianity to bear upon men with a power and a life which contrasted strangely with the cold dead religion of the Thomists and Scotists. I am as far also from underrating the force and the fire of St. Augustine. What, indeed, must not that force and that fire have been to have made it possible for him to bind the conscience of Western Christendom for fourteen centuries by the chains of his dogmatic theology! And when it is considered, on the one hand, that the greatest of the Schoolmen were _so loyal_ to St. Augustine, that some of their subtlest distinctions were resorted to expressly to mitigate the harshness of the rigid results of his system, and thus were attempts, not to get from under its yoke, but _to make it bearable_;[764] and, on the other hand, that the chief _reactions_ against scholastic formalism--those of Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, the Portroyalists, the Puritans, the modern Evangelicals--were _Augustinian_ reactions; so far from _under_-estimating the power of the man whose influence was so diverse and so vast, it may well become an object of ever-increasing astonishment to the student of Ecclesiastical History.

At the same time, these considerations must raise also our estimate of the need and the value of the firm stand taken 350 years ago by the Oxford Reformers against this dogmatic power so long dominant in the realm of religious thought. It has been seen in every page of this history, that they had taken their standpoint, so to speak, _behind_ that of St. Augustine; behind even the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom; behind those patristic hypotheses which grew up into the scholastic theology; behind that notion of Church authority by which these hypotheses obtained a fictitious verification; behind the theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ without which the Scriptures could not have been converted, as they were, into a mass of raw material for the manufacture of any quantity of hypotheses--behind all these--on the foundation of _fact_ which underlies them all.

The essential difference between the standpoints of the Protestant and Oxford Reformers Luther had been the first to perceive. And the correctness of this first impression of Luther’s has been singularly confirmed by the history of the three-and-a-half centuries of Protestant ascendency in Western Christendom. The Protestant movement, whilst accomplishing by one revolutionary blow many objects which the Oxford Reformers were striving and striving in vain to compass by constitutional means, has been so far antagonistic to their work in other directions as to throw it back--not to say _to wipe it out of remembrance_--so that in this nineteenth century those Christians who have desired, as they did, to rest their faith upon honest facts, and not upon dogmas--upon evidence, and not upon authority--instead of taking up the work where the Oxford Reformers left it, have had to begin it again at the beginning, as Colet did at Oxford in 1496. They have had, like the Oxford Reformers, to combat at the outset the theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ and the tendency inherited along with it from St. Augustine, by both Schoolmen and Protestant Reformers, to build up a theology, as I have said, upon unverified hypotheses, and to narrow the boundaries of Christian fellowship by the imposition of dogmatic creeds so manufactured. They have had to meet the same arguments and the same blind opposition; to bear the same taunts of heresy and unsoundness from ascendant orthodox schools; to be pointed at by their fellow-Christians as insidious enemies of the Christian faith, because they have striven to present it before the eyes of a scientific age, as what they think it really is--_not_ a system of unverified hypotheses, but a faith in _facts_ which it would be unscientific even in a disciple of the positive philosophy to pass by unexplored.

VIII. MORE’S DOMESTIC LIFE (1519).

By the aid of a letter from Erasmus to Ulrich Hutten,[765] written in July 1519, one more lingering look may be taken at the beautiful picture of domestic happiness presented by More’s home. This history would be incomplete without it.

[Sidenote: More forty years old.]

[Sidenote: His first wife.]

The ‘young More,’ with whom Colet and Erasmus had fallen in love twenty years ago, was now past forty.[766] The four motherless children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John, awhile ago nestling round their widowed father’s knee, as the dark shadow of sorrow passed over the once bright home in Bucklersbury, were now from ten to thirteen years old. The good stepmother, Alice Middleton, is said to have ruled her household well, and her daughter had taken a place in the family circle as one of More’s children. There was a marked absence of jarring or quarrelling,[767] which in such a household bore witness to the goodnature of the mistress. She could not, indeed, fill altogether the void left in More’s heart by the loss of his first wife--the gentle girl brought up in country retirement with her parents and sisters, whom he had delighted to educate to his own tastes, in letters and in music, in the fond hope that she would be to him a lifelong companion,[768] and respecting whom, soon after his second marriage, in composing the epitaph for the family tomb, in which _she_ was already laid, he had written this simple line:--

‘Cara Thomæ jacet hic Joanna uxorcula Mori!’[769]

[Sidenote: His second wife.]

The ‘dame Alice,’ though somewhat older than her husband and matronly in her habits, ‘nec bella nec puella,’ as he was fond of jokingly telling her, out of deference to More’s musical tastes, had learned to sing and to play on the harp;[770] but, after all, she was more of the housekeeper than of the wife. It was not to her but to his daughter Margaret that his heart now clung with fondest affection.

[Sidenote: More’s true piety.]

More himself, Erasmus described to Hutten as humorous without being foolish, simple in his dress and habits, and, with all his popularity and success, neither proud nor boastful, but accessible, obliging, and kind to his neighbours.[771] Fond of liberty and ease he might be, but no one could be more active or more patient than he when occasion required it.[772] No one was less influenced by current opinion, and yet no man had more common sense.[773] Averse as he was to all superstition, and having shown in his ‘Utopia’ what were regarded in some quarters as freethinking tendencies, he had to share with Colet the sneers of the ‘orthodox,’ yet a tone of unaffected piety pervaded his life. He had stated times for devotion, and when he prayed, it was not as a matter of form, but from his heart. When, too, as he often did, he talked to his intimate friends of the life to come, Erasmus tells Hutten that he evidently spoke from his heart, and not without the brightest hope.[774]

[Sidenote: The children’s animals.]

[Sidenote: Their celebrated monkey.]

He was careful to cultivate in his children not only a filial regard to himself, but also feelings of mutual interest and intimacy. He made himself one of them, and took evidently as much pleasure as they did in their birds and animals--the monkey, the rabbits, the fox, the ferret, and the weasel.[775] Thus when Erasmus was a guest at his house, More would take him into the garden to see the children’s rabbit hutches, or to watch the sly ways of the monkey; which on one occasion so amused Erasmus by the clever way in which it prevented the weasel from making an assault upon the rabbits through an aperture between the boards at the back of the hutch, that he rewarded the animal by making it famous all over Europe, telling the story in one of his ‘Colloquies.’[776] Whereupon so important a member of the household did this monkey become, that when Hans Holbein some years afterwards painted his famous picture of the household of Sir Thomas More, its portrait was taken along with the rest, and there to this day it may be seen nestling in the folds of dame Alice’s robes.

[Sidenote: Their interest in his pursuits.]

If More thus took an interest in the children’s animals, so they were trained to take an interest in his pictures, his cabinet of coins and curiosities, and his literary pursuits. He did everything he could to allure his children on in acquiring knowledge. If an astronomer came in his way he would get him to stay awhile in his house, to teach them all about the stars and planets.[777] And it surely must have been More’s children whom Erasmus speaks of as learning the Greek alphabet by shooting with their bows and arrows at the letters.[778]

[Sidenote: Letter to his children in verse.]

Unhappily of late More had been long and frequently absent from home. Still, even when away upon an embassy, trudging on horseback dreary stages along the muddy roads, we find him on the saddle composing a metrical letter in Latin to his ‘sweetest children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John,’ which, when a second edition of his ‘Epigrams’ was called for, was added at the end of the volume and printed with the rest by the great printer of Basle[779]--a letter in which he expresses his delight in their companionship, and reminds them how gentle and tender a father he has been to them, in these loving words:--

Kisses enough I have given you forsooth, but stripes hardly ever,
If I have flogged you at all it has been with the tail of a peacock!

* * * * *

Manners matured in youth, minds cultured in arts and in knowledge,
Tongues that can speak your thoughts in graceful and elegant language:--
These bind my heart to yours with so many ties of affection
That now I love you far more than if you were merely my children.

* * * * *

Go on (for you can!), my children, in winning your father’s affection,
So that as now your goodness has made me to feel as though never
I really had loved you before, you may on some future occasion,

* * * * *

Make me to love you so much that my present love may seem nothing!

What a picture lies here, even in these roughly translated lines, of the gentle relation which during years of early sorrow had grown up between the widowed father and the motherless children!

It is a companion-picture to that which Erasmus drew in colours so glowing, of More’s home at Chelsea many years after this, when his children were older and he himself Lord Chancellor. What a gleam of light too does it throw into the future, upon that last farewell embrace between Sir Thomas More and Margaret Roper upon the Tower-wharf, when even stern soldiers wept to behold their ‘fatherly and daughterly affection!’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: More’s character.]

This was the man whom Henry VIII. had at last succeeded in drawing into his court; who reluctantly, this summer of 1519,[780] in order that he might fulfil his duties to the King, had laid aside his post of under-sheriff in the city and his private practice at the bar; ‘who now,’ to quote the words of Roper, ‘was often sent for by the King into his traverse, where sometimes in matters of astronomy, geometry, divinity, and such other faculties, and sometimes of his worldly affairs, he would sit and confer with him. And otherwhiles in the night would he have him up into the leads there to consider with him the diversities, courses, motions, and operations of the stars and planets.

‘And because he was of a pleasant disposition, it pleased the King and Queen after the Council had supped for their pleasure commonly to call for him to be merry with them. Till he,’ continues Roper, ‘perceiving them so much in his talk to delight that he could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and his children (whose company he most desired), and to be absent from court two days together but that he should be thither sent for again; much misliking this restraint of his liberty, began thereupon somewhat to dissemble his nature, and so by little and little from his former mirth to disuse himself.’[781]

This was the man who, after ‘trying as hard to keep out of court as most men try to get into it,’ had accepted office on the noble understanding that he was ‘first to look unto God, and after God to the King,’ and who under the most difficult circumstances, and in times most perilous, whatever may have been his faults and errors, still

Reverenced his conscience as his King,

and died at last upon the scaffold, a martyr to integrity!

IX. THE DEATH OF COLET (1519).

Erasmus was working hard at his Paraphrases at Louvain, when the news reached him that _Colet was dead_! On the 11th September Pace had written to Wolsey that ‘the Dean of Paul’s had lain continually since Thursday _in extremis_, but was not yet dead.’[782] He had died on the 16th of September 1519.

[Sidenote: The grief of Erasmus on hearing of it.]

[Sidenote: His estimate of Colet’s character.]

When Erasmus heard of it, he could not refrain from weeping. ‘For thirty years I have not felt the death of a friend so bitterly,’[783] he wrote to Lupset, a young disciple of Colet’s. ‘I seem,’ he wrote to Pace, ‘as though only half of me were alive, Colet being dead. What a _man_ has _England_ and what a _friend_ have _I_ lost!’ To another Englishman he wrote, ‘What avail these sobs and lamentations? They cannot bring him back again. In a little while we shall follow him. In the meantime we should rejoice for Colet. He now is safely enjoying _Christ_, whom he always had upon his lips and at his heart.’[784] To Tunstal, ‘I should be inconsolable for the death of Colet did I not know that my tears would avail nothing for him and for me;’[785] and to Bishop Fisher, ‘I have written this weeping for Colet’s death.... I know it is all right with him who, escaped from this evil and wretched world, is in present enjoyment of that Christ whom he so loved when alive. I cannot help mourning in the public name the loss of so rare an example of Christian piety, so remarkable a preacher of Christian truth!’[786] And, in again writing to Lupset, a month or two afterwards, a long letter, pouring his troubles, on account of a bitter controversy which Edward Lee had raised up against him, into the ears of Lupset, instead of, as had hitherto been his wont, into the ears of Colet, he exclaimed in conclusion, ‘O true theologian! O wonderful preacher of evangelical doctrine! With what earnest zeal did he drink in the philosophy of Christ! How eagerly did he imbibe the spirit and feelings of St. Paul! How did the purity of his whole life correspond to his heavenly doctrine! How many years following the example of St. Paul, did he teach the people without reward!’[787] ‘You would not hesitate,’ finally wrote Erasmus to Justus Jonas, ‘to inscribe the name of this man in the roll of the saints although uncanonised by the Pope.’

[Sidenote: More’s estimate of Colet’s character.]

‘For generations,’ wrote More, ‘we have not had amongst us any one man more learned or holy!’[788]

The inscription on the leaden plate laid on the coffin of Dean Colet[789] bore witness that he died ‘to the great grief of the whole people, by whom, for his integrity of life and divine gift of preaching, he was the most beloved of all his time;’ and his remains were laid in the tomb prepared by himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

X. CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote: The fellow-work of the Oxford Reformers accomplished.]

With the death of Colet this history of the Oxford Reformers may fitly end. Erasmus and More, it is true, lived on sixteen years after this, and retained their love for one another to the last. But even _their_ future history was no longer, to the same extent as it had been, a joint history. Erasmus never again visited England, and if they did meet during those long years, it was a chance meeting only, on some occasion when More was sent on an embassy, and their intercourse could not be intimate.

[Sidenote: The Protestant Reformation a new movement under which theirs was submerged.]

The fellow-work of the Oxford Reformers was to a great extent accomplished when Colet died. From its small beginnings during their college intercourse at Oxford it had risen into prominence and made its power felt throughout Europe. But now for three hundred years it was to stop and, as it were, to be submerged under a new wave of the great tide of human progress. For, as has been said, the Protestant Reformation was in many respects a new movement, and not altogether a continuation of that of the Oxford Reformers.

As yet the ‘tragedy of Luther’ had appeared only like the little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand rising above the horizon. But scarcely had a year passed from Colet’s death before the whole heavens were overcast by it, and Christendom was suddenly involved, by the madness of her rulers, in all the terrors of a religious convulsion, which threatened to shake social and civil, as well as ecclesiastical, institutions to their foundations.

[Sidenote: The future course of the survivors could not alter the fellow-work of the past.]

How Erasmus and More met the storm--how far they stood their ground, or were carried away by natural fears and disappointment from their former standing-point--is well worthy of careful inquiry; but it must not be attempted here. In the meantime, the subsequent course of the two survivors could not alter the spirit and aim of the fellow-work to which for so many years past the three friends had been devoting their lives.

Their fellow-work had been to urge, at a critical period in the history of Christendom, the necessity of that thorough and comprehensive reform which the carrying out of Christianity into practice in the affairs of nations and of men would involve.

[Sidenote: Nature of the Reform urged by the Oxford Reformers.]

[Sidenote: Religious Reform.]

Believing Christianity to be true, they had faith that it would work. Deeply imbued with the spirit of Christianity as the true religion of the heart, they had demanded, not so much the reform of particular ecclesiastical abuses, as that the whole Church and the lives of Christians should be reanimated by the Christian spirit. Instead of contenting themselves with urging the correction of particular theological errors, and so tinkering the scholastic creed, they had sought to let in the light, and to draw men’s attention from dogmas to the facts which lay at their root. Having faith in free inquiry, they had demanded freedom of thought, tolerance, education.

[Sidenote: Political Reform.]

Believing that Christianity had to do with secular as well as with religious affairs, they had urged the necessity, not only of religious but also of political reform. And here again, instead of attacking particular abuses, they had gone to the root of the matter, and laid down the _golden rule_ as the true basis of political society. They not only had censured the tyranny, vices, and selfishness of princes, but denied the divine right of kings, assuming the principle that they reign by the consent and for the good of the nations whom they govern. Instead of simply asserting the rights of the people against their rulers in particular acts of oppression, they had advocated, on Christian and natural grounds, the equal rights of rich and poor, and insisted that the good of the _whole people as one community_ should be the object of all legislation.

[Sidenote: International Reform.]

Believing lastly in the Christian as well as in the natural brotherhood of nations, they had not only condemned the selfish wars of princes, but also claimed that the golden rule, instead of the Machiavellian code, should be regarded as the true basis of international politics.

Such was the broad and distinctively _Christian_ Reform urged by the Oxford Reformers during the years of their fellow-work.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Their demand for Reform, though listened to, refused.]

And if ever any reformers had a fair chance of a hearing in influential quarters, surely it was they. They had direct access to the ears of Leo X., of Henry VIII., of Charles V., of Francis I.; not to mention multitudes of minor potentates, lay and ecclesiastical, as well as ambassadors and statesmen, whose influence upon the politics of Europe was scarcely less than that of princes. But though they were courted and patronised by the potentates of Europe, _their reform was refused_.

The destinies of Christendom, by a remarkable concurrence of circumstances, were thrown very much into the hands of the young Emperor Charles V.; and, unfortunately for Christendom, Charles V. turned out to be the opposite of the ‘Christian Prince’ which Erasmus had done his best to induce him to become. Leo X. also had bitterly disappointed the hopes of Erasmus. When the time for final decision came, in the Diet of Worms the Emperor and the Pope were found banded together in the determination to refuse reform.

[Sidenote: Reform of Luther.]

In the meantime the leadership of the Reform movement had passed into other and sterner hands. Luther, concentrating his energies upon a narrower point, had already, in making his attack upon the abuse of Indulgences, raised a definite quarrel with the Pope. Within fifteen months of the death of Colet, he had astonished Europe by defiantly burning the Bull issued against him from Rome. And summoned by the Emperor to Worms, to answer for his life, he still more startled the world by boldly demanding, in the name of the German nation from the Emperor and Princes, that Germany should throw off the Papal yoke from her neck. For this was practically what Luther did at Worms.[790]

[Sidenote: Luther’s battle-cry at the Diet of Worms.]

The Emperor and Princes had to make up their minds, whether they would side with the Pope or with the nation, and they decided to side with the Pope. They thought they were siding with the stronger party, but they were grievously mistaken. Their defiance of Luther was engrossed on parchment. Luther’s defiance of _them_, and assertion of the rights of conscience against Pope and Emperor, rang through the ages. It stands out even now as a watershed in history dividing the old era from the new.

[Sidenote: The refusal of Reform followed by a period of Revolution.]

In the history of the next three centuries, it is impossible not to trace the onward swell, as it were, of a great revolutionary wave, which, commencing with the Peasant War and the Sack of Rome, swept on through the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War, the Puritan Revolution in England, and the foundation of the great American Republic, until it culminated and broke in the French Revolution. It is impossible not to see, in the whole course of the events of this remarkable period, an onward movement as irresistible and certain in its ultimate progress as that of the great geological changes which have passed over the physical world.

It is in vain to speculate upon what might have been the result of the concession of broad measures of reform whilst yet there was time; but in view of the bloodshed and misery, which, humanly speaking, might have been spared, who can fail to be impressed with the terrible responsibility, in the eye of History, resting upon those by whom, in the sixteenth century, the reform was refused? They were utterly powerless, indeed, to stop the ultimate flow of the tide, but they had the terrible power to turn, what might otherwise have been a steady and peaceful stream, into a turbulent and devastating flood. They had the terrible power, and they used it, of involving their own and ten succeeding generations in the turmoils of revolution.