Part 2 (1/2)

Everywhere it was proved that a large proportion of the clergy were both wofully ignorant and morally unworthy. Besides the priests who had concubines, there were many given to drink and some who kept taverns, gaming rooms and worse places. Plunged in gross ignorance and superst.i.tion, those blind leaders of the blind, who won great reputations as exorcists or as wizards, were unable to understand the Latin service, and sometimes to repeat even the Lord's prayer or creed in any language.

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[Sidenote: Piety]

The Reformation, like most other revolutions, came not at the lowest ebb of abuse, but at a time when the tide had already begun to run, and to run strongly, in the direction of improvement. One can hardly find a sweeter, more spiritual religion anywhere than that set forth in Erasmus's _Enchiridion_, or in More's _Utopia_, or than that lived by Vitrier and Colet. Many men, who had not attained to this conception of the true beauty of the gospel, were yet thoroughly disgusted with things as they were and quite ready to subst.i.tute a new and purer conception and practice for the old, mechanical one.

Evidence for this is the popularity of the Bible and other devotional books. Before 1500 there were nearly a hundred editions of the Latin Vulgate, and a number of translations into German and French. There were also nearly a hundred editions, in Latin and various vernaculars, of _The Imitation of Christ_. There was so flouris.h.i.+ng a crop of devotional handbooks that no others could compete with them in popularity. For those who could not read there were the _Biblia Pauperum_, picture-books with a minimum of text, and there were sermons by popular preachers. If some of these tracts and homilies were crude and superst.i.tious, others were filled with a spirit of love and honesty. Whereas the pa.s.sion for pilgrimages and relics seemed to increase, there were men of clear vision to denounce the attendant evils. A new feature was the foundation of lay brotherhoods, like that of the Common Life, with the purpose of cultivating a good character in the world, and of rendering social service. The number of these brotherhoods was great and their popularity general.

[Sidenote: Clash of new spirit with old inst.i.tutions]

Had the forces already at work within the church been allowed to operate, probably much of the moral reform desired by the best Catholics would have been {27} accomplished quietly without the violent rending of Christian unity that actually took place. But the fact is, that such reforms never would or could have satisfied the spirit of the age. Men were not only shocked by the abuses in the church, but they had outgrown some of her ideals. Not all of her teaching, nor most of it, had become repugnant to them, for it has often been pointed out that the Reformers kept more of the doctrines of Catholicism than they threw away, but in certain respects they repudiated, not the abuse but the very principle on which the church acted. In four respects, particularly the ideals of the new age were incompatible with those of the Roman communion.

[Sidenote: Sacramental theory of the church]

The first of these was the sacramental theory of salvation and its corollary, the sacerdotal power. According to Catholic doctrine grace is imparted to the believer by means of certain rites: baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony. Baptism is the necessary prerequisite to the enjoyment of the others, for without it the unwashed soul, whether heathen or child of Christian parents, would go to eternal fire; but the ”most excellent of the sacraments” is the eucharist, in which Christ is mysteriously sacrificed by the priest to the Father and his body and blood eaten and drunk by the wors.h.i.+ppers. Without these rites there was no salvation, and they acted automatically (_ex opere operato_) on the soul of the faithful who put no active hindrance in their way. Save baptism, they could be administered only by priests, a special caste with ”an indelible character” marking them off from the laity. Needless to remark the immense power that this doctrine gave the clergy in a believing age.

They were made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and their moral character had no more to do with their binding and loosing sentence than does the moral {28} character of a secular officer affect his official acts. Add to this that the priests were unbound by ties of family, that by confession they entered into everyone's private life, that they were not amenable to civil justice--and their position as a privileged order was secure. The growing self-a.s.surance and enlightenment of a nascent individualism found this distinction intolerable.

[Sidenote: Other-worldliness]

Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash with the developing powers of the new age was its pessimistic and ascetic other-worldliness.

The ideal of the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this world, all its pomps and learning and art were but snares to seduce men from salvation. Reason was called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom like the rose. Wealth was shunned as dangerous, marriage deprecated as a necessary evil. Fasting, scourging, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated as the surest roads to heaven. If a good layman might barely shoulder his way through the strait and narrow gate, the highest graces and heavenly rewards were vouchsafed to the faithful monk. All this grated harshly on the minds of the generations that began to find life glorious and happy, not evil but good.

[Sidenote: Wors.h.i.+p of saints]

Third, the wors.h.i.+p of the saints, which had once been a stepping-stone to higher things, was now widely regarded as a stumbling-block. Though far from a scientific conception of natural law, many men had become sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see in the current hagiolatry a sort of polytheism. Erasmus freely drew the parallel between the saints and the heathen deities, and he and others scourged the grossly materialistic form which this wors.h.i.+p often took. If we may believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for help in hiding their sin; merchants for a rich haul; gamblers for luck; and prost.i.tutes for generous {29} patrons. Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact of a man who prayed for help in seducing his neighbor's wife, and similar instances of perverted piety are not wanting. The pa.s.sion for the relics of the saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles. There appeared to be enough of the wood of the true cross, said Erasmus, to make a s.h.i.+p; there were exhibited five s.h.i.+n-bones of the a.s.s on which Christ rode, whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several complete bits of skin saved from the circ.u.mcision of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Temporal power of the church]

Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate the claims of the popes to temporal power. The church had become, in fact, an international state, with its monarch, its representative legislative a.s.semblies, its laws and its code. It was not a voluntary society, for if citizens were not born into it they were baptized into it before they could exercise any choice. It kept prisons and pa.s.sed sentence (virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments as one power with another; it took princ.i.p.alities and kingdoms in fief.

It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6]

The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church. It needed a new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the Reformation. Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by the patriots and by the humanists.

[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine s.h.i.+llings, at a time when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.

[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied considerably in value. It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about 8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing power that it now has.

[3] A spiritual relations.h.i.+p was established if a man and woman were sponsors to the same child at baptism.

[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.

[5] ”Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non conceduntur pauperibus.” _Taxa cancellariae apostolicae_, in E.

Friedberg: _Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts_, 1903, pp. 389 ff.

[6] Maitland: _Canon Law in the Church of England_, p. 100.

SECTION 4. THE MYSTICS

One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth and fifteenth {30} century. In this, however, there was protest neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more religious than the church herself. They were like soldiers who disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these orders interfered with their supreme duty of hara.s.sing the enemy. With the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory; they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her sacraments as aids to the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see what they considered merely the means of grace subst.i.tuted for the end sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted service. Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart of religion is a union of the soul with G.o.d, they were shocked to see the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best bargain they could for their own eternal happiness. While rejecting nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything. Accepting priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard them as necessary intermediaries.