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                          CHAPTER XXVII

             The Reformation and Protestant Reaction

   The Disgust of Christendom -- Why the Reformation Succeeded
         -- martin Lather -- The Catholic Reformation --
                  Humanity Crucified for Christ

                   THE DISGUST OF CHRISTENDOM

     In the spring  of the year 1415 a General Council of the
     Church of Christ met at Constance to deliberate on the
     indecent spectacle presented by its Popes and its clergy.

     This Council represented all the chief monarchs and all the
prelates of Europe. The ablest scholars and the most learned abbots
assured it that its authority was higher than that of Popes, and
that it must, and could, put an end to the scandals which made
Christendom seem to the Mohammedans a religious masquerade. So the
twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, three hundred
bishops and abbots, and hundred grave doctors of law and divinity
solemnly invoked the light of the Holy Ghost, deposed two Anti-
Popes, branded Rome's ruling Pope as "the dregs of vice and a
mirror of infamy ... guilty of poisoning, murder, and persistent
indulgence in vices of the flesh," and decided that the Church must
be reformed "in head and members." They decided also, very
emphatically, to suppress all heretics; and in this at least they
set a good example by forthwith burning John Hus, who had the
effrontery to wish to lead Christendom back to Christ.

     This was just one hundred years before Father Tetzel roused
the fateful ire of Father Luther by coming to sell indulgences in
his district. A Reformation a century before Luther! And this
Conciliar Movement, as it is called -- this plan of making General
Councils of bishops higher than the Popes -- lasted quite a long
time, and had the support of the finest scholars and prelates of
Europe. Yet, curiously enough, neither the Catholic nor the
Protestant writer presses the movement on your notice. The modern
Catholic does not because he has discovered, eighteen centuries
after the death of Christ, that the Pope is higher than a Council.
And the Protestant does not because ... Well, let me tell you a
little more about this famous Council of Constance.

     During all the winter of 1414-1415 the right reverend and very
reverend gentlemen were pouring over the Swiss mountains into the
little city by the Lake. They traveled, not as Paul had done, but
in all the comfort that the age afforded: swaddled in heavy furs in
their lumbering coaches, gay troops of horse protecting them from
the ubiquitous robbers. Into the little town also poured streams of
gay adventurers, entertainers, purveyors of all luxuries, from the
nearest cities of Germany, France and Italy. And amongst these, the
most reliable chroniclers of the time tell us, were a thousand
painted ladies who came to alleviate the labors and soften the
exile from their courts of the four hundred prelates and abbots and
their suites.

     You see how supple and accommodating a weapon in the hand of
the apologist is the writing of historical facts. Omit one little
detail, the gathering of the geishas at Constance -- it is surely
not a material part of the story of the Council -- and you have an

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edifying account of Christendom striving to purge itself of its
wantons. Tell that detail, and the reform Council begins to need a
little further elucidation. And when I add that the Emperor
Sigismund, who sternly commanded this gathering to reform the
Church, was a flagrantly immoral and unscrupulous monarch; that the
king of France was not a whit better and, like the emperor, was
consulting his own pocket; and that the king of Naples, the third
chief monarch involved, was poisoned by the father of one of his
many mistresses while the Council was assembling, you begin to
wonder whether that eccentric little man John Hus was not the only
Christian amongst them. Certainly as a body those four hundred
prelates and abbots, and their priest and monk retainers, shuddered
at the prospect of a return to Christ.

     A few years earlier that "mirror of infamy" Pope John XXIII
had called a Council in St. Peter's, at Rome, to reform the Church.
I have no doubt that the ex-brigand (as he was) opened the
proceedings with quite a grave countenance. But an owl came out of
a dark corner of the church and sat, blinking, right opposite the
Pope; and be blushed as red as an Italian can blush, and closed the
meeting. Roman wits, who thought the whole business a delicious
comedy, said that he imagined himself confronting the Holy Ghost
whom he had invoked.

     You see, I do not begin my little study of the Reformation
with learned and profound reflections on the political, economic,
psycho-nalytic, and mystic conditions of the time. We shall see
presently such of these as concern us. But much of this "philosophy
of history" that is now written is merely proof of the author's
ability to philosophize; as we saw in regard to the causes of the
Renaissance. A good solid chunk of human truth is better to get
one's teeth into.

     And the broad human truth here is that Europe was in a stupid
and muddled condition of mind because an unnatural creed had been
forced upon it, and there could not be a sound general advance
until an age of enlightenment removed the creed. The only question
was whether the world would first give one more trial to the pure
doctrine of Christianity, or entirely discard the creed and frame
a human idealism. Was salvation to come by the Renaissance or the
Reformation?

     In justice to our ancestors we must avoid judging them by our
modern standards. It occurred to nobody in those days to ask when,
where, and by whom the Gospels were written; which was the first
condition of escape from the Christian creed. To talk about the
"simple piety" of our ancestors is bunk. They were duped so
thoroughly and comprehensively that even a scholar did not think of
asking those skeptical questions. Do not imagine that I am making
bold statements which modern scholars would not sanction. It is
merely the words I use that they would not sanction; and these
pages are written for people who prefer a lie to be called a lie
instead of a terminological inexactitude.

     Most of the more learned theological authorities on the
Gospels now say that words are put into the mouth of Jesus which
Jesus certainly never uttered. All but Catholic scholars say this


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of the profoundly important supposed saying to Peter: "On this rock
I will build my Church"; and even learned Catholic scholars say it
of the almost equally important command (Matthew xxviii, 19) to
"baptize" in the name of the Trinity. Then attention was distracted
from such weaknesses as the gospel narrative obviously has by the
fabrication of a supernatural version of the triumph of
Christianity (the tabarum, the discovery of the cross and
Veronica's pocket handkerchief, thousands of forged legends of
saints and martyrs, etc.). A number of further forgeries (Donation
of Constantine, etc.) established the Pope's royal dignity, and a
vast number of falsified or forged decrees of Councils proved his
spiritual supremacy. There had been, on the admission of all
historians, six hundred years of forgeries. The stark humanity of
the Church was concealed under a purple and gold robe of
supernatural favor.

     In the circumstances it is remarkable how much radical anti-
Christian heresy there was before the revival of learning. I must
not attempt even to summarize it here. It is enough to recall that,
to our positive knowledge, hundreds of thousands of men and women
were killed for revolt against the ruling creed between 1200 and
1500 A.D. If we were to take the early Christians as a standard --
say, in the Diocletian persecution, when a few hundred suffered for
the faith and a few million abjured it -- we should have to
conclude that there was a colossal proportion of heresy in the
Middle Ages. Remember that the total population of Europe in those
days was only about thirty millions. Life was so ghastly, so
ruthlessly devastated by disease and violence, that, although men
and women bred like rabbits, the population was almost stationary.
However, let us be liberal and grant the apologist that the
medieval heretics were much more faithful than the early Christians
-- or, if he prefers it, that the Christian Church was much more
thorough in its bloody measures than the pagan authorities had been
-- so that we will not claim a thousand heretics for every one that
died.

     This revolt took two different lines. In part (in the
Bogomiles, Albigensians, Luciferists, etc.) it was a revolt against
Christian doctrine. In part (Waldensians, Lollards, Hussites, etc.)
it was a revolt against the Church's corruption of Christian
doctrine. But in both cases the mightiest element in the revolt was
disgust at the state of Christendom. The corruption of the Church
was the seed of heretics. Whether they said that the creed was
wrong and unnatural, or that the creed was right but corrupted,
they united in pointing out that the actual state of the Church
repelled people of delicate spiritual nostrils.

     The intellectual or doctrinal revolt was murdered. Churches
are always sterner against intellectual vitality than erotic
vitality -- in practice. The Renaissance was not in the least a
continuation of the earlier doctrinal rebellion. It was confined to
the cultivated few. It was generally on good terms with the Church
and as willing to burn incense to Jesus as to Apollo or any other
form of thought. Where it was outspokenly anti-Christian, it was
Greek: Platonist or Epicurean or Stoic. But in Greek literature
were the germs of modern thought and the modern spirit.



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     Hence the relation of the Renaissance to the more dramatic
revolt which we call the Reformation is profoundly interesting, and
quite opposite opinions are expressed on it. The Reformation was in
the direct line of moral revolts against the Church in the interest
of pure Christianity. It continued, and it was greatly helped by,
the revolts of the Wyclifites, Hussites, Christian Cathari, etc. It
agreed with the Humanists in the attack on Scholastic theology and
Canon Law; and the leading Humanists (Erasmus, etc.) agreed with
the Reformers in denouncing the corruption of the Church. Yet,
although the effects of the Renaissance remained -- the act of
awakening is merely the first and temporary condition of the state
of being awake -- the Reformers denounced the human or, as they
said, pagan spirit of it, which was its finest contribution to the
new era. Did the Reformation do more harm than good? Did it
postpone unnecessarily the development of the modern humanitarian,
libertarian, and scientific spirit?

     Let us first set aside the claim of the modern Catholic that
there was less to reform in the Church than is generally supposed,
and that the machinery and desire of reform were in the Church, so
that the Revolution, as they call it, was unnecessary. On the
former point we have seen enough. The Church stank with corruption.
The literature of the fifteenth century reeks with it. And the
verdict of history is just as emphatic on the second point.

     When the Council of Constance closed its labors, it handed to
the new Pope a long list of abuses and vices which he was to
correct. He bowed humbly; and he dropped the schedule into the
waste-paper basket at the Vatican as soon as he got there. Every
one of his successors for the next century and a half absolutely
rejected the world-demand for reform. The Popes and the Curia
(Papal court) became more and more vicious, as we saw, and
precisely when the demand for reform was loudest and most
threatening (1450-1530), the chair of Peter was occupied by
entirely immoral and unscrupulous men. To the very end the Papacy
bitterly resisted moral and financial reform.

     Well, says the Catholic, there were other ways. There was the
intellectual vitality of the Scholastic movement: which was
captured and sterilized at once by the Popes, and in the sixteenth
century was the arch-foe of intellectual progress. There were
Francis of Assissi and Dominic and the friars; and the Franciscan
friars and all other monks were corrupt within fifty years of their
foundation. Movements like that which Francis inaugurated were
crushed by the Popes all over Europe; and Francis himself would
have suffered like the others if he had had any intellect. In
short, the facts of history show that no reform was possible in the
Church as long as Rome retained its power.

     This is the other side of the picture. Rationalists, noticing
only that the Reformation interrupted the return of paganism, are
apt to dismiss it with the contemptuous remark that it enthroned a
book after dethroning the Pope. Protestants, who make a bogey of
paganism and refuse to see that all that is best in modern times
means a return to it, applaud the Reformation precisely because it
put an end (they say) to the Renaissance. Against both we might
plead that it is misleading to talk of the collapse of the


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Renaissance. A birth or re-birth does not continue; it is the thing
born or re-born which continues. And a very great deal that was re-
born in the fifteenth century continued. The art-movement was bound
to end soon, as all great artistic periods do. The scientific
movement, on the contrary, moved on, slowly but surely, to its
triumph. The establishment in the schools of "humane letters" was
not undone.

     Still, there was a reaction, and we have to study carefully
both the causes and consequences of the Reformation. To begin with,
as I said, it is better to take a very broad view of the historical
situation. There were three rebellions in Europe; one against the
doctrines of Christianity, one against its ethic, and one against
the corrupt hierarchy of the Church. The first had little chance of
success in the sixteenth century. Ninety percent of the people were
illiterate, and could barely understand skepticism. Erasmus and the
Humanists trusted to see superstition die a natural death as
knowledge grew. But it is a very serious question whether, but for
the Reformation, the Papacy might not have, by some political
chance, passed to a new Innocent III, and he could have crushed the
intellectual revolt.

     The rebellion against the Christian ethic as such was
comparatively small. The Luciferist or witch movement was the chief
expression of it. Apart from this were only a few Neo-Pagans. The
truth is that the Christian ethic was not taken seriously enough to
inspire a revolt. The fire-insurance arrangements of the Church
were so complete and generous that people used "hell" as a
comfortable swear-word.

     The essential condition of a successful revolt was to have a
powerful organization to oppose to the Church's organization.
Isolated rebels, or small bodies of rebels, were simply butchered
-- and the experience of the Albigensians and Waldensians showed
that even a body of half a million or more members, with their own
fortified cities, could not succeed. The Pope could loosen an
avalanche of looters, called Crusaders, upon the rebels. Even a
relatively powerful State could be attacked by the Pope arranging
a coalition of other States against it.

     In other words, there could be no freedom of thought in Europe
until the power of the Popes was broken, and it could not be broken
until the mass of the people and their rulers in several States
already accepted the new ideas. And this in turn obviously means
that the rebellion had to be based upon some serious practical
grievance acutely felt and resented by both peoples and their
rulers. The immorality of the clergy (or of Popes, cardinals
bishops, priests, monks, and nuns) alone would never cause such a
revolt, There were not enough people with sincere moral
indignation. Disdain of the hypocrisy of the clergy was more
commonly expressed in ribald songs and spicy stories which were
themselves indecent. The disgust of Christendom, which was to be
the driving force of any successful revolt, had to be excited
primarily by something more important than the amours of Popes and
nuns. Fortunately, the Popes were stupid enough to give the world
this grievance just at the time when political conditions made a
Cooperative revolt possible and a man of powerful personality
appeared to incite and lead it.

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                  WHY THE REFORMATION SUCCEEDED

     To the Protestant the Reformation is from the first a sublime
revolt against the moral corruption, usurped authority, and un-
Christian teaching of the Roman clergy. But it is an acknowledged
fact that, although Luther was at Rome in 1510, and saw with his
own eyes the corrupt condition of the Curia and the clergy, he
remained silent for years; and it is equally clear that in the
early years of his struggle he had not the least idea of the
doctrinal challenge which he afterwards formulated.

     Modern historians, therefore, speak of the Reformation as a
political and religious event. I have several times referred to the
incautious tendency of some of our historical writers to show their
liberality by admitting some of the contentions of the Catholic
writers. Naturally, no subject in the whole range of controversy
has brought out so strongly the ingenuity and sophistry of Catholic
writers as the Reformation, yet voluminous unscrupulous historians
like Denifle ("Luther und Lutherthum"), Grisar ("Luther," 6 vols.,
English translation 1913), and Janssen ("History of the German
People at the Close of the Middle Ages," 6 vols., English
translation 1896-1903) have not seriously modified the traditional
view of the Reformation. American Catholics have not even ventured
to translate Father Denifle's "great" work; though Father Grisar's
work and the article on Luther in the "Catholic Encyclopedia" (by
a Doctor of Music!) are largely based on it.

     Popular Catholic works on Luther and the Reformation are, as
we shall see, so gross that Catholic scholars have to protest
against them, The only use of the best of them is to correct the
exaggeration of the religious elements of the Reformation -- or the
exclusion of any other elements -- by popular Protestant writers.
A vast amount of melodramatic rubbish has been written on both
sides, and, after looking over the entire literature of the last
twenty years, I cannot recommend any book. Professor Robinson's
long article in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" is a fine and
substantial analysis, as far as it goes, and (the Rev.) Professor
Mackinnon's recent "Luther and the Reformation" (only the first
volume of which is out) is a useful work on the narrow lines of a
liberal theology.

     The truth is that the new fashion of speaking of the
Reformation as a political and religious event is not quite
accurate, and it represents a concession to Catholic literary
intrigue. Catholics want the Reformation to be put on political
grounds. But the grounds of the disgust of Christendom which led to
an examination of the Pope's authority and teaching, and thus
brought about a doctrinal revolt, are not well described as
"political." In the main they referred to two things: the Papal
claim of a right to interfere in the affairs of every kingdom in
the world, and the appalling Papal extortion and greed which drew
vast sums of money out of every country to Italy. The grievances
summarized under these heads united rulers and people, and a good
many of the clergy, in a common hostile attitude toward the Roman
Curia. They provided the first essential of a successful revolt. It
was a religious revolt, but it started as a resentment of
grievances which were not religious, yet are not aptly described as
political.

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     The whole history of the three centuries preceding the
Reformation is, as every student knows, filled with the quarrels of
the Popes with various monarchs. During the whole thirteenth
century Italy was rent in halves, and spattered with blood, by the
quarrel of the Guelphs and Ghibellines; which means, mainly,
partisans of the Pope or the emperor. In fact, the well-known
picture of the Emperor Henry IV doing penance at Canossa in the
year 1076 shows the arrogance of the Popes far earlier. Gregory
VII, the Pope of the time, claimed to depose monarchs, hand out
crowns, and use armies, as he thought fit. His principle was
("Letters," iv, 24): "If the See of the Blessed Peter decides and
judges heavenly and spiritual things, how much more shall it judge
things earthly and secular?" Innocent III, the next most powerful
of the Popes, had exactly the same ruling principle. Europe was to
them a kind of United States and the Pope was president -- without
a Congress to check him.

     This arrogant attitude had its foundations in the barbaric
days of Europe, when the half-civilized Teuton monarchs had a
superstitious awe of the Papacy, and the Popes could fabricate
documents with impunity. Charlemagne's father, Pippin, was a mere
usurper; but when the Pope had heard of his intention -- he
consulted the Pope as to the morality of it -- he ordered Pippin to
seize the throne, and Popes afterwards claimed that this made
France a "fief," or feudal dependency, of Rome.

     It was a Pope, moreover, who created Charlemagne "Roman
Emperor" (after duping him with two of the most shameless forgeries
in history). Then, in 858, came Nicholas I (in whose reign the most
comprehensive and profitable of all the forgeries, the False
Decretals, appeared), who expressly described himself as "prince
over all the earth" ("Letters," lxv) and claimed that all kings
received their swords, the symbols of their power, from the Pope.

     There is an exaltation almost amounting to insanity in the
letters of Nicholas, Gregory, and Innocent; and the Forged
Decretals, to which Gregory VII added other forgeries, gave chapter
and verse for every act of autocracy. But, with all the
superstition of Europe, the autocracy was fiercely resented. An
Archbishop of Cologne in the ninth century wrote as contemptuously
as Luther would ever do about this Papal "emperor of all the
world," and the emperor came to Rome to smoke the Pope out of his
palace. But the Popes generally won, for the ignorant monarchs of
the time had a terrible dread of hell-opening anathemas. Rome then
passed into its hundred and fifty years of degradation, but the
Puritan Popes who followed fastened their chains upon Europe more
firmly than ever.

     I have in my "Crises in the History of the Papacy" given a
summary record of the acts of Nicholas, Gregory, and Innocent and
it is a record of the most insufferable interferences in secular
matters. Many historians do not realize this and speak as if such
matters as "investitures" were the chief grounds of quarrel.
Bishops and archbishops were amongst the most powerful nobles of a
king in the early Middle Ages, and the monarch naturally demanded




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a voice in their appointment. The Popes just as naturally claimed
the sole right to appoint or "invest" them. This led to a century
of quarrels and ended in compromise. The exemption of the clergy
from taxation was an even greater cause of friction and annoyance.

     But it is quite a mistake to suppose that Popes confined their
interference to matters of this kind, in which they could make out
at least a plausible case. The words of Gregory VII, which I have
translated from one of his letters, mean that there is no single
"earthly and secular" thing on which they may not dictate if they
think fit. The claim was strengthened by making countries "fiefs of
the Holy See"; and this was by a series of often sordid maneuvers.
Pope Alexander II gave his blessing and a Papal banner to William
of Normandy when he made his quite unscrupulous raid on England,
and this was later held to make England a feudal dependency of the
Papacy. Pope Innocent kindly undertook to be guardian of the boy
Frederick II for his simple-minded mother, and thus claimed Naples
as a fief of the Holy See. On one pretext or other most countries
of Europe became Papal fiefs, or subject to the Pope as feudal
monarch as well as spiritual head.

     The more religious the Pope, the more use he made, and often
very unscrupulous use, of this power. Innocent III was a terrible
offender, but I will give only one instance. He did not move a
finger when King John of England murdered his nephew and he
complacently rid the king of his wife, and gave him a very light
penance for his new amorous adventure. But he laid an interdict on
England when John resented his forcing Stephen Langton as
Archbishop of Canterbury; be deposed the King (expressly as his
feudal monarch), and invited Philip of France to cross the Channel
and lay waste the country. When John submitted, the Pope exacted a
solemn recognition of England's feudal dependency on Rome, and
then, as feudal monarch, excommunicated the barons for forcing the
king to sign the Magna Charta. When the barons offered the crown to
the son of the French king, Innocent excommunicated the king. His
interference in Germany was just as galling and even more
unscrupulous.

     Now the various European monarchs had become much more
powerful and less docile by the sixteenth century. A very
significant change in the history of Europe, which is not
sufficiently noticed, is that the advisers of kings were now
largely lay lawyers and nobles instead of prelates. The Pope had to
treat with them as one monarch with another and forget all the talk
about "fiefs." But a glance at the activity of Leo X, the Pope of
Luther's day, will show how irritating the Papal claims still were.

     "When you have made a league with one man," the Pope used to
say, "there is no reason why you should cease to negotiate with his
opponent." Accordingly he signed a secret treaty with Spain against
France, and at the same time a secret treaty with France against
Spain; and a few months later secretly entered the German League
against France. His aid, it is important to remember, always took
the form of the funds which the Papacy wrung out of Europe. He made
secret terms with the French king, then deceived both him and his
other allies and tried to escape by revealing their secrets to each
other. Later he again sold his secret support to France for half a


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million dollars, and within a fortnight secretly signed a treaty
against France with Spain. This "unparalleled duplicity," as the
Catholic historian Pastor calls it, was merely the last stage of
Papal interference before the crash, and every monarch in Europe
was profoundly disgusted. The first blast of the great storm was
already raging in Germany, and the chair of Peter was occupied by
a fat, lazy, and utterly unscrupulous sensualist, a man who was
said in clerical circles to have boasted that his luxurious life
was based upon the world's belief in "the fable of Jesus Christ."

     At this point also, just when Luther had taken the war-path in
Germany, the fiscal system of Rome reached its most scandalous
proportions. Rome had so many sources of income that it is
impossible even to summarize them here. Peter's Pence, the direct
contribution of the faithful to the Pope, may be dismissed as
comparatively respectable. The Papal States yielded a further
income which might be deemed respectable if the Pope's title-deeds
were not arrant forgeries, as all now admit, and if the maintenance
of them through the ages had not meant so much bloodshed and
intrigue.

     Beyond that one may admit that, like the civil service, the
Papal Curia had a right to recoup its clerical and administrative
expenses from petitioners, but this innocent plea of payment for
necessary servants had grown into a colossal and sordid system of
extortion, entailing the grossest simony, or sale of sacred things.

     The charges for dispensations from various disabilities alone
brought a huge sum and were scandalous. For instance, the degrees
of kindred which formed an impediment to marriage, without a
dispensation, were extended farther and farther until one could not
marry a person related within four degrees by blood or marriage or
spiritual relationship. These and other impediments were
deliberately fabricated in order to make money out of the
dispensations. When some pious Christian expostulated with the
Vice-Chancellor of Pope Innocent III -- the system was already
fully developed in the thirteenth century -- he cynically answered:
"God desired not the death of sinners, but that they should pay and
live." The result was that the poor (who were related to
practically everybody in their village and never got away from it)
lived in "sin" and scoffed at the rich. There was no "divorce," but
a large payment so sharpened the eyes of the Papal lawyers that
they could discover a flaw in, and declare null and void, any
marriage of a wealthy man. "The most holy sacrament of marriage,"
says a Catholic writer, "was made a subject of derision to the
laity by the venality with which marriages were made and unmade to
fill the pouches of the episcopal officials."

     This, remember, is only a single class of dispensations. There
were many others, such as dispensations from onerous penances. The
real quarrel of Rome with the Spanish Inquisition was about money.
Even today in Spain you can buy a dispensation from nearly all the
fast-days of the Church during a year for ten cents. But the two
corrupt sources of revenue which were most significant in
connection with the Reformation, which exasperated the clergy as
well as the laity, were the sale of benefices and the sale of
indulgences.


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     John XXII, one of the Avignon Popes, a miserly lawyer who
organized the Papal finances, made a drastic beginning of what is
quite properly called the sale of benefices. An earlier Pope had
declared that the benefices of priests who died at Rome passed to
the disposal of the Papacy. John made this a general law of the
Church. When a benefice -- the salaried position of priest,
chaplain, abbot, bishop, etc. -- fell vacant, the successor of the
dead incumbent was to pay three years' revenue to Rome. Benefices
(bishoprics, etc.) were multiplied by the Papacy, and candidates
for the vacant office came with their offers of payment of "first
fruits" just as they made offers for any other lucrative
appointment.

     The infamous John XXIII extended the system and gave it a
quite sordid character. The Papacy had spies and an information
bureau, reporting on the health of ailing or aged priests. The
"expectation" of the benefice was sold to the highest bidder; and
even after this a "preference" would be sold to a second man over
the head of the first. The most disgusting traffic in sacred
offices continued throughout Christendom for two or three
centuries, but again it will suffice to take an instance from the
reign of Leo X, in the days of Luther.

     It will probably occur some day to an historian or medical man
to inquire whether Leo X was entirely sane. There was in his time
such a demand for reform, such an open scorn of the Church's
corruption, that Leo had to hold a Council in Rome to consider it.
He, of course, thwarted the Council. What idea of reform could
there be in a man who spent, largely in personal luxury, about two
million dollars a year, and surrounded himself with a court of
buffoons and immoral companions? He needed vast sums of money, and
he used the corrupt system of the Vatican more unscrupulously than
any before. In 1514, in order to have the political support of the
Elector Albert of Brandenburg, he permitted that young and
licentious noble to assume the dignity of Archbishop of Mayence,
and, against all Church rules, he further permitted him, for a
bribe of one hundred thousand dollars, to retain the bishoprics of
Magdeburg and Halberstadt. Germany was particularly angry about the
corrupt system, and Germany was treated by the Papacy as if it were
a nation of helpless peasants.

     Albert of Brandenburg was told that he could recoup himself
out of the sale of indulgences, and this brings us to the second
most corrupt source of income.

     I will not linger over the word "sale." You can in Spain today
get valuable indulgences, sealed and signed by the Archbishop of
Toledo, who says that he has a fresh Papal authorization every
year, in a shop. You pay seventy-five centimos (about fourteen
cents). That sum is marked on the paper (bula), and if you offer a
quarter of a dollar you get your change just as if you had bought
a cake of soap. The Church says that your money is a gift or alms
to itself, and that the indulgence is a gift to you. It is the
emptiest of bunk. Indulgences are sold in Spain today, and were in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sold all over Europe.




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     The "indulgence" started as an arrangement by which a man who
was condemned to an onerous penance for his sins might have it
commuted for an "alms" -- to the Church. In time the Popes
discovered that the wonderful graces and indulgences you gained by
making a pilgrimage to Rome might be gained just as well by paying
to the Church the price of such a pilgrimage. From that time, the
fourteenth century, indulgences were given for money-payments
everywhere. The price of a pilgrimage to Rome was high, so the
scale of the alms was lowered. The Church, as ever, was mindful of
her poorer members; in other words, she realized that a million
gifts of a dime each are worth more than a hundred gifts of twenty
dollars each.

     Most people are now aware that an indulgence does not mean
permission to commit sin, or even absolution from sin. It means
that a certain amount of punishment in Purgatory is wiped off the
slate. Pope John XXIII, the Council of Constance found, actually
sold absolution from sin, but that is exceptional. Still, any
person who knows Catholic sentiments will understand that the
indulgence encourages "sin" by making it easy to avoid the
punishment (Purgatory) which the Catholic dreads most. Confession
relieves him of the fear of hell at any time, but not of the
penalty in Purgatory.

     This traffic reached its culmination under the Popes of the
Renaissance, and especially Leo X. For the maintenance of the
luxury of the court and for the building of St. Peter's and other
monuments colossal sums were needed. Leo X organized the sale of
indulgences as if they were a new cure for indigestion.
Commissaries were sent everywhere, and, flaunting the Papal banner,
they cried their wares like street-salesmen. And again it was
Germany, the most disaffected part of Christendom, that was most
exploited. The cup was full. Rulers, priests, and people were
talking angrily or scornfully of this system which was somehow
imposed upon them as part of their religion. Pamphleteers had a
resounding success. And at last came the man who could prove that
this was no part of Christ's religion, and that therefore Rome had
apostatized from Christ.

                          MARTIN LUTHER

     German scholars have devoted very considerable research to the
condition of their country in the half-century before Luther raised
the flag of revolt, and it is now known that the land was
particularly ripe for insurgence against the Papacy. With their
customary blindness to actualities, the Popes did not appreciate
the changes which were taking place in Europe, and, proud of the
strength and wealth they had recovered since their return from
Avignon, they contemptuously ignored all protests except where
their political or diplomatic interest was involved. Thus France
had been induced to withdraw its support from the Conciliar
Movement in 1438 and had been granted a liberal arrangement with
the Papacy (in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges). England and
Spain had come to terms at an earlier date, and Italy, where
Marsiglio of Padua had published a virulent attack on the Papacy as
early as 1324 ("Defensor Pacis"), was, as usual, cowed into
subjection.


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     The German emperor had ostensibly got a favorable Concordat
with the Papacy in 1448, but it left the principal sources of
friction unsettled, and there were loud and constant complaints of
Papal greed. The excuse was now made that to increase the extortion
large funds were needed for a campaign against the Turks; yet
Christendom presently learned with horror that Popes Innocent VIII
and Alexander VI accepted one hundred thousand dollars a year from
the Sultan to keep his younger brother a captive at the Vatican,
and that Alexander VI offered to prevent a war against the Sultan
if the money was paid. Complaints were formulated at every meeting
of the German Diets, and it was particularly emphasized that the
fine folk at the Vatican treated the Germans as "slaves,"
"barbarians," and "beer-swillers," and contemptuously refused to
hear them. For a time there was a renewed demand for a General
Council, but Pius II decreed that such an appeal was an
infringement of Papal rights, and the Germans had to be content
with venting their anger.

     The new circumstances which escaped the notice of the Popes
were the rapid growth of the feeling of nationality in Germany, the
kindling of some spirit amongst the peasantry themselves after the
abolition of serfdom, the dissemination of the ideas of the
Humanists, and eventually the invention of printing. Very extensive
agitations amongst the peasants already existed in the fifteenth
century, and peasant orators, who had immense influence, were not
slow to point out how the people were exploited by the clergy.

     By the middle of the century there were scores of printing
presses in Germany, and, scanty as education was, the new invention
was in controversy something like what the invention of gunpowder
was in warfare. There was in the second half of the fifteenth
century a sort of religious revival in Germany: a purification and
deepening of religious sentiment which tended to concentrate
attention on the words and spirit of Christ. Editions of the Bible
poured from the press, and a thousand could now consult the actual
words of Christ for one who could have done so fifty years earlier.
Luther seems to have exaggerated, from imperfect recollection, when
he said in later years that he was almost the only monk of his body
to read the Bible. In the seventy years before the revolt of Luther
about two hundred editions (total or partial) of the Bible were
printed in European languages, and eighteen of these were in
German; and there were some five or six hundred editions in Latin.

     Another formidable weapon provided by the German press was the
literature of the Humanists. Erasmus, as we saw, quitted his native
Netherlands, where Spain and the Inquisition ruled, and ultimately
settled in Germany. Reuchlin, an older and more orthodox Humanist,
had to some extent prepared the way for him, but the brilliant and
dissipated young poet Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) hit the popular
taste even more effectively than the broad passages in the
"Colloquies" of Erasmus. Ex-monk himself, he had ample material for
controversy, and his courage was equal to his wit. He printed in
Germany Lorenza Valia's exposure of the fraudulent bases of the
Pope's temporal power (the Donation of Constantine), and in
conjunction with another German writer he issued a work, "The
Letters of Obscure Men," in which he held up to ridicule the
orthodox monks who defended the Papacy, by assigning to them


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letters that combined orthodoxy and stupidity in equal proportions.
The anger of Germany thus assumed at times the more dangerous form
of laughter. Scores of pamphlets circulated deriding the Papacy and
the clergy.

     At the height of this movement Leo X, as I said, gave Germany
a most cynical proof of his contempt for their claims. Men already
murmured that the archbishopric of Mayence had been vacant seven
times in one generation, and that the price which the Papacy
demanded for appointment to it was raised from ten thousand to
twenty thousand gulden. Then Leo sold it to the quite unworthy
Elector, Albert of Brandenburg, who merely desired its revenues,
and in addition permitted him, for a large consideration, to keep
two other episcopal sees. Albert was, as we saw, to recover part of
his payment by a share in the proceeds of the sale of indulgences,
and it is here that the Dominican monk Tetzel and the Augustinian
monk Martin Luther enter the story.

     Few characters in history have been so venomously libeled and
so unscrupulously glorified as Martin Luther. To the uncultivated
Protestant he is, after Jesus and Paul, the third founder of pure
Christianity: a man purified and ennobled by the spiritual flame
that burned in him and removed from him every human defilement. To
the Catholic he is an instrument of the devil: a coarse and fierce
sensualist, a man whose very breath was foul with obscenities, a
fool who for the tickling of his vanity and the gratification of
his passions perjured his soul and fabricated a charge against the
Church. Yet no character that has thus been painted by rival love
and hatred in fantastically exaggerated colors is more easy to
appreciate.

     Catholic literature even in our own day, when it affects an
air of liberality, is stupid in its exaggerations. Professor
Mackinnon quotes a work by a German Catholic (Merkle's
"Reformations-geschichtliche Streitfragen," 1904) which I have not
been able to see, and tells us that it contains a "crushing
exposure" of the Catholic Baron von Berlichingen's "Luther and the
Reformation." But a good idea of the stupid tradition may be
obtained from the American work "The Facts About Luther" by the
Rev. Mgr. Dr. P. O'Hare. From such a very reverend and learned-
looking author the Catholic expects the very truth, and is assured
by a professor of the Catholic University at Washington (the Rev.
Prof. Dr. Guilday), who writes the preface, that he gets it.

     The book is a quite sordid piece of deceit. The reverend
professor first tickles the appetite of the reader by announcing
"scenes of coarseness, vulgarity, obscenity and degrading
immorality." That is Catholic university culture in America. Even
the writer on Luther in the "Catholic Encyclopedia" ignores this
libel in his authorities, and, instead of immorality, speaks only
of "unsurpassable and irreproducible coarseness." But Father O'Hare
reproduces this for us. He opens his book with the constructive lie
that "learned and distinguished historians like Janssen, Denifle,
and Grisar, and many others" have "Painted with masterly accuracy
the real picture of the reformer." He conceals from his Catholic
readers the fact that Denifle and Grisar are just Church-serving
priests like himself, and that the "many others" have a profound
contempt for their lies about Luther.

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     Then he discovers that even unscrupulous hatred can invent no
calumny about Luther as a student, monk and professor, so he fills
his book with dreary discussions of doctrine and untruthful
defenses of the faith. We saw, for instance, that the last straw
laid upon the back of Germany was Leo X's cynical deal with Albert
of Brandenburg. Albert's purchase of the archbishopric is actually
defended, his character is not mentioned, and not a word is said
about the Pope permitting him, for a corrupt bribe, to retain two
other bishoprics.

     However, in the last chapter we reach the "obscenities"
promised us by the introducing professors. Luther's immorality, the
priest assures us, is vouched for by numbers of witnesses; and the
only one he quotes is a bitter Catholic opponent of the Reformer
who makes a vague general charge. On the strength of this, and some
of the passages in which Luther satirizes clerical celibacy and
bluntly tells monks and nuns to go and get married, we get the
quite childish assurance that "to deify indecency" was part of
Luther's "satanic desire and diabolical purpose." This sort of
melodramatic mouthing is what the American Catholic reads as a
summary of "learned and distinguished historians." From refined
Father Grisar the refined Father O'Hare even reproduces the very
delicate suggestion that Luther had syphilis ... One almost regrets
that the kind of blunt and forceful language which he quotes from
Luther has gone out of fashion, and that one has now, more
politely, to describe this kind of literature as the dung of obese
Jesuits and the dollar-catching drivel of lick-spittle servants of
the Pope.

     There is no dispute about the fact that Luther was a
profoundly religious man: that is to say, a man of, not only the
firmest belief in Christianity, but of exceptionally strong
religious sentiment, In his "Table-Talk" he describes adultery as
"a crime most odious ... a crime at once against God, against
society, and against one's family." And, as against Dr. O'Hare's
repeated statement that he glorified sexual intercourse and
ridiculed the idea that a man or woman could remain virginal, we
have his advice, in insisting on purity, to the preacher of the
gospel: "Is he able, with a good conscience to remain unmarried?
Let him so remain." Luther was a man of strong sensuality. His
temperament was peculiar in this that he united an acute nervous
sensibility and explosiveness with the eupeptic blood-circulation
that usually goes with placid nerves. He therefore felt acutely the
conflict of his "flesh" and the contempt of his creed for the
flesh, but he was too sincere in his faith to assuage the conflict
by a compromise between the two. or by devoting a Saturday to the
one and a Sunday to the other. It is impossible to say exactly why
he became a monk, but I agree with Professor Mackinnon that an
explanation given by himself in later years is the correct one:
that in a dangerous thunder-storm he vowed to enter a monastery if
his life was spared.

     The Augustinian monastery he entered was not lax, and the
fierce conflict of flesh and faith tormented his early manhood, in
spite of his admitted austerities. He brooded morbidly for years on
what Paul calls, in the Latin Bible, the "justice" of God. It
suggested a Rhadamanthus of a judge, particularly in regard to the


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innocent physiological movements which the Christian calls "bad
thoughts." How could a man like himself, with so many "bad
thoughts," hope to escape this searching and fiercely punishing
judge? And it is admitted by all that this terrible stress ended,
long before he had any idea of a breach with Rome, in a discovery
that there was a mistranslation of the Greek text of Paul. He had
spoken of God's "righteousness," not "justice," and a perfect
confidence in God would infallibly bring whatever "grace" was
necessary for "salvation."

     These things do not of themselves interest us today. Even the
normal Protestant or Catholic does not now go home, after glimpses
of the upper regions of silk stockings on the screen or of bare
limbs in a revue or a vaudeville, to tear the sheets and wet the
pillow with tears. But Luther's struggle and the solution of it
while he was still a monk are part of the essential history of the
Reformation. It was evolving in Luther's mind as inevitably as
events were moving toward it in the world at large; but without
those outward events we should never have heard of Martin Luther.
He had no instinct of rebellion. In 1510 he visited Rome on
business of his Augustinian Order, and after seeing all its
corruption, he went back meekly to his cell. He was not of heroic
stuff. Son of a miner, he had in early manhood a great sympathy
with the oppressed poor and spoke scornfully of their lords and
exploiters; but when the peasants rebelled and appealed for his
aid, he not unmindful that if princes deserted the Reformation, it
was certainly ruined -- harshly exhorted the masters to treat them
as "mad dogs" and shoot them.

     The career of such a man naturally has weaknesses, but the
only one worth serious notice is his fiery temper and coarseness of
language. He was, as I said, of an explosive nervous temperament,
and to say that he often in the trying circumstances of his
struggle flew into a rage is merely to say that he was not a
"saint." The coarseness of his language at times -- his "Table-
Talk" generally reads as soporifically as Marcus Aurelius -- cannot
be lightly set aside as explained by the lowliness of his home or
the general coarseness of the Middle Ages; though, if we had the
same extensive and intimate knowledge of some even of the bishops
and nobles of the time, we might find them using the same language.
Luther, indeed, might have argued, if any person had objected to
his fluent scattering of "asses" and "swine," that Jesus himself
was pretty free with expletives like "brood of vipers," and so on.
In short, Luther was not and never professed to be, a meek saint or
an anemic apostle of gentleness. He did not see that Christianity
obliged him to say "woman of ill fame" (with a blush) instead of
"whore." For any serious historical purpose his "coarseness" is as
immaterial as the size of his boots.

     Luther was teaching at Wittenberg University when, toward the
close of 1517, the Dominican monk, Father Tetzel, came to Juterbog,
a few miles away, to sell indulgences. Tetzel's character no more
matters than the robustness of Luther's language. He was specially
chosen by the Pope as chief indulgence-monger because he had an
effective way of getting money. This way consisted in his loud and
picturesque appraisal of the value of the indulgences. Wittenberg
was only three miles away, and people went over to hear this


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medieval Billy Sunday and talked about him. Luther had long ago
concluded that salvation was a very difficult business, and one
could make sure of it only by personal union with and reliance on
God. From every point of view the Tetzel business honestly
disgusted him. It released people from reliance on "grace" and
encouraged them to rely on bits of money and ceremonies. It
encouraged vice by indicating a very easy way of evading payment
for it. And the money went to a corrupt hierarchy, and Purgatory
was not in the Bible or the Fathers, so ... As the issue of his
reflections, Luther drew up ninety-five propositions about
Purgatory and indulgences, and nailed his paper, on the eve of the
feast of All Saints, to the door of the Castle Church, which was
used as a sort of notice board.

     This was not the beginning of the Reformation. It was one
Catholic disputing with another Catholic as to whether some point
not defined by the Church could or could not be held. But there was
the germ of revolution in it, because the Popes had for two
centuries drawn vast funds from the sale of indulgences, and this
was based essentially on the doctrine of Purgatory. Luther cannot
have dreamed that Rome would tolerate his denial. He can only have
supposed that Rome, nearly a thousand miles away, would never hear
of his proposed battle of wits with Tetzel. Probably, indeed, he
never thought about Rome, but only of Tetzel. From his pulpit in
Wittenberg he roared invectives across the three miles of space to
Juterbog.

     The bishop sent a copy of Luther's ninety-five theses to Rome.
He smelt sulphur, but a professor at the university was a
professor. A Dominican monk in Rome replied to the theses, and, in
fact, the Dominican monks, the "dogs of the Lord," the ready tools
of the Popes at that time in searching out wealthy heretics and in
selling indulgences, informed the Vatican that Luther was spoiling
business in his part of Germany. The emperor also was induced to
denounce Luther. He was summoned to Rome; and he was probably
reminded of the little poem, if it already existed in some shape,
about the spider and the fly. Through the influence of his patron,
the Elector of Saxony, he was excused from going to Rome, and
ordered to present himself before the Papal Legate at Augsburg in
1518.

     Pope Leo sent his ablest Legate, Cardinal Cajetan, for he
wanted money. But the Diet listened somberly to the cardinal's
description of the menace of the Turk, and, in fine, refused the
money and drew up afresh a long list of their grievances against
Rome. It was in this atmosphere that Luther boldly refused to
retract and appealed to a general Council. This was not new or
revolutionary. A great many people, especially in Germany, had held
for a century that a General Council was higher than the Pope, and,
on such a theory, it could not matter that the Pope said otherwise.

     Luther returned unmolested to Wittenberg, and no further step
was taken for two years. But the work went on mightily. People were
now reading Erasmus and laughing over Ulrich von Hutten's "Letters
of Obscure Men." More pious folk were reading spiritual books which
brought them back, like Luther, to Paul and the New Testament.
Luther's theses were printed, in Latin and German, and widely


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discussed. This learned professor, it seemed, maintained that the
Papacy had definitely admitted as Christian truth a human
invention. On top of it all came the political news that the Diet
had buttoned up the German people's pockets against the Pope. The
general frame of mind was one of hostility to Rome within the
limits of the faith. But if anyone were now to prove that this
faith imposed by the Popes was adulterated in their own interest
... The prairie was very ready for a spark.

     The spark fell, and the Reformation began, when Luther in 1520
published the results of his two years reflections. He had compared
the Scholastic theology (about which he had long been uneasy) and
the Canon Law with the real Christian faith as given in the New
Testament and the Fathers. He issued two pamphlets (and a third
which does not matter here). The first, an "Address to the
Christian Nobility of the German Nation," reminded secular rulers
how much they paid for the pomp and luxury of Rome, and informed
them that they had a perfect right to reform the Church; that the
Pope's sharp distinction between spiritual and temporal power was
an invention. The second pamphlet, "The Babylonish Captivity of the
Church," said that the Christian truth was that men must rely on
God's grace, not ceremonies; that four of the Church's seven
sacraments were inventions; and so on. A Papal bull was hurled at
the monk; and he gave the Reformation its third and final
foundation when, on December 10th, he, in the presence of students,
professors, and townsfolk, burned Pope Leo's bull at the gate of
Wittenburg, amidst general applause.

     Luther was still far more Catholic than Wyclif or Hus had
been. His idea merely was that the Papal system should be sheared
by a General Council, convoked by secular rulers, of certain
doctrines and practices not contained in the writings of the
Fathers. But this was to attack the basic principle of the system,
the authority of the Pope; and it was, on the other hand, the very
note which Germany required to give a definite direction to its
vague dissatisfaction. At the same time a certain Jacques Lefevre
was preaching a somewhat similar gospel, and bringing men back to
the Bible, in France, and Zwingli, the favorite preacher of Zurich,
was denouncing indulgences in that city.

     The next move was with "the assassins," and the orthodox young
emperor, Charles V, summoned Luther to appear before the Diet at
Worms (1621) and condemned him. He and the Diet reaffirmed all
their grievances against Rome, and demanded a General Council, but
he had not the least sympathy with an eccentric monk who burned
Papal bulls. Luther was a "notorious and stiff-necked heretics" and
his writings were "foul and harmful." Strong in the loud
manifestations of popular support everywhere, Luther had refused to
recant, but the combination of Church and State against him was
irresistible. He might have ended as Hus and Savonarola had ended,
and the Reformation been postponed to another age, had not the
friendly Elector of Saxony arranged a little plot for his safety.
He was seized as he traveled from Worms and lodged in the ancient
castle of the Wartburg. There, disguised as a knight, he turned to
the translation of the Bible, awaiting some new turn of events. And
the turn, the critical historical fact which facilitated the
Reformation, was that the fiery ambition of the young emperor now


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drove him abroad for some years in the military enforcement of his
rights, and the minor princes of Germany were left free to
consider, and in some cases adopt and encourage, the new anti-Papal
theories.

                    THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

     The German Emperor Charles was, though no model of chastity,
an orthodox believer; but we do not need a prolonged search to find
the usual very human elements in any spiritual triumph of Leo X.
The emperor was embarking upon a serious campaign against France,
and he wanted, and received a promise of, Papal support. So he
branded Luther a heretic, and Leo felt that he could now force the
Elector of Saxony to surrender Luther to the mercies of the
Inquisition. But Leo himself died before the end of the year, and
he was succeeded by Hadrian VI.

     Quite certainly Hadrian wanted reform, and there were many
clerics in Rome who saw that reform was urgently needed to save the
Papacy. But the luxurious and vicious cardinals appointed by Leo
and his predecessors ruled the Palace, and they smiled at the piety
of this son of the working class who had strangely found his way
among them. Hadrian himself, in fact, did not propose to do more
than modify the abominable traffic in spiritual things. He died,
utterly distracted, within two years, and the Papacy again fell to
a member of the great Medici house.

     Clement VII was not vicious, but he was weak and he was, like
his predecessors, immersed in politics and in the interests of his
relatives. Catholic writers claim under his pontificate the first
evidence that the Church could and would reform itself, and even so
cautious an historian as Professor Robinson says that the Legate
Campeggio, acting on the Pope's instructions, "met the longstanding
and general demand for reform without a revolution in doctrines or
institutions." The truth is that the Catholic princes themselves,
whom Campeggio was to combine in a League against Luther's
supporters, compelled the Pope to make some show of reform, and
what was done was of the most meager description.

     The pontificate of Clement VII precisely shows the utter
unwillingness or incapacity of the Church to reform itself. The
Lutheran princes formed a powerful League to protect the heresy. In
Switzerland city after city officially adopted the rebellion.
Gustavus Vasa adopted Lutheranism in Sweden, and it made great
progress in Denmark. And, most formidable of all, Henry VIII had
severed his own State and Church from the Vatican, and the
Reformers were making dangerous progress in France. The revolution
was sweeping Europe. Yet this representative of the more luxurious
members of the Sacred College, confronting the most terrible
disaster that the Pope had ever imagined, spent his life in
promoting the interests of his family by political intrigue and at
the most made a few tactical and entirely useless concessions to a
local demand.

     That the Church was neither willing nor able to reform itself
is even more clearly proved by the pontificate of Alexander VI.
When the Medicean Pope Clement died in the year 1534 the


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Reformation was almost established. The one hope now for the
Vatican was that by a drastic purification of the morals of the
higher clergy and a complete reform of its fiscal system it might
unite the Catholic princes in a zeal for the faith and win back a
large body of the people. Most of the German princes held firm for
the faith, and they waited only for a General Council to reform the
Church and settle points of doctrine before they set out to coerce
the minority. There was still a possibility of at least confining
the schism to a few countries or provinces on the fringe of Europe.

     In this solemn hour the frivolous cardinals who met at Rome to
elect a Pope, and cynically implored the light of the Holy Ghost,
chose Cardinal Alessandro Farnese to wear the tiara and control the
destinies of the Church. A more stupid and irritating choice it
would be difficult to imagine. He had been known in the Church for
more than twenty years as "the petticoat cardinal." No one in
Europe was ignorant that he owed his high position to the fact that
his fifteen-year-old sister, Giulia Farnese, had been the mistress
of Alexander VI, and that as a cardinal he had had a regular
mistress, besides his occasional amours, who bore him four children
in his cardinalitial palace. At the very time of his election his
son, Pier Luigi, and his daughter, Costanza, were well-known
figures in Roman society, and, instead of retiring into a decent
obscurity, they came out boldly to enjoy the new wealth and
prestige of their Papa. Two boy nephews also, one seventeen and the
other fourteen years old, were at once promoted to the cardinalate
and enriched with lucrative ecclesiastical benefices; and both of
these cardinals became as immoral as the rest of the noble Farnese
family.

     Paul III was, as Pope, a man of virtue; he was nearly seventy
years old when he was elected. But, although, there were assuredly
now many cardinals who wanted reform -- it is a miracle of
Stupidity that any did not -- the very fact that Paul III was
elected shows that the Papal court as a body was still corrupt. Its
attitude is quite clear. Paul III was reputed to be a very able
diplomatist, and he was to meet the demands of Europe for reform
with all the astuteness in words that he could command, yet yield
not one inch except under severe pressure.

     And that is precisely what was done even at the height of the
storm in Europe. Paul announced that a General Council would be
held to reform the Church and settle questions of doctrine. It was
three years after his accession when he fixed the date and place of
the Council, and, as it was to be held in Italy under the control
of his Legates, even the Catholic monarchs would have nothing to do
with it. Paul was determined not to yield, and he wasted another
year and then announced a Council at Vicenza: again in an Italian
town, which both Catholic and Protestant princes refused to
sanction, and under Papal auspices. When Paul's three Legates made
a pompous entry into Vicenza at the appointed time, they found only
five bishops there, and they ignominiously retired to Rome.

     Many historians believe that Paul had not the least desire to
hold a Council. I should say that he was certainly willing to hold
a Council in Italy, under his own control, but he had only the
faintest hope of inducing even the Catholic monarchs to agree to


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it, and he relied entirely on his diplomatic ability to bring about
a union of Catholic princes and then organize a massacre of
Protestants on the largest scale. Meantime, he had a reform-
commission at work in the Vatican, and, although he gave the reform
cardinals to understand that they must be prudent and moderate,
they in 1537 presented him with a very ugly document, a list of the
reforms which the Church must make "from within." It is enough to
say that the document was shelved in the Papal Archives, where it
remains today.

     One office of the Vatican establishment was selected for
reform, and the discussion of this lasted three further years. It
was not until 1540, nearly twenty years after Luther had burned the
Pope's bull, that any reforms, a few minor reforms, were carried
out. One instance will show the real value of these, however
edifying they may seem in schedule. One of the grave abuses was
that priests obtained lucrative clerical positions far away from
Rome, and then lived a luxurious life in Rome on the income. This
scandal at least must end, said the reform cardinals, and the Pope
resigned himself to sacrifice eighty notorious offenders. They
tearfully pointed out ... In short, they all remained in Rome.

     It is of interest to the modern reader to know that the Popes
and cardinals were not the only offenders in the Church. It was,
above all, the German Emperor who pressed for a General Council, so
that he might unite and pacify his distracted empire, and the
French king and many of the subsidiary German princes felt that it
was very much against their own interest to see the emperor recover
his full power. Priests and laymen, in other words, were equally
lax in regard to a "reform from within." All that Rome -- apart
from the minority of reformers -- wanted was a Council which should
satisfy the emperor that the followers of Luther were formal
heretics, and he might unsheathe the sword. But the emperor wanted
a Council at which the Lutherans would assist in the discussion of
doctrine and thus afford some chance of a pacific settlement. For
this, he knew, reform of morals and finance was essential; and Rome
preferred its traditional device of bloody suppression.

     In 1541 the Pope met the emperor and was forced to act. A
Council should be held, as soon as possible, at Trent, in the
emperor's dominions. It is enough to say that when Paul's Legates
arrived there, with the usual pomp, and after allowing three weeks
for the gathering of the prelates, not a single bishop had come! No
one believed in the Pope's intentions. At that solemn hour of Papal
history he was enriching his family and parading his illegitimate
offspring. When the emperor heard that the Pope had, with
incredible levity, just given his granddaughter (daughter of his
illegitimate daughter) two duchies of the Papal States as a dowry,
he threatened to invade Rome and depose the libertine.

     These are undisputed historical facts. These are the prosy
statements you will find in any history of the time. Instead of the
Church -- either Popes, cardinals, or prelates -- being willing and
able to reform themselves, they evaded every attempt of the laity
for forty years, in fact for a hundred and thirty years (counting
from the Council of Constance), to impose reform on them. When the
Council of Trent was at last announced, in 1545, there were only


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two bishops present when the Pope's Legates arrived. The purpose of
the Pope was notorious. At the very time when he announced his
grand plan of reform, he issued new coins in Rome on which there
was a naked figure of Ganymede watering the Farnese lily! Secretly,
as we now know, Paul was sending funds to Germany for a war on the
heretics which would make the Council superfluous. So to the end of
his life he resisted reform and relied on the sword. His successor,
Julius III, suspended the labors of the Council of Trent and proved
even more frivolous than Paul. It was only when Protestantism was
fully established that some measure of reform became inevitable;
and the sale of indulgences in Spain to this day is a sufficient
proof that it was based on policy, not principle. The Church was
reformed where, and in so far as, compulsion existed.

                  HUMANITY CRUCIFIED FOR CHRIST

     It remains to tell how Rome now failed to drown the new heresy
in blood, as it had drowned previous revolts, and how in its effort
to do so it crucified humanity anew. It may be said in a word that
the new religion triumphed for the same reason that Christianity
had triumphed in the fourth century: it won the favor of secular
princes. The Protestant who seeks a divine intervention in the
affairs of the world in the sixteenth century is just as eccentric
as the Catholic who holds that his Church enjoyed a divine guidance
throughout the nightmare of the early Middle Ages and the
corruption of the later. Religious ideas prevailed, like political
ideas, when the sword of the soldier enforced or protected them.

     Luther, branded a heretic by the emperor at the instigation of
the Papal Legate, was in hiding in the Wartburg fortress. His great
hymn, "Our God Is a Strong Fort," is not without irony. The
Wartburg and the soldiers of the Elector had to represent God to
him for the time being. But -- here the zealous Protestant might
discern the hand of God -- the greed and ambition of the young
emperor drove him to military fields abroad for several years, and
the governing council which he left in Germany proved feeble and
futile. The new ideas spread rapidly, and several men of power were
won to them. The city of Wittenberg officially embraced some of the
new ideas, modifying the mass, abolishing fasts, and pooling Church
property; and Luther was encouraged to return.

     The new Pope, Hadrian VI, wanted reform, as I said, but could
not achieve it. Through his Legate at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1523
he admitted the corruption of the Church, yet he demanded the
enforcement of the edict against Luther. The Diet refused to
persecute, demanded a General Council, and enjoined on Luther
merely to refrain from further controversy until the Council was
held. One might is well tell a fire to burn no further. The
Reformation swept on. To the Diet of Spires in 1524 the Pope sent
his ablest Legate, Campeggio, and promised reform. Now the Diet
promised to enforce the coercive decree, but it was too late to do
so, and the opposing forces secretly organized. The Pope's
representative formed a Catholic League of the Duke of Austria, the
two Dukes of Bavaria, and a few others -- incidentally assigning to
each, on the Pope's instructions, a large bribe out of Church funds
-- and the Elector of Saxony, the Margrave of Hesse, and others
formed a league to protect the reformers. The Swiss cities were now


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adopting the ideas of Zwingli, and an attempt was made to unite the
German and Swiss reformers, but Luther and Zwingli, who met in
1529, could not agree. The Swiss cities combined separately to
protect their reformed religion.

     In the same year, 1529, the Diet of Spires received orders
from the emperor, who was still abroad, to enforce the Worms decree
against the innovators. Here it was that the Lutheran minority of
the Diet made the famous "Protest" which made them henceforth the
Protesters or Protestants.

     In 1530 the Emperor Charles returned, and the moment of crisis
seemed to have arrived. He summoned a Diet at Augsburg, inviting
the Protestants to formulate their views, and they did so in the
Augsburg Confessions. To this document, rejecting auricular
confession, the mass, clerical celibacy, and monastic vows, the
majority replied by a decree that if the Protestants did not
voluntarily submit by a certain date the truth would be enforced
upon them in the traditional way of those pious times. But the
Confession had the signatures of the Elector of Saxony (the
Constantine of Protestantism), Philip of Hesse, the Margrave of
Brandenburg, the Dukes of Luneburg, and the representatives of
various cities, and, when they left the Diet and formed the
Schmalkaldic League, the odor of gunpowder restrained the zeal of
the orthodox. The period of grace was extended. The emperor was
busy with his personal ambitions, the Turks were threatening
Christendom, and the Catholic princes were not too eager to see the
emperor triumph. It is not for a very profane historian like myself
to say if God arranged these things.

     Meantime, as I said, Lutheranism conquered Denmark and
Scandinavia, and the strange spectacle was seen in Paris, in 1528,
of his Most Catholic Majesty inviting the reformers to set forth
their ideas in his palace, through the mouth of a zealous young man
named Cauvin, or Calvin, of whom the world would hear much. The
king's sister favored the new ideas. The Sorbonne was deeply
infected with them. But Calvin had to fly to Geneva, where he
persuaded the Swiss to exchange the less irrational views of
Zwingli for his own dreary and ferocious predestinationism; which
soon showed its human value in the horrible outrage of the burning
of the brilliant young Spaniard, Servetus, because his views of
religion were two centuries more enlightened than those of John
Calvin.

     Meantime, also, Henry VIII of England had been inspired by his
"lust" and by the Papal control of his appetites to reflect in his
turn on the bases of the Pope's power. The superficial Catholic
view which represents the Reformation in England as merely an
expression of the perversity of Henry VIII ought to be resented by
Catholic readers as an insult to their intelligence. Long before
Henry's time more than one-tenth of England had embraced the even
more radical Protestantism of Wyclif, and the grounds of that
heresy remained: the actual teaching of Christ in the Gospels on
the one hand, and the elaborate mythology and corrupt practices of
the Church on the other. All Europe was ready for a reform, and was
prevented from embracing it only by the use of force. Long before
the question of Henry's divorce arose, the learned Dean of St.
Paul's Colet, was preaching a kind of Protestantism and had many
supporters.
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     But, however we may smile at the character of the man who in
1533 displaced the Pope ("the petticoat cardinal") as the head of
the Church of England, we can quite easily see how he could reach
his conclusion in sincerity. The English kings had long refused to
recognize Papal supremacy in the form in which the Popes demanded
a recognition of it, and royal advisers like Crammer, who became
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532, had studied the Lutheran ideas at
Cambridge and in Germany. To look for ambitions and lusts at the
roots of the English Reformation is to the modern mind amusing. The
contrast of Christ's teaching and the teaching and practice of Rome
was so glaring that, no matter what occasioned a man to reflect on
it, he could hardly be other than sincere in saying that he
perceived it.

     It is much easier to understand than a case in recent times of
a Protestant English princess discovering, just when the Spanish
royal crown was dangled before her eyes, that the mythology of the
Spanish Church is much nearer to the teaching of Christ than the
comparatively respectable tenets and practices of the Church of
England; and every Catholic in the world warmly approved the
conversion" and subsequent marriage to the king of Spain of that
English princess.

     I need not, therefore, follow the details of the English
Reformation. To most of us moderns the only difficulty is to
understand how it took men so long to realize the rottenness and
untruthfulness of the bases of the Papal claim; for little beyond
that was rejected in the early days of the Reformation. England
remained Catholic, and the Bishop of Rome was told to confine
himself to his own ill-regulated diocese. But the discovery of one
Papal fraud was bound to lead to the discovery of others, and
presently the maggots were ejected from the comfort of the monastic
cheese, the mummery of the mass was seen to be a burlesque of
Christ's last supper, the confessional was easily recognized as an
invention of medieval priestcraft, and so on.

     Protestantism in every country ran its inevitable course.
Luther died, and the Council of Trent began its labors, in 1546.
The schism was now a formal and powerful heresy, and Pope Paul III
egged on the emperor and the Catholic princes to a crusade. Paul
secretly promised the emperor one hundred thousand ducats out of
the Papal treasury, twelve thousand soldiers in Papal pay, half a
year of the revenue of the Spanish Church and five hundred thousand
ducats' worth of monastic property -- the confiscation of which in
England so profoundly shocked the Pope. Charles was at length
brought or driven to the conclusion of a secret treaty with the
Pope and the Catholic princes to make "war" on his Protestants.
Again he hesitated for a moment when be learned that the Pope, to
precipitate matters, had treacherously betrayed this plot to the
Protestants themselves and had invited other Catholic monarchs to
join the "crusade" and thus diminish the glory of the vain monarch.
Charles inflicted some defeats on the Protestants, and then
bitterly disappointed and angered the Pope by granting the interim,
a temporary peace and compromise between the two parties. The
treaty of Augsburg in 1555 then promised mutual toleration and
liberty.



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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     But a new "religious" farce, the Jesuits, now appeared, and
the Court at Rome was purified of its paganism and the inevitable
issue was -- war, massacres, burnings, hangings, disembowelings.
The civilization of Europe, which had begun to advance again, was
once more put back a hundred years. France checked its Protestants
by the most horrible outrage that stains its chronicles, the St.
Bartholomew Massacre (1572), over which the Pope sang a Te Deum,
and by the war against the Huguenots. England stank with the
burning flesh of "martyrs" on both sides. In the little Netherlands
Catholic Spain's "butcher's bill" amounted to more than a hundred
thousand men and women. Germany, or the whole central part of
Europe, remained a charnel-house for decades. Bohemia, the main
battlefield, and until then a most promising civilization, had its
thirty thousand prosperous villages reduced to six thousand, its
three million enlightened citizens reduced to seven hundred and
eighty thousand beggars. The plague, supervening upon the
impoverished people, carried off a further hundred thousand.

     So the glorious Reformation and the now "reformed" Church of
Rome crucified humanity afresh. The same fierce intolerance
remained on both sides. The human interests of man were despised on
both sides. The new culture, which had initiated and symbolized the
awakening of civilization, was dreaded by both sides. Protestantism
had the lean fanatic's hatred of art: Catholicism prostituted it
and ruined its inspiration. Eyes bloodshot with hatred glared
across streets and frontiers at each other. ... You would tell me
that God and Christ were looking down on this new and unprecedented
massacre and debauchment of men in their name! "The only excuse for
God is that he does not exist."

     But humanity had new germs of mental vitality in it which
could never again be destroyed. Even in the religious field Ana-
baptists and Socinians appeared. Presently Deism would inaugurate
the final development. Science found laboratories where Popes and
their Inquisitors dare no longer intrude their noses. I am disposed
to welcome the Reformation: not indeed the narrow theology, the
dreary worship, the ferocious orthodoxy, which some would
perpetuate in the world, but the effect on Rome. It proved that the
new tyranny of a book had no approach to the tyranny of the Pope.
The race began to speculate. A great lesson in rebellion had been
taught. The progress of the world consists in learning lessons of
rebellion. The Catholic sneers at the "Protestant Revolution." He
gives us the measure of his own fatuity.





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