10 ORIENTATION.
lectics and idle speculations, but ignored the great doctrines of the gospel. Carlstadt, the older colleague of Luther, confessed that ‘he had been doctor of divinity before he had seen a complete copy of the Bible. Education was confined to priests and nobles. “The mass of the laity could neither read nor write, and had no access to the word of God except the Scripture lessons from the pulpit.
The priest’s chief duty was to perform, by his magic words, the miracle of transubstantiation, and to offer the sacrifice of the mass for the living and the dead in a foreign tongue. Many did it mechanically, or with a skeptical reservation, especially in Italy. Preaching was neglected, and had reference, mostly, to indulgences, alms, pilgrimages and processions. The churches were overloaded with good and bad pictures, with real and fictitious relics. Saint-worship and image-worship, superstitious rites and ceremonies obstructed the direct worship of God in spirit and in truth.
Piety which should proceed from a living union of the soul with Christ and a consecration of character, was turned outward and reduced to a round of mechanical performances such as the recital of Paternosters and Avemarias, fasting, alms-giving, confession to the priest, and pilgrimage to a holy shrine. Good works were measured by the quantity rather than the quality, and vitiated by the principle of meritoriousness which appealed to the selfish motive of reward. Remission of sin could be bought with money ; a shameful traffic in indulgences was carried on under the Pope’s sanction for filthy lucre as well as for the building of St. Peter’s Dome, and caused that outburst of moral indignation which was the beginning of the Reformation and of the fearful judgment on the Church of Rome.
This is a one-sided, but not an exaggerated description. It is true as far as it goes, and needs only to be supplemented by the bright side which we shall present in the next section.
Honest Roman Catholic scholars, while maintaining the infallibility and consequent doctrinal irreformability of their church,
§ 3. NECESSITY OF A REFORMATION. 11
admit in strong terms the decay of discipline and the necessity of a moral reform in the sixteenth century.’
The best proof is furnished by a pope of exceptional integrity, Adrian VI., who made an extraordinary confession of the papal _ and clerical corruption to the Diet of Niirnberg in 1522, and tried earnestly, though in vain, to reform his court. The Council of Trent was called not only for the extirpation of heresy, but in part also “for the reformation of the clergy and Christian people ;”? and Pope Pius IV., in the bull of confirmation, likewise declares that one of the objects of the Council was “the correction of morals and the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline.” ὅ
On the other hand, it must be admitted that the church was more than once in a far worse condition, during the papal schism in the fourteenth, and especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries ; and yet she was reformed by Pope Hildebrand and his successors without a split and without an alteration of the Catholic Creed.
Why could not the same be done in the sixteenth century? Because the Roman church in the critical moment resisted reform with all her might, and forced the issue: either no reformation at all, or a reformation in opposition to Rome.
The guilt of the western schism is divided between the two parties, as the guilt of the eastern schism is; although no human
1So Bellarmine and Bossuet. M@hler also (in his Kirchengesch. III. 99) says: “We do not believe that the period before the Reformation was a flourishing period of church history, for we hear from it a thousand voices for a reformation in the head and members (wir héren aus derselben den tausendstimmigen Ruf nach einer Verbesserung an Haupt und Gliedern uns entgegentinen).” Even Janssen, the eulogist of medieval Germany, devotes the concluding section of the first volume of his Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (p. 594-613) to a consideration of some of the crying evils of those times.
Ὁ Sess. I. (held Dec. 13, 1545): “ad extirpationem heresium, ad pacem et unionem ecclesice, ad reformationem cleri et populi Christiani.’” See Smets, Concilii Trident. Canones et Decreta, p. 10,
*“ Ad plurimas et perniciosissimas hereses extirpandas, ad corrigendos mores, et restituendam ecclesiasticam disciplinam,” etc. See Smets, l. c. 209.