476 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
On a superficial view one might wish that the Reformers had remained true to their solemn promise, like the Jansenist bishops in the seventeenth century, and the clerical leaders of the Old Catholic secession in the nineteenth! But it was their mission to introduce by example as well as by precept, a new type of Christian morality, to restore and re-create clerical family life, and to secure the purity, peace, and happiness of innumerable homes.
Far be it from us to depreciate the value of voluntary celibacy which is inspired by the love of God. The mysterious word of our Lord, Matt. 19:12, and the advice and example of Paul, 1 Cor. 7:7, 40, forbid it. We cheerfully admire the self-denial and devotion of martyrs, priests, missionaries, monks, nuns, and sisters of charity, who sacrificed all for Christ and their fellow-men. Protestantism, too, has produced not a few noble men and women who, without vows and without seeking or claiming extra merit, renounced the right of marriage from the purest motives.2— But according
coarsest hypocrites’’ and ‘‘slaves of the most vulgar superstition ”’ (p. 246, Philad. ed. 1833). The same poet gives us the startling piece of information (p. 248) that the Protestants were subdivided on the eucharistic question alone into countless factions such as ‘‘ Panarii, Accidentarii, Corporarii, Arrabonarii, Tropiste, Metamorphiste, Iscariotistze, Schwenkenfeldians, etc., etc., etc.,’’ and that “‘an author of Bellarmine’s time counted no less than two hundred different opinions on the words, ‘ This is my body’’’! Moore was evidently better at home in the history of Lord Byron than in the history of the church.
1 The Old Catholic Bishop Reinkens and Bishop Herzog, Drs. Dollinger, Friederich, Reusch, and Langen, remained single after their excommunication in 1870. But Pére Loyson-Hyacinthe, who occupies a similar position of Tridentine or rather Gallican Romanism versus Vatican Romanism, followed the example of the Reformers, and married an American widow, whom ἡ he had converted to the Roman Church by his eloquent sermons in Notre Dame, before she converted him to herself. They were joined together by Dean Stanley in Westminster Abbey. It is reported that Pope Pius IX., on being informed of the fact, and asked to excommunicate the ex-monk, wittily replied, ‘‘It is not necessary, since he has taken the punishment into his own arms.” A Pope’s view of the blessed estate of matrimony!
2 We may mention the saintly Archbishop Leighton, Dr. Samuel Hopkins, the missionary Zeisberger, Dr. William Augustus Miihlenberg (the founder of St. Luke’s Hospital in New York and of St. Johnland, and the singer of
ὃ 79. REFLECTIONS ON CLERICAL FAMILY LIFE. 477
to God’s ordinance dating from the state of innocency, and sanctioned by Christ at the wedding feast at Cana, marriage is the rule for all classes of men, ministers as well as laymen. For ministers are men, and do not cease to be men by becoming ministers.
The Reformation has changed the moral ideal, and elevated domestic and social life. The medieval ideal of piety is the flight from the evil world: the modern ideal is the transforma- - tion of the world. The model saint of the Roman Church is the monk separated from the enjoyments and duties of society, and anticipating the angelic life in heaven where men neither marry nor are given in marriage: the model saint of the Evangelical Church is the free Christian and useful citizen, who shows his piety in the performance of social and domestic duties, and aims at the sanctification of the ordinances of nature. The former tries to conquer the world by running away from its temptations — though after all he cannot escape the flesh, the world, and the Devil in his own heart: the latter tries to conquer the world by converting it. The one abstains from the wedding feast: the other attends it, and changes the water into wine. The one flees from woman as a tempter: the other takes her to his heart, and reflects in the marriage relation the holy union of Christ with his Church. The one aims to secure chastity by abstinence: the other proves it within the family. The one renounces all earthly possessions: the other uses them for the good of his fellow-men. The one looks for happiness in heaven: the other is happy already on earth by making others happy. The daily duties and trials of domestic and social life are a better school of moral discipline than monkish celibacy and poverty. Female virtues and graces are necessary to supplement and round out the character of man. Exceptions there are, but they prove the rule.
“1 would not live alway’), the model pastor Ludwig Harms of Hermanns-
burg, the historian Neander and his sister, and the nurses or deaconesses of Kaiserswerth and similar institutions,