480 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
Archbishop Cranmer appears in an unfavorable light. His first wife, “ Black Joan,” died in childbed before his ordination. Early in 1532, before he was raised to the primacy of Canterbury by Henry VIII. (August, 1532), he married a niece of the Lutheran preacher Osiander of Niirnberg, and concealed the fact, the disclosure of which would have prevented his elevation. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March, 1533, and his consecration took place March 30, 1533. The next year he privately summoned his wife to England; but sent her away in 1539, when he found it necessary to execute the bloody articles of Henry VIII., which included the prohibition of clerical marriage. He lent a willing hand to the divorces and re-marriages of his royal master. And yet with all his weakness of character, . and time-serving policy, Cranmer must have been an eminently devout man if he translated and reproduced (as he certainly edited) the Anglican liturgy, which has stood the test of many generations to this day.'
John Knox, the Luther of Scotland, had the courage, as a widower of fifty-eight (March, 1563-64), to marry a Scotch lass of sixteen, Margaret Stuart, of royal name and blood, to the great indignation of Queen Mary, who “ stormed wonderfully” at his audacity. The papists got up the story that he gained her affection by sorcery, and aimed to secure for his heirs, with the aid of the Devil, the throne of Scotland. His wife bore him three daughters, and two years after his death
Drummond’s Erasmus, 11. 319. Archbishop Spalding (l. c. I. 176) thus repeats the joke: ‘‘The gospel light seems to have first beamed upon (Ecolampadius from the eye of a beautiful young lady, whom, in violation of his solemn vows plighted to Heaven, he espoused, probably, as Erasmus wittily remarked, to mortify himself.’’ He says nothing of the apology of. Erasmus to his friend and associate. .
1 Strype’s Memorials of Cranmer (Bk. I., chs. 1, 4,19; Bk. III., chs. 8 and 88); Hook’s Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (vols. VI. and VII.); Hardwick’s History of the Reformation, ed. W. Stubbs (1873), p. 179; and art. Cranmer in Leslie Stephen’s ‘‘ Dictionary of National Biogr.,”’ vol. . XIII.
§ 79. REFLECTIONS ON CLERICAL FAMILY LIFE. 481
(1572) contracted a second marriage with Andrew Ker, a widower.’
The most unfortunate matrimonial incident in the Reformation is the consent of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer to the disgraceful bigamy of Landgrave Philip of Hesse. It isa blot on their character, and admits of no justification. When the secret came out (1540), Melanchthon was so overwhelmed with the reproaches of conscience and a sense of shame that _ he fell dangerously ill at Weimar, till Luther, who was made of sterner stuff, and found comfort in his doctrine of justification by faith alone, prayed him out of the jaws of death.
In forming a just estimate of this subject, we must not only look backward to the long ages of clerical celibacy with all its dangers and evils, but also forward to the innumerable clerical homes which were made possible by the Reformation. They can bear the test of the closest examination.
Clerical celibacy and monastic vows deprived the church of the services of many men who might have become shining stars. On the other hand, it has been calculated by Justus Moser in 1750, that within two centuries after the Reformation from ten to fifteen millions of human beings in all lands owe their existence to the abolition of clerical celibacy.? More important than this numerical increase is the fact that an unusual proportion of eminent scholars and useful men in church and state were descended from clerical families.®
There is a poetic as well as religious charm in the home of
1 Dr. M‘Crie’s Life of John που, Philad. ed., pp. 269 and 477 (Append. Note HHH); and Dav. Laing’s Preface to the 6th vol. of his ed. of Works of John πος, pp. LXV. sqq.
2 Ranke states this fact.
8 Among distinguished sons of clergymen may be named Linné, the botanist; Berzelius, the chemist; Pufendorf, the lawyer; Schelling, the philosopher; Buxtorff, the Orientalist; Euler, the mathematician; Agassiz, the scientist ; Edward and Ottfried Miiller, the classical philologists; John von Miller, Spittler, Heeren, Mommsen, Bancroft, among historians; Henry Clay, Senator Evarts, and two Presidents of the United States, Arthur and
Cleveland, among statesmen; Charles Wesley, Gellert, Wieland, Lessing, the brothers Schlegel, Jean Paul, Emanuel Geibel, Emerson (also the female