THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
S. Views Antagonistic to the Reformation : The
view that the movement was a stage in the legitimate development of the Christian Church is opposed by Roman Catholic historians and by writers of the Anglo-Catholic school in the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal 1. Frelati- Church of America. These writers
calAssault treat the Reformation as a misfortune on Reform- T, ,, , .,
, char- or a cnme- " was a cnme in that its acters and leaders wilfully rent the unity of the Motives. Western Church. It was a misfortune in so far as it prevented the orderly growth of the Church under the conduct of its ordained hierarchy and led to a decline of the Church's influence over the nations and of Christendom in the world. The chief representatives of this view are Dollinger, in his early period before 1870, Cardinal Hergenrother, Janssen, Denifle, Nicolas Paulus, Cardinal Newman, and F. A. Gasquet (The Eve of the Reformation, London, 1905). Such Roman Catholic historians as Hefele and Funk give to the same view a moderate statement. The very term (Neuerung, " Innovation ") which German Roman Catholics — Denifle, Funk, and others, — give to the Reformation at once predicates of the movement a violent rupture with the preceding history of the Church and departure from the true form of Christianity. Roman Catholic writers pursue three methods to show that the Reformation was an insalutary and violent rupture: (1) The motives and character of the Reformers themselves are assailed as irreligious and sometimes sordid.. This method was applied to the Reformers in their own day or soon after their death. Luther was charged with suicide, Calvin with sodomy, and Knox with the same or other offenses. The producing cause on the continent is declared to have been the rude self-will and carnalism of Luther and in England the sensualism and monarchical pride of Henry VIII. These men, with Calvin, who is compared by Dollinger and others with Marsilius of Eadua, coarsely broke with legitimate Church authority, lawlessly served their own ambitions, and deserved the title and the fate of heretics. The latest traducer of the character of the Reformers was the late Henri Denifle in his learned but intemperate Luther und Luthertum (2 vols., Mainz, 1904 sqq.). The assault magnifies the imperfections of the Reformers, and leaves out of sight their good qualities and their purpose to do good. It denies the statements of those who stood nearest to these men, and, as in the case of Luther, distorts into a confession of carnalism and debauchery isolated statements made by Luther himself in his own vigorous and exaggerated form of speech which probably had no references to excesses. (2) The doctrines which the Reformers promulgated are declared not only unscriptural and contrary to Church tradition but immoral. Among the first representatives of this method was Johann Eck (q.v.). There has been no more able one than Denifle. The latter in a prolonged discussion pronounces Luther's doctrine of justification by faith to be not only the mother of moral lawlessness but the outcome of Luther's carnal habits. Luther, unable and unwilling to restrain his appetites, finally gave them full rein and
invented the doctrine as a cloak for his excesses. He meant to say, " one may be as immoral as he pleases, faith will save." Denifle sets over against this anomic principle the principle he ascribes to the Catholic Church of salvation through faith working by love. Love is the element which expresses itself in obedience and conformity to the moral example'of Christ. This element Luther intentionally left out. In order to make a case Denifle mangles a statement in one of Luther's sermons and then gives to the fragment an interpretation which antagonizes every principle of fair criticism. (3) The Reformation is declared to have put a brusk check upon forces of progress and betterment going on in the Church. Janssen (History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, 12 vols. London, 1896 sqq.) has presented this view with subtlety and skill. The work produced a remarkable sensation when it appeared in German (in 1876 sqq.) and it has passed through nearly twenty editions (the last, 1896 sqq.) under the hand of Pastor. Laying stress upon educational forces which were active, upon certain economic movements in society, certain devotional tracts which appeared in Germany, etc., he confuses the reader into supposing that these disconnected rills were a great current moving toward the ocean of ecclesiastical and social reform which leaders like Gerson and Clamanges had sighed for and the great reformatory councils had labored to reach. Luther not only checked but turned back this movement of progress and in Germany started an era of social disintegration and individual lawlessness from which the Western world is still suffering. Janssen (18th ed., p. 8) distinctly traces the beneficent activity of the fifteenth century " to the doctrine of the merit of good works, taught by the Church which in that age still continued to dominate all minds." This is not the place to discuss a treatment the plausibility of which has attracted even members of the Anglican Church, but is based on insecure foundations. The theory, as handled by Janssen, ignores the hopeless corruption of the papal court at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, passes by the utter failure of the Fifth Lateran Council, which adjourned a few months before Luther nailed up his theses, to set reforms on foot, and keeps out of sight the general distraction of Western Christendom. It also leaves out of account the fact that the most loyal Roman Catholic countries since the Reformation era, Austria, Spain, and South America, have been in matters of human progress and civilization far behind the Protestant parts of the world, England, North America, and Germany. Burckhardt in his History of the Italian Renaissance declares with no little probability that the papacy itself was saved by the Reformation.
Another theory of recent origin goes so far as to make the religious element secondary in the Reformation or so to minimize it as to give it little importance. Thus J. A. Robinson, Study of the Lutheran Revolt (in American Historical Review, Jan., 1903), says: " The assertion that the Reformation can scarcely be called a religious revolution may prove to be an overstatement, but