Christianity; the religion which grew out of the Jewish faith as transformed by the worship of Jesus Christ after the Resurrection, and which, by combination with Greek culture and the conversion of a great part of the Roman Empire, took a systematized form as historical Christianity, having its chief basis in Europe and presiding over the development of Western civilization until recent centuries.

I.
THE EARLY CHURCH

1.
Judaic Christianity.
The disciples of Jesus, if they appeared ready to confess their despondency and even weakness at the time of the Crucifixion, made a recovery so rapid that it puzzles the historians.
It altered the course of history; for though, as a result of it, they did not exactly announce a new religion to their fellow countrymen, they proclaimed an event which brought the older faith to its culmination, shattering its traditional framework and calling for a host of new interpretations.

It would seem that, during the lifetime of Jesus, they may have followed Him without properly understanding the drift of His teaching; and it would appear to have been the vividness of their belief in the Resurrection that transformed the situation for them, enabling them to feel that now everything could be fitted into place.

It had in fact convinced them that Jesus was the fulfilment of the famous prophecies on which the Jews had been relying for a long time; and that, if the truth had been so difficult to recognize, it had been because those prophecies and particularly the notions of the Messiah and the divine Kingdom had been construed in too mundane a manner.
Once this basic insight had been reached, a remarkable work of intellectual synthesis was quickly achieved, and there followed an amazing missionary endeavor, which required considerable bravery at first and cannot be plausibly accounted for by reference to mundane vested interests.
It is clear to the historian, and it was amply admitted at the time, that the dynamic behind all this was the conviction that the beloved Leader has risen from the dead. There was a strong expectation that He would quickly return.

It has always been a matter of the greatest difficulty for Christianity and perhaps for any similar form of faith to secure by peaceful means and sheer mission ary endeavor the wholesale conversion of a people already dominated by an exclusive form of supernatural religion.
The Holy Land was in this position, and though Judaism was in a fluid and interesting state, the disciples produced only what appeared to be an addition to the multitude of sects and parties there some of these latter being impressive on the spiritual and ethical side, and some of them so similar in one way or another that the tracing of influences among them is a delicate affair.
The Church for a few decades was predominantly Judeo-Christian,its members still attending the Temple and conforming to the Law, but meeting also in private houses or the Upper Room for instruction, prayer, and the breaking of bread.

Until the war which led to the destruction of the city in A.D. 70, it was the group in Jerusalem (with James, the brother of Jesus, at its head) which was the leader.

It seems to have been quickly recognized that converts from paganism were admissible; and pagans were encountered in great numbers when the gospel was carried to the virtually Greek cities, such as Caesarea, on the Palestine coast.
Communities were soon established also in Damascus and the Hellenistic city of Antioch, beyond the frontier; and Antioch, where the term Christian came into use, became the center for a wider missionary campaign in the Greco-Roman world.
But also, at this early stage in the story, Christian missions (following previous ones on the part of the Jews) spread eastwards to Transjordan and into Arabia, and they were pushed forwards to the upper Euphrates and the Tigris.

Here, churches using the Aramaic tongue became important during the earliest centuries.
Some difficulty arose over the question whether the pagans should be made to conform to the Jewish law and this may have created additional difficulty for Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as Jewish nationalism became more intense, more exacting.
But the extension into the Greco-Roman world, together with the destruction of Jerusalem, brought the Christian faith a higher degree of autonomy, a further scope for development; and it opened to Christianity the possibility of becoming a world-religion.

The early need for exposition in the Greek language, the marriage with Greek ideas, and the contact with a highly developed culture were to prove important in this connection.
Historical Christianity the religion as we have actually known it in its concrete development through the centuries comes in some respects as a Greco ewish synthesis, owing part of its power to the combination of two such highly different systems.
It would be interesting to know how the religion would have developed if, in its early generative period, it had combined with a different culture.
The historian is hampered because the Christians in their very earliest period produced so little in writing, or at least preserved so little.
Their leaders knew what was needed at the time, however, and the whole future question of authority in the Church would seem to have been decisively affected by the fact that (for the immediate purpose) so much was realized to depend on the evidence of eyewitnesses, and the primacy was naturally given to these.

Perhaps it is for similar reasons that one glimpses the importance of certain relatives of Jesus in the earliest days at Jerusalem; and, of course, Saint Paul was accepted as an Apostle because his particular vision of the risen Christ was regarded as giving him first hand knowledge.

Once the eyewitnesses had passed off the scene, it was natural that a certain primacy should be conceded to those who had been closest to them those to whom they had communicated most; and the objective was the preservation of what had originally been delivered at first hand what in the course of time could only appear in a less cogent form as tradition.
The attempt to secure uniformity in the Church would seem to go back to the jealousy with which the Judeo Christian leaders in Jerusalem regarded the Hellenizers some of these latter being Jews who had been affected by Hellenization or pagans who (before becoming Christian) had been converts to Judaism.

When the Hellenizers carried the gospel to pagans in the Greek coastal cities of Palestine or in Syria, it would appear that the Church at Jerusalem would send a Hebrew to check on the result of their work.
But, in spite of the care that was taken, there were aberrations even amongst the Christians in Palestine; and in Samaria, which had already been heterodox in its Judaism, an irregular form of Christianity slid away and became the origin of Gnosticism this after A.D. 70, when the failure of Jahweh to grant victory in an apocalyptic war helped to produce a movement partly directed against the Old Testament deity.
Henceforward, the rise of Christianity was paralleled by the multiplication of Gnostic sects which,in spite of their fantastic character, proved imposing.
Now, more than ever, it was necessary to safeguard the original doctrines of the Church.

2.
The Church in the Roman Empire. The Christians would appear in the empire as a strange small sect and for a time their recruits were perhaps chiefly amongst the lowly, though churches for which the epistles of Saint Paul were written can hardly be regarded as unimpressive.
In the Roman Empire the believers might be hated because they were confused with the Jews or because the Jews incited the pagans against them; but in the first two centuries they suffered from the hostility of the populace rather than the intolerance of the emperors.

After the fall of Jerusalem it was in Asia Minor that they came to appear most numerous, most lively, and most capable; and for a long time this was the most impressive seat of the Church.
In various parts of the empire the teaching n the apostolic period itself would tend to vary, at least in its emphases, and the tradition came to develop on differing lines.
Also, as time went on, one great region (almost as a matter of temperament) would be preoccupied chiefly with doctrine while another concentrated on asceticism and another became interested in organization.

From the middle of the second century, Hellenization which found its climax in Alexandria had captured the mentality of churchmen, who, instead of appearing as a mere sect came out into firstclass controversy with leading intellectuals.
They had taken Platonic ideas into their own system, but they set out to show where pagan thought had gone wrong, and claimed that Christianity was the culmination of Greek culture, the real heir of ancient philosophy.
While this was happening, and the Church was settling down to a long term role in the world, there arose in Asia Minor the Montanism which in a sense implied a reversion to the primitive spirit, the exultant early days.
It meant a wave of prophesyings, a reawakening of more immediate eschatological hopes, a severity in disciplinary matters and something like an actual thirst for martyrdom.

Dealing with these problems was part of the larger process by which a sect that had envisaged an imminent eschatological climax gradually turned into a sedentary Church, realizing what it needed if it were to exist on a permanent footing.
Controversies in the third century about penance, about relapses in time of persecution, about the validity of baptism by heretics, and about the rights of bishops, were part of the consequences of this transition.
Christians were beginning to develop a larger world view; scholarship was accumulating; the interest in history was rising.

Confronted by the multiplicity of theological opinions, towards the end of the second century, Irenaeus had insisted on the steadying influence of bishops, who were still regarded as the repositories of the original apostolic tradition.
In spite of the varieties at a certain level, an impressive uniformity and consistency had been made possible by such procedures as the communication from one region to another of the decisions made by local councils of bishops.
At the same time, the heads of great sees attempted on occasion to secure the support of Rome in a doctrinal controversy, and this was capable of being construed later as an appeal to Rome.
The church in Rome, very much a church of foreign colonists at first, was for a long time cosmopolitan consisting of groups that had brought their local traditions and customs with them.

Like Christianity itself, all new sects, all heresies, all novel teaching sought to reach the capital of the empire; and the bishop of Rome would have to meet early at a local level the challenge that these were later to present to the Church in general.
When Christians from further east brought to Rome their different dates for the celebration of Easter, he was in a position to be highly aware of the inconvenience of this anomaly.
Perhaps because he was inclined to be less speculative than the bishops of the Greek speaking East, and more concerned for tradition and order, he not only met problems early but seems often to have commanded respect by his actual decisions.
In the remarkable period in which the universal Church was developing its organization, he gains in importance, though all his claims do not go unchallenged. To us it might appear that the leadership which he asserted was likely to become due to him by reason of his merits.

At the same time, it was still recognized that the authority of a bishopric or a local tradition depended primarily on the distinction of its apostolic origin. Rome could claim to go back to Peter and Paul.
In the middle of the third century the expansion is remarkable in Africa and in Western Europe, as well as in the lands to the east of the Mediterranean.
Further east again, the missionary work pushes across Iraq, though its effect is to be gravely limited from this point by a Persian dynasty that is committed to Zoroastrianism.
At a time when the Roman Empire was coming under pressure on the frontiers and was moving towards a grim development while in any case this empire held hosts of deeracinees, people feeling lost, not quite at home in the world the older paganism was coming into decline.
Oriental mystery cults attempted to answer the need for a salvationist faith with its mysticisms and forms of sacrament;philosophy outside the Church was running to religiosity.

By the second half of the third century the Church had become an imposing body and a powerful influence in the empire, with important government and court officials amongst its members.
Amongst its assets in the great conflict of religions were the possession of a sacred book; the attachment not to a mythical figure or a demiurge but to a Person who had walked in the world and could be identified in history; the assistance of an imposing organization; and the fact that this religion, besides producing its martyrs and issuing in an expressive kind of devotion, had become intimately connected with the moral life and works of charity. The Church was beginning perhaps to suffer even from its prosperity, and, to some, the rise of heresies seemed to come as a retribution for this.
Already the controversies had opened which led to the long conflicts over the Holy Trinity and the Person of Christ.

Christianity had profited from the meeting of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy, and the Roman Empire a conjuncture that seemed to coincide with the Incarnation.
It had profited from the defects of all three Jewish legalism, the tendencies of Greek philosophy at this late period, and the frustrations and distractedness of the Roman world.
It had appeared at an advanced date in that long period in which much of the ability and the yearning of the human race in Asia, and now even in Europe the result of a great anxiety about man's destiny had been directed to the exploring of the possibilities of the spiritual realm.
At a turning point in the history of man's religious consciousness, Christianity, moreover, had moved into a highly civilized world which had an advanced form of urban life a world which could support it with a certain refinement of intellect.

Its success was bound to affect the mentality of men bound to alter their way of experiencing life, their attitude to nature, their posture under the sun, and their notions of human destiny.
Since Christians believed in the Incarnation, they were bound to deny the gulf which the pagans had so often presumed to exist between God and Nature bound to reject the view that matter is evil and that salvation must consist in escape from the body.
They could not believe that in an eternity of cyclic repetitions Christ would go on dying over and over again for sinners; so they were released from extreme cyclic theories, while the Old Testament presented history as moving forward, moving to an objective, an unrepeatable and irreversible thing.

The Old Testament indeed, forced them to look at history and regard it as important, and it cannot have been without significance that in Europe, for generation after generation, men could not learn about their religion without turning to what was really very ancient history.
Instead of a great emphasis on Fortune, Christianity gave currency to the notion that the hand of Providence was in everything and (as had already happened) this might mean that retrospective reasoning could ultimately make sense of that kind of history making which goes on over people's heads, overriding their conscious purposes and their predictions.

Christianity stressed the sanctity of human life, the importance of the family, the inadmissibility of sexual license and the evil of such things as gladiatorial contests and the murder of infants.
It regarded suicide as wicked. It insisted that man's life had a spiritual dimension, but it combined a high view of personality and its potentialities with an insistence on man's universal sin.
It must have affected the world the very conception of a human being when, week in and week out, in numberless localities, men were reminded to reflect on their own sins, on forgiveness, humility, mercy, and love.


3. The Christianized Empire.
After the failure of a great persecution and a tyrannical development of the empire, the Emperor Constantine granted to the Church in A.D. 313 full freedom of worship and the restitution of confiscated goods. Henceforward, he increased his favors to the Christians, and the Church began to move into a privileged position.
It could be argued that his interests as an emperor would recommend an alliance with an institution that carried power; but there are signs that he was a sincere believer, though pagan in his manner of believing too sure that the Christian God was the one who was victorious in battle and helped him to outwit his enemies.
All this came as the climax of the Christian interpretation of history that had been developing with the Hebrews regarded as the fathers of civilization, their language the original one, the language of God; Christianity being the return to the original religion of mankind, the one from which the Jews had lapsed (only to be partially rescued by Moses) while the Greeks had declined still more the Church being the heir of the wisdom of both Jews and Greeks, however, and the Incarnation coinciding neatly with the establishment of the Roman Empire, the era of peace.

It seemed that, at this culminating moment, when the empire itself was becoming Christian, churchmen were willing to attribute to a Christian emperor the kind of divinity that they had refused to concede to his predecessors.
Henceforward it became almost consistently true that all who wished to gain imperial favor or to hold office or to make their way in society would have every motive for joining the Church; and the conversion of the Roman Empire hitherto a matter of persuasion and not without its risks was to be continued by the strong arm of the state.
This was almost bound to introduce corruptions in the Church itself, and to increase the danger of a formal Christianity, mixed with paganism and thinking in pagan termsthe danger also of official compromises with paganism.

It was perhaps natural, but it was unfortunate, that when there were parties in the Church, one or more of these (not merely the orthodox, but sometimes the heretical) should appeal to the emperor, even when he was not inclined to intervene.
This had its special dangers, for in A.D. 325 Constantine himself, having called the first ecumenical council at Nicaea,put himself behind the decree of that Council, condemning the Arian heresy, but within less than three years was induced to change his mind.

Stranger still, men so convinced that they spoke for the right religion and so sure that government and power should be at the service of God were soon advocates of persecution; and the process in this case was so understandable that nobody today can feel sure that, living in the same period and sharing the same assumptions about religion, he would have decided differently.
Some who were slow in their conversion to the practice appear to have been brought over when the victims of persecution declared later in life that they were now glad that they had been coerced.

Already, in the reign of Constantine, there arose issues which were to trouble the Church for a long time.
One of them was the Donatist schism, which arose out of the later persecutions and was directed against bishops who had consented to the handing over of sacred books to the magistrates.
It led to the erection of a counter church in Africa bishop confronting antibishop with violence, persecution,atrocities, self immolation, and streaks of the revolutionary and the apocalyptic.
An extravagant, though serious and understandable, religious issue received tremendous leverage from social discontent and possibly a sort of nationalism, and from hostility to the Roman establishment.
The trouble lasted for a century, almost until the barbarians overran the province.

Shortly before 325, Arius, who wished to guard the sovereignty of God the Father, and may not have been far enough from paganism to reject all ideas of subordination in the deity, produced a doctrine which, while asserting the divinity of the Son, secured a clear reduction of status for Him.
The controversy tore the Church apart until A.D. 381, and it is perhaps not too much to say that for a longer period than this a great deal of the ecclesiastical conflict lay between men who wished to assert both the complete divinity and the complete humanity of Christ, but could not agree on the formula that would ensure the one without depleting the other.

The formula adopted at Nicaea, homoousion (consubstantial with the Father) had already been rejected in a part of the eastern Church that had reacted against a heresy of an opposite tendency.
It was uncongenial to some because in any case it could not claim to be scriptural.
Various shades of the Arian and Nicene formulas were attempted by one party and another, who suggested like the Father and of like substance with the Father, though there emerged one group that diverged further than Arius and declared that there was no likeness at all.
The emperors provided a complicating factor now hesitating, now changing their minds, now plumping for a form of Arianism.
The West remained firm in its support of the Nicene formula, but subtle differences arose when technical terms had been translated into Latin, and the West was later than the East in confronting the earlier heresy that had constituted the opposite danger.
At a moment when a great work of reconciliation was being achieved, there emerged an emperor who was a Westerner and a pious man, and he clinched the matter by an edict in 380, and a second ecumenical council, that of Constantinople, 381, which confirmed Nicaea.

If the Church had become more worldly and more contentious, its power to inspire renunciation and the life of the spirit was reasserted in the development of monasteries.
There had been analogies to this in other parts of the globe, but Christianity had had from the first an ideal of chastity and poverty, and the sufferings of the martyrs had kept its self denying aspects alive.
The Egyptian anchorites are anterior to the victory of the Church in the empire, and, when they appear, they have strange features, particularly their obsession with the battle against the vast multiplicity of demons a battle which could only be won by the repudiation of the world, a tremendous disciplining of the body, and a conquest of all ordinary emotions.
It was a battle not to be won by the man who lived as a citizen in society; and, though prayers sometimes repeated in what seems to be an incredibly mechanical manner contributed to the objective, the movement was one which needed the greatest care by the Church.
Nor is it clear how much of its deeper Christian character may not have been contributed retrospectively by the influential literature that it provoked.

We are told, however, that Saint Anthony, when he went to a solitary life in the desert in A.D. 271, was moved by the injunction: Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and follow me.
The Egyptian desert offered a remarkable opportunity, and great numbers followed his example.
Something that almost seems like a competition in asceticism may have developed here and there and warnings against spiritual pride in this connection appear early in Egypt but out of his very loneliness the hermit was to contribute something of rare quality to the inner life of the Church.

The anchorites came to rudimentary forms of grouping for certain purposes, but it was Saint Pachomius who, in about A.D. 320 or 323, brought to the problem an essentially organizing mind and established the community principle.
He prescribed rules for a whole order of monasteries; and, now not only renunciation but also obedience was important, while, besides vigils, readings from the Bible, prayer, and contemplation, there was greater emphasis on manual labor.
The hermit was to have a significant history in Palestine and Syria, but Saint Basil the Great, from about A.D. 357, produced a community ideal which superseded this and became current throughout the Greek world.
Before the middle of the century the news had reached the West and very soon ascetic groups were being founded there, though it was not until something like two hundred years later that Saint Benedict established his famous Rule that became the guide for Westerners.

The whole movement, the literature that arose from it, and the spiritual teaching it produced had a great effect on the Church in general; and in the fourth century important people, including a surprising number of the leading intellects, associated themselves with it, at least during part of their lives.
In its ultimate extension, it was to have by products of an unpredictable kind especially its contributions to cultural and even economic life.
It may have been in one sense a protest against the growing worldliness of the fourth century Church, or an attempt to find a new pattern of renunciation, in some cases perhaps even an escape from civic obligations.
But it became, from the religious point of view, an eminently creative thing.

It is a whole Christian version of civilization that comes to the front in the fourth century.
Biblical scholarship has advanced and become a technical affair. Eusebius not only reconstructs the story of the Church but has an interpretation of world history.
The ancient culture receives a Christian shape, and the transmutation sometimes shows originality. The greatest intellects of the time, and some of the most imposing Christian figures of any age are the Fathers of the Church who cluster in the latter half of the century almost all of them highborn, enjoying the best education of the time, and trained in the monastic movement, yet emerging also as great men of the world Saint Basil, Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and many more.
In a period of influential bishops, particularly Saint Ambrose in Milan, the reign of Theodosius I (379-95) saw paganism forbidden, heretics pursued by the government, Catholic orthodoxy the official religion of the whole empire, and the spiritual authority boldly asserting its right against the temporal.
The piety of the lower sections of society made itself evident in the further development of the cult of martyrs and the veneration for relics, as well as in the eagerness for pilgrimages.
Early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine had to meet an important accusation from the paganism that still asserted itself, particularly in some of the aristocracy.
Barbarian raiders had even reached the city of Rome.
The tragedy that was falling upon the West was being ascribed to the desertion of the pagan deities. Augustine answered the charge in his City of God.


II. THE MIDDLE AGES

1.
The Church and the Barbarian Invaders.
Between the fifth and the tenth centuries, the downfall of the Roman Empire in the West, the eruption of barbarian hordes from Asia, the establishment of Teutonic monarchies and the long period of wars and migrations threw the map of the European continent into the melting pot, until it finally emerged with a general pattern that is still recognizable today.
From the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the expansion of the Arabian Empire produced a drastic and permanent division in that Mediterranean world which had been the seat of the Greco Roman civilization and had formed the original Christendom.
In the eastern half of the ancient Roman Empire, the imperial system maintained itself at Byzantium, and, though it lost to Islam most of its territory bordering on the eastern as well as all the southern Mediterranean, it retained its cultural continuity (and preserved Christianity in Constantinople) for a further period of something like a thousand years.

In a sense it is now the history of Europe that really opens, and this Europe is to emerge as the new form of Christendom though it is only very slowly that the northern part of it becomes Christianized.
The centuries of upheaval produced a grave decline of culture even in the south, and much of what had been subtle and profound in classical thought much even of the scholarship and science was to disappear for a long period.
Henceforward, there is a separate history of the West and we trace the rise of a Western civilization from a comparatively early stage at which society itself has returned in many respects to primitive forms.
Compared with the Byzantine world, and even later with the rapidly developing culture of Islam, the West appears as a backward region for a long time, its backwardness illustrated by the appalling collapse of its city ife, at a time when Constantinople, and later Bagdad, were of tremendous prestige and size.
For special reasons this Western civilization at its formative period, when everything was still malleable, found itself under the presiding influence of a Christianity that had acquired greater power over mundane affairs than ever before.

Some of the Teutonic invaders had become Christianized before their eruption into the Roman world, but they had been converted by Arians and had received the faith in a heretical form.
This would seem to have created difficulties with the populations they subjected, for no Arian dynasty survived, though,in the case of Spain, the Visigoths maintained themselves by going over to Catholicism.
The Frankish invaders of Gaul may have owed some of their success to the fact that their dynasty was converted only after their migration into the Roman Empire, so that from the very first, they adhered to the Catholicism of their Gallo Roman subjects.
For centuries the reigning dynasties were to have an exceptional part to play in the shaping of the map, the history and the culture of Europe, and it was they who brought their peoples over to Christianity in those more primitive conditions under which it was inevitable that religion should be regarded as the affair of the group.

If Christianity had won its way in the Roman Empire through individual conversion, it owed its spread over Europe sometimes to mass conversion, i.e., to the decrees, perhaps the example, sometimes the pressures and persecuting policies, of those who held the government.
It was to be extended further in the north of Europe in subsequent centuries by movements from both the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, so that, when the thirteenth century opened, only a small wedge of paganism remained, near the point where the southern coast of the Baltic turns north.
Lithuania resisted longest of all, balanced for a considerable period between the influence of Rome and the influence of Byzantium.
From the western side the advance was sometimes made through military conquest and colonization policies, particularly in the east of what the modern historian knows as Germany.
Here the warfare between Christian and pagan might be of a brutal kind, down to the time when, in the thirteenth century, Prussia was converted by the Teutonic Knights.

A considerable part of Europe was Christianized, therefore, by methods not unlike the ones by means of which a similar area was brought over to communism in the twentieth century.
As in the case of communism though with greater effect in those earlier stages in the history of society the Christian control of education, the procedures of indoctrination, and the withholding of knowledge about possible alternative systems (or the treatment of all alternatives as merely disreputable) ensured the maintenance of the authoritarian creed in subsequent centuries, without the need to continue perpetually the forcible methods that had been required for its installation.
Granted the conditions of the time, one could say, however, that those countries which became Christian were fortunate.
The existing alternatives would hardly have been more happy for them.
Indeed, it was their conversion that brought them into the orbit of civilization. In the Byzantine East, Roman Emperors, continuing a regime that had developed from the time of Constantine, were able to exercise in some respects (though perhaps less than was once thought) a species of caesaropapism.
But in the West the Roman Emperor had disappeared, while the bishop of Rome maintained his spiritual ascendancy amongst Christian believers and acquired during the invasions even a certain leadership in some secular matters.
Pope Gregory the Great (590-614) was fervent in his religious duties, extending his influence over western countries, directing the conversion of England, and asserting the spiritual supremacy of Rome as the see of Saint Peter.

But in default of anybody else, at a time when Byzantine authority in Italy had become inert, he was compelled to negotiate with the Lombard invaders of Italy and to administer Rome as a governor, inaugurating the temporal power of the papacy.
It almost seemed as though the Church in the centuries before the barbarian invasions had unwittingly been developing an organization exactly calculated to survive, and to preserve the faith, through just such a period of cataclysm as had now occurred.

In a world where civilization had suffered such a recession, Christianity itself shared in the barbarization, coming closer sometimes to those pagan superstitions that governed primitive minds.
Neither the spiritual life nor examples of saintliness were impossible, but the intellect was ready to accept magic and legend even more easily than before; and, since ancient thought itself was now imperfectly known and imperfectly understood, something of superstition was run into the interstices, and there was produced an outlook which entangled the material with the spiritual, making religion more earthy, in a way, and nature herself a field for the miraculous.

On the other hand, whatever may be said about the way in which the new nations of Europe were converted, there was a sense in which the spread of Christianity was the kind of conquest that justifies itself retrospectively.
The most impressive part of the story is the tremendous internal missionary work which the Church conducted in the succeeding centuries in the countries into which it spread work calculated to bring religion home to the individual, and to make it gradually more genuine and profound, even if it had been shallow and unreliable at first.
It was not merely a case of eliminating all the superstitions that could not be harnessed to Christianity or preventing lapses into paganism, but also teaching the belief that had been handed down, influencing manners and morals, and deepening sincerity, deepening the appreciation of the faith.

Part of the curious charm of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (including those papal letters which provide guidance for the conversion of England and prescribe special consideration for those who need careful weaning from paganism) lies in an amazing gentleness that stands out (early in the eighth century) against a background of violence; in it also is found a combination of high ideas at the spiritual level with crude notions about the universe, a simple love of amiable miracles.
The great support of the Church in the Middle Ages was to be the sheer fidelity of the mass of the people to their beliefs, and whether the faith were superstitious or not, its genuineness was in the last resort the real weapon that popes were to have against kings.

During its earliest centuries, the Church had developed in a highly civilized world, and its theological teaching had come to require a considerable degree of sophistication.
The literature to which it was attached, and its own insistence on the continuity of its doctrinal tradition, gave it a vested interest in the preservation of the Greco Roman culture.
It could not prevent a serious relapse even within its own ranks; but in a sense it had from the first been particularly organizing itself for the preservation of a creedal system; and this indeed the maintenance of the whole tradition called for a staff of trained ecclesiastics.
These latter, precisely because of the education that was so essential for them, were to become indispensable also in the work of secular government.
The attachment to the Scriptures made the Christian Church the enemy of illiteracy at a crucial stage in the development of peoples; and the need to have translations for missionary purposes secured that it might even be the chief agency in the development of a literary language.
The whole situation, in fact, imposed upon church men the tasks of educating the barbarians and they became the principal instrument by which the culture of the ancient classical world was transmitted to the Teutonic peoples who had acquired the predominance in Europe.

In the most violent days the monasteries stood like fortresses, preserving the tradition of learning preserving, sometimes without knowing it, the manuscripts of classical works that went out of circulation for centuries.
And for centuries it was church men people with minds primarily shaped by their religious beliefs and religious training who took the lead in the gradual recovery and deepening appreciation of the thought and learning of antiquity.
The ancient materials were now envisaged in a framework of Christian ideas. It was as though, in Western Europe, a civilization was being constructed from old materials but to a new architectural design.
There emerged in the Arabian Empire a parallel culture, closely connected with that of ancient Greece, but under the presidency of the Islamic faith.
These two imposing examples of a culture which developed in a religious setting almost under the eye of the historian, offer promising material for a resort to the comparative method.

During centuries of tumult and upheaval, however, the framework of medieval culture (like the pattern on the map of Europe itself) was slow in taking shape.
There was a period in the eighth century when England and Ireland seemed to be the last refuge of civilization, and missionaries particularly from Northumbria (often in the tradition of Bede) carried the light back to the continent, converting parts of Germany that had never been Christianized, and contributing to the emergence of the Carolingian Renaissance at the end of the century.
At this latter date, a long alliance between the papacy and the predecessors of Charlemagne had resulted in the recreation of an empire one in which Charlemagne was able to exercise a sort of caesaropapism, controlling the Church even in essential matters and expecting from it spiritual support as though the function of the laity was to fight the battles while the function of the clergy was simply to assist the warfare with their prayers.
A Carolingian Renaissance, which did not itself open out into a long-term cultural development, established, through the emperor's edicts, the enduring principle that monasteries and cathedrals should accept the responsibility for education.

Then further waves of invasion in Europe and even in Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries brought a renewed period of turbulence; and in the tenth century the papacy, having no longer an emperor to protect it, came to the saddest period in its history when it met something worse than caesaropapism, becoming the victim and the plaything of the local Roman aristocracy.
The danger from violence of this immediate sort was doubled by the spread of the doctrine that the lord of the soil had the ownership of all the land, even the land that was devoted to religious use.
David Knowles (in a paper, Some Trends of Scholarship, 1868-1968, in the Field of Medieval History) has described how the ownership and control of all churches, not excluding monastic and canonical foundations, passed gradually into the hands of individuals who, whether laymen or ecclesiastics, were lords of the land.
Thus from the eighth century onwards there was gradually established in western Europe the regime of the private or proprietary church, of which the lord enjoyed many of the fruits and to which he appointed a priest (or abbot or bishop) of his choice, and which he could give, sell or divide like any other real property.
When the system was linked at the summit to the extreme claims [of] the emperors to appoint bishops and even popes, there existed in perfect form the church in the hands of laymen.

2.
The Establishment of the Medieval Order.
The real recovery of Europe from what can justifiably be regarded as Dark Ages dates from the latter half of the tenth century, when the Germans halted the Magyars, nomadic hordes from Asia, who had carried their raids across the length and breadth of the continent.
Henceforward the west of Europe was guarded against the worst of its dangers by the consolidation of Germany and the establishment of the Magyars in a sedentary Christian state in Hungary, as well as the development also of Christian monarchies in Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavia.
The establishment of a Roman Empire under Otto I in 962 opened at last a period of comparative stability, and there emerged something like the shape of the Western Europe we know a Europe which by 1053 had lost a great deal of its connection with the Orthodox Church.

Trade and industrial production increased again, and the Mediterranean, which in 972 like the Baltic, was a hostile sea, saw important developments which brought Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to the front.
The period between 1050 and 1150 was to prove one of the most creative epochs in European history, and its great achievement was that it established the real bases of the medieval system.
In this period intellectual influences from the more highly developed Islamic world provided an important stimulus; but it was only one factor in the case.
The intellectual leadership had passed to the northern part of France and to Lorraine.
The promotion of the study of logic (which goes back to Gerbert in Rheims, A.D. 972, and was based at first on the writings of Boethius) became the most important feature in the advancement of learning in northern Europe.

But from the time of Otto I the Church had become still more the prey of the laity and a low-water mark was reached when the Emperor Henry III (1039-56)deposed three popes and installed his own nominees.
From the Church's point of view, the main problem to be solved was the question of the independence of the spiritual authority; for the existing system led to many abuses and obstructed any attempt to bring the clergy under discipline.
A monastic reform which started in Cluny in 910, though it did not attack this problem, established centers of piety over a very wide area.
Another such movement in Lorraine can be seen from 1046 making a specific call for the absolute independence of the spiritual authority.
The demand for change arose in the provinces therefore, and it was a band of people connected with the Lorraine movement who brought this latter program to Rome and became influential in that city.
They supported their cause by a study of the canon law, and if on the one hand they made use of what we know as the False Decretals (produced two centuries earlier in the province of Tours) they also found more imposing evidence, including documents from the time of Gregory the Great.

Perhaps their labors would have been ineffectual if the Emperor Henry III, though nominating popes, had not appointed some worthy people to the Holy See.
Their efforts at a time when the next emperor, Henry IV, was a minor, led in 1059 to a crucial decree which excluded the laity whether the emperor or the Roman aristocracy rom any part in the appointment of a pope and prescribed an independent election by cardinals.

A great development of ecclesiastical litigation and an increasing number of appeals to Rome may have represented another way in which action from the provinces helped to elevate and transform the papal office.
The Lorraine reformers had been equally anxious indeed, it would seem to have been their initial anxiety that local ecclesiastical authorities should be liberated from subservience to a powerful laity.
During the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-85) the zeal of the pope for the reform of the Church at large, and particularly the Church in Germany the determination to get rid of such evils as simony led to that conflict between papacy and empire which was to form one of the great themes of medieval history. In any case, the essential system of the Middle Ages now took shape.

At first it was a controversy as to whether the monarch should choose his own bishops and invest them with the insignia of the spiritual office.
And here the Church was faced with problems that arose out of the character of its new entanglement with the world.
Bishops in Germany had vast temporal possessions and might be the heads of considerable principalities.
An emperor could not be indifferent to the appointment of such formidable dignitaries. What was called the Investiture Contest was in fact open to compromise, and one pope, in what seems like a fit of absent mindedness, accepted the interesting idea of turning the bishops into purely spiritual officers a thing which had no chance of being tolerated by the German episcopate.
The pope possessed weapons he could use discontented magnates, or incite foreign powers, or foment public opinion, against an emperor.
Before long, pope and emperor were presuming to depose one another.

There can be little doubt that the assertion of the independence of the spiritual authority, and the resulting conflict between spiritual and temporal, were amongst the factors that were to give to Western history its remarkable dynamic quality.
The controversy directed the thought of men to the question of the origin and basis of government, whether secular or ecclesiastical, and produced a literature that has little parallel in the history of Byzantine Christianity.
At times it led to a confrontation between the theory or the assumptions of the canon law and the principles that lay behind Roman Law.
The fervor for political theory in Europe in the centuries from the time of the Renaissance may owe something (just as medieval thought itself owed something) to the influence of the ancient world.
But many of the modern ideas rise more directly out of the politico-ecclesiastical controversies of the Middle Ages.
This point became a great feature in the historical thinking of Lord Acton, who summed up the matter by saying that Saint Thomas Aquinas had been the first Whig.

In the age of the Reformation many of the medieval patterns of thought are still visible, whether in the theory of the divine right of kings, or the notion of a contract between king and people, or the idea of constitutional limitations on monarchical authority, or the controversy over tyrannicide.
At a later period still, it is possible to trace the actual secularization of what had once been politico-religious ideas.
Without what under various forms was an epic conflict between the secular authority and the spiritual, a Western Europe under a predominant religious faith might have hardened into something like the Byzantine or oriental systems.

Gregory VII and the restored papacy stood for the idea of a Christian Commonwealth not a state but a religious society existing for the glory and the service of God.
The whole was to be managed by a secular arm and a spiritual arm, and these were supposed to cooperate with one another.
Often the two did cooperate, the Church not only offering its prayers and its spiritual services not merely giving a vague support to the whole order of things but allying with the monarch because, for example, it had an interest in preserving the larger territorial unit from disruption.
The ecclesiastics might introduce the monarchy toideas of law, notions of property, the use of written deeds techniques of an older civilization which they were in a position to remember, and perhaps to need for themselves.

Monarchs in turn defended and endowed the Church; and at a desperate moment an emperor had helped to produce that reformed papacy which was to harass his successors.
When the two clashed, it was almost in the logic of the medieval system that the conflict should be long and that the spiritual arm should ultimately prevail, but only to its own detriment.
Already, for Gregory VII, the pope represented Christ, the real governor of the world, and it was for him to guide the destiny of the religious society, directing and coordinating its larger purposes.
The most signal illustration of this in the latter half of the eleventh century was the way in which Gregory VII and his successor took up the idea of a Crusade assuming that Rome should have the role of inspirer and director.
At a time when monarchs were in revolt against the Holy See, and Germany in particular withheld its support, it was the pope, not the emperor, who launched the First Crusade (1096-99) and showed himself the leader of Western Europe.

3.
The Culmination of the Middle Ages.
What was now in the process of formation was a Christian culture based on the universal acceptance of the faith and typified in the twelfth century by the rise of scholasticism, the great cathedral building, and the gradual transition to what we call universities.
Behind it lay the revival of Western economic life in the eleventh century; the growth of towns; the emergence of something like city states in Italy; the development of Mediterranean trade by some of these as Moslem power in that sea declined; the success of the First Crusade; the wider view of the world; the contacts with Arabian civilization; and the recovery of important areas of ancient thought all these, together with the fact that both men and society had come to the stage of general intellectual awakening, or had found the kind of exhilaration which lights the spark.
Starting from the discovery of Aristotelian logic and greatly relishing this while lacking the concrete knowledge of the world and nature which Aristotle had possessed, men ran to a great amount of deductive reasoning from little material; and, as the more scientific work of Aristotle emerged, they accepted virtually his whole system of nature, which became to them an inherited authority, almost like the Bible an authority all the firmer because it was in schools that medieval thought developed.

The great achievement was the degree to which the natural science and the philosophy of Aristotle were combined with the Christian faith, to produce a scholasticism which was bound to have a character of its own, if only because the philosophy (always remembering theology in the background) tended to concentrate on such problems as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the question of free will.
The pontificate of the statesmanlike Innocent III (1198-1216) sees the religious society of Western Europe in all its majesty, and it is this that sets the stage in the thirteenth century for the development of scholasticism to its culmination in Saint Thomas Aquinas, the renewed cathedral building, and the spread of universities the climax of that Christian culture which, a century after Innocent, was to produce a Giotto and a Dante.
Innocent more than once chose an emperor, and he forced Philip Augustus of France to recognize as a queen the first wife whom he had tried to divorce.
He had the kings of Aragon, England, Portugal, Castile, Denmark, and Sicily as his vassals.
He launched two crusades against the infidel, as well as a third against the heretics in the south of France.
He also dominated the whole European diplomatic situation. His Lateran Council of 1215 was attended by over 1200 bishops, abbots, and priors (including representatives from Armenia and the Latin churches that the crusaders had established in Syria and the Balkans) as well as many other people from European countries proctors from the Emperor at Constantinople, for example, and from the kings of France, England, Hungary, and Poland.

In other words,it was like a representative Parliament of all Christendom. It was entirely the pope's council and it passed judgment between rival candidates for the empire, and between King John of England and his barons.
It also allotted the major part of the county of Toulouse, besides taking measures for the reform of the Church, and planning a new crusade.
The activities of the papal curia and its agents were now undergoing a great expansion.
The multiplicity of the appeals to Rome and the constant despatch of delegates from Rome to all parts of Europe secured the authority of the canon law throughout the system, and kept the papacy in touch with all regions.
The increasing organization and the increasing circulation of money assisted the development of papal finances and enabled Innocent to draw on the great wealth of the Church.

This mundane success had its darker side, and, indeed, for some time the protests against the worldliness of ecclesiastics had been rising protests that took shape as heresies.
In the case of the Cathari, who had brought Manichaeism from the East and had captured much of society in the south of France, as well as spreading into neighboring regions, the class of austere perfecti were a reproach to the Church, while the ordinary credentes were allowed excessive license, and the whole movement could be regarded as a threat to society itself.
The menace was so formidable that the idea of the crusade was now directed to the conflict against the heretic as well as against the infidel.
A cruel suppression took place and the Inquisition was gradually developed to cope with the aftermath.

In the case of Peter Waldo and his followers who from about 1170 took to poverty and began to draw doctrine straight from the New Testament, the suppression of the unauthorized preaching drove a band who had erred only through their enthusiasm, into revolutionary ways and actual heresy.
When Saint Francis dedicated himself to poverty in 1208, Innocent III took care not to repeat the error, though Francis and his followers had found their own way of imitating the apostolic life and they, too, had preached without license.
They were harnessed to the Church, and the organization of the movement was gradually taken out of Saint Francis' hands.
The monastic system, based on poverty, chastity, and obedience, was adapted to the purpose of men who went out into the world to preach; and so the friars found their way into the medieval landscape.

Similarly, Saint Dominic in 1215 received permission to establish an order which should meet heresy with argument and learning, and the members of this order were particularly trained for a preaching and teaching role.
These new orders of wandering friars, who served under the direct command of the pope and constituted his special sort of army, quickly became important and numerous.
They brought religion home to the people and acquired a popularity that sometimes weakened the position of the parish priest.
They recruited brilliant men, some of the Dominicans leading in the development of scholasticism; and they came to acquire an important place in universities.
The Franciscans soon carried their missionary work into northern Europe and North Africa. Before long they were in China.

This was a period when religion was so imposing in the way in which it was handed down and presented to people and was so powerful in its forms of current expression that, in spite of some strange deviations, it hardly occurred to the great mass of human beings (even to the rebels and the powerful intellects) that there was the alternative of disbelief.
A religion that has soaked itself into the minds of men, and almost become second nature to them, can work like a chemical in society, inspiring original thought, giving wing to the imagination and inciting the believer to strange adventures, curious experiments in living.
In the Middle Ages a certain marriage of Christianity and the world Christianity with the whole mundane order produced a supra-national religious society that was itself an amazing structure and can now be envisaged as a work of art.
If we have in mind all the external apparatus of the religion as it existed at that time its symbolism and its ceremonial, its biblical personalities and famous saints, its associations with a peculiar pattern of the cosmos, even its view of the hand of God in history we can entertain the hazardous idea of a Christian civilization, which, culminating in the thirteenth century, affected the landscape of town and country, governed the calendar of the year, touched the home, the craft guilds, the universities, and even put a stamp of its own on the most idle superstitions.

This civilization carried its own ideas about the nature of personality and about the right posture to be adopted by human beings under the sun.
It provided the conditions for the development of piety and the inner life for the deepening of religious thought and religious experience and for the expression of all this in cathedrals, in painting, and in poetry.
Even the papacy, which can seem so unattractive to us as it asserts its claims against powerful monarchs, stood in many ways as a beneficent influence, insisting on certain standards, raising the quality of the clergy, checking forms of tyranny, providing antecedents for modern international law, and directing governments to objects that transcended the ambitions of secular rulers.

4.
The Beginning of Decline.
However, in this whole medieval order of things Christianity was gravely entangled with the systems of the world, its bishops, for example, being great landholders and feudal lords.
Even if men in general had been more otherworldly, the conditions in the terrestrial sphere itself were bound to suffer changes as time went on.
Because even the ecclesiastics (by the very character of the situation) were not sufficiently otherworldly, the Church itself came under the operation of some of the laws which govern other religions govern human systems generally.
In a sense it became the victim of the remarkable success that it had achieved in the preceding period.
To the upholders of the existing order of things, the changes that were brought about during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were bound to appear as a decline; and in certain respects the medieval synthesis can be seen to be breaking down.
But the story of religion even the story of the state as essentially a religious society had by no means come to its end.

The downfall of the old order is difficult to disentangle from the interesting movements that were reassembling the materials and bringing about the creation of a new one.
In some respects the medieval period moved into what we call modern times on its own momentum, as a result of impulses within itself.
Amid much confusion, we see deeper lines of continuous development, as though the logic of events were working itself out.
It was in the realm of thought indeed, it was at the heart of scholasticism itself that the most fateful changes occurred.
And these changes were calculated to affect the actual character of religion, not merely the relations between Christianity and the world. Saint Thomas Aquinas, by his reexposition of Aristotelianism, had provided believers with a philosophy which explained the cosmos and was crowned by a theology; but the result had been to make philosophy an autonomous affiar.
Even while he was at work there were men who were more down-to-earth, more prepared just to hold their Aristotelianism neat; and perhaps a certain worldly-mindedness made them a danger not only to an ecclesiastical system but also to religion itself.

Others who were not worldly-minded or unbelieving tended to argue their way behind the tradition of classical philosophy itself, and to question its basis to doubt even the possibility of metaphysics.
It meant denying the ability of the human mind to reach the kind of truths that were associated with natural religion, or to reason in any way about God.

Under the influence of William of Ockham a great section of the academic world went over to a system which, without denying the revelation, cut away the forms of rationalization hitherto current, making religion a matter of pure fideistic acceptance.
Even the difference between right and wrong was removed from the domain of reason it came to be held that a thing was good because an arbitrary God had decreed it so.
If scholasticism itself had emerged too directly out of a passion for logic, and had lost something by its developments in an abstract realm, too remote from life and from general culture, the fourteenth century developments increased the gulf and helped to make the whole system curiously arid.
Even the content of religious thought came to be altered, for reflection was now concentrated on the absolute power of a God who was beyond man's reason, and who, from a state of unconditioned freedom, settled all things by sheer arbitrary decree.

The will of God, the power of God, became the great theme, and the result was by no means the same as when the emphasis is placed on the thesis: God is love.
Even in the discussion of human beings,attention was fixed on the role of man's will and that of God's grace in the work of salvation.
These preoccupations help to explain some of the peculiar emphases and developments in the sixteenth century Reformation.
In any case, the separation between faith and reason was bound to create difficulty, belief itself now appearing more farfetched and more unreal, God himself more remote situation which could encourage secularism and religious indifference.
Perhaps more dramatic at the time, however, were the changes in the relationship between the Church and the world, and even the appearance of a tremendous controversy concerning the nature of the Church itself.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the papacy both presumed too much on the success that it had achieved, and discovered what it had lost by the discomfiture of its chief rival, the empire in Germany.
Henceforward, it had to confront the rising national monarchies without the powerful assistance which, ideally, should have come from the ancient partnership between pope and emperor.
In the bull Unam Sanctam of 1302, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), relying on the assertions and on the victories of his predecessors, issued too high a challenge to monarchs claiming too boldly the right to direct and judge them even in the exercise of their temporal power.
The resulting conflict, in which the French government accused him of appalling crimes and demanded his trial before a general council of the Church, brought him to humiliation in 1303 at the hands of a body of desperadoes, and he died within a few weeks after he had been released.

In 1305, an archbishop of Bordeaux who was elected as Pope Clement V proved to be a creature of the French king; and, besides creating many French cardinals, he took up his residence at Avignon, which was then just outside the frontiers of France.
Owing partly to the political confusion of Italy, a return of the papacy to Rome proved impracticable for a long time. Gregory XI went back there in 1377, but he died in the following year and then the cardinals in Rome elected a pope, but another was elected in Avignon.
Now, therefore, the system reached its reductio ad absurdum, two successors of Saint Peter making concurrent claims and exercising concurrent power.
Nothing could have been more injurious to the Church and more damaging to prestige than the existence for over thirty years of the Great Schism some parts of Europe attaching themselves to a pope in Avignon, others to a pope in Rome, with the further complication of overlappings here and there, so that a diocese might not be sure which of two rival claimants was its duly appointed bishop.
There now arose the question: What means of rescue were open to a Church that seemed to have been struck at its very heart?

5.
The Conciliar Movement.
It was natural that there should be some tension in the Middle Ages between the idea of the Church as the entire community of believers, collectively sustained and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and the notion of a clerical hierarchy, imposed from above, and deriving a special authority from outside the system, i.e., direct from Christ.
It had been noted that if Peter had received the power of binding and loosing (in Matthew 16:18-19) this particular prerogative had been extended after the Resurrection to all the Apostles (in John 20:22-23); but though the effect of this was to widen the basis of authority in the Church, it did not in reality override the prevailing view that the bishop of Rome, as the representative of Saint Peter, had the effective power of government.
The term Roman Church was ambiguous it could mean the local church of the city of Rome but also it could signify the entire congregation of the faithful.
It was the latter that was supposed to be preserved against error, not in the sense that lapses here and there were impossible, but in the sense that the Church in its entirety would never go astray there would never be heresy in all its parts at a single time.

Even this stress on the wide-ranging community of believers, was not taken to mean that the community as such could carry on the work of government without the directing hand of the papacy; and those who glorified General Councils of the Church normally assumed that the pope himself would actually summon these bodies and lead them that, indeed, his own authority came to its maximum when he worked through a General Council.
On the other hand, it was possible to consider that, though the church in Rome had played a distinguished part in the establishment and maintenance of orthodoxy, the pope as a man might fall into error; and if he notoriously supported what had long been regarded as heresy, his authority would be ipso facto at an end.
It came to be asserted that the same would be true if he were publicly and obviously guilty of serious crime.
The possibility of such contingencies raised the question of the part which the College of Cardinals or General Councils might have to play at the moment when the incapacity had to be declared.
It has been pointed out that in canonist writers of about A.D. 1200 are to be found anticipations of all the main assertions of the Conciliar Movement.
Yet this was the time when the papacy under Innocent III was making the highest possible claims and asserting that all other jurisdictions in the Church were only a derivation from Rome.
In the thirteenth century, however, the development of the kind of canon law which treated the Church as a corporation tended to increase the possible leverage of conciliar ideas.
There now appeared more of the suggestion that a corporation is the source of the authority of its head, that all members of a corporation should take part in decisions which affect the whole body, that a corporation could survive as a unity if it lost its head, and could take the necessary measures to rectify the default in the leadership.
Such ideas were able to develop at the very time when papal publicists, for their part, were continuing the line of thought which had brought the authority of Innocent III to its height.
Amongst writers hostile to the papacy the idea arises not only that the cardinals could act on behalf of the pope when he himself was defaulting in some way, but also the idea that in serious matters the pope should always act in consultation with the cardinals and moreover the idea that the cardinals had the authority to summon a General Council.

In all this we find the insertion of what the modern student would regard as constitutional ideas into canonist reflections on Church government.
The supporters of the Conciliar Movement at the beginning of the fifteenth century could feel that they were by no means innovators that, indeed, they were following principles with a long and respectable ancestry, principles essentially orthodox.
In any case, the Great Schism the scandal of two lines of successive popes reigning contemporaneously and dividing the West made it necessary to turn to just that kind of thinking which envisaged the Church's power of selfrectification during a failure in the supreme leadership.
The Schism lasted for nearly thirty years, and, though almost all of the popes elected during this period had sworn to resign if their departure would help the cause of unity, the promises were not kept.
If either of the rival popes summoned a General Council it could only be a party affair and the two colleges of cardinals failed in their attempts to persuade their respective popes to issue a joint invitation to a Council.
When in 1409 a Council was called by cardinals at Pisa, its legality was doubtful, and though it pretended to depose the two existing holders of the papal office and secure the election of a third, the real effect of this was to make the situation worse there were now three claimants to the dignity instead of two.
It is understandable if such an impasse provoked much discontent with the general condition of the Church, and stimulated a great deal of thinking about the position of both popes and General Councils.

The situation was aggravated by the fact that the nation states were now becoming more important and governments that had the choice of adhering to one pope rather than another acquired more power over their national churches.
Their diplomacies (particularly during the Hundred Years' War between France and England) affected their ecclesiastical loyalties (the English disliking a pope at Avignon, for example); and when the Emperor Sigismund combined with one of the rival popes to summon the more imposing Council of Constance, it was through diplomacy conducted with various national governments that he secured a broad basis for the assembly.
This body attacked the papal problem in 1415, and began by deposing the successor of the pope who had gained office as a result of the Council of Pisa they struck at the very pope who had joined Sigismund in summoning the new Council. The resignation of another claimant was then secured; and, though the pope at Avignon refused to give way, the diplomacy of Sigismund prevented his having the support of reigning monarchs.

The Great Schism was for practical purposes healed and a new pope, Martin V (1417-31), was appointed a man who, once in authority, opposed the conciliarist ideas then prevalent.
The cry had gone up that a General Council was superior to the pope and it was decreed at Constance that a Council should be summoned at least every ten years.
There were some who urged that even laymen should have a place in such a Council, which was being regarded as a representative body.
Another Council which assembled at Basel in 1431 refused to be dissolved at the command of another pope, and it brought absurdity to a higher degree than before, for it threatened a renewal of schism by presuming to depose the pope and to appoint another one.
The excesses of the radicals frightened some of the moderates into conservatism, however, and in any case it was the pope rather than the Council who had the power to execute a policy effectively.
In 1439 a rival Council which the pope had summoned to Ferrara decreed that a Council was not superior to a pope; and though a dwindling body went on meeting at Basel, they came to terms in 1449, abandoning their adhesion to the man whom they had presumed to appoint to the papal office.
They had humiliated a supreme pontiff and compelled him to treat with them after he had decreed their dissolution; but they brought the whole Conciliar movement to a miserable end.

6.
The Transition to a New Order.
In the meantime new forms of heresy had been arising, and they gained additional strength from the abuse that was being made of such things as indulgences, from the jealousy felt toward ecclesiastical property, and from national feeling against the intrusions of papal power into one country and another.
From about 1374 John Wycliffe in England was preaching against the excessive wealth of the Church and claiming that the monarch should decide how much of this should be retained a gospel that brought him the patronage of a powerful and covetous nobility.
He lost some of his humbler allies when he attacked the problem of the eucharist, declaring that Christ was present spiritually but that the bread and wine retained their former substance.
Emphasizing the absolute power of the will of God a form of emphasis which the influence of Saint Augustine as well as contemporary movements in philosophy encouraged Wycliffe ran to predestinarian views which were calculated to lessen the role of church offices in the work of salvation.
He encouraged the reading of the Bible (and its translation into the vernacular) because the Scriptures were of higher authority than the traditions of the Church.

Some analogies to the later Protestantism are apparent in all this; but the first Lancastrian monarch of England, Henry IV (1399-1413), desired the Church's recognition of his title to the throne of England, and his parliament carried a new statute, requiring the burning of heretics a statute which was severely executed during the reign of his son.
The Lollard followers of Wycliffe, some of whom had tended to revolutionary ideas, could survive only as ineffectual secret heretics.
Partly under the influence of the English movement, John Hus led a similar revolt against ecclesiastical evils in Bohemia, and, though he avoided some of Wycliffe's doctrinal innovations, he was burned in 1415 by the Council of Constance, which wished to show that at least it did not tolerate heresy.
Some of Hus's associates came nearer to the ideas of Wycliffe, and there emerged a popular radical movement which attacked monasticism, the adoration of saints, purgatory, indulgences, etc., on the ground that these things were not authorized by the actual words of Scripture.
And here, as in England, a powerful and richly endowed Church, rife with obvious abuses, was challenged by a dangerous picture of Apostolic Christianity the concept that the clergy should be poor men leading a simple life as they guarded their flocks.
In 1419 the Czechs revolted and their religious grievances, which gave the conflict at times something of an apocalyptic character, combined with a tremendous national hatred against the Germans, who had acquired a strong position at court, in the university of Prague, and in the industry of the towns.

Successive campaigns against the rebels came to disaster, and though the extremists were defeated in 1434, an agreement had to be made with the moderates which put the Bohemian church in a special position (e.g., in regard to the reception by the laity of communion in both kinds). Bohemia remained, indeed, a region of potential revolt, potential heresy.
It might have been argued that the fifteenth century had a special need for the Christian religion at its best, since deep forces in society were producing a great secularization of life producing indeed a society that increased the mundane claims on human beings.
The growth of industry and commerce, the development of high finance, the increasing importance of a bourgeois class, and the blossoming of virtual city states in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands provided a new dynamic for the secular activities of men.
The resulting erosion of the traditional feudal forms of society was bound to produce disorder in the period of transition, and the Church had tied itself unduly to the older order of things the very pattern of its organization ceased to correspond with the systems that were developing in the world.
The exile of the papacy in Avignon, the ensuing Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement had increased the tendency of separate regions to look after their local religious affairs, and the national governments were growing in strength and importance, legislating against papal interference or making their own terms with the popes.

The principle of nationality was itself receiving recognition, even in the organization of General Councils and universities.
The Renaissance in Italy and the more effective recovery of the thought of antiquity, assisted a secularization which, however, had also been showing itself in the development of vernacular literature and its advance to high artistic status.
And the secularization showed itself within the great development of the visual arts, especially in Italy perhaps also in the tendency of some scholastic writers to move over to science, to problems of celestial mechanics, for example.
But all this and the palpable abuses in the Church itself did not mean that Christianity was coming to its terminus or that there had been a serious decline of religious faith as such.
The very revolts against the Church were born of religious zeal themselves signs of a questing kind of religion that gets behind the conventions and seeks the original fountain of the faith.

The interesting eruptions of spontaneous life are not antireligious but are more like a groping for fresh adventures in religion, longings for an almost noninstitutional kind of piety, as though it were felt necessary to cut through the artificialities and go direct to the essential things.
Most significant of all are the devotional movements, that press for contemplation and austerity, or seek a mystical apprehension of Christ.
And the Imitation of Christ which has been the inspiration of both Protestants and Catholics written in the midfifteenth century, and more widely published and translated than anything in Christianity except the Bible contains hardly a reference to the Church in spite of its devotion to the Eucharist.
An interesting feature of the new age is the involvement of the laity in the new religious movements, and the association of these with municipal life.

III.
THE REFORMATION AND COUNTER-REFORMATION
1.
The Pre Reformation Church.
The Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century confronts us with the variety which we should expect to find when we look at the manifold life of a whole continent.
There were abuses and disorders indeed an unusual number of grave scandals at certain levels but also in many places even deep piety and reforming zeal.
The Renaissance itself could bring attempts to enrich the Christian outlook with the new humanism, projects for a further alliance between Platonism and religion, and a fresh interest in the ancient texts the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church.
Even in Italy there were many localities that had their religious revivals, some of them medieval in character, popular and even perhaps superstitious, though the one associated with Savonarola in Florence captured some of the famous figures of the Renaissance.
The monastic system, from its very nature, was subject to ups-and-downs, especially as its rules took for granted a certain intensity of spiritual life.
But if in some regions monasteries had sunk into immorality, there had been a number of reforming movements, some of them emerging from within and arising spontaneously.
There had been educational developments the religious schools under the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands, for example, and the founding in fifteenth century Germany of universities under the patronage of the clergy or the pope.

Many of these movements were local in character, arising from below. Even a wicked pope would normally have no reason for checking them, or for discouraging piety as such.
On the other hand, the leading officers of the Church could be too remote from these things and ordinarily too indifferent in respect to them.
It is doubtful whether the directors of the Catholic system took even the minimum measures that were required to maintain their guidance over religious life or ensure the survival of the system as a whole.
In some regions the state of the priesthood and the work of the pulpit had sunk so low that a prince who wished to plunder the Church had only to open the door to the missionaries of Protestantism, who might bring an awakening or a revolt without meeting with an adequate reply.
Too much of the burden of the Church had come to be borne by a lower clergy who seemed sometimes hardly trained to realize the nature of their own religion, and had every reason to be discontented with their lot.

A surprising number of them (and particularly of those who belonged to the minor and mendicant orders) were to become Protestants, and some of those who had been unsatisfactory before their conversion were by no means contemptible after it.
It would appear that there was often too much of what might be called paganism or superstition still mixed into the popular Christianity of the period too great a readiness on the part of the authorities to exploit the willingness of ignorant people to rely on wonders that were mechanically operated, salvation devices that had lost their connection with the inner man.

Apart from the more technical controversies at a higher level the Reformers were to attack in the world at large the attitude which the lowest classes were encouraged to take towards images, relics, indulgences, the invocation of saints, and the like.
There were now too many people who were coming to be too mature for this; and the Reformation (which could have achieved nothing without the success of its preaching) came in one aspect as a religious revival, a call to a more personal faith, a demand for a more genuine “u“Christian society.
The Reformation was to have its dark sides but it was to secure its successes because so many people were ready to be earnest, ready (when called upon) to bring religion home to themselves and to feel that they had some responsibility in the matter.
In a sense the Reformation occurred because (on a long-term view) the medieval Church had done its work so well, producing out of barbarian beginnings a laity now capable of a certain self-help, a certain awareness of responsibility.

And as the Church of Rome, once it had been provoked into reexamining itself, was to recover its hold on people by its own preaching and its spiritual intensity, the opening centuries of modern times see the reassertion of religion both in the individual and in society.
The Reformation was to be helped at the same time by what on the one hand was a colossal envy and covetousness, and on the other hand a great resentment.
The abuses in the ecclesiastical organization itself were sufficient to provoke a revolt, and if they offered an opening for zealous reformers they presented too great a temptation to monarchs and magnates.
In the Middle Ages there had been serious opposition to the development of the power of the papacy in particular the capture of the spiritual prerogatives into a single center and the insertion of papal authority into every corner of the European system.

At a certain stage in the story the process had been understandable; the papacy had often stood as the most beneficial agency on the continent; abuses, disorders, and lapses into superstition had tended to occur in the regions which the hand of the pope could not reach.
But the centralization did not prevent benefices, offices, indulgences, dispensations, etc., being used as a means of making money, and new offices being created in order that they could be sold the Church, and particularly Rome, being saddled with dignitaries who had to find the means of recouping themselves for the initial outlay.
Early in the sixteenth century the position of the papal states was so difficult that the pope, as the ruler of a principality, had a desperate need for money; and he used his spiritual prerogatives in order to procure it an evil that was liable to show its consequences throughout the length and breadth of Western Christendom.

A higher clergy who were too often like the sharers in a colossal spoils system did too little for the earnest people, though they seemed to stamp very quickly on any enterprise that might threaten their own profits.
The Church lost much, therefore, through the nature of its entanglement with the world; and its vested interests the mundane possessions that were supposed to guarantee its position became in fact a terrible weakness, an abuse to some people, and, to others, the primary object of cupidity.

2.
The Reformation in Germany.
The Reformation is to be regarded as essentially a religious movement and all our history becomes distorted unless we see it as arising primarily out of the spiritual needs and aspirations of earnest men.
Social conditions might place certain sections of the population in a favorable position for hearing propaganda or for welcoming it rather in the way that townsmen may be more ready than peasants to open their minds to a new thing and such factors might have an effect on the social or geographical distribution of a new religious system.
The current forms and the current needs of society might affect that fringe of ethical ideas and practical precepts in which a new form of faith works out some of its more mundane implications.
In history, everything is so entangled with everything else that for many students the political or economic consequences of the Reformation might appear more momentous than any other aspect of the movement.
But religion is the stone that is thrown into the pool, the agency that starts all the ripples.

In the Reformation itself we are dealing with people for whom religion was not merely a matter of opinion or speculation, leaving an opening for alternatives.
They were people who superstitiously feared the powers of hell, and reckoned the afterlife as clear a vested interest as anything in the world people, also, who believed that only one form of religion could be right, and regarded it as a matter of eternal moment that God should be served and propitiated in the proper way.
Martin Luther, while still a young man, and a member of the Augustinian order which was to produce so many supporters of the Reformation, became remarkable through the intensity of his inner experience and his exaggerated attempts to secure the salvation of his soul by his own works and religious exercises.
In this whole endeavor he would seem to have over looked certain aspects of theological teaching that had not been lost in the Middle Ages, and he was brought into the predicament of Saint Paul powerless to achieve the good that he so greatly wanted to achieve.
After a distressing time, the help of his own superior and the study of the Epistle to the Romans brought him further light, and he came to the view that man is justified by faith alone, but that the Catholicism of his time was preaching salvation by works, even by religious exercises.

In reality historical Christianity had always excluded as Pelagianism any idea that a man could save himself by his own efforts; and Luther, though he had seized on something that had been part of the Church's tradition going back to certain aspects of Saint Augustine and Saint Paul went to the opposite extreme, insisting on the corruptness of man and his inability to have a part in his own salvation, so that he ran to predestinarian ideas which were later systematized by Calvin, and which gave the Reformation an antihumanist aspect.
The later Middle Ages had seen a concentration on the problem of both freedom and the will in both man and God; and it seems clear that unfortunate consequences followed from too intent a consideration of the power and sovereignty of God, if these were regarded as separate from His love.
In a sense Luther's views sprang from the intensity of his own spiritual experience and his feeling about what had happened in his own case; and they answered to what many people throughout the ages had felt to be their own experience the sense of being drawn by a power greater than themselves, pulled into salvation by forces which they tried in vain to resist.

Luther therefore had been open to the criticism that he inferred too much of his theology from his personal experience.
In Wittenberg he was one of those people who promoted a local religious revival, and his immediate superiors were encouraging him in his work, advancing him to a professorship so that his influence would be enlarged.
He was a mountain of a man, capable of great profundities and giant angers, but possessing a vein of poetry, and, at times, the heart of a little child.
But he was liable to be intellectually erratic, and when in 1517 the abuses of indulgence selling led him to offer his ninety five theses as a debating challenge, he enlarged the issue by his theological assertions and provided his enemies with a basis for attack.
Instead of calmly reasoning with him, they too set out to enlarge the issue, driving him from one logical conclusion to another and into positions that he had not anticipated.
And he incited by the wave of feeling that he had aroused in Germany as well as by his own mighty passions was glad to be provoked, moving forward until he had denied the authority of popes and councils, and denounced the condition of the whole Church.
Carefully measuring his power, he enlarged the whole campaign in 1520, setting out to undermine the sacramental system of the Church which contributed to the power of priests.
He called in the secular authority to carry out the work of reform which the Church seemed unable to achieve for itself.

Against the power of a vast organization that had long had the governments of Europe behind it, he asserted what he called the liberty of a Christian man.
Soon he was attacking the monastic system to which he had once been devoted. And he convinced himself that the pope was Anti-Christ.
He was helped by a certain religious dissatisfaction and by the anger, particularly in Germany, against ecclesiastical abuses that were associated with Italy.
He was enabled by the printing press, and by his own prodigious energy, to conduct what was perhaps the first really large scale publicity campaign of the kind that makes its appeal to general readers.
An enormous factor in the case was the weakness in Germany of the Emperor Charles V, who was distracted by the problems of the many countries over which he ruled, and by the princes of the separate states in Germany who sought to aggrandize their authority and were sometimes ready to see the advantage of an alliance with Lutheranism.

The Emperor was to be held up still further by the advance of the Turks, which made it necessary for him to postpone the solution of his German problems.
When the cause of the Reformation came to be preached in the cities of South Germany for example it found an eager reception; and for a considerable time even regions like Bavaria and Austria regions that later became renowned for their Catholicism seemed to be moving over to Protestantism.
In reality Luther seems to have been a man of conservative and perhaps authoritarian disposition. He had been moved to action because he could not bear the manner in which the Church was tolerating both practical abuses and misrepresentations of the faith.
But in the period of the great revolt he put forward certain theses which were to be remembered as the great Reformation principles, and were to have a broader historical influence than even his theology.
They asserted the right of the individual to interpret the Scriptures; the priesthood of all believers; and the liberty of a Christian man.

When others took these theses according to their obvious meaning but at the same time came to conclusions that were different from his, he made it plain that he could not tolerate their individualism, and that indeed he had no use for rebels.
There was one interpretation of Scripture, and that the true one; and only sheer perversity could induce a man to read anything else into the text.
Neither the Roman Catholics nor the Zwinglians nor the Anabaptists were free to interpret the Scriptures for themselves.
And when Luther came to the construction of his own system, he showed himself in many respects a conservative at heart. Clearly it had not been his desire to divide the Church, but his theological teaching and his persistence in it after it had been condemned was almost bound to produce that result.
The general historian of Europe would have to say that the most momentous consequences of the Lutheran revolt were things of which Luther would have disapproved.
Lutheranism itself remained essentially Teutonic, and, outside Germany, it established itself at the time only in Scandinavia.

There was a moment when it seemed likely to sweep over Germany, a politico religious unheaval of the kind that can create a nation.
Once it failed to carry the whole country however, it was bound to have the opposite effect, creating a new, confessional division, in some respects more bitter than any of the others, more difficult to overcome. It resulted in one important contribution to the German nation, however Luther's translation of the Bible into a language which was to prevail over local dialects and to have a unifying effect.
But, though Luther, when he called for the aid of princes, thought of them as servants of the Church, bound by duty to serve the lofty cause, he produced a situation in which princes had the power to choose between competing systems and so acquired great authority in religious matters.
His pessimistic ideas about man and the world may have had the effect of diminishing the role and the influence of religion in the political realm, making Lutheranism too uncritical an ally of monarchy.
In the period immediately after his condemnation at the Diet of Worms (April 1521), Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg castle, and during his absence more radical developments began to take place.
In Wittenberg itself, Andrew Karlstadt (or Carlstadt) promoted a further movement against the Mass and, on the strength of the Old Testament attacked images and called for a stricter sabbatarianism, so that signs of the later Puritanism were already visible.
This, in March 1522, provoked Luther's return to Wittenberg, for he did not give the same authority to Old Testament law, and, in regard to the things that the populace loved, he deprecated a destructive policy conducted without sufficient previous explanation.

In the meantime the reform movement had been establishing itself in towns where the social conflict had made the situation almost revolutionary; and by the spring of 1521 Thomas Müüntzer had combined the religious cause with civic revolt in the town of Zwickau.
Before the end of the year he had proclaimed in an apocalyptic manner the downfall of the Church; he insisted that a scriptural religion was not enough since the voice of God spoke directly within the believer, and he threatened the opposition with punishment at the hands of the Turk. Also some of the other prophets of Zwickau moved in 1522 to Wittenberg, where they produced trouble for the Lutherans.
Soon the objections to infant baptism became significant. Forms of apocalypticism and mysticism had made their appearance in various regions in the later Middle Ages, and in Germany not only the peasantry but the lower classes in the towns provided promising soil for these movements.
Now, as so often in history, religious radicalism could quickly lead to political extremism and to the feeling that the time had come for the destruction of the godless. Thomas Müüntzer came to be connected with the Peasants' Revolt in 1525, and, when speaking to the rebels about the enemy, could say: They will beg you, will whine and cry like children.

But you are to have no mercy, as God commanded through Moses. Yet he is deeply moving when he writes of his spiritual experience and the voice of God in the believer: Scripture cannot make men live, as does the living Word which an empty soul hears.
The sects for which Luther so unwillingly opened the way did not know how to apply the brake, and when they captured Mü2ünster in 1534 they established polygamy, while in Moravia they experimented in communism.
It was they who carried the seeds that were to be so important to the far future the insistence that God regarded men as equal, that Christ had made them free and that there was an Inner Light which men had to obey.
The twentieth century has shown that even the apocalypticism can be deeply ingrained in man and admits of being secularized. It goes back to biblical times, but (at least when the pattern has once been established) it can exist without a supernatural religion.

3.
Calvin.
In the Swiss Reformation the city state made its last contribution to history; for it communicated to a nascent church something of the pattern of its own organization (and particularly government by councils) as well as something of its spirit, so that the secular and the spiritual seemed to have kinship with one another, just as the development of the Catholic hierarchy had fitted neatly into the feudal world.
Here, moreover, the transformation that occurred was more radical organized Christianity reshaped itself, producing a palpably different landscape.
Signs of this are apparent in the case of Zwingli, the original leader of the revolt within the Swiss Confederation. The initial breach occurred on matters of discipline, but the changes in doctrine and thought were more radical, more rationalistic than in the case of the Lutheran Revolt.
Here, however, the identification of the movement with the political ambitions of Zurich turned the Reformation into a politico religious affair a patriotic cause—u—Zwingli meeting his death in battle.
What we might regard as the international Reformation is associated with John Calvin and with Geneva a city which was not yet part of the Confederation, and which belonged to no country, though it stood at the point where France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland came together.
After trying to establish himself in the city from 1536 and being driven out in 1538, Calvin from 1541 gained the mastery, and held it till 1564, though this involved the expulsion of many of the ancient families and the granting of citizenship to hosts of refugees from abroad.
At the beginning of this period, the Reformation itself had arrived at a critical stage. Many people had become weary of the conflict, and there were distinguished intellects as well as political leaders who had come to desire ecclesiastical reunion.

Under Melanchthon, the Lutherans seemed to be trying to discover how far they could go towards a reconciliation with Catholicism. After the Peasants' Revolt in Germany in 1525 there had been the spectacle of the revolutionized city of Munster in 1534, and this had shown what could happen if religious rebellion was not restrained.
Calvin represented a new generation, and an important part of his work was the stabilizing of the reformation conceiving it as an international affair, and erecting it if possible into an international order comparable to the Catholic one of the Middle Ages.
In 1536, by the first version of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (which was to prove the best-seller of the sixteenth century), and then, in the following year, by his part in the reunion discussions in Germany, he had been qualifying himself to become an international leader.
In 1539 his Letter to Cardinal Sadoleto had proved to be the most successful of the popular defences of the Reformation. The wheel had come into full cycle, and he saw that what was needed was the reestablishment of ecclesiastical authority.
He realized that the situation called for three important things: a confession of faith, a doctrine of the Church, and an ecclesiastical discipline.

His originality lay not in the generation of new doctrines but in the better coordination of received ones, and their adaptation to the purpose of achieving a coherent system.
Difficulties concerning the question of the real presence in the Eucharist prevented a union with the Lutherans, who preserved something of the Catholic point of view, and, for a long time, also, with the Zwinglians, who treated the sacrament as rather a symbol and a remembrance of Christ. These latter began to be reconciled, however, from 1549.
It is in Calvinism that the Reformation, at least in externals, begins to wear the aspect of almost a new type of religion like a new style in art or, as some would think (perhaps unfairly) a change from poetry to prose, if not a reaction against aestheticism itself.
It becomes clear now that religion is a very serious matter; the preaching holds a great importance; and, under the tighter authority that is possible in the citystates, there arises a severer control of private life.
Calvin was ready (as Zwingli had been) to follow the Bible more consistently than Luther, and this was bound to give an increased importance to the Old Testament.
He put the idea of the sovereignty of God at the center of his whole system, whereas Luther might be said to have been preoccupied by the idea of Grace. The emphasis on sovereignty had its counterpart in the demand for obedience from the human side.
Here was the basis for a firm authoritarianism an insistence that the Christian life should be a severe discipline. It has been said that Catholicism is the religion of priests, Lutheranism the religion of theologians, and Calvinism the religion of the believing congregation.

In spite of its inaccuracies, this comparison throws light on the Calvinist system in which, theoretically at least, the Church was the congregation of believing Christians, independent of mystery and ceremony and external paraphernalia.
The system governed through assemblies, synods, consistories; pastors were elected by congregations; and all pastors were equal, just as all churches were equal.
The layman was given a part to play in ecclesiastical affairs; and the ministers were to have no special immunities, no territorial lordships, and they were to pay taxes like anybody else.
The ecclesiastical system was to have no prisons, no instruments of mundane power; their sole weapon against the offender was to be exclusion from the Lord's Supper. In other words, sacerdotalism was at an end; and it was Calvin rather than Luther who broke the power of priests.
It was all congenial to the pattern of a city state, and suggests a Christianity that is being reshaped in the context of a more modern world. Yet it was authoritarian, and only with the greatest difficulty did Calvin impose it on an unwilling city.
Coming later than Luther, and having a more remorselessly logical mind, he did not pretend that the individual might interpret Scripture for himself.

If congregations elected their ministers the qualifications of these had to be approved, and their ordination carried out, by other ministers, and in Calvin's time the congregation would be provided with a nominee; all it could do was to give or refuse its consent.
In reality, the system was governed by an oligarchy which recruited itself by cooptation and closely superintended its members, entering private houses, and exercising control over private life.
It was even something like a police state, with spies, informers, and occult agents, and with neighbors and members of families betraying one another the culprit being handed over to the civil magistrate, who carried out the requirements of the Church.
If the influx of foreign exiles enabled Calvin to clinch his mastery of Geneva, it also provided him with the means of extending his influence abroad. The city became like a modern nest of international revolution, where the foreign guests received their training, and then departed to continue the work in their home country.
Though he repressed freedom of conscience and personal liberty, and, like Martin Luther, gave the individual no right to rebel, he did allow disobedience to rulers who commanded what was contrary to the word of God, and he gave currency to a theory of resistance to monarchy which was to be of great importance in the subsequent period.

Individuals had no right to rebel but representative institutions (the States General in France, the Parliament in England, for example) were justified in fighting the king. The doctrine was quoted from Calvin by the early Whigs and debated by the nascent Tories in seventeenth century England and it had already been significant in other countries.
It inaugurates the modern theory the modern paradox of constitutional revolution where the organ of revolt (as in France in 1789) is the representative system itself.
It happened that, in various countries, Calvinism spread originally in opposition to government, and its leader approved of these movements and guided them.
Calvinism, in fact, often emerged in the attitude of rebellion, and Calvin's warnings against this were not always heeded, if indeed he himself was quite consistent about the matter.
It is not an accident that liberty extends itself in the modern world via Holland, Great Britain and the United States countries where political rebellion was allied to Calvinism.

4.
The Counter-Reformation.
The Catholic revival of the sixteenth century has two aspects. On the one hand, like the Protestant Reformation itself, it can be regarded as a religious revival, a reaction against the ecclesiastical abuses that had been accumulating, and a protest against the secularization of Church and society.
In this sense, if it ran parallel to the Lutheran movement, it had in fact begun at an earlier date. And one of its important features had been a purification of the Church in Spain a remarkable reform of monasteries for example before the end of the fifteenth century, that is to say, under Ferdinand and Isabella, and chiefly through the piety of the latter.
One result of this was the fact that even the Renaissance in Spain had a peculiar character it was largely a regeneration of ecclesiastical scholarship, and for a time it gave Erasmus a considerable influence on the religious life of that country.
In their program for the New World the Spaniards gave a high place to the idea of transplanting Christianity and a Christian civilization to the other side of the Atlantic.
Spanish monks, using the Bible, canon law, and scholastic writings, assisted the transition to modern international law by their works on the laws of war and the rights of the native population, as they related to the overseas empire.

At the same time, the fanaticism and intolerance of the Spaniards seems to have been an acquired characteristic, a product of history. At an earlier date they had been reproached by other Christians for their laxity, their resort to infidel doctors, their visits to Moorish courts, so long as the Muhammadans remained in the peninsula.
The enduring conflict with the infidel, and the religious propaganda connected with it, helped to make Spain more firmly Catholic, more intolerantly orthodox, than any other country.
On the other hand there was a Counter Reformation in a stricter sense the reaction against the Protestant movement, which, to a Catholic was the greatest of the disorders of the time.
There was a moment when some men were able to feel that the Catholic revival might combine with the Lutheran movement, especially when more radical revolts had broken out and a section of the Lutherans had taken a conservative turn.
A group of important Catholics were even sympathetic to a certain form of the doctrine of justification by faith; and when the accession of Pope Paul III brought something of a turn towards a reformation at Rome itself, the appointment of a number of cardinals in the year 1534 was significant in the story, for a handful of these belonged to this more liberalizing group, including Cardinal Contarini and the Englishman, Cardinal Pole.
The years 1537-41 saw the failure of reunion negotiations which had been promoted in France as well as Germany, and, from that time, the men who had seemed prepared to broaden the basis of the Church were in disrepute indeed, more than one of the Cardinals involved in this aspect of the reforming movement was himself in danger from the Inquisition.

The years 1540-43 have special importance in the history of the Counter-Reformation. In 1540 the Society of Jesus was formed, and quickly attained an influence, though its widespread results were only to be apparent in the second generation.
In 1541 came the failure of conferences between Catholics and Lutherans at Ratisbon, so that the movement for comprehension and reunion was now virtually at an end. And though at this time there were disturbing manifestations of Protestantism in a number of localities even in Italy, effective action was now taken against the movement.
In 1542, Cardinal Contarini, the leader of the reformist group died, and at about this time the stronger members of that party passed off the stage, leaving Cardinal Pole a less effective personality in the leading position.
In 1542, moreover, a General Council of the Church was summoned; and, by this time, it had become apparent that it would not represent an opposition to Rome in the way that the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century had done.
It would itself be under the leadership of Rome. Some controversy has been caused by the question how far the leadership of Spain was responsible for the turn which the Counter-Reformation took.
Everywhere in the peninsula itself, in Africa, in the Mediterranean and in America Spain's enemy seemed to be the infidel and the championship of orthodoxy had become a major part of the national tradition.
The Jesuit Order was founded and organized by Spaniards and its first generals were Spaniards. The new form of papal Inquisition was influenced by the more powerful and modern form of Inquisition that had been established in Spain.
The pope's chief assistants and advisers at the Council of Trent, particularly on theological questions, were Spaniards. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the Catholic party in the French Wars of Religion and the supporters of Mary Tudor in England looked to Spain, and the Counter Reformation came to be identified with the aggressive policies of Philip II.

At the same time one must not overlook the determined manner in which the popes set out to hold the leadership in the Counter-Reformation. They were not Spaniards; they were often anti-Spaniards, and now, as in the past, they tended to be hostile to the Spanish preponderance in Italy.
The severest of the antiProtestant popes, Paul IV (Caraffa) had been a Dominican and his religion may have been affected by his residence in Spain at an earlier period in his life.
But even as Pope he found himself at war with Philip II, and Spanish troops besieged him in Rome, where he was defended by Lutheran mercenaries.
The popes were even a little hostile and jealous in their attitude to the Jesuit Order at first, and this was partly because that order seemed so closely connected with Spain.
The popes indeed would have liked to see the reform of the Church carried out through committees and commissions in Rome, where in 1552 Julius III established a Congregation of Reform.
Important sections of the Catholic world, headed by the Emperor Charles V, had long wanted the summoning of a General Council of the Church to reform abuses, particularly the abuses in Rome.
On various occasions in Germany early in the 1520's and in France early in the 1550's there had been threats of a National Council of the Church to bring about ecclesiastical reform within a single country.
When the Council met at Trent it made sure that its decrees should reserve the rights of the pope, and should be subject to his confirmation; also that he should have the sole right of interpreting them.

Throughout the proceedings (which took place in three sessions between 1545 and 1563) papal diplomacy proved to be remarkably effective. Perhaps the great dynamic features of Protestantism, as it developed in later centuries, lay in the way in which it confronted a man with the Bible and allowed him to seize upon the things which he internally ratified, the things which in his spiritual experience he grasped as living and true; the way also in which it could cut its way to the original sources, and, by returning to the fountain of the faith, disengage Christianity from the accidents of a long period of intervening history.
Perhaps the great stabilizing feature of Catholicism has been that it sought rather to preserve a tradition of doctrine, so that a man did not just think out the things he was to believe he sought to discover the teaching which had united Christians throughout the centuries.
On this system, at least one did not persecute on behalf of doctrines that one had only recently worked out for oneself. The impressive feature of the Council of Trent is the way in which doctrine, instead of issuing from some brilliant book by an individual theologian, was threshed out by commissions that sought to discover what had really been the tradition of the centuries.

On questions of dogma, a conservative position was maintained. Against Luther's teaching about the interpretation of the Bible it was agreed that the Bible must be interpreted by the tradition and conscience of the Church.
And the authoritative version was the Vulgate, which had been related to the development of Church doctrine through so many centuries. The Bible in the original languages was available for academic work, but the decision of the Church's doctrines was not to be transferred in a spirit of literalism to the experts in philology.
Luther's doctrine of justification by faith was condemned at the first session of the Council in 1545, but an opening was still left for the resurgence of the tradition of Saint Augustine in the Jansenism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The doctrine of predestination was condemned, but the Church had never tolerated Pelagianism, and there was still room in Catholicism for long quarrels between the Jesuits and the Dominicans about the proportion to be attributed to Divine Grace and to a man's free will in the work of salvation.
And though transubstantiation was confirmed there was still room for controversy within Catholicism about the interpretation of even this doctrine.

In regard to an important dispute concerning the question whether bishops held their power direct from God or only through the pope a controversy in which the Spanish bishops were hostile to the papacy the Council failed to come to a clear decision.
In order to have a picture of the Counter Reformation, however, it is not sufficient to see what was happening at headquarters and in the central institutions of Catholicism one must have some impression of what was taking place in the world at large.
One thing that was involved was the revival of preaching, and in this connection some of the Observantine section of the Franciscans, who reformed themselves in 1525 and became known as the Capuchins, become important amongst the common people in Italy, France, and Germany.
During the numerous outbreaks of plague that occurred in Italy, their fidelity and courage made a great impression.
The Jesuits attacked the problem at a different level and became important at first through their teaching and influence in universities, though later they became powerful at royal courts.
Even in Spain where they gained most adherents, and in France, where the supporters of Gallican claims and particularly the Parlement of Paris had special reasons for jealousy, they suffered some opposition at first.
When they went to Cologne in 1544, some said that the urgent need was rather for good bishops and parish priests. Just after the mid century, not only were many of the German bishops still worldly-minded and indifferent to the religious cause, but there were regions where it was impossible for good Catholics to be served except by priests who were actually married or living with concubines, and preaching semi-Lutheran ideas.

In the 1550's, however, the famous Jesuit, Canisius, began the important work which saved the city and university of Vienna from the Protestants who had come to acquire almost absolute control.
His influence extended to Prague as well as to Ingolstadt, which became the great Catholic educational center in the next generation.
The same Canisius was responsible for the issue of a catechism which was to be of great importance in Catholic teaching. At the humblest level of all, moreover, great efforts were made to inspire and nourish popular piety.
Even so, it is difficult to see how the new influences could have found a footing if they had not been patronized by princes, particularly the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Habsburgs in Austria.
The papacy was wise enough now to make concessions to princes who might have become Protestant for the sake of the spoils; and the Bavarian princes were to acquire a good deal of revenue from ecclesiastical sources on which they were now permitted to draw.
For a few years from about 1563 the Duke of Bavaria sought to bring his principality back to Catholicism but this imposed upon him a difficult conflict with his parliamentary estates and with the nobility.

He succeeded in restoring the Church only by high-handed measures and by making encroachments on ecclesiastical jurisdiction himself. In general, the restoration of the clergy and the care for the educational work were calculated in themselves to have a great effect, and even in Bohemia, a traditional home of heresy, Catholic preaching and Catholic saintliness began to exercise their influence again.

5.
The Results of the Reformation.
It is more clear to the twentieth century than it was to the sixteenth that a great deal of the evil and the suffering which arose from the Reformation a great many of the wars, atrocities and crimes that came to be associated with it arose from the beliefs that the various parties had in common.
The world had changed greatly since New Testament days, and all were agreed that religion was not a matter for the Individual only; that the uniform Christian Society was the important thing; and that only one form of faith could be true, the rest standing not merely as errors but as diabolical perversions.
It was the duty of rulers to support the true faith and there were precedents for the view that when all else failed when the ecclesiastical system was too decadent to rectify itself the secular arm should reform the Church.
Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the Anabaptists sought to capture the government if only the government of a city state. And this only highlighted the fact that the papacy needed the support of the secular authority too.
Many of the results of the Reformation particularly the more paradoxical results sprang from the fact that neither the papacy, on the one hand, nor Luther (or any other Protestant leader) on the other, was able to secure a total victory that would have reestablished unity in the West.
This itself contributed to the power of princes, for it left them the choice in matters of religion, so that they tended to become masters rather than servants at the most crucial point of all. A monarch like Henry VIII of England could evade the alternatives before him, simply setting up a system of his own.

Furthermore, besides confiscating much of the property of the Church, they became accustomed to controlling religious affairs even (in the case of Lutheran princes and Henry VIII, for example) replacing the pope as the superior over bishops.
Each state tended to become its own Christian Society, and authority being now closer at hand was liable to become more tyrannical than before. Although the tendencies were already in existence and may have contributed to the growth of an antipapal movement, the Reformation gave a fresh stimulus to the rising power of kings, and the development of nationalism.
It was a great blow to such international order as had previously existed. A revival of religion had occurred, and both published works and private letters bear evidence of inspiring thought and deep sincerity a tremendous reexploring of Christianity.
But it was also a revival of religious passions, religious hatreds and religious wars, and it showed what a scourge a supernatural religion could be to the world if it were not tempered by the constant remembrance of the dominating importance of charity.
In sixteenth century Europe the rivalry between one set of doctrines and another, and even the negotiations between the parties indeed all the transactions which related to doctrinal tests inaugurated a period in which the confessional issue was too momentous, and there was too hard an attitude toward intellectual statements of belief.
In the long run, the very conflict of authorities was bound to leave a greater opening for individualism even a tendency to see all the religious parties with relativity.
But the process to this was slower than one would have imagined and for nearly two centuries the conflict had a politico-religious character. In a given country the Reformation, particularly in its Calvinist form, was likely to arise in the first place amongst a minority; and there were signs of it even in countries that were to remain Catholic signs in Italy and even Spain, and a formidable movement in France.

The irrepressibility of these nonconformists, even when they failed to capture the government, added a dynamic quality to the history of a number of states, particularly England. Yet for the most part it was due to their predicament rather than to their theology that the dissenters made their great contribution to the modern world.
They wished to capture the whole body politic; and because they failed they were in the mood for opposition to the Establishment, both Church and State; and they could better afford to judge society and government by reference to Christian principles and fundamental ideas.
The elevation of the Bible by the Protestants, and particularly the Calvinists what has been called the bibliolatry of the sixteenth century was to have important and widespread consequences. Even the translation of the book had a wide general significance,especially in France and Germany.
In an age when everything is being thrown into the melting pot, it becomes more easy to note the equality of men before God, the Christ who makes men free, the idea of communism in the New Testament.
One of the effects of the concentration on the Bible was the unprecedented importance which the Old Testament acquired in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In some respects it replaced the volumes of canon law which Luther had burned, and it proved less flexible than the canon law, to which Luther objected, partly because of the development that had taken place in it; he objected not to its prohibition of usury but to the loopholes which it had come to admit.
Now, economic regulations, political theories, ethical ideas and even science, even one's views about the physical universe would be taken from the Old Testament, which was more relevant for these mundane purposes than the New.

Monarchy itself found its justification there and Luther's view of what we should call the state was Old Testament rather than medieval the king having the power while being expected to listen to the prophet (the Reformation leader) at his side.
And over and over again the early Protestants would refer to their monarch as the King Josiah, who had reformed the Church after discovering the books of the Law. The conception of the covenant, which was so familiar amongst the ancient Hebrews, was now revived and seems to have played its part in the development of the Social Contract theory.
When the Pilgram Fathers went to America, they signed what they called a covenant, in which they constituted themselves as a body politic.
Amongst the Puritans the prohibition of images may have tended to the discouragement of the visual arts. In England, Sundays (which had at first been deprecated, along with the excessive number of saints' days) came to be equated with the Jewish Sabbath.
The Old Testament provided textual bases for witch burnings, which multiplied at this period, as well as for religious intolerance and severe theories of persecution, including the view that heretics should be destroyed as blasphemers.
It has been held by Max Weber and others that something in the nature of Protestantism itself played an important part in the rise of capitalism, and the advance of England and Holland (together with a decline in Belgium and a backwardness in Spain and Italy) has lent plausibility to this view.

But capitalism and the spirit of capitalism were highly advanced in Italy and the Netherlands before the Reformation, and the famous Fugger family in Germany was Catholic.
Luther, joining in the hostility that had already arisen against it said that the greatest misfortune of the German nation was the traffic in usury, and he blamed the pope for having sanctioned the evil. Calvin, coming at a later date, recognized the changed condition of the world and attacked the Aristotelian view that money is barren but he was a little troubled lest this should assist the capitalists and encourage usury.
He would have liked to drive the latter out of the world, but since this was impossible, he said that one must give way to the general utility.
He sought to prevent the evil which explained the antipathy of agricultural societies to usury namely, the practices which took advantage of the misfortunes of the poor and t