THE BUILDER JULY 1927

The Reformation

By PROF. E. E. BOOTHROYD, Canada

THE Reformation would appear to be generally regarded as a purely
religious movement, a movement by which a great part of western
Europe rejected the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papacy and
abandoned or modified the doctrines and practices of the medieval
church. This is very natural in view of the fact that the religious
questions which agitated men's minds in the 16th century--as to the
number and character of the sacraments, the organization of the
church, the invocation of the virgin and the Saints, the wearing of
vestments, and the like are still vital and controversial questions
in the 20th. A close examination of the movement will, however,
show that many elements other than the religious dictated the
character and course of the Reformation, and may lead to a
suspicion that religion, far from being the only factor, was not
even the most important.

The first of the non-religious aspects of the Reformation to
attract the student's attention would probably be that of race.
Protestantism seems to have appealed, with comparatively few and
unimportant exceptions, to the Teutonic races alone. It spread with
remarkable rapidity among the Germanic peoples of England and
southern Scotland, of Holland, north Germany and Scandinavia, but
appears to have had little attraction for the Celtic and Romance
nations. It is true that Calvin was a Frenchman and that his
teachings had considerable influence in his mother country; but the
Huguenots never formed more than a small minority of the French,
and Huguenotism was largely eradicated by the persecuting policy of
Louis XIV; while the Celtic stocks of Ireland and the Scottish
Highlands .and the Romance populations of Spain and Italy rejected
Protestantism and clung to the religious organization and beliefs
of their ancestors. This fact can hardly have been accidental, and
gives to the Reformation the appearance of a racial movement by
which a cleavage was opened between the Teutonic peoples and the
other races of western Europe, Celtic and Romance.

Turning from the general character of the movement to a study of
the course of events in the various countries which adopted
Protestantism, the student will note that in nearly every case the
Reformation assumes a national appearance. It has been said that

Zwingli's first real collision with the papacy arose in 1521, when
Leo X sent to Switzerland to raise forces for the war against the
French. He was unable to prevent the levy of troops, but his
PATRIOTIC feelings led him to make bitter complaints against the
Roman pontiff.

In England the statute of Supremacy of 1559 is for the utter
extinguishment and putting away of all usurped and FOREIGN powers
and authorities out of his realm. And the national character of the
English Reformation is also visible in the penal laws against the
Roman Catholics in the later years of Elizabeth. Roman Catholic
priests and emissaries were executed, not as heretics, but as
traitors; they were hanged, drawn and quartered, not burned. In
Holland Protestantism became the badge and symbol of Dutch
independence from Spanish rule. William the Silent was originally
a convinced Roman Catholic, and it was only as the struggle for
freedom developed that he became a Protestant. Gustaf Vasa, the
champion of Swedish national liberty, adopted the Reformation and
forced it upon a reluctant country at the Diet of Westeras, in
1627, as a means of establishing an independent Sweden, not from
any religious motives. Thus at every turn in its history the
Reformation exhibits the influence of nationality and national
feeling.

Nor were political ideas without their share in the movement.
Protestantism assumed three main forms in the 16th century, those
of Anglicanism, Lutheranism and Calvinism; and a study of the
history of these three forms will reveal the significant fact that
Anglicanism and Lutheranism were adopted in countries where the
political system was monarchial, Calvinism where political ideas
were republican and democratic.

Anglicanism was, of course, practically confined to England;
Lutheranism was favored by the majority of the German princes and
in monarchical Denmark and Sweden, while the republican Swiss and
Dutch leaned towards Calvinism. Moreover the real strength of that
English Puritanism which established the Commonwealth of England in
1649 and played no small part in the founding of the United States,
was supplied by the Calvinistic Independents. In the actual
conflicts of the 16th century political and religious aims appear
inextricably intertwined. The religious wars in France have been
described as being, in reality, the last great armed struggle of
the feudal nobility against the growing power and absolutism of the
Crown, while the same feudal tendency can be seen in the rising of
the Catholic earls of the North against Elizabeth in 1569. Thus the
character and course of the Reformation seem to have been
profoundly affected by political ideas and political movements.

Another salient characteristic is the important part played in the
history of the Reformation by finance. The actual cause of its
outbreak was a matter of papal finance. When Leo X found himself
faced with the problem of providing the necessary funds for his
great building program and other extraordinary expenses, he had
recourse, as his predecessors had frequently done, to the expedient
of a lavish sale of Indulgences, and in so doing fired Luther to
nail his ninety-five theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg and
inaugurate the Reformation. The English statutes which reject papal
authority were designed to disburden the country of

divers great and intolerable charges and exactions before that time
unlawfully taken and exacted.

When Gustaf Vasa had freed Sweden from Danish control and was
seeking to establish a strong monarchical government to preserve
that hard-won independence and maintain internal order, he found in
the wealth of the church the only source from which the necessary
revenue to provide for the administrative expenditure could be
drawn; and it seems to have been his financial necessities which
dictated the determination to introduce the Reformation into
Sweden. Perhaps the most significant of the four articles issued by
the Diet of Westeras was the one which laid it down that

the king is allowed the free disposal of clerical and monastic
property.

In the Low Countries the Duke of Alva seemed likely to be
successful in stamping out the Reformation by the ruthless action
of his Council of Blood, until his tax on sales of 1569, which
meant ruin for a commercial community, led to that desperate
resistance which founded the Protestant state of Holland.

Finally the student of the Reformation cannot fail to notice the
fact that there is a social aspect of the movement. In medieval
times the clergy had been a class apart. Distinguished from the
laity by the physical mark of the tonsure, prohibited by the law of
the church, at least from the 11th century, from sharing that
married and family life which is the foundation of human society,
largely exempted, as the struggle between Henry II and Becket
shows, from the jurisdiction of the state and secular law, the
cleric stood outside the ordinary life of the time, directing and
controlling it, but from without, not from within. In Protestant
countries this social and legal separation of clergy and laity was
ended by the Reformation, and a more unified social system
established, while that legal control over men's actions which had
been exerted by the church in the Middle Ages through the Canon Law
and the Courts Christian gradually ceased, not merely in Protestant
countries but also to a considerable extent in those countries
which remained Catholic. The dominant force in the social organism
was thenceforward the state, not, as in former days, the church.
Nor was this all. In the Reformation there stands clearly revealed
that principle upon which modern society and social life and action
have been based--the principle of Individualism. Lord Acton,
himself a Roman Catholic, who held to his faith through the great
storm precipitated by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal
infallibility, has described the attitude of Luther at the Diet of
Worms as "the most momentous and pregnant fact in modern history."
And the reason which the distinguished historian gives for his
statement is that as Luther faced the authorities of church and
state he stood for the individualistic against the corporate idea.
Medieval life had been corporate through and through. Agriculture
had been carried on, not according to the ideas of the individual
agriculturalist, but in accordance with the "custom" of the manor;
the artizan had worked at his craft, not as he himself thought
best, but along the lines dictated by the elaborate regulations of
his guild; and in religion men had been bound, under penalty, to
accept the teaching of the corporate church. When Luther at Worms
rejected that corporate teaching because it conflicted with his
personal views and the feelings of his own individual soul, he
stood forth as the incarnation of that principle of individualism
on which modern society came to be organized, until in our own days
the rise of trades unionism, state-socialism and kindred movements
began to give evidence of a new swing of the social pendulum.

Thus arises the conception of the Reformation, not as a purely
religious movement, but as a complex of movements, racial,
national, political, financial and social, as well as religious.
Further, as has been indicated, the student of Reformation times
may well come to doubt whether the religious element was the
primary force. Religion was certainly not the original question at
issue. Abuses, not errors, were the evils which led the reformers
to attack the existing system. As Wyclif, in the 14th century, had
first attacked the wealth of the church and the wordliness of the
prelates, and had only gone on after a considerable time to a
questioning of doctrine and a denial of transubstantiation, so
Luther, in the 16th, began his career as a reformer with a simple
attack on the practice of selling Indulgences, and would have
repudiated, in the initial stages of his career, any imputation of
unorthodoxy. In England the Reformation movement was inaugurated by
Henry VIII on legal and financial grounds--to vindicate the
sovereign independence of English courts, subject to no appellate
jurisdiction on the papal curia as the Constitution of Clarendon
had declared as far back as 1164, and to fill the royal coffers and
the purses of his courtiers with the spoils of the monasteries. In
Sweden Vasa had attacked the existing system to secure a revenue
for his newly-established government, and in Switzerland Zwingli
had objected to the drafting off of Swiss youth to fight the
political battles of the papacy. In no case, apparently, was the
Reformation originally due to disagreement with religious doctrine,
or discontent at purely religious practices; although it is true,
as the movement developed, religious questions did begin to play a
part, and the reformers went on from a mere attack on abuses to a
criticism, and frequently to a rejection, of fundamental dogmas and
long-established practices of the medieval church, and an attempt,
in many cases, to replace the church organization which had
gradually been evolved by the development of fifteen centuries by
what they considered to be a constitution more nearly resembling
that of the primitive church, as conjectured from New Testament
narrative.

Two questions are naturally suggested by the foregoing
considerations: how it was that these racial, national, political,
financial and social movements came to be so closely associated
with the question of religion, and how an attack on certain abuses
of the existing system, a reform movement pure and simple,
developed into an attack on fundamental doctrines and practices, a
thorough religious revolution. The answers to these questions are
to be found in the history of the medieval church, and will give us
a true conception of the real nature and meaning of the
Reformation.

Historians tell us that the thousand years from the 6th to the 16th
centuries are the "Middle Age," the period of transition from
ancient to modern civilization and social organization. During the
first five centuries of the Christian era the civilized portion of
Europe, nearer Asia, and north Africa had been united in the
world-state of the Roman Empire and gradually knit together into
the ecumenical organization of the Christian Church. The histories
of the secular and religious institutions during this period were,
however, diametrically opposite. The state, the Roman Empire, was
gradually weakening and decaying, the church steadily developing
and organizing itself in doctrine, practice and administrative
system. One organism was dying, the other gradually rising from
infancy to maturity. Accordingly, when in the 5th and 6th centuries
the pressure of the Huns and growth of population drove the
Teutonic races of the north --Goth, and Frank, Vandal, Lombard and
Saxon--in upon the Roman Empire in the great folk-movement of the
barbarian invasions, the state-system of the Roman Empire, already
perishing of internal decay, was dashed to pieces, while the
religious organization, the church, still in the period of vigorous
growth, not merely survived and retained its influence over the old
provincials but extended that influence over the conquering
barbarians and even over the German districts it had failed to
penetrate in the time of the Empire.

During the early period of the Middle Ages, then, the political and
social system of civilized antiquity --developed by the races of
southern Europe and extended over the Celtic populations of Gaul
and Britain --was replaced by the primitive, barbaric institutions
of the Teutonic conquerors, while the religious system remained and
was gradually adopted by the newcomers. Western Europe entered upon
the transition from ancient to modern life with the anomaly of a
civilized religious organization inherited from the Romance nations
established in the midst of the barbaric political and social
institutions of the Teutons; and medieval history is really the
story of the mutual influence of these widely different systems and
views of life. Gradually, as the thousand years rolled on, the
church civilized the savage, primitive, barbarians who had
conquered the ancient state; but was itself affected by the thought
and organization of its rude environment, and by the nature of the
task upon which it was engaged.

One effect of this development was that the church assumed the
appearance and began to perform many of the functions of a state.
The different sides of human life and activity, religious,
political and social, may be separated for philosophical
examination, but are intimately related in actual fact--religious
views must necessarily dictate social customs, and social customs
determine the character of political life. The primitive political
institutions of the early Middle Ages were quite unable to provide
that peace and order which the civilized religious life of
Christianity requires. Upon the church, therefore, devolved the
task of making good the deficiencies of the contemporary state. But
the state-system under which it had originated, and which gave the
church its conception of a civilized state, was that of the Roman
Empire; and, accordingly, the medieval church came to assume the
character of a world-state under the autocratic rule of the papacy,
on the model of its prototype. As a state, the church was forced to
develop a legal and financial system and so arose the wonderful
organization of the Courts Christian with a final court of appeal
at Rome in the papal curia; and a highly developed law, the Canon
Law--codified in the Decretum of Gratian in the 12th century, and
dealing with many subjects which we now associate with the state
and secular law, wills and contracts, the taking of interest, and
the like-- while papal finance was developed until an English
parliament declared that the papacy derived an annual revenue from
England five times as great as the royal revenue itself.

The authority of the state depends, in the ultimate resort, on
force; and as the clergy, a minority of the population, could not
depend upon physical force to secure their authority, they were
forced to rely upon moral. Thus religious doctrine and practice
were in turn affected. The clergy had to make themselves regarded
as superior beings with supernatural powers and authority if they
were to establish and retain their control over the savage,
war-like populations of the West. And accordingly the student of
medieval history will notice the development of the doctrine of
transubstantiation, the miracle by which the duly ordained priest,
and he alone, can effect the change of substance from bread and
wine to flesh and blood, in virtue of which power he is established
as a personage distinct from and superior to the laymen; the stress
laid upon the control of the keys of heaven and hell inherited by
the popes as the successors of St. Peter; and the use of
excommunication for political purposes --to prevent the taxation of
clerical revenues, to ensure obedience to papal commands on the
part of recalcitrant monarchs and nobles, and so forth. Bearing in
mind the primitive conditions of the early Middle Ages, it is
hardly too much to say that the power of the medieval priest was
similar to that of the witchdoctor of a savage tribe.

Throughout the greater part of the medieval period this political,
social, legal, and even financial activity of the church was
extremely beneficial, acting as a civilizing agency by which the
Teutonic conquerors were raised to a higher and more advanced level
of thought and action. In England, for example, in the sphere of
politics, it was the existence of a single church which supplied
inspiration and a model for the development of a kingdom of
England, a single strong state in place of the many independent
warring kingdoms of the original heptarchy; and Stubbs has pointed
out that representation had been in practice in the Convocation of
the Church long before Edward I created the Model Parliament, the
idea of which was, in all probability, largely suggested by that
fact. It would, indeed, be almost impossible to overestimate the
debt owed by western Europe to that "Mother Church" which gave it
the first lessons, not only in Christianity, but in civilization,
and under whose guidance it rose from utter barbarism to an ordered
and cultured life. But in proportion as the church accomplished its
civilizing mission, its secular activities, political, legal and
financial, ceased to be necessary and beneficial, and became
actually harmful. No man can owe allegiance to two states. And as
the Teutons developed nation-states with organized administrative
and legal systems a clash between church and state became
inevitable. The financial system by which the church had obtained
the funds necessary for the maintenance of its elaborate and
semi-secular organization was felt to be especially irksome when
the newly-created states needed increasingly large revenues to
enable them to carry on their work, and found the resources on
which they had to rely drained away by excessive papal taxation.

Moreover the church itself was suffering a moral and spiritual
decline, partly as a result of its great service to medieval
Europe. Forced to embark on a career of secular activity in
consequence of the barbarism by which it was confronted at the
beginning of the medieval epoch, the church had inevitably become
secularized. Popes had ceased to be religious leaders and become
statesmen, "bishops," it has aptly been said, "had become barons in
mitres." And as a result innumerable abuses had crept into the
ecclesiastical system. Thoughtful men were alienated by the
worldliness of the later medieval church, and the flagrant abuses
which flourished were unchecked, and often abetted by its rulers.
"Chaucer's gentle irony" played around the hunting monk and the
fashionable prioress of the Prologue, and ceased to be quite so
gentle when he sketched the characters of the summoner and the
pardoner; while his imaginative genius allowed itself free play as
he drew the contrasting portrait of the ideal pastor in his poor
parson; and Langland finds in Piers Plowman that the official
guides of the organized church do not know the road to God, and the
pilgrims who would seek His abode have to fall back upon the
guidance of the simple ploughman who has been "Truth's servant"
many a year.

In the light of these facts, the true character of the Reformation,
and the strange intermixture of racial, national, financial and
religious elements in the movement become comprehensible. The
Reformation appears as a great revolution by which the nations of
western Europe broke loose from that medieval tutelage of the
church which had raised them from initial barbarism to a level of
civilization comparable to that of antiquity in which their mentor,
the church, had originated, and entered on the fuller, freer life
of modern times. The racial quality of the movement shows the
Teutonic stock freeing itself completely from the Latin authority
which had educated it in civilization, and going forth to live its
own life. The national aspect is seen to be due to the fact that
during the Middle Ages a new system of political organization had
been evolved, that of the autonomous nation-state, which was
inherently antagonistic to the idea of a world-state which the
church had inherited from the Roman Empire, and had restored in the
pontificate of Innocent III.

The prominence of financial questions was a natural effect of the
change in political and economic conditions which rendered the
practical monopoly of wealth by the church an insuperable bar to
progress. And in like manner with the other aspects of the
Reformation. While the apparently strange fact that all these
movements should be associated with a religious development may be
attributed to the fact that the medieval church had based its
secular activities on a religious foundation, and had claimed power
and authority over non-religious spheres of life on the ground that
its ministration in such sacraments as those of the altar and holy
matrimony rendered the clergy superior to the laity, and that power
of the keys inherited by the popes as the successors of St. Peter
constituted them a supreme authority in matters secular as well as
spiritual. It was natural that in rejecting the secular authority
and reforming the abuses of the church, men should go on to attack
the religious beliefs and organization out of which that secular
authority and those abuses had arisen; that Wyclif, for example,
should proceed from an attack on the wealth of the church to a
rejection of that doctrine of transubstantiation which had proved
a regular mint to the clergy.

In conclusion it should, perhaps, be pointed out that the real
meaning and importance of the Reformation will not be understood if
attention is directed solely to the rise of Protestantism. The
effect of the movement was well-nigh as great in those countries
which retained their spiritual allegiance to the See of Rome; since
the Counter-Reformation in the Roman Catholic church which was the
direct result of the Protestant revolt did much to reform existing
abuses, to strip Catholicism of that secularity which had been the
real cause of the movement, and to confine the activities of the
church to those religious and spiritual spheres of action for which
it had been created, and to which, when an efficient state has been
evolved, it should properly confine its energies.

