The Story of Mankind [98]
made the best of
the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and
plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old
Crusaders.
A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the
Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the ``protesting''
adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their
Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their
Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526
tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering
that ``the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination
as their princes.'' This turned Germany into a checkerboard
of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and
created a situation which prevented the normal political
growth for hundreds of years.
In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put
to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he
had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of Indulgences.
In less than thirty years, the indifferent, joking and
laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into
the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society of the
Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes
came to a sudden end and the whole Western Europe was
turned into a battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics
killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological
doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present generation
as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.
RELIGIOUS WARFARE
THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS
CONTROVERSIES
THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of
religious controversy.
If you will notice you will find that almost everybody
around you is forever ``talking economics'' and discussing
wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the
life of the community, for that is the main topic of interest
of our own time.
The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared
worse. They never heard anything but ``religion.'' Their
heads were filled with ``predestination,'' ``transubstantition,''
``free will,'' and a hundred other queer words, expressing
obscure points of ``the true faith,'' whether Catholic or
Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were
baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians
or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg
catechism, composed by Luther, or from the ``institutes
of Christianity,'' written by Calvin, or they mumbled the
Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were printed in the English
Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that these
alone represented the ``True Faith.''
They heard of the wholesale theft of church property
perpetrated by King Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of
England, who made himself the supreme head of the English
church, and assumed the old papal rights of appointing bishops
and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one
mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its
many torture chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible
stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had
got hold of a dozen defenceless old priests and hanged them
for the sheer pleasure of killing those who professed
a different faith. It was unfortunate that the two
contending parties were so equally matched. Otherwise
the struggle would have come to a quick solution.
Now it dragged on for eight generations, and
it grew so complicated that I can only tell you the most
important details, and must ask you to get the
rest from one of the many histories of the Reformation.
The great reform movement of the Protestants
had been followed by a thoroughgoing reform
within the bosom of the Church. Those popes who
had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman
and Greek antiquities, disappeared from the scene and
their
the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and
plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old
Crusaders.
A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the
Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the ``protesting''
adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their
Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their
Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526
tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering
that ``the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination
as their princes.'' This turned Germany into a checkerboard
of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and
created a situation which prevented the normal political
growth for hundreds of years.
In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put
to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he
had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of Indulgences.
In less than thirty years, the indifferent, joking and
laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into
the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society of the
Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes
came to a sudden end and the whole Western Europe was
turned into a battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics
killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological
doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present generation
as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.
RELIGIOUS WARFARE
THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS
CONTROVERSIES
THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of
religious controversy.
If you will notice you will find that almost everybody
around you is forever ``talking economics'' and discussing
wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the
life of the community, for that is the main topic of interest
of our own time.
The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared
worse. They never heard anything but ``religion.'' Their
heads were filled with ``predestination,'' ``transubstantition,''
``free will,'' and a hundred other queer words, expressing
obscure points of ``the true faith,'' whether Catholic or
Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were
baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians
or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg
catechism, composed by Luther, or from the ``institutes
of Christianity,'' written by Calvin, or they mumbled the
Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were printed in the English
Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that these
alone represented the ``True Faith.''
They heard of the wholesale theft of church property
perpetrated by King Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of
England, who made himself the supreme head of the English
church, and assumed the old papal rights of appointing bishops
and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one
mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its
many torture chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible
stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had
got hold of a dozen defenceless old priests and hanged them
for the sheer pleasure of killing those who professed
a different faith. It was unfortunate that the two
contending parties were so equally matched. Otherwise
the struggle would have come to a quick solution.
Now it dragged on for eight generations, and
it grew so complicated that I can only tell you the most
important details, and must ask you to get the
rest from one of the many histories of the Reformation.
The great reform movement of the Protestants
had been followed by a thoroughgoing reform
within the bosom of the Church. Those popes who
had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman
and Greek antiquities, disappeared from the scene and
their