THE COUNTER-REFORMATION
THE REFORMATION was extended and established without arousing any
strong reaction among Catholics, or inspiring them with a policy.
Under the influence of secular interests, profane literature and art,
it was a time of slackness in spiritual life. Religious men, like
the Cardinals Egidius, Carvajal, and Campeggio, knew, and
acknowledged, and deplored, as sincerely as Adrian VI, the growing
defects of the ill-governed Church; and at each Conclave the whole of
the Sacred College bound itself by capitulations under oath to put an
effective check on the excesses of the court of Rome. But at the
Lateran Council the same men who had imposed on Leo the obligation to
revoke the indulgences suffered them to be renewed; and those who held
the language of Erasmus were confronted by a resisting body of
officials for whom reform was ruin. Rome flourished on money obtained
from the nations in return for ecclesiastical treasures, for promotion
and patronage, for indulgences and dispensations. With the loss of
Germany the sources of revenue that remained became more necessary;
and it was certain that they would be damaged by reform. Chieregato,
the bishop who carried to the Diet of Nuremberg that message from
Adrian VI of which I spoke in the last lecture, related in his Memoirs
that there was a disposition at one moment to take Luther very
seriously, and to avert peril by making the changes he suggested, but
that it was decided to repel the attack. There is no other authority
for the story, and we only know of it through Father Paul, whom
Macaulay admired as the best modern historian. There is a book
attributed to Father Paul in which the use of poison is recommended to
the Venetian government. We cannot take our history out of Newgate,
and until his authorship is disproved his solitary testimony is
insufficient.
While Clement VII lived, of whom Sadolet said that he did not renounce
his good intention of reforming society, but only postponed it, the
idealists who aspired after a regenerated Catholicism never found
their opportunity. In 1534 he was succeeded by Paul III, Farnese, a
stronger if not a better man, and the change was quickly felt. The
new pontiff offered a red hat to Erasmus, to Reginald Pole, who was
admired by the Italians, and was supposed to have a future before him
in England, being sprung from a royal stock; to Sadolet and Cortese,
and to Contarini, the finest character of them all. He appointed a
Commission, chiefly consisting of these men, to advise as to things
that wanted mending; and besides their report, he received from
Contarini himself private communications on the same engrossing topic.
In 1541 Paul sent Contarini as his Legate to Ratisbon, where he held
the famous Peace Conference with Melanchthon. The reformers of the
Renaissance seemed about to prevail, and to possess the ear of the
Pontiff. Their common policy was reduction of prerogative, concession
in discipline, conciliation in doctrine; and it involved the reversal
of an established system. As they became powerful, and their purpose
clear, another group detached itself from them, under the flag of No
Surrender, and the division of opinion which had been already apparent
between Cajetan and Miltitz, between the friends of Erasmus and
Reuchlin, and their detractors, burst into open conflict. To men
trained in the thought of the Middle Ages, with the clergy above the
laity and the Pope above the king, the party that aimed at internal
improvement by means the exact opposite of those which had preserved
the Church in the past, were feckless enthusiasts. They reverted to
the old tradition of indefeasible authority wielding irresistible
force; and in the person of Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, afterwards
Archbishop of Naples, cardinal, and Pope, under the name of Paul IV,
they now came to the front. It was reported from Ratisbon that the
Catholic negotiation, with the Legate Contarini at their head, had
accepted the Lutheran doctrine of justification. Pole wrote, in his
enthusiasm, that it was a truth long suppressed by the Church, now at
length brought to light by his friend. Another friend of Pole,
Flaminio, helped to write a book in its defence, which appeared in
1542, and of which 60,000 copies were sold immediately--indicating a
popularity which no work of Luther or Erasmus had ever attained. This
was the famous volume on the Benefit of the Death of Christ, which was
supposed to have perished, said Macaulay, as hopelessly as the Second
Decade of Livy, until it was discovered in a Cambridge library, and
republished in my recollection.
Now it was these men, Pole, Contarini, and their friends Cortese and
Sadolet, who dominated in the Sacred College, occupied high places,
and helped to govern the policy of Rome. There were nests of
Lutherans at Modena, Naples, and elsewhere; but nobody in those days
knew the force of multitudes; a few cardinals caused greater alarm
than all the readers of the Benefizio, and it soon appeared that the
general of the Capuchins, the Bishop of Capo d'Istria, the Bishop of
Modena and Nuncio in Germany, inclined the same way as the suspected
cardinals. The most eminent men of the Italian clergy were steering
for Wittenberg, and taking Rome with them. An uncle of the Duke of
Alva, the cardinal of Sant Iago, thereupon suggested to Caraffa that
the best way to save the Church was to introduce the Spanish
Inquisition; and he was seconded by another Spaniard, a Basque of
great note in history, of whom there will be more to tell. Caraffa,
who had been Nuncio in Spain, took up the idea, urged it upon the
Pope, and succeeded. What he obtained was nothing new; it belonged to
the thirteenth century, and it had been the result of two forces
powerful at the time, the Crusades and the belief in witchcraft.
When the first warlike pilgrims started for Palestine at the end of
the eleventh century, it occurred to some of them that without toiling
so far they could find enemies of Christ, as bad as the Saracens,
close at hand. So they fell upon the Jews in the north of France,
along the Rhine and the Danube, and murdered them as they passed.
This was done at a moment of religious fervour. And when it became
known, in the same region, that there were heretics, the same cause
produced the same effects, and the clergy were not always able to save
them from the wrath of the populace. The many sects known by the name
of Albigenses were Gnostics; but they were better known as Manichees,
for the Roman law was severe on Manichees, who were dualists, and by a
dualist they meant a worshipper of the devil. Sorcery had not become
epidemic and sectarian, but it was suspected occasionally in the
twelfth century. We know at the present day to what horrible and
loathsome rites Madame de Montespan submitted for the sake of love and
hatred. That was done in the most refined and enlightened court in
Europe, in the best days of the French intellect, in the home of
Bossuet and Racine. It is not difficult to imagine what was believed
and what was attempted in ignorant and criminal classes five centuries
earlier. Now a witch was, by the hypothesis, a worshipper of the
devil, and the dualists fell under the same suspicion of propitiation
by sin. It was impossible to exterminate them too quickly, or to
devise torments worse than they deserved.
That was the situation towards the middle of the twelfth century.
There was a practice which the clergy desired to restrain, and which
they attempted to organise. We see by their writings that they
believed in many horrible imputations. As time went on, it appeared
that much of this was fable. But it also became known that it was not
all fabulous, and that the Albigensian creed culminated in what was
known as the Endura, which was in reality suicide. It was the object
of the Inquisition that such people should not indeed be spared, but
should not perish without a trial and without opportunity of
resipiscence, so that they might save their souls if not their lives.
Its founders could claim to act from motives both of mercy and of
justice against members of a satanic association. And it was not
against error or noncomformity simply, but against criminal error
erected into a system, that the Inquisitors forged their terrific
armoury. In the latter half of the fifteenth century their work was
done and their occupation gone. The dread tribunal lapsed into
obscurity. Therefore, when the Spaniards demanded to have it for the
coercion of the Jews, they asked for what was dormant, but not
abolished. It was a revival rather than a creation. And it was for a
specifically Spanish purpose. At Rome there were no Moors, and they
did not oppress the Jews. Even those who, having passed for
Christians, went back to their own faith, were permitted to do so by
Clement VII. Against such backsliding the Council of Toledo, under
the Gothic kings, had decreed the severest penalties, anticipating
Ferdinand and Isabella, or rather Torquemada and Ximenes, by eight
hundred years. Founded on the ancient lines, the Spanish Inquisition
was modified in the interest of the Crown, and became an important
attribute of absolutism.
When the Holy Office for the universal Church was set up in Rome in
1542, it was in many respects distinct both from the first medieval
type and from the later Spanish type. In the Middle Ages the
headquarters were in the south of France, and the legislation was
carried out by Councils at Toulouse, Narbonne, and Beziers. The
Popes controlled them through their legates, and issued their own
orders to the Dominicans. But it was not one of the institutions of
the Court of Rome, and did not always act in harmony with it. It now
became part of the Roman machinery and an element of centralisation.
A supreme body of cardinals governed it with the Pope at their head.
The medieval theory was that the Church condemned, and the State
executed, priests having nothing to do with punishment, and requesting
that it might not be excessive. This distinction fell away, and the
clergy had to conquer their horror of bloodshed. The delinquent was
tried by the Pope as ruler of the Church, and burnt by the Pope as
ruler of the State. Consequently, this is the genuine and official
Inquisition, not that of the Middle Ages, which was only partly in the
hands of Rome; not that of Spain, which was founded but not governed
by Rome, and for the developments of which the Papacy is not directly
responsible.
Originally the business of the Inquisitor was to exterminate. The
Albigenses delighted in death, and they were disappointed when it was
put off. But now it was directed against opinions not very clearly
understood or firmly held, that often resembled a reformed Catholicism
more than Protestantism. The number of victims was smaller. At
Venice, where the Holy Office had a branch, there were 1562 trials in
the sixteenth century, 1469 in the seventeenth, 541 in the eighteenth.
But executions were frequent only in Rome. There, in many recorded
cases, the victim was strangled before burning. It is doubtful
whether death by fire was adopted as the most cruel; for boiling had
been tried at Utrecht, and the sight was so awful that the bishop who
was present stopped the proceedings. Roman experts regard it as a
distinctive mark of the new tribunal that it allowed culprits who
could not be caught and punished in the proper way, to be killed
without ceremony by anybody who met them. This practice was not
unprecedented, but it had fallen into disuse with the rest during the
profane Renaissance, and its revival was a portentous event, for it
prompted the frequent murders and massacres which stain the story of
the Counter-Reformation with crimes committed for the love of God. The
laws have not been repealed, but the system continued in its force for
no more than a century; and before the death of Urban VIII the fires
of Rome were quenched. At that time persecution unto death was not
extinct in England; the last instance in France was in 1762, and in
Spain still later. The immediate objects were obtained in the first
thirty years. The Reformation in Italy had by that time come to an
end, and the Popes had been supplied with an instrument that enabled
them to control the Council of Trent. Its action did not extend to
other countries.
Next to the Inquisition, the second of the several measures by which
central organs were created for the Counter-Reformation is the
establishment of new orders. The old ones were manifestly
ineffective. The Augustinians produced Luther. The Dominicans had
done still worse, for they produced the adversaries of Luther. The
learning of the Benedictines was useless for the purpose of the day,
and they were not organised for combat. A rich and varied growth of
new religious orders was the consequence. The first were the
Theatines, then the Capuchins, who were remodelled Franciscans,
adapted to the need of the time; then the Barnabites, the Oratorians,
and others. Caraffa was the most influential of the Theatines, though
not their founder; and he gave them their name, for he was Bishop of
Chieti, in Latin Theate. He did more for another institution than for
his own, for it was he who brought forward the extraordinary man in
whom the spirit of the Catholic reaction is incorporated. At Venice
he found a group of young men, most of them Spaniards, all of them
seekers after perfection, united otherwise in a somewhat vague design
of visiting the Holy Land. Their leader, Ignatius Loyola, at that
time an enthusiast, later on a calculator and organiser of the first
class, was the same man who helped to transplant to Rome the
Inquisition of his own country. As they waited in vain for a passage,
Carana advised them that their true destination was Rome, where they
would be more useful with Protestants than with the heathen; and thus,
by his intervention, the Society was founded which eclipsed his own.
Here at last the Catholics acquired a leader who was a man of original
genius, and who grasped the whole, or nearly the whole, situation.
The Papacy had let things go to ruin; he undertook to save the Church
through the Papacy. The ship, tossed in a hurricane, could only be
rescued by absolute obedience to the word of command. He called his
order the Company of Jesus, making it the perpetual militia of the
Holy See for the restoration of authority; and he governed it not only
with military discipline, but with a system of supervision and
counter-checks which are his chief discovery. The worst crime of the
Jesuits, says Helvetius, was the excellence of their government.
Nothing had done more to aid the Reformation than the decline and
insufficiency of the secular clergy. By raising up a body of
virtuous, educated, and active priests, the Jesuits met that argument.
The theological difference remained, and they dealt with it through
the best controversialists. And when their polemics failed, they
strove, as pamphleteers, and as the confessors of the great, to resist
the Protestants with the arm of the flesh. For the multitudes that
had never heard the Catholic case stated, they trained the most
eloquent school of modern preachers. For security in the coming
generation, they established successful colleges, chiefly for the
study of good silver Latin, and they frequented the towns more than
the country, and the rich more than the poor. Thus, while they
pursued their original purpose as missionaries to the heathen, almost
civilising South America, and almost converting China, they kept their
forces gathered for the repulse of Protestantism. They so identified
their order and the Church itself with the struggle for existence in
Europe, that they were full of the same spirit long after the
Counter-Reformation was spent and the permanent line of frontier laid
down in the Thirty Years' War, and were busy with the same policy down
to the Revocation and the suppression of Port Royal in France, and
longer still in Poland.
St. Ignatius directed his disciples according to the maxim that more
prudence and less piety is better than more piety and less prudence.
His main desire was that they should always act together, presenting a
united front, without a rift or a variation. He suppressed
independence of mind, discouraged original thinking and unrestrained
research, recommended commonly accepted opinions, and required all to
hold without question the theology of St. Thomas. The training he
imposed made ordinary men very much alike. And this is the mistake we
have to guard against in considering the Jesuits. The intended unity
never was enforced when the order became numerous and was joined by
many able men. There arose so great a wealth of talent that it was
followed by variety in ideas among them, such as the founder never
contemplated. Their general, Aquaviva, forbade every opinion that
contradicts St. Thomas. There could be no question whether it was
true or false, and no other test of truth than conformity with his
teaching. Yet Molina taught, in regard to grace, a doctrine very
different from Thomism, and was followed by the bulk of his order.
They were expected to think well of their rule and their rulers; but
the most perspicacious exposure of what he called the infirmities of
the company was composed by Mariana. Jesuits were by profession
advocates of submission to authority; but the Jesuit Sarasa preceded
Butler in proclaiming the infallibility of conscience. No other
Society was so remarkable for internal discipline; but there were
glaring exceptions. Caussin, confessor to Lewis XIII, opposed the
policy of his superiors, and was dismissed by them. And when the
general required works on theology to be revised at Rome, before
publication, he was told that Father Gretser of Ingolstadt would never
consent. They were all absorbed in the conflict with the Protestants;
but when the idea of reunion arose, late in the seventeenth century,
there were Jesuits, such as Masenius, one of those who anticipated
Paradise Lost, who wrote in favour of it.
As trials for witchcraft were promoted by Rome, the Jesuits,
especially Del Rio, defended them. But it was another Jesuit, Spec,
who broke the back of the custom, though he had to publish his book
anonymously and in a Protestant town. They were, of necessity,
friends of persecution, though one of them, Faure, said that he knew
of 6000 heretics put to death, and doubted if one of them had
renounced his belief. Belief in system, and in an accepted system,
was an essential laid down in their constitutions. But it was Father
Petavius who first described the evolution of dogma, and cast every
system into the melting-pot of History. Under the name of
probabilism, the majority adopted a theory of morals that made
salvation easy, partly as confessors of the great, that they might
retain their penitents; partly as subject to superiors, that they
might not scruple to obey in dubious cases; and partly as defenders of
the irrevocable past, that they might be lenient judges.
Nevertheless, the opposition was never silenced, and one general of
the order wrote against its most conspicuous and characteristic
doctrine.
The order was, from the first, ultramontane, in the old meaning of the
term. But its members in France consented to sign their names to
Gallican propositions as the custom of the country, not as truth.
They were ultramontanes in the other sense of the word, as
conservatives, advocates of authority and submission, opponents of
insubordination and resistance. Accordingly, they became the habitual
confessors of absolute monarchs, in Austria, and in France under the
Bourbons, and were intimately associated with great conservative
forces of society. At the same time they were required to be
disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas had a very large
element of political liberalism. He believed in the Higher Law, in
conditional allegiance, in the illegitimacy of all governments that do
not act in the interest of the commonwealth. This was convenient
doctrine in the endeavour to repress the forces of Protestantism, and
for a time the Jesuits were revolutionists. The ideas of 1688, of
1776, of 1789 prevail among them from the wars of religion to about
1620. In some of the medieval writers revolution included
tyrannicide. It began to be taught in the twelfth century, and became
popular in the sixteenth. The Jesuits adopted the doctrine at one
time, and in such numbers that one of them, Keller, in 1611, says he
knows hardly three who were opposed to it. A hundred years later this
was deplored as a melancholy deviation by D'Avrigny and other fathers
of the Society.
The Society of Jesus is the second in the enumeration of the forces
that produced and directed the great historic movement that we call
the Counter-Reformation. The third is the Council of Trent. The idea
arose very early that the only way to find a remedy for those things
of which Protestants complained was to hold a general Council, and it
was very earnestly desired by the Emperor. Fifteenth-century divines
believed that all things would go well if Councils were constantly
held. But the Popes were against it from the first, and at the last
the Protestants also. It was to be an assembly from which they were
excluded, and their interests were to be debated and decided by men
whose function it now avowedly was to take their lives. The Duke of
Wurtemberg marvelled at the unhindered presence of Cardinal Farnese in
Germany, as a man of blood. The original purpose, therefore, was lost
beforehand. The Council did not tend to reconcile, but to confirm,
separation. It met in 1545, and ended in 1563, having been
interrupted by two long intervals. Questions of doctrine were
considered at the beginning, questions of reform chiefly at the end.
Pole, who was one of the presiding legates, proposed that they should
open the proceedings with a full confession of failings and of
repentance on the part of Rome. Then the others would follow. The
policy of his colleagues, on the contrary, was to postpone all inquiry
into internal defects, and to repel the Protestant aggression.
Therefore, the doctrines at issue were defined. Many things were
settled which had remained open, and no attempt was made to meet the
Protestant demand. Pole, who had hailed the compromise of Ratisbon,
spoke with the grace and moderation that were in his character. At
the next Conclave he was so near obtaining a majority of votes that
the cardinals bowed to him as they passed before his place, and Pole,
ignorant of the force at work against him, put on paper what he meant
to say by way of thanks. But Caraffa reminded them that he had spoken
as a Lutheran during the Council, and he replied that he had put the
argument for the sake of discussion only, that Protestants might not
say that they had been condemned undefended. The feud continued, and
when Pole was legate in England, Caraffa, who was then Pope, recalled
him in disgrace, appointing Peto as his successor; and he sent his
friend, Cardinal Morone, to the prison of the Inquisition. The effect
of these rigours was that Pole, whose friends in Italy were men
afterwards burnt by the Holy Office, sent poor people to the flames at
Canterbury when he knew that the reign of Mary was nearing its end;
and Morone, the colleague of Contarini at Ratisbon, and an admirer of
the "Benefizio," having been rescued from prison by the mob, who tore
it down at the death of Caraffa, wound up the Council, obedient to
orders from Rome, under his successor.
A more persuasive means of expressing opposition was money. When a
divine appeared at Trent, the legates, or Visconti, the agent of the
Cardinal nephew, decided whether he was to receive payment for his
prospective services. Even the Cardinal of Lorraine, the head of the
Gallican party, and one of the first men in Europe, gave way for a
considerable sum. Father Paul, in a very famous work, describes the
Council as a scene of intrigue in which the good intentions of
virtuous prelates were thwarted by the artifices of Rome. If the bulk
of virtuous prelates resembled Pole and Lorraine, we cannot say much
for the strength of their good intentions. Some remedies were,
however, applied, and the state of the clergy was improved. On the
whole, the reforms were regarded by the government as a disappointing
result of so much promise and so much effort.
The Council instituted the index of prohibited books, which is the
fourth article in the machinery of resistance. At first, the new
power of the press was treated with large indulgence. This was
changed by the Reformation, and far more by the organised reaction
against it. Books were suppressed by the State, by the clergy, and by
the universities. In 1531 the Bishop of London prohibited thirty
books at St. Paul's Cross, as well as all other suspect works
existing, and to be hereafter written. Vienna, Paris, Venice,
followed the example. In 1551, certain books enumerated by the
university of Louvain were forbidden by Charles V under pain of death.
A German divine warned the Pope that if the fathers of Trent were
allowed to read Lutheran books they would become Lutherans themselves,
and such writings were accordingly forbidden even to cardinals and
archbishops. The idea of drawing up a comprehensive list of all that
no man should read commended itself to the zeal of Caraffa, having
been suggested to him by Della Casa, who had published such a list at
Venice. He issued the first Roman index, which, under his successor,
who was not his friend, was denounced at the Council of Trent as a bad
piece of work, and became so rare that I have never seen a copy. It
was proposed that a revised edition should be prepared, and in spite
of protests from those who had assisted the late Pontiff, and of the
Spaniards, who saw the province of their Inquisition invaded, the
thing was done, and what was called the Tridentine Index appeared at
Rome in 1564. It alludes only in one place to the work which it
superseded. A congregation was appointed to examine new publications,
to issue decrees against them as required, and to make out catalogues
from time to time of works so condemned. Besides this, censures were
also pronounced by the Pope himself, the Inquisition, the Master of
the Sacred Palace, and the Secretary of the Index, separately. In
this way an attempt was made to control what people read, committing
to oblivion works of Protestant scholars, and of such men as
Machiavelli, and correcting offensive texts, especially historians.
Several such corrected editions were published at the time, and many
things were reprinted with large omissions. But no Index
Expurgatorius, no notification of what called for modification, was
ever published by Rome, officially; and when we use the term, we are
thinking of Spain, where it grew into a custom. The best way to
suppress a book is to burn it, and there were, accordingly, frequent
bonfires of peccant literature. One man, Konias, is said to have thus
destroyed 60,000 books, principally Bohemian. Freedom of speech and
sincerity of history were abolished for many years.
In connection with this repressive policy, and as its counterpart, a
scheme ripened to place Rome, with its libraries, its archives, its
incomparable opportunities of gathering contributory aid from every
quarter of the Church, at the head of ecclesiastical literature. The
Calendar was reformed. The text of the Canon Law was corrected. The
Latin Vulgate was revised by Pope Sixtus himself, and every further
attempt to improve it was energetically put down. Collections of
councils and editions of Fathers were projected, and Baronius, of the
Oratory, began the greatest history of the Church ever written, and
carried it down to the eleventh folio volume.
In this manner the foundations were laid of that later scholarship,
that matured and completed Renaissance, by which the Catholics
recovered much of the intellectual influence that had passed to other
hands, and learning assisted policy in undoing the work of the
reformers.
The natural and inevitable centre of the movement which is known as
the Catholic Reformation, but which, for reasons already indicated, is
better called the Counter-Reformation, was Rome. It was an enterprise
requiring consistency in the objects aimed at, variety in the means,
combination with the Powers and avoidance of rivalry, an authority
superior to national obstacles and political limitations. At first
the initiative did not reside with the Papacy. Farnese, in whose
pontificate the transition occurred from the religion of Erasmus to
the religion of Loyola, allowed men to act for him whose spirit
differed from his own. He long put off the Portuguese demand for a
tribunal like the Inquisition of Castile, on the ground that it was a
mere scheme of spoliation. With the elevation of Cervini in 1555,
reforming or Tridentine Catholicism ascended the papal throne; but he
died before his virtues or his talents could avail. Caraffa himself
followed. He let the Council drop, saying that no such thing was
needed, if governments did their duty. By his lack of control, he
pushed things to a breach with the moderate party at home, and with
the Habsburgs abroad, and the Roman people threw his statue into the
Tiber, in their rejoicings when he died, and released seventy
prisoners that he kept in the Inquisition. His nephews, who
compromised him and had incurred disgrace in his lifetime, were put to
death by his successor. They were the last papal nephews of the old
type, angling for principalities and using the Papacy for their own
ends. Pius IV, when he closed the Council, strove to do its work by
reforms at home. Three modern saints dominated in his time, and
effected a conspicuous change in the aspect of Rome. His nephew was
Charles Borromeo. St. Philip Neri was the best-known and the
best-loved figure in the streets of the city, and Alexandrino governed
the Inquisition as an almost independent power. He succeeded, as Pius
V, and then the Counter-Reformation was master. Pius was the most
austere, the most ardent, the most vehement of men. He incited France
to civil war, applauded the methods of Alva, deposed Elizabeth, and by
incessant executions strove to maintain public decency and orthodox
religion. Protestantism disappeared from Italy in his day, as it had
already done in Spain. The Counter-Reformation touched high-water
mark with the massacre of St. Bartholomew, a few months after his
death.
The quarter of a century from 1564 to the death of Sixtus V in 1590 is
the active period of the movement. It begins when the Council, having
determined doctrine, dispersed; and it declines when, by the death of
Mary Stuart and the flight of the Armada, the Protestant succession
was secured in England and Scotland, and the churches acquired their
permanent limit.
It may be doubted whether Italian Protestants ever gave promise of
vitality. The leaders who escaped were men of original and eccentric
thought, who did not combine well with others; and it was they who
established the Socinian church in Poland, in defiance of both
Lutheran and Calvinist. The Italian movement was crushed by violence.
The scene of the authentic Counter-Reformation was central Europe, and
especially those countries which were the scene of the Reformation
itself, Germany and Austria. There the tide, which with little
interruption had flowed for fifty years, was effectually turned back,
and regions which were Protestant became Catholic again. There too
the means employed were not those prevailing under the crown of Spain.
They were weapons supplied and suggested by the Peace of Religion,
harmoniously forged by the Lutherans themselves at the Diet of 1555.
There was to be no mutual persecution, taking persecution to imply the
penalty of death, and a persecutor to mean homicide, in the sense to
which Europe was accustomed. No subject, on either side, could be
deprived of life or property, could be tortured or imprisoned, or even
banished, if there were numbers, for that would be ruinous to the
State. Governments were forced to oppress him wisely, depriving him
of Church and school, of preacher and schoolmaster; and by those
nameless arts with which the rich used to coerce the poor in the good
old days, and which, under the name of influence, were not considered
altogether infamous by Englishmen in the last generation. When the
people had been deprived of their pastors, the children were sent to
Catholic schools. Fervent preachers came among them, Jesuits, or it
might be Capuchins, widely different in morality, earnestness,
education, and eloquence from the parish clergy, whose deficiencies
gave such succour to Luther. Most of those who, having no turn for
controversy, had been repelled by scandals were easily reconciled.
Others, who were conscious of disagreement with the theology of the
last thousand years, and were uninfluenced by the secondary and
auxiliary motives, had now to face disputants of a more serious type
than the adversaries of Luther, and to face them unsupported by
experts of their own. Where there had been indifference, ignorance,
disorder, in the easy-going days of the Renaissance, there were now
the closest concentration of efforts, strict discipline and regularity
of life, a better though narrower education, and the most strenuous
and effective oratory. Therefore it was by honest conviction as well
as by calculated but not illegal coercion that the Reformation was
driven back, and Protestants who had been almost the nation became no
more than a bare majority. The original spring ran dry, and the
expansive force had departed from Lutheranism.
In Austria conditions were of another kind. The country was largely
Protestant, and the Emperor, Maximilian II, was not only a friend to
toleration, but to Lutheran ideas. Under his auspices a conciliatory,
neutral, and unconventional Catholicism came into existence, accepting
the doctrinal compromise which had been tendered more than once,
discouraging pilgrimages, relics, indulgences, celibacy, and much that
had been the occasion of scoffing, an approach to Erasmus, if not to
Luther. The outward sign was the restoration of the cup. When his
restraining hand was removed, the process of reaction which had done
well on the Rhine was extended to the Danube and the Illyrian Alps,
with like success. And it was the steady pursuit of this policy in
Austria that provoked the Thirty Years' War. In Poland, too, where
toleration had been conceded in the avowed expectation that the sects
would devour each other, it was exchanged for acts like those I have
described. The result of the struggle was that the boundary receded,
that a time came of recovery for the Catholics and of decline for the
Lutherans in central Europe, and that the distribution has remained
practically unchanged. The only example of a country becoming
Protestant since then occurred when the principles of the
Counter-Reformation, applied by Alva, drove the Netherlands into
revolt, and changed the Reformation into revolution. The great and
rapid victories of the sixteenth century were gained over the
unreformed and disorganised Catholicism of the Renaissance, not over
the Church which had been renovated at Trent. Rome, with a contested
authority and a contracted sphere, developed greater energy, resource,
and power than when it exercised undivided sway over Christendom in
the West. The recovery was accomplished by violence, and was due to
the advent of men who did not shrink from blood in place of the
gracious idealists for whom Luther and Calvin were too strong.
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