THE REFORMATION PERIOD.

19

the end. Its protest in the name of Free Conscience was only a far-away anticipation of our era of Free Thought. The political arrangements that resulted from it were only earlier steps in that era of revolution which is upon us now. Its chaotic struggles for better social justice were only the harbinger of that broad popular movement, which has come to one crisis already in America, and to another in France, and which is only beginning, at this late day, to find its interpretation in what we have learned to call Social Science.

Thus the event we call The Reformation is not so simple in theory as the inauguration of Protestant theology. It is the transition from the imperialecclesiastical system of the Middle Age to the free thought, democratic policies, and social levellings of the modern world. The ashes of its theological warfare are still hot; the fires of its revolutionary principles still burn. The last French Empire went down in 1870, in an attempt to recover something of that old dominion; and the lost cause of the temporal power of the Pope is held by some good Catholics to be no unlikely occasion of another religious war in our own day.

There is, however, a certain dramatic unity and completeness in the period just defined, which is not at all apparent since. For then there was a definite issue, clearly understood by all the contending parties, the victory or defeat of the Medieval system, in Church and State, which was the real object of attack. So that, during this period, we may say that not only all thinking men, but all governments,

LIBERTY AND UNION.

21

and Calvin have a will as well as he, and respect his decision no more than he the Pope's. The logic of all this is soon seen. As the first Reformer stood alone, confronting the world of Catholic Christendom, and meeting the Pope's excommunication by an excommunication of his own, so Protestantism itself comes down fast to the condition of strife among numberless jealous individualisms, with as many sects as there are men to make them or names to call them by, till many a church is literally cut down to the gospel minimum of two or three.

But, again, if it were only to make its own existence possible, Protestantism must find some check to this dispersion. There must be some common ground of attack and defence. The interior history of Protestantism is by no means so simple a thing as a history of opinions branching out more and more widely asunder, tapering from dogmatism towards scepticism at one pole and sentimental mysticism at the other. On the contrary, it is the history of a conflict between two opposing tendencies. Over against the demand of liberty is set the need of union. The process is not random and chaotic, as it looks at first, but is eminently dramatic. The fatal division of Lutheran and Reformed in Germany is quelled in the terror of the Thirty Years' War. The quarrelsome sectaries in Puritan England are sharply disciplined under the military rule of Cromwell. But without such outside pressure, the dispersion is as sure as that of steam in the open air. The weakness of Protestantism is from the same

source

as its

strength, — that elasticity, which means the mutual

repulsion of its particles.

THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY.

23

a broad way, so far as it could be comprehended at that day, and with inflexible courage tried to solve it. It did this in a Name before which all differences of social level absolutely disappeared. Emperor or king, peasant or serf, priest or noble, it knew men only as equal subjects of its spiritual empire. It declared the state of slavery impossible for a Christian, and did in fact practically abolish slavery in Europe by embracing all ranks and conditions within its fold. It established the Truce of God, setting a bound to the rage of private wars, and winning society slowly towards a reign of peace. It created charities on a scale with which the world had till then known

nothing to compare. In an age of strife, ravage, destitution, and disease, far worse than what we suffer now, it grappled as it could with that hopeless question of Pauperism: on false principles, indeed

by adopting and consecrating Mendicancy; but perhaps no other way was possible then. At least, it was better than brutal and pitiless neglect, the old Pagan way. It assumed the charge of educating every child, — not in the way we think right, but at least so far as was needful to make him a subject of its empire and an heir of its hope; and so, of meeting hand-to-hand the vice, ignorance, and savagery of the lowest order in the State. In the Catholic system once, as in Papal countries still, every man, however guilty or wretched, is in theory at least to be met by the formal offices of the Church for instruction, for comfort, for rescue from sin, at least for absolution at his death-hour. This splendid ideal it has always professed, of what Religion has to do for society as well as for every man.