A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
50.THE REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH
The Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this mental rebirth. It was dismembered; and even the portion that survived was extensively renewed.
We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic leadership of all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how in the fourteenth and fifteenth its power over men’s minds and affairs declined. We have described how popular religious enthusiasm which had in earlier ages been its support and power was turned against it by its pride, persecutions and centralization, and how the insidious scepticism of Frederick II bore fruit in a growing insubordination of the princes. The Great Schism had reduced its religious and political prestige to negligible proportions. The forces of insurrection struck it now from both sides.
The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely throughout
Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of
lectures upon Wycliffe’s teachings in the university of Prague. This
teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused great
popular enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole church was held
at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was invited to this
Council under promise of a safe conduct from the emperor, seized, put
on trial for heresy and burnt alive (1415). So far from tranquillizing
the Bohemian people, this led to an insurrection of the Hussites in
that country, the first of a series of religious wars that inaugurated
the break-up of Latin Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope
Martin V, the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of a
reunited Christendom, preached a Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people and
all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe was turned
upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in the thirteenth it had
been turned upon the Waldenses. But the Bohemian Czechs, unlike the
Waldenses, believed in armed resistance. The Bohemian Crusade
dissolved and streamed away from the battlefield at the sound of the
Hussites’ waggons and the distant chanting of their troops; it did not
even wait to fight (battle of Domazlice, 1431). In 1436 an agreement
was patched up with the Hussites by a new Council of the church at
Basle in which many of the special objections to Latin practice were
conceded.
In the fifteenth century a great pestilence had produced much social
disorganization throughout Europe. There had been extreme misery and
discontent among the common people, and peasant risings against the
landlords and the wealthy in England and France. After the Hussite
Wars these peasant insurrections increased in gravity in Germany and
took on a religious character. Printing came in as an influence upon
this development. By the middle of the fifteenth century there were
printers at work with movable type in Holland and the Rhineland. The
art spread to Italy and England, where Caxton was printing in
Westminster in 1477. The immediate consequence was a great increase
and distribution of Bibles, and greatly increased facilities for
widespread popular controversies. The European world became a world of
readers, to an extent that had never happened to any community in the
past. And this sudden irrigation of the general mind with clearer
ideas and more accessible information occurred just at a time when the
church was confused and divided and not in a position to defend itself
effectively, and when many princes were looking for means to weaken its
hold upon the vast wealth it claimed in their dominions.
In Germany the attack upon the church gathered round the personality of
an ex-monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), who appeared in Wittenberg in
1517 offering disputations against various orthodox doctrines and
practices. At first he disputed in Latin in the fashion of the
Schoolmen. Then he took up the new weapon of the printed word and
scattered his views far and wide in German addressed to the ordinary
people. An attempt was made to suppress him as Huss had been
suppressed, but the printing press had changed conditions and he had
too many open and secret friends among the German princes for this fate
to overtake him.
For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith there were
many rulers who saw their advantage in breaking the religious ties
between their people and Rome. They sought to make themselves in
person the heads of a more nationalized religion. England, Scotland,
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany and Bohemia, one after another,
separated themselves from the Roman Communion. They have remained separated ever since.
The various princes concerned cared very little for the moral and
intellectual freedom of their subjects. They used the religious doubts
and insurgence of their peoples to strengthen them against Rome, but
they tried to keep a grip upon the popular movement as soon as that
rupture was achieved and a national church set up under the control of
the crown. But there has always been a curious vitality in the
teaching of Jesus, a direct appeal to righteousness and a man’s
self-respect over every loyalty and every subordination, lay or
ecclesiastical. None of these princely churches broke off without also
breaking off a number of fragmentary sects that would admit the
intervention of neither prince nor Pope between a man and his God. In
England and Scotland, for example, there was a number of sects who now
held firmly to the Bible as their one guide in life and belief. They
refused the disciplines of a state church. In England these
dissentients were the Non- conformists, who played a very large part in
the polities of that country in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In England they carried their objection to a princely head
to the church so far as to decapitate King Charles I (1649), and for
eleven prosperous years England was a republic under Non- conformist rule.
The breaking away of this large section of Northern Europe from Latin
Christendom is what is generally spoken of as the Reformation. But the
shock and stress of these losses produced changes perhaps as profound
in the Roman Church itself. The church was reorganized and a new
spirit came into its life. One of the dominant figures in this revival
was a young Spanish soldier, Inigo Lopez de Recalde, better known to
the world as St. Ignatius of Loyola. After some romantic beginnings he
became a priest (1538) and was permitted to found the Society of Jesus,
a direct attempt to bring the generous and chivalrous traditions of
military discipline into the service of religion. This Society of
Jesus, the Jesuits, became one of the greatest teaching and missionary
societies the world has ever seen. It carried Christianity to India,
China and America. It arrested the rapid disintegration of the Roman
Church. It raised the standard of education throughout the whole
Catholic world; it raised the level of Catholic intelligence and
quickened the Catholic conscience everywhere; it stimulated Protestant
Europe to competitive educational efforts. The vigorous and aggressive
Roman Catholic Church we know to-day is largely the product of this Jesuit revival.