are told, "many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them. . . . . One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home, and wove it into the life of every English family.

Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the intellectual development of the people. All the prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little-known verse of Chaucer existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning.1

On its economic side, the Reformation took the course foreshadowed by events in the Middle Ages. During the century preceding the Reformation, the peasantry all over Europe were in a state of restlessness which, in many localities, flamed out into revolt. The vast lower class, on which the upper and middle orders rested, knew but little about religion. An extensive inquiry was made into the religious condition of the people of northern Germany after the revolt from Catholicism. Luther's experience in the Saxon Visitation was typical. After his return he prepared a "Small Cathechism," in the introduction to which I Green, History of the English People, Book VII, chap. i.

he said, “The common people know nothing at all of Christian doctrine, especially in the villages! and unfortunately many pastors are well-nigh unskilled and incapable of teaching; and although all are called Christians and partake of the Holy Sacrament, they know neither the Lord's Prayer, nor the Creed, nor the Ten Commandments, but live like poor cattle and senseless swine, though, now that the gospel is come, they have learnt well enough how they may abuse their liberty." It was found by Luther "that the only application of the new evangelical liberty made by many of the people was to refuse to pay all clerical dues." General conditions were no different in England. The hostility of the merchant and manufacturing classes everywhere toward the Roman church was instinctive. "The trading classes of the towns," writes Green, "had been the first to embrace the doctrines of the Reformation." And we find that "the religious reformation in every land of Europe," as Motley says, "derived a portion of its strength from the opportunity it afforded to potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property. The situation in England may be taken as a type of that in all countries where Protestantism became the established form of Christianity. The English Reformation began during the reign of Henry the Eighth (1509-1547). In his time the pressure for economic change became too great to be resisted any longer by the Roman church in England. The vast landed property of the church was transferred by act of Parliament into the hands of the King, who turned most of it over to the nobility. Green writes:

The bulk of these possessions were granted lavishly away to the nobles and courtiers about the King, and to a host of adventurers who "had become gospellers for the abbey lands." Something like a fifth of

Lindsay, op. cit., I, p. 409.

2 Ibid., pp. 405, 406.

3 Green, op. cit., Book VI, chap. v.

4 Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic (Philadelphia, McKay), Vol. I, p. 272.

the actual land in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only were the older houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers.'

* Green, History of the English People, Book VI, chap. i. Cf. Froude, History of England (New York, 1873), Vol. III, p. 359; Vol. VII, pp. 11, 40. Cf. "Cambridge Modern History," Vol. II, The Reformation (New York, 1904).

CHAPTER XXXIII

PROTESTANTISM AS EXTERNAL AUTHORITY

Protestantism, at the time of its legal establishment, was based upon the union of Church and State.-When the Protestants broke away from Catholicism, this great revolution was accomplished by law. The Protestant states, in their corporate capacity as "social groups," had to dispossess the Roman church of its property, and make the old forms of worship illegal. Furthermore, such principles as the toleration of different views, and the liberty of conscience, were unknown to the world at that time. So the Protestant states had to make legal provision for churches of their own. As a consequence, the churches of the Reformation slipped into the place of the banished Romanism. These considerations prepare us to see that Protestantism, at first, held the same position in the social body as did Catholicism, Judaism, and paganism. It was the religion of the state, or, as it is called in England, the "established" worship. Although the external forms and circumstances were different, the sociological meaning of Protestantism was everywhere the same. Church and State were everywhere united; and all the people of a state were compelled to support the local church. The historian Froude writes: "The Council of Geneva, the General Assembly at Edinburgh, the Smalcaldic League, the English Parliament, and the Spanish Inquisition held the same opinions on the wickedness of heresy; they differed only in the definition of the crime."

The Protestant clergy, therefore, held a position as high as the Catholic priesthood; and in practice they made as lofty claims to respect as did the ministers of the Roman church.

1 Froude, History of England (New York, 1873), Vol. III, p. 311.

They were appointed by officials whose authority was derived from the state; and they could be deprived of office by the same power. A good illustration is found in the famous Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, which were set forth by national law in the year 1562. Article 23 declares: "Those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given unto them in the Congregation, to call and send Ministers into the Lord's Vineyard." John Calvin's view of the ministry was even higher than this, for in his Institutes of the Christian Religion he laid down the principle that the clergy ought to rule all mankind within the terms of a theocracy. His autocratic tendencies were checked by the civil power; but the prevailing union of Church and State made the church an engine of public authority.

Protestantism, like the Jewish and Catholic churches, viewed the religion of the Bible as ordained by external divine authority. -Since Protestantism at first occupied the same social position as the older forms of worship, it is easy to see how the Reformation churches necessarily started out by taking the ancient view of the Bible and its religion. "Orthodox" theology was demanded alike by the social and the mental constitution of early Protestantism. The idea of natural, evolutionary development of religious belief was unthinkable at that period of human history, and was unknown to the Protestant world for many generations.

It is a curious, but explainable, fact that the Reformation churches did not at once perceive the logic of their position with reference to the Bible. On the one hand, the whole Reformation movement was an economic movement, directed by the civil powers of the Protestant states; and these powers considered their authority to be inherent in themselves. On

1 Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (New York, 1899), Vol. III, p. 501 (italics ours). Lindsay, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 111, 127, 128, 129.