THE ARRESTED REFORMATION THE ARRESTED REFORMATION BY REV. WILLIAM MUIR, M.A., B.D., B.L. AUTHOR OF "THE CALL OF THE NEW ERA;' "OUR GRAND OLD BIBLE," " THE BOOKS WE ALL WRITE," ETC. MORGAN & SCOTT LD. 12, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS LONDON, E.G. MCMXII Copyright 1912 by Morgan & Scott Ld. To my History Teacher PRINCIPAL THOMAS M. LINDSAY D.D., LL.D. PREFACE rilHERE are many books which deal with the Reformation, as well as many about the Romish controversy. There are few, how- ever, which deal with the Arrest of the Reformation from the strictly practical standpoint and in view of the present necessity. It is believed there is need for one which has for its burden through- out the answer to the inquiry: How can the work of the Reformation be completed ? How can Rome be won for the Evangel ? In apologizing for the Reformers' neglect of Foreign Missions, a failure which had so much to do with the arrest of the good work they began, it has been argued that they believed that the end of the world was at hand, and that the nations had made their choice as, indeed, in a sense they had. But the end was not then, nor is it yet. Still those who are faithful are looking for the vii viii Preface blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Still the conflict between the Divine and the Satanic persists and deepens, and if the good grows better the evil grows worse. The icy fingers of disobedience and division still prevent the triumph of the Good News which was the secret of Reformation power, and the chariot wheels drive heavily. Yet there is no yearning among believers which is more widespread than that for Revival : a yearning which is itself half the battle, and the dawn of the coming day. God has been showing those who trust in Him that it must always be true that without Him they can do nothing ; and their sense of helplessness and need is very intense. There have been drops of blessing many a time since the Arrest came. There have even been showers of blessing, as when the Evangelical Re- vival gave birth to modern philanthropy and mission effort both at home and abroad. But what is needed is rain splashing, dripping, soaking rain which will go down to the very roots of all our life and make everything new. If there is to be Revival, however, it must begin at the House of God. It is the indifference within the Churches which makes the indifference without Preface ix such a menace. If only God's people everywhere were to go back by the way of the Eeformation the greatest Revival of heart-religion since the days of the Apostles to Christ Himself, ready to obey Him in everything, and to be nothing that He may be all in all, who can doubt that they would be filled with the very mind that is in Him, and be swept on to the crowning victory through supreme faith in His grace and power and a great compel- ling compassion for those who have never felt His healing touch. This endeavour to deal with a difficult situation as well as with a perplexing problem, with this very definite and practical aim, is sent forth with the earnest prayer, in which surely multitudes are joining, that ere long we shall see a New Reforma- tion which will be world- wide in its reach and will suffer no arrest. Even should it come in dis- concerting or revolutionary ways there will be gladness everywhere : if only it comes and comes quickly. The world is very weary without its rightful Lord. Christ alone can fathom its yearn- ings and satisfy its needs. It is hoped that such new groupings of Refor- mation problems and the problems of to-day as may be found throughout, and especially in the x Preface chapters on Reformation Genealogies and the Signi- ficance of the Council of Trent, may prove useful to not a few. Above all it is hoped that the closing chapters reach a genuine culmination in their argument and appeal, and that there will be fruit therefrom to the glory of God and the salvation of immortal souls. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGES INTRODUCTION The problem Failure of Reformation as well as success The early promise The line then drawn still persists The debateable territory Peace of Westphalia Many and mixed motives at work Reformation era not Golden Age Course of events in Scot/and and England Causes of the arrest Lack of unity The taint of Sacerdotalism Failure as regards Social Reform and Foreign Missions Arrest tacitly accepted now Rome aggressive and virile . . . . .1-24 BOOK I Origins and Principles /. THE CASE FOR THE REFORMATION Trouble began even before Constantine' s time The Mystery of Iniquity Menace of Sacerdotalism and Erastianism How faith disappeared Corruptio optimi pessima est The Renaissance Teutonic v. Italian Humanism Christianity without the Bible Romish substitutes for Scriptures Christianity without conversion The religion of the natural man 27-4? xii Contents CHAf. PAGES II. REFORMATION GENEALOGIES Reformed Church neither a new Communion nor a mere Secession Reformers before Reformation Mediaval hymns Medieval social, political, and revival movements Heretical sects The Fran- ciscans and their failure Imitatio Christi The Mystics The godly homes from which the Refor- mers came Wiclif- John Wessel Church of Rome schismatic Augustine's divided inheritance . 48-68 ///. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMATION The unity of sixteenth-century Europe One Church One literary language Simultaneous revival in many lands A new conception and use of Scrip- ture God speaking directly to men The testimony of the Holy Spirit Justification by faith alone Heartfelt trust in personal Saviour Grace the keynote Right and duty of private judgment Priesthood of all beRevers Here also right involves duty Orthodoxy in practice the main thing . . 6989 BOOK II On the Field of History I. THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT AMONG ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES The failure only comparative Sixteenth-century defects now largely overcome Social movements Foreign Missions English domination and Reformation in Ireland Celts and Evangelicalism Wales Scotland England's unique story Romish gains Contents xiii PAGES and losses The Free Churches In England Puri- tanism High Churchism Reformed Churches In America and Greater Britain . . . .93113 77. PROTESTANTISM ON THE CONTINENT Germany Cujus reglo ejus rellglo Line almost im- movable yet France Edict of Nantes, Concordat, Disestablishment The Netherlands Belgium and Holland Dutch Foreign Missions Switzerland Scandinavia Predominance of Lutheranlsm Erastianlsm Bohemia and Persecution Hungary and Reaction Spain Portugal Italy Absolut- ism, socialism, and infidelity . . . .114-132 777. THE DEFORMATION AND THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL Deformation not the last word Rationalism not off- spring of Reformation Evangelicalism the golden mean bet<ween SacerdotaRsm and Agnosticism State of England in eighteenth century Protestant Scholasticism Neglect of Missions Lutherans v. Calvinists Pietism and Methodism Evangeli- calism and Philanthropy The present indifference . 1 3 3- 1 46 IV. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION Blood of martyrs not always seed of Church Revival of Romish faith and enthusiasm How Reformation affected Rome Council of Trent The Jesuits Their ultimate failure inevitable Causes of Counter- Reformation in Rome and Protestantism Extent of reaction In Slustria, Germany, and Switzerland In France and England Its cessation . . , .I4y-l66 xiv Contents CHAP. PAGES V. ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS Rome as aggressive as ever Home Missions , Schools, Sodalities, Lecturers Foreign Missions Devoted and humble helpers Impossibility of co-operation with Rome Superstitious and magical work Extent of Romish Missions ' Accommodation ' Failure of early Missions Intrusion into Protest- ant fields Terrible condition of South America after Rome's long monopoly . . . .167-186 VI. 'LOS VON ROM' The drift in France Rome and atheism Italy and the revolt against priestism A Romish Bible Society Anti-clericalism in Spain Portugal and Belgium The movement away from Rome in Austria Increasingly evangelical Many converts from Rome in Austria and Germany Pessimism unwarrantable ...... 187-204 VII. ROME IN THE NEW WORLD Early Romish Missions and their fate Las Casas and negro slavery Failure in California Canada South America and its revolt j Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico Rome's enormous losses in United States The explanations offered The real ex- planation Americanism. . . . .205-221 BOOK /// Can the Arrest be removed? I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRENT Rome's Kneage Church of Rome dates from Council of Trent Clericalism and obscurantism then finally Contents xv PAGES chosen Bondage of a written constitution Rome separated from unity of Western Church and made a sect Far more than codification in Decrees Justification, the Scriptures, and Transubstantia- tion Sinister genius for choosing the worst part and making it the whole Everything made to turn on submission to the Papacy Reformers the true Catholics 225-242 II. ROME AND THE MODERN SPIRIT Rome's helplessness in presence of modern spirit The slave of the letter ; in bondage to clericalism Modernism not necessarily right because in conflict 'with Rome Believers must be free from mere tradition, and must walk in the Tight The blunders of the Curia and the infallible Pope Reception given to Encyclical in England, Germany, and France Rome in British Colonies Treatment of Fogazzaro Intellect as well as spirit suffers through Romish obscurantism Power behind the Pope 243-261 ///. IF ROME IS TO BE WON SHE MUST BE UNDERSTOOD Many difficulties still in the way Division among Protestants Rome's persistence in spite of many defeats must be understood So must the needs to which she ministers Iron as well as clay Saints as well as sensualists She must be taken at her best as well as at her worst Mere dialectical triumphs not enough Rome's errors mainly per- verted truths The needs she meets must be met in better ways Priesthood, Confession, and the Mass in the light of a fuller doctrine of the Holy Ghost .262-280 xvi Contents CHAP. PAGES IV. IF ROME IS TO BE WON IT MUST BE BY POSITIVE EVANGELICAL TRUTH The Gospel alone can make all things ne<w Re-viva/ of heart-religion needed Either Rome or the Evangel must <win All believers must take part in this -work of evangelising The great doctrines of the faith must anew live and glow with reality and passion Mere controversy of little avail Mere protesting of no avail Revival must begin at the House of God All things possible to those who believe ; even the universal empire of their Lord 281-299 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION The Problem MlHE one outstanding marvel of the Reforma- tion era is that so much that was supremely -^- valuable was achieved in so short a time. The other is that where so much was accomplished there was nevertheless failure as well as success, and that the great movement halted so soon in its victorious career. In some respects, indeed, that great and fruitful revolution is the classic instance of arrested development. For a time it seemed destined to make all things new, but ultimately it came far short of a universal triumph. At first it went forth conquering and to conquer, but by and by it was not only brought to a standstill but was swept far back again. Nor is any feature of the Reformation story more impressive than the fact that the line which was drawn between the nations within sixty years of the time when Luther was proclaimed a heretic by the Pope is drawn still. The peoples which were Protestant then are Protestant and progressive 4 The Arrested Reformation still. Those which stood for Romanism then are superstitious and decadent still. No Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century has ever adopted them. Since then Romish peoples have become infidel and some of them Romish again, but none of them has become Protestant. After the first shock of battle was over, and the Counter-Reformation had done its work, it was found that Protestantism and the Evangel had triumphed among the Germanic or Teutonic peoples, whereas Rome had kept the great Latin or Romance nations. On the one side of the line were the North Germans and the Swiss, the Scandinavians and the English, the Scots and the Dutch. On the other were the Austrians and the Italians, the Spanish and the French. And as it was then so it is now. From the first the victory of the Reformation was swift and decisive among the peoples of Northern Europe, and they have never gone back on the choice which they made in the sixteenth century. For a time, however, many wise and patriotic men cherished the expectation that the nations of Southern Europe would also be won. Some of the foremost statesmen of the age, indeed, were determined that Rome should be reformed sufficiently to prevent any schism in the Church. Baffled Hopes 5 In the year 1541 Pope Paul in. actually deputed Cardinal Contarini to meet the Protestants at the Diet of Ratisbon to see whether terms could be arranged for reconciliation and all - round reform. Luther himself distrusted the whole affair and did not appear, but Melanchthon was there, and the doctrine of Justification by Faith was even agreed on as the basis of reunion. For political and other reasons, however, the negotia- tions fell through, mainly because there was no common ground for a genuine reconciliation, nor any real desire for thorough reform among the dominant Papal ecclesiastics. Yet the fact that such a thing was even dreamed of by leaders in Church and State shows what might have been had there been no arrest, and gives point to the reflection, how different the history of Europe would have been and how different its condition to-day had their hopes been realised. The most shameful chapters in that history would never have been written, and everything would have been far other than it is. Ere long, however, it became evident to the most sanguine and the most determined alike, that reunion was impossible ; and everywhere men and nations had to make their momentous choice. There can be no concord between Christ and Belial, between the living and the dead. Instead of reconciliation a far-reaching counter- 6 The Arrested Reformation revolution began in Italy and Spain, in both of which countries the Eeformation had taken a stronger hold than is usually realised, and soon the two peoples and governments beyond the Pyrenees and the Alps were on fire for the Papacy with a zeal for long unknown. Under the leader- ship of the Jesuits, too, the Council of Trent finally decided that there were to be two hostile camps and not one reformed and united Church. The door was then closed for ever on reconciliation, and whatever reform was in store for Rome was thereafter to be on the basis of intolerance and reaction. But even then there was still a great stretch of debateable territory in which the battle between Rome and the Reformation had to be fought out. It had still to be decided whether South Germany, France, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, and Ireland were to be Protestant or Popish. Nowhere had the Reformation begun more auspiciously in some respects than in France, which according to Carlyle was within a hair- breadth of becoming actually Protestant ; nor did it anywhere gather round it a nobler band of brave men and devoted women. In Belgium the friends of the new movement were at one time to be counted by hundreds of thousands ; while in Austria there was a point where it could be said that not more than one -thirtieth of the Romish Reaction 7 population could be depended on as good Catholics. In Bavaria the Protestants had a majority in the Assembly of the States ; in Poland, according to the Papal Nuncio, it ap- peared that Protestantism would completely supersede Catholicism ; and it was still possible that Ireland would be at one with her sister kingdoms in their new departure on behalf of freedom and truth. Yet half a century later Kome was supreme in every one of these countries and the deciding line had been drawn as it still unhappily persists. Even where the chances had seemed most decidedly in favour of the Reformation the victory remained with Rome ; and when the Peace of Westphalia was arranged in 1648 she was left in full possession of all the debateable lands which in the middle of the preceding century seemed as likely as not to slip from her grasp. No nation was then Protestant, or is Protestant now, which had not become thoroughly Protestant before the genera- tion which heard Luther preach had passed away ; a portentous result which must be faced and understood if the work of the Reformation is ever to be carried to the glorious consummation which is so devoutly to be desired and which has so long and so sadly been postponed. The real strength of the Reformation movement did not lie in statesmen or even reformers, but in 8 The Arrested Reformation the loyal, earnest men and women, in all the nations, who in their sense of sin and their yearning for reconciliation to God had gone directly to Him, as the Reformers did, and had found pardon and peace in His free saving grace. At its best it was a great revival of heart religion, the greatest since Apostolic days, and wherever that side of it pre- dominated it not only overcame all opposition but spread in spite of the most cunning and cruel devices of the foe. There were many, however, who adhered to the Reformation for other reasons, and from very mixed motives. There were those who wished political freedom but were moved by no deep consciousness of sin nor any profound realisation of the mercy of God in Christ. There were those who longed for moral cleansing who had no theological interests nor any quarrel with the doctrines of Rome. There were also those who saw opportunities for selfish aggrandisement in such an upheaval ; as well as those who were swept on by the crowd without knowing very well where they were going. At such a time there are always those who like Words- worth's clouds move together if they move at all ; while many even of those who were whole-hearted in their conviction that the Augean stables must be cleansed went no more with the Reformers when they saw how much was involved in their principles and demands. They foresaw political The Mixed Multitude 9 revolution, ecclesiastical schism, and theological cleavage as well as moral purification and spiritual uplift, and either shrank back into a barren neu- trality or hardened into hostility to all change. There were not a few who, like Erasmus, More, and Pole, exhausted their zeal for reform in dealing superficially with the evils which were acknowledged by all earnest men ; and who refused to trace these back to their causes in doctrine and church government ; and there at any rate the old Adam was too strong for the young Melanchthon. It is a serious error to think of the Eeformation era, glorious and fruitful as it was, as if it were the Golden Age of the Church, or as if everything was perfect even when it was at its best. The best is yet to be ; that best for which all the ages have done their work. If we in our time are to put the copestone on the building which the Reformers only began ; if the liberated waters are to flow once more in every land ; it can only be through our being even more thoroughgoing in our loyalty to the light we have and even more keenly respon- sive to the needs of our age than the Reformers were. Their work was permanently fruitful in proportion as it was truly evangelical ; while they failed in proportion as they were involved in barren controversies, or were disobedient to the heavenly vision. If we in our time are to witness IO The Arrested Reformation the disappearance of the old lines of demarcation between Protestant and Romanist, as by the grace of God we ought, that can only be through every- thing else being subordinated to a passion for righteousness, to a Christlike compassion for the souls of men, and to the whole-hearted practising and proclamation of the great salvation. The course of events in England and Scotland may be taken as typical of much that took place in other lands. In England the masses, who were never really evangelised until John Wesley's time, changed sides as the monarchs changed and were usually ready to shout with the biggest crowd. Many of them were on both sides at once in the time of Henry vra., and later were Protestant under Edward vi., Romanist under Mary, and again Pro- testant, with modifications, under Elizabeth. The attitude of the " man in the street " during these vicissitudes was not very different from what it was in later times when the excesses of the Restoration threw such an unwelcome light on the professions which so many had made under the Protectorate. Even in Scotland, although the Reformation took a firm hold of the common people, much as it did in Germany and as it failed to do in France, and although the great mass of the community stood for the National Covenant as set forth in Grey- friars Churchyard, the later generation of Cove- nanters were only a fraction of the population, and The Light Quenched \ \ many sections of the nation showed clearly that they neither understood nor appreciated their courage and faith. When the prisoners from Both- well Brig were brought bound to Edinburgh the mob greeted them with the taunt " Where's your God ? " and few showed sympathy with them of any sort. In Germany, too, in spite of his buoyant optimism, Luther himself complained more and more as time went on that the true evangelical spirit and passion were sadly awanting ; a very pathetic limitation of a movement which had to be evangelical or nothing. To explain fully how the Reformation movement suffered such an arrest is probably an impossible task ; but to suggest that it was wholly or even mainly due to what Rome did, whether through the redress of the more glaring abuses or through remorseless persecution, is not only not in harmony with the facts of the case but is to stand in the way of the arrest being removed. This problem ought to be looked at strictly from the practical point of view and in order that the failure of the past may be so understood as to open up the way to victory in the days to come. A mere dialectic triumph is of no account, and the very heart of the problem is how it was that devices and persecution which only served to spread the light in the sixteenth century should have been able to quench it in the seventeenth. How did the blood of the martyrs 12 The Arrested Reformation cease to be the seed of the Church ? The Counter- Reformation cannot be ignored as a factor in the case, but the causes of failure which are to be found in the Reformed Churches themselves must be laid bare if the twentieth century is to put the copestone on the unfinished structure. Nor are the more outstanding of these causes far to seek. There was the lack of unity which so soon brought the Reformation Churches into a condition of bitter internal hostility, and had so much to do with the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. Men as great and wise as the Reformers were might have agreed to differ, at least in the non-essentials. There might easily have been room for much healthy diversity of opinion, and even of practice, in the free space which lay between the Lutheran readiness to permit what- ever was not actually prohibited in Scripture and the Calvinistic position that nothing should be allowed in the Church which is not allowed in the Word. But latterly they could agree only in denouncing each other, and in calling down fire from heaven on all who did not follow with them. Nor is it either ungenerous or hypercritical to say that some at least of the Churches of the Reformation came far short as regards the social implications of the Gospel ; while all of them came short as regards the Missionary obligations of the Christian Church in view alike of the world's The Mystery of Iniquity \ 3 need and of the Great Commission. Probably, too, in many instances they did not free themselves entirely from the taint of sacerdotalism. There is no subtler or more persistent influence for evil than that of the Mystery of Iniquity, and presbyter has only too often been priest writ large. The paganism which so soon began to avenge itself by creeping into the doctrines and practices of the Early Church has never been altogether eradicated, and has always been ready to become the nucleus of heresy or corruption when faith declined or ardour cooled. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump whether for evil or for good ; and sacerdotalism can creep into Christian communities like an untimely frost until even the Garden of the Lord becomes a dreary waste. " Clericalism is the enemy," said Gambetta, and he was right if by clericalism he meant priestism, the spirit which makes men seek to lord it over God's heritage or stand between their fellows and God. There is no power so malign, so hostile to freedom, or so alien to the spirit of Christ as the spirit of the priest, whether it manifests itself in Romanists or in Protestants, among laymen or ministers or those who have been episcopally ordained. Nor was the lack of unity, so largely due in turn to this leaven of sacerdotalism, any less fatal in the conflict with Rome, especially after her forces were mobilised under the new and effective leadership 14 The Arrested Reformation of the Society of Jesus. Nothing more hostile to the interests of religion could well be imagined than what came to be called the religious wars weird contradiction in terms ; and as they developed they did much to drive out everything for which the friends of freedom and the Evangel were con- tending. From the time when Luther refused to associate with Zwingli and the Swiss, until the time when the Peace of Westphalia, a hundred and twenty years later, found Germany, especially in the south and west, a wilderness of ruins with haunts of wolves and robbers where there had been prosperous communities, one deadly blow after another was struck at vital godliness and pure religion, and the crowning victory of the Reforma- tion had meanwhile been rendered impossible. ["' That many of the Reformers came short as regards the social implications of the Gospel cannot be denied. Nor is there room for doubt that the results of their shortcomings were disastrous. " It was little wonder," says Professor Pollard, writing of the Peasants' War with all its disillusion- ment and betrayal, " that the organisers of the Lutheran Church afterwards found the peasants deaf to their exhortations or that Melanchthon was once constrained to admit that the people abhorred himself and his fellow-divines." That great warm-hearted hero, Martin Luther, like the Apostle Peter and others, had the defects Luther and the Peasants \ 5 of his qualities ; and it is no part of the duty of those who admire him to defend everything he did or to proclaim him faultless. On the other hand, every one must admit that his position was extremely difficult. He was a peasant's son, and his big human heart was sore for the serfs whose hard bondage was growing harder every year. But his work as evangelist-reformer, which was dearer to him than life, might be endangered or even undone in a great social upheaval. Very early, indeed, he was denounced as a half-hearted reformer, disloyal at once to logic and the Gospel, at the very time when the evangelical doctrines which he proclaimed were being made responsible by those at the other extreme for what they thought their vile social and political fruits. It must be admitted, too, that in her divided state no section of the Reformed Church could speak either to masters or servants with the authority which even the mightiest had had to respect in the preceding ages. Yet after every allowance has been made it must be maintained that no course could have been sadder than that which the great Reformer ultimately pursued. At first he tried to mediate between the contending parties ; and until he declared himself against them the peasants counted on him as their leader, or at any rate reckoned on his silent approval. But latterly he turned on 1 6 The Arrested Reformation them and actually encouraged the nobles in their murderous work; and not only did more than 130,000 persons perish in the atrocities which ensued, but the wretched serfs were left in a worse condition than before. They fell back on their miserable conditions of life in bitterness and despair, alienated for ever from the Reformation ; while at the same time many of their oppressors went no more with the new movement. Perhaps it was beyond the wit of man at that time to find a solution for the labour problem as it then presented itself, but the probability is that if the Reformers, and especially Luther, had accepted their due share of responsibility, the most lamentable of the excesses would have been spared ; the utter failure of the rising would have been averted ; the Counter-Reformation would have proved abortive ; and the miserable decline of the Churches into Erastianism, formal- ism, and death would never have taken place. Of course there was much about the outbreak which deserved denunciation, especially as the conflict deepened and hope fled. Evil laws and cowardly inaction seldom fail to provide that sort of justification for themselves. And vain as it is to lament now as to what might have been had Luther been as resolute against the oppressors of the peasants as he was against the Hierarchy, the fact remains that the Church of Christ in The Twelve Articles \ 7 Europe has never again had the same supreme opportunity it then had of enforcing Christ's message of hope for all mankind. In the Twelve Articles which the serfs drew up as their programme, and as embodying their demands, they set forth their beautiful and pathetic resolution to be no longer regarded as the property of others since Christ had redeemed them with His blood. They had found spiritual freedom at the Cross, and in the midst of their manifold hardships and wrongs they saw that freedom in the State was also involved in the deliverance which Christ had wrought for them. In the new light they saw that Calvary was the birthplace of the true and enduring rights of men. Even as the Jerusalem Church had all things in common in the first ardour of their love, and as slavery in the Empire was modified into serfdom at the Table of the Lord, these humble peasants saw the truth in its fulness and beauty in the new light which had flooded their sad and sordid lives as only God's redeeming light can. Many charges have been made against them by pre- judiced historians, but it is increasingly evident that their demands were entirely reasonable. They called for the abolition of forced labour, a system which was as wasteful as it was iniquitous ; and the abolition of the more oppressive of their feudal dues, which were as galling to their manhood 1 8 The Arrested Reformation as they were unjust to their miserable gains. To have granted these demands, however, would have meant a social revolution, and almost everywhere they were treated with indignation and contempt. Even the nobles who were in the light themselves could not see what it meant for the suffering peasants, and both preachers and princes did much to betray the Reformation in the great crisis. The case is even clearer as regards the failure of the Reformers with respect to the Missionary obligations of the Church. After everything has been said about their undoubted preoccupation in the work at home, about the fact that the maritime nations which alone were in touch with the great heathen peoples were on the other side, and about the influence of their predestinarianism and their belief in the nearness of the end of the world, it remains that they stand condemned at the bar of history, and that their lack of response to the clear command of Christ and to the appeal of the perishing multitudes had much to do with the unhappy Deformation which ensued, and was far deadlier in its results than the Counter- Reformation itself. There are spots on the sun; and even the Reformers were not perfect. It was left to Erasmus the Unready to plead for Missions, and to the agents of Rome to go forth in their determination to redress their losses in Missionary Obligations 1 9 Europe by gains among the heathen. In the second generation of the Reformation era, John Calvin, the prince of exegetes who was as fearless as he was learned and far-seeing, in his com- mentary on the Great Commission had not a word to say as to the duty of the Church to those who were sitting in the shadow of death. And this neglect deepened into actual opposition in the Protestant Churches, so that when in 1664 Baron von Welz appealed for the formation of a society through which, with the Divine help, the Evangelical religion might be extended, his suggestions were stigmatised as impossible, and were treated with indignation as nothing better than proposals to cast the holy things of God before dogs and swine. He seemed to the Pro- testants of his time as one who dreamed, so much were they in bondage to the prejudices which had come down to them through the attitude of their nobler predecessors. There is indeed much in this aspect of the Reformation story which gives point to the injunction of the poet : " Miss not the occasion ; by the forelock take That subtle power, the never-halting time ; Lest a mere moment's putting off should make Mischance almost as heavy as a crime." In view of all this there is little room for surprise that Rome, who had meanwhile been setting her 2O The Arrested Reformation house in order, was able to win back the debateable territory. What is surprising is that she still holds it almost without protest. It can hardly be said that even ardent and convinced Evan- gelicals expect the arrest of the Reformation to be removed so that the lands which are still covered by the arid sands of the desert may even in our time be won for the Garden of the Lord. A practical illustration of this may be found in the diagnosis which Home Mission Committees often make regarding the possibilities of any district in which they propose to work. They write off the Romish population as not within their scope, and that not so much because they are already connected with a church as because they have no expectation of winning them for the evangelical faith. Whether they are careless or interested, if they are Romanists at all they are ruled out so far as aggressive work is concerned. Yet all the men of the Reformation era were Romanists to begin with, and our present atti- tude is the measure of the altered spirit which now prevails. There are, of course, many con- versions from the Church of Rome, and there are obvious reasons why they are not blazoned abroad as counter conversions are. A considerable part of the emigration from Ireland to America, against which the Romish Hierarchy are now setting themselves, is said to be due to the fact that The Line of Demarcation 2 1 many wish to break with Koine and can do so only by going where they can walk in the light and be free therein. But no one can suggest that such conversions are on an adequate scale or that we have anything like a New Reformation in the sense that the development so long ar- rested has been resumed. Even the revivals which have blessed the Church in modern times have not appreciably shifted the line of demarcation which was drawn so long ago and which sometimes eems as if it were to remain for ever. Not only so, but the Church of Rome is as virile and aggressive as ever. We would hardly venture nowadays to make John Bunyan's words about Giant Pope our own, that, " though he be yet alive, he is by reason of age, and also the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails, because he cannot come at them." The giant's power is still very tangible and real, as both baffled statesmen and workers for Christ in many a land know to their cost. The very failure of the Papacy in its conflicts with modern governments, as in France and Portugal, even where these have been due to such ineptitude of diplomacy as to suggest that the gods are making those mad whom they are about to ruin, have only thrown it back more than 22 The Arrested Reformation ever on the people. For choice, Rome prefers an autocracy, but when that fails her she can make herself at home in a democracy ; and she has prob- ably more friends to-day in France than she had before she broke with the Republic. A Jesuit Father at the time of the Vatican Council was dis- graced for suggesting that the Church would be stronger without the temporal power, but he had warrant for his view. At any rate, that was the case while Leo xm. was Pope. Such a pheno- menon, too, as the~ numbers who have left the Church of England for the Church of Rome in recent times is both significant and disquieting. Nor are Rome's losses, enormous as they are both in the Old World and the New, an adequate offset to these gains, since many of those who leave her drift out to indifferentism and infidelity. In- deed, it is one of the most disastrous features of Romanism in practical life that it prepares so many for unbelief. Mr. Chesterton describes some one as "a lucid Southerner, incapable of conceiving himself as anything but a Catholic or an atheist." There are even Protestants who declare that, logic- ally viewed, there is no half-way house between Romanism and Agnosticism, a position which is belied on every page of the Evangelical record, and in every land on the face of the earth. The problem, then, is this : How can the move- ment so long arrested be resumed until the work The Menace of Romanism 23 of the Reformation has been completed, and all Europe, yea the whole earth, is evangelical and free ? How can the rays of the Sun of Righteousness be brought to bear on the frozen streams so that the living waters shall flow once more ? How can the unity of the Brotherhood of Christ be widened so that, through revival and reform, it shall at length embrace all men everywhere ? The present situa- tion is not only sad but intolerable, and prayer should be offered continually that it may soon come to an end. Those who love our Lord can never look with complacency on the persistence of a great unreformed system which in so many respects is a menace to the spirituality of the Kingdom of God ; and what does the prayer '' Thy Kingdom come " mean if it does not involve the endeavour to complete the Reformers' work ? A New Reformation which would make Rome Evangelical would unite Protestants in gracious ties ; for should the Ice Age end Christians would be held together in the unity of the Spirit of Christ and by the magnetism of His love. The only effective way to bring in the new era is to assail error with positive truth. The only way to be loyal to the King is to extend His domain. The only way to prevent Romish invasions is to invade Rome with the Good News. Those who are satisfied with things as they are, are bearing , 24 The Arrested Reformation a very poor testimony to what Christ and the Evangel have done for them, and have nothing of the compelling compassion for souls which made St. Paul cry out, " Necessity is laid upon me, yea woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel." BOOK I ORIGINS AND PRINCIPLES CHAPTER I The Case for the Reformation TO understand how the Reformation was arrested, it is necessary to see something of how it had become absolutely imperative. The trouble began at least as far back as the days of Constantino, when the sunshine of unwonted favour brought so many into the Church, who were won, not by the power of Divine truth but by the Imperial edict. Men and women crowded into the Church who brought with them their heathen philosophies and their love of pagan ceremonial, and corrupted the simplicity of the Gospel alike in faith and worship, so that to this day every branch of it still suffers from the in- sidious invasion. The paganism which had been conquered was deadlier than the paganism which had power to persecute and kill. Victi victoribus leges dederunt : the conquered gave laws to their conquerors. If only the Empire had stopped short with recognition, all might have been well. The State should be Christian, a holy institution of God, just like the Church. But when the State takes the Church under her wing and patronises 28 The Arrested Reformation it, she does more harm than good; and a critic as great and far-seeing as the poet Dante attributed the "downfall of the Church to the fatal gift of Constantine. Certain it is that under the new auspices and patronage the Mystery of Iniquity, of which St. Paul had such sad forebodings, developed apace, until the tyranny of the priest took the place of that of the pagan oppressor, and the sacerdotal spirit, itself pagan, led to many features of paganism being incorporated into the doctrines and practices of the Christian Church. The truth is, however, that we must go still farther back than the days of Constantine to get to the very roots of the deadly upas tree whose leaves were for the corruption of the nations. The menace of Erastianism may date from the year 313, but the menace of sacerdotalism is of earlier origin. Almost from the first, through pagan converts and a pagan environment, there had been a gradual and steady infiltration of alien ideas, a reversal of primitive conceptions, and a degeneracy into forbidden practices. " As soon as ever Christianity is cast into the world to begin its history," says Mozley in his University Sermons, " that moment there begins the great deception." r ' There are to be false Christs and false prophets, false signs and wonders ; so that it is the parting admonition of Christ to His Sacerdotalism at Work 29 disciples, ' Take heed lest any man deceive you/ as if that would be the great danger." The ex- planation of this " mass of deception " lies in the solemn power of Christianity, " not only to bring out the truth of human nature, but, like some powerful alchemy, to elicit and extract the false- hood of it." When once the Church turned its face towards sacerdotalism, that evil thing developed within it not so much by any deliberate usurpation as by what Dr. Horton calls " an apparently intrinsic impulse from the original presuppositions " of the priestly conception. Already in the Apostolic era itself St. Paul saw the Mystery of Iniquity at work. In the second half of the second century the Lord's Supper can be seen moving in the direction of the Mass in the writings of Justin Martyr, and the first suggestions of the authority of Eome appear- ing in the writings of Irenaeus. By the third century Cyprian had elaborated the extreme view of episcopal authority, and the relics of saints and martyrs were in use as objects of superstitious veneration. By the fourth century it was taken for granted that the priest had power to remit and retain sins in the next world as well as in this ; and we find evidences of the fanatical asceticism, the scorn for marriage, and the hatred of heretics which gradually eliminated mercy and humanity from the ecclesiastical heart. In 30 The Arrested Reformation the fifth century Leo i. practically founded the Papacy ; and by the end of the sixth century the Papal claims were widely accepted, defended as they already were by forgery as well as by super- stition and tyranny. And thus the leprosy of sacerdotalism spread until, in the Middle Ages, the corruption was such that Roman Catholicism had become a travesty of the Church of the New Testament, and the reign of the moral ideal was at an end. The Divine categorical imperative had been subordinated to trivial positive ordinances and to the ritual and routine of the cloister or the school. By the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury the Church-empire had become as worldly, as corrupt, and as oppressive as the old World- empire had been. The open vice, the gross ignorance, the utter negligence of the Romish clergy, both secular and monastic, were manifest to all who had eyes to see ; and Pope Leo x. could speak of the Gospel itself as a profitable fable for him and his caste. Not that all, even in the Hierarchy, were as complacent or self-satisfied as the Pope in whose reign the Reformation began. Not only were there loyal souls in obscure places who were keeping the fire on the altar from going altogether out, there were great ecclesiastics whose hearts revolted at much they saw, or who felt that some The Reforming Cardinals 3 i sort of reformation was absolutely necessary in order to prevent utter apostasy. Three great cardinals of the Reformation era went so far as to get bulls from Rome authorising them to visit and reform the monasteries ; while, later, it was the chief merit of the Jesuits that they saw clearly that the Augean stables must be cleansed. From their point of view the Counter-Reformation was not merely a checkmate to the Protestant revolu- tion but a genuine reform which had become as necessary as, in their eyes, it was altogether salutary. Only the ignorant can deny that those whose opinion was of any value were agreed as to the need for some reform. Not only so, but there is a sense in which there was reform of a sort all round. True as it is that reaction was the order of the day when at length the Jesuits were dominant, it is also true that certain abuses were corrected, that provision was made for the educa- tion of the priesthood which had been shamefully neglected, and that some sort of decency was enforced. Since that time a cultured pagan like Leo x., or a man filled with the lust for war like Julius ii., would probably be as impossible a Pope as a monster like Alexander vi. And while on the one hand the fact that reform was thus felt to be necessary even within the remanent Church abundantly justifies the demands of the Refor- mers, the character of that Counter-Reformation 32 The Arrested Reformation enhances our sense of obligation to the real Re- formers. So far as doctrine was concerned, it meant reaction instead of purification, and that the creed of the Romish Church was laid down once for all in rigid statements from which there was no appeal. The Inquisition, too, was set to work on a more extended scale than before to crush out every atom of diversity of opinion and of independence of judgment or outlook. It is a commonplace with certain writers to speak of the ages before the Reformation as the ages of faith ; and not a few who ought to know better even look back regretfully on that epoch, when they contrast it with our era of criticism, unrest, and doubt. As a matter of fact, faith was the one thing which was everywhere awanting, and increasingly so as the Revolutionary era drew near. As Sir Walter Scott has remarked in con- nection with such festivities as the Abbot of Unreason, " the indifference of the clergy, even when their power was greatest, to the indecent exhibitions which they always tolerated and sometimes encouraged, forms a strong contrast to the sensitiveness with which they regarded any serious attempt, by preaching or writing, to impeach any of the doctrines of the Church." This want of faith comes out in the very archi- tecture of the later Middle Ages. As Sir Daniel Wilson has it in connection with the church which The Corruption of the Best 33 Mary of Gueldres, the Queen of James the Second of Scotland, founded under the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, " its vaulting-shafts sprang from corbels fashioned into all manner of grotesque imps, leering masks, and caricatures of monks and friars, such as a jolly brother who looked out from one of the angles of the apse over the very site of the high altar, as if in purposed mockery of the mysteries enacted below/* The difficulty, indeed, is not to prove how absolutely necessary the Reformation was, if the Christian religion were to survive, but to conceive how the Church of Christ, with so much Christian truth regarding the Trinity, the Atonement, and much else which still persisted in the midst of abounding error, and with the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the humble and contrite who trembled at His word, could have become so corrupt. But corruptio optimi pessima est ; and just because it was a corrupted Church and not a mere institution of men it could fathom deeps of impiety and perfidy as no other institution could. There was the twofold and apparently contradictory triumph of superstition and naturalism pagan both of them. Even the " faith " of the age had degenerated into a miserable bondage to slavish fears, as may be seen in such a life as that of King John of England, who in his combination of superstition and iniquity 3 34 The Arrested Reformation was an example " writ large " of what a pagan Christianity can produce. Although his wicked- ness was such that, in the savage words of the Saxon Chronicler, " foul as it is, hell itself is denied by the fouler presence of John," he would never venture on a journey without hanging relics round his neck, and was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in his impiety. It would appear that there is some fatal necessity which compels those who strain at gnats to swallow camels. Not only is faith lost, but all sense of proportion or decency as well. Macaulay tells of a Colonel Turner who, when on the scaffold for his crimes, thanked God that he had never entered a church without taking off his hat ; while Froude tells of a gang of assassins in Ireland who sat down to enjoy the fare in the house where their murdered victims lay, but abstained from animal food because it was Lent. It was not otherwise with the enemies of our Lord, who, at the very time when they were setting aside every appeal of justice, patriotism, and honour, and were swear- ing away an innocent life, could not enter Pilate's house lest they should be denied by the leaven which might be within its walls. Just before the Eeformation movement began there had come into the midst of the deepening corruption that other wonderful movement with The Renaissance 35 which it was closely associated, with all its revela- tions and impulses, its new hopes and yearnings, which is variously described as the Renaissance, Humanism, and the Revival of Letters. The fall of Constantinople in the year 1453 had scattered Greek scholars among the Western nations of Europe, and both the classical and ancient Christian literature were recovered and made objects of historical study and knowledge. The results were as marvellous as they were varied, and so closely were they bound up with the Reformation which followed that for the ordinary Romish theologian Greek became for a time the language of the heretic. But the revival of letters did not of itself involve the revival of religion, and Transalpine Humanism was very different from Cisalpine Humanism. The Teutonic Re- naissance was notable for the intense ethical seriousness, the religiousness, and the Christian temper of its representative men ; whereas the Italian Renaissance was notable for its unethical character, its spirit of revolt against religion, and its recoil towards the classical and pagan forms of philosophical belief. Primitive Christianity, in- deed, was not so intelligible to Southern as to Northern Europe, so deadly had the influence of the Papacy been where its triumph had been most complete ; and already there was a strange anticipation of the line of cleavage which was to 36 The Arrested Reformation be the abiding outcome of the Reformation move- ment when it forced the nations to take their stand for the Evangel or against. Alike in the North and the South, however, the Humanistic revival acted as a solvent. Then, as always, the truth was a savour of life unto life or of death unto death. Those whose eyes were turned towards the light were led out into the pathway to the Reformation. Those whose eyes were blinded by passion and sin drifted into sheer unbelief. Scholars had to make their choice be- tween the New Testament and its teaching, and the literature of paganism with all it involved ; and ere long the nations, too, had to choose between pure religion and undefiled, and thoroughgoing antagonism to the claims of the eternal and unseen. In the new light it was soon manifest that the proudest of the claims made by the Mediaeval ecclesiasticism were based on fraud ; while even pagan ideals, especially through Plato, rebuked the insincerities of the fallen Church. The spirit of man, too, as made for God and in the image of God, began to assert itself in Church and State alike ; while students who read the Greek New Testament of Erasmus found them- selves compelled to ask the question, which all men asked later as the vernacular scriptures spread, Where were Rome and the Papacy, the priesthood and the whole sacerdotal system, in Rome and the Bible 37 the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles, or anywhere in the New Testament ? The Christianity of Rome had in truth almost wholly ceased to be Bible Christianity. In Mr. Shorthouse's John Inglesant there is a striking passage in his description of the form which Christianity assumed in the mind and life of the hero under the guidance of his Jesuit teachers. " It was similar in many respects," he says, " to that which prevails in the present day in most Roman Catholic countries, and may be described as Christianity without the Bible." This illumi- nating phrase sums up the situation equally well for the period just before the Reformation and for the period with which he was dealing; a fact which serves to show how little Rome changes in any essential. In Fourteen Years a Jesuit Count von Hoensbroech says that in the intensely Ultramontane home of his youth the children never saw the Bible, and that this neglect is typical since Romanists go for teaching and help and comfort not so much to the Scriptures as to the thousand books of devotion which are supplied them in every shape and size. " Non-biblical piety," he adds, " is an ordinary thing in Catholic circles." It cannot be claimed for the Mediaeval Church that she ever encouraged a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures even for her priests. The 38 The Arrested Reformation utmost she did was to tolerate a knowledge of the Psalter, of Service Books, and in the fifteenth century, of the Plenaria, which were made up of paragraphs from the Gospels and Epistles along with legends and popular tales. In- creasingly, too, as Romanism developed on the lines it still follows, and sacerdotalism was casting its baleful shadow all over Europe, a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures was regarded with suspicion by the ecclesiastical authorities. As mutterings of dissatisfaction began to be heard among the awakening nations, the influence of the Bible was rightly felt to be hostile at once to the oppressor and the priest. In the year 1229 a Council at Toulouse had decreed : ' We also forbid the laity to possess any of the books of the Old and New Testaments, except perhaps the Psalter, or Breviary for the Offices, or the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, which some out of devotion wish to have ; but having any of these books translated into the vulgar tongue we strictly forbid." In England, too, one Kneighton a chronicler, writing probably before the year 1400, angrily declared that Wiclif by his English version had made Scripture " common and more open to laymen and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well-learned and of good understanding, so that the pearl of the Gospel is trampled under Ritualists and the Bible 39 foot of swine." He maintained that Christ gave His Gospel not to the Church but only to the clergy and doctors of the Church, that they might communicate it to the weaker brethren and the laity according to their need. It is very significant, in this connection, that in proportion as men drift towards Romanism in their sym- pathies and aspirations their love for the free and unfettered circulation of the Bible diminishes- ' To hear the Church was to hear the Bible in its truest and only true sense. Was it not an abuse of the Bible to send shiploads of copies across the seas to convert the nations ? ''' is how one of the English Churchmen who in our own time have come under the influence of this tendency, expresses what is surely a striking and illuminating reversion to type. Another of the same school puts it that " the crucifix should be the first book for their English Home Missionaries' dis- ciples ; and the Holy Scriptures must never be put into the hands of unbelievers." When even a tendency to Romanism in the twentieth century gives birth to such sentiments there need be no suggestion that it is ungenerous to hold that undiluted Romanism in the fifteenth century did not encourage men to read the Bible for themselves. The theory of the Mediaeval Church that any knowledge of the Scriptures which was necessary 40 The Arrested Reformation for the laity should reach them through the clergy was all the more intolerable, that increasingly as corruptions multiplied the clergy themselves did not know the Scriptures so as to be able to break the Bread of Life to the hungry multitudes who looked up to them to be fed and so often looked in vain. There were only too many like the notorious Bishop of Dunkeld who thanked God that he knew neither the Old Testament nor the New. In England, in the year 1551, out of 311 clerics in the diocese of Gloucester, all of them incumbents of parishes, who were examined as to their knowledge of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, only 90 passed well or fairly well. No fewer than 171 of them could not repeat the Com- mandments, 10 could not repeat the Lord's Prayer, and 9 could not repeat the Creed. Mani- festly such spiritual guides were not qualified to take the place of the Scriptures for the people, nor were they entitled to offer their teaching as a substitute for the written oracles of God as they did. As recently as May 3rd, 1824, Pope Leo xn. spoke thus in an Encyclical to the Latin Bishops : :< We also, venerable brothers, in conformity with our apostolic duty, exhort you to turn away your flocks from these poisonous pastures (i.e. vernacular Bibles). Reprove, en- treat, be instant in season and out of season, Rome and the Bible 41 that the faithful committed to you (adhering strictly to the rules of the Congregation of the Index) be persuaded that if the Sacred Scriptures be everywhere indiscriminately published, more evil than advantage will arise thence, because of the rashness of men/' In our own time, too, a striking example of Rome's attitude to the Holy Scriptures has been furnished in the experience of Henri Laserre the distinguished Frenchman. Struck by the fact that the children of the Church he loved knew " the Divine Book only in fragments, without logical or chronological order/ 5 he brought out a very attractive and scholarly French translation of the Four Gospels in the end of the year 1886. "We must lead back," he said, "the faithful to the great fountain of living water which flows from the inspired book." As one who had done much for the Church in connection with the shrine at Lourdes his version readily obtained the sanc- tion not only of the Archbishop of Paris but of the Pope, and appeared with the Papal imprimatur. The result was that within a year 25 editions, amounting probably to 100,000 copies, were issued, and it seemed as if France were at last to be allowed to drink freely of the living flood ; and certainly the eagerness of the people to read the Gospel for themselves was most remarkable. But the Jesuits soon interfered and proved that 42 The Arrested Reformation the Power behind the Pope is mightier than the Pope himself. The Papal sanction was withdrawn under the pretext that some passages were in- accurately translated, although it had been ex- pressly given through Cardinal Jacobini ; and within twelve months of its first appearance the book was on the Index, Papal imprimatur and all, and at once as if by magic disappeared from circulation. Not only did the Bible practically disappear from common use in the pre-Eeformation Church as the Mystery of Iniquity developed, until what was left was Christianity without the Bible, but every effort had been made to fill up the place it ought to have had with ecclesiastical and traditional lore about saints and angels, to say nothing of sub- stitutes less worthy. Dr. Horton describes the process thus : " As the Bible was taken from the Christian it became necessary to entertain the mind with other devotions, worships, and intercessions. To take the place of the Bible and of Christ, the Virgin Mary was elevated to a divine position in heaven, and treated as the mediator between men and her Son. Though St. Bernard, the last of the Fathers, regarded the idea of her immaculate con- ception as a heresy, because Christ and Christ alone was born without sin, the worship of Mary rapidly and inevitably filled the mind of the Substitutes for Scripture 43 Church." When once " the restraint of Scriptural standards is lost, the Church proceeds to invent new cults, to stimulate devotion. By slow and sure steps the mother of Jesus was raised to the rank of Queen of Heaven ; she became, as ' mother of God/ the intercessor to whom men must pray for interest with her Son. It took eighteen cen- turies to establish the point that she was born sin- less, in order to secure the sinlessness of her Son." " As Mary was an ecclesiastical creation, fancy and dogmatic necessity might paint her portrait and exploit her authority at will. The saints and even their relics, pilgrimages, sacred hearts, scapu- laries and the endless novelties of Catholicism, down to the fictions of Loretto and the extrava- gances of New Pompeii, are devices to fill the mind and heart of people who are cut off from the Scrip- tures. The habitual use of the Bible would shatter the whole system." '' The most humble reader of the New Testament could not but see that there was no Mass, no priest, no confessional, and no purgatory there." Another illuminating and pathetic description of Mediaeval Komanism is that it had become Christianity without conversion ; or, as it has otherwise been expressed, it was the religion of the natural man. ' Ye must be born again " is the Master's message for all the ages, but gradually the necessity for regeneration and conversion had 44 The Arrested Reformation been obscured until it was buried beneath the sands which drifted in from the deserts of the world as it lay in wickedness. Sinful men came to believe that they could make their peace with the Church, and through the Church with God, without becoming spiritually-minded or new creatures in Christ. John Ruskin says that the root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has ever suffered is the desire of men to earn salvation rather than receive it, and that the reason why preaching is so commonly ineffectual is that it calls on men oftener to work for God than to behold God working for them. But while this tendency is common to all the Churches, Rome deliberately set herself to pander to it, until it was no more than the truth to say that by her accommodations she left the unre- generate free to live in estrangement from God and yet enjoy the conviction of being religious. By one device after another the direct and personal intercourse of the worshipper with God was reduced to a minimum. Man was made for God and his heart cries out for the Living God. Yet at the same time he shrinks from drawing near because of his sin ; and Rome set herself by her vast system of mediation and intercession to satisfy both yearning and shrinking with the most disastrous results. The process ended by delivering the unsanctified heart from all necessity for personal intercourse Rome and Conversion 45 with the Holy, Unseen, and Spiritual God. The true offence of the Cross ceased even while the literal cross and the crucifix were increasingly obtruded. " It is one of the greatest secrets of the power of popery that it accommodates the natural heart of man with an apology for religion when yet it makes no demand on him for close communion with a Holy God." The very severity of its demands from its devotees is the proof rather than the refutation of this. With all that is hard in the shape of pen- ances and money exactions, the system is vastly easier for the unspiritual than the evangelical insistence on the need for repentance and faith, for the new birth and the lowly heart. The cry of corrupt human nature is, " Save us from heart- work/' and the very "hardness" of Rome ministers subtly to carnal pride. The Christian demand at every stage is for faith, and the sacerdotal system comes instead with its priests and external rites to satiate if not to satisfy the deepest longings of men without surrender to Christ Himself. Those who have ears to hear can hear the Living Voice of the Good Shepherd^ Others may come to imagine that the voice of the priest is the Master's voice, but they are wrong, and the fruits of their error are very degrading and deadly. It is of course true in the best sense that Christianity is the religion for the natural man, but that is 46 The Arrested Reformation because it tells how he can become a new man in Christ. It interprets his yearnings and fathoms his needs that it may take him out of the fearful pit and the miry clay. It tells of salvation for sinners that it may save them from their sins not that they may continue in sin. It is not synonymous with morality, but it leads to the purest moral life. It deals very tenderly with those who cry out in their blindness for help, but it makes no compromise with evil, and those to whom it effectually appeals have the proof that they have been called, in proportion as they turn from everything unworthy and unclean, with a full purpose of and endeavour after new obedience. Under the influence of this neglect of Scripture and these sacerdotal compromises and accom- modations, the very vocabulary of the Christian faith gradually changed its meaning in the pre-Reformation Church. Words and phrases which denoted spiritual relations came to be used to describe what was external and visible. A field was holy if it belonged to a priest and secular if a layman drew the rent. A monk was holy because he was a monk and quite apart from any question as to his character ; while an ordinary tradesman was secular although he might be a saint. To become religious meant entering a convent ; and religion itself was thought of as consisting in the performance of a round of cere- Barriers Overthrown 47 monies. " Separation from the world " had no reference to godliness, but to membership in a visible and intensely worldly institution mis- named the Church. The Hierarchy took away the Lord so that the pious worshipper knew not where to find Him ; and He was none the less hidden that He was concealed by sacred phrases, and under services which bore His own Holy Name. Hence it was that on its true and enduring side the Reformation was just a great revival of heart-religion, a movement born of the irresistible desire of souls, awakened to their true needs, to get near to God. The Mediaeval Church had ended in barring the way to the Divine presence, and it was the overthrow of these barriers which constituted the Reformation. The great tide which arose, and grew deeper and mightier, through the outpouring of the Holy Ghost on His waiting people, ended in sweeping the barriers away, and then the Reformation was an accom- plished fact. The more clearly this is recognised the stronger will the case for the Reformation become. CHAPTER II Reformation Genealogies F^NELON the French Archbishop once asked an old Huguenot peasant, "Where was your Church two hundred years ago ? " and received the gracious response, " In hearts like yours." The popular reply, however, to the question, " Where was your Church before the Reformation ? " is the counter-question, " Where was your face before it was washed ? " Those who know the story of the strivings and yearnings of the centuries which preceded the Reformation know well that the Reformed Church is the Church reformed, and that it is not to be viewed as if it were either a new communion or a mere secession from the Catholic Church. There never was a time, even when the Mystery of Iniquity was most potent, when there were not purity and piety and faith, or when there were not protests and attempts at reform. In the best sense Pro- testantism is not a breaking away from the un- divided Church of the West, but is the Evangelical- ism of that Church that in virtue of which it sur- vived and was a Church purified, strengthened, Reformers before Reformation 49 and, above all, made explicit. The ancestry of the Reformers is to be found in the godly men and women who even in the darkest days, by their simple evangelical piety, kept the fire on the altar from going out altogether. Low as it might burn, the flickering flame was never quite extinguished. Even when the gracious Christ could do no mighty works because of the cor- ruption and unbelief of His own, He never left Himself without a witness, and there never was a time when He was not laying His hands on a few sick folk and healing them. When at length the Reformation came, men did not receive the Evangelical doctrine as something entirely new, but as something they had always felt, although they had not been able to give adequate expres- sion to their feelings. There were Reformers before the Reformation, as there were heroes before Agamemnon. Again and again there were uprisings against wrongs which had become intolerable outbreaks of religious fervour among those whose hearts were crying out for the Living God, which in their beginnings seemed as full of promise as the Re- formation movement itself. It may be that all who at various times broke with Rome are no more to be accounted as ancestors of the mighty men of the sixteenth century than all the enemies of Rome to-day are to be accounted friends of the 4 50 The Arrested Reformation Evangel. But on the other hand it must be borne in mind throughout that in connection with the heresies of some of the sectaries and intransigeants of the Middle Ages, due apparently to Pagan or Mohammedan influences, our information is almost exclusively derived from their bitter and often unscrupulous foes. For long that was the case also with the sects of the post-Reformation era, and as the light spread it has been found that they were often grossly maligned. Bound the great statue of Luther in the Ref orma- tion Memorial at Worms the figures of Hus, Savonarola, Wiclif, and Peter Waldo are grouped as precursors; and not only were there others who might have been added to that noble group, there were multitudes of humble precursors of the Reformation who never lifted up their voices in public protest, but who never bowed the knee to Baal. For, full of interest as the upheavals in the Middle Ages are, it is not to them exclusively we must look for the roots of the Reformation or for anticipations of its principles. Rather must we look to the humble faithful men and women who all the centuries through were the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the friends of God. They had the new life in their hearts ; they never quite abandoned the idea that all mankind were to be won for Christ ; and in spite of every theory to the contrary they went past Mediaeval Hymns 51 the priest and had fellowship with Christ their Saviour and Lord. Unfortunately, however, these are just the people who get no place in the records of these formative ages. Chroniclers like Froissart who saw everything from feudal castle walls, and actually held that the seething discontent of his time grew out of " the great ease and abund- ance of goods in which the common folk then lived," knew as little of them as the monkish annalists in their blindness and superstition. Yet they were there, forming the subsoil in which the roots of the Reformation trees of knowledge and liberty grew up in due time, and preserving faith in the earth amid rude violence, appalling cruelty, and ever-deepening corruption of life and dogma. Gracious and helpful suggestions of this are to be found in the Mediaeval hymns, translations of which appear in all the hymn-books of the Christian Church. Many of these still thrill with a passion for Jesus which appeals to every believer, and shows not only how much truth had survived, but how much love and faith there were in spite of abounding error and evil. We have a man like Bernard of Clairvaux, the great statesman and leader ; and pope-maker though he was he sounds the depths where all else is for- gotten except the great Divine Saviour for great sinners. He it was who taught the Church to 52 The Arrested Reformation sing " Jesus the very thought of Thee " ; "0 Jesus King most wonderful " ; " Jesus Thou joy of loving hearts." We have a man like Bernard of Clugny, too, with his wonderful satire on the luxury, folly, and vice of his age written although it was in the splendid monastery which in the twelfth century had 2000 religious establishments owning its authority and extending its influence. It is true that the reform which he achieved only ended in deepening the darkness, through its unchristian view of what separation from the world meant. Yet his yearning cry was this : " Jesus in mercy bring us To that dear land of rest, Who art with God the Father And Spirit ever blest/' We have likewise Thomas of Celano with his " Dies Irae," said by many to be the grandest, kingliest hymn ever penned ; the hymn which Goethe, Dryden, Haydn, Milman, and Jeremy Taylor united in putting first among hymns ; and which Mozart made the basis of his celebrated Requiem, and Dr. Johnson could never repeat without tears. It also has the Mediaeval passion for Jesus : " Faint and weary Thou hast sought me, On the cross of suffering bought me, Shall such grace be vainly brought me ?" Medieval Strivings 53 There never was a time when men and women who were sinners and yearning for pardon, purity, and peace were not showing that in the very midst of error, and along with much that was anti-Christian, they were hearing the voice of Jesus and crying to Him in love and faith. When we turn to the actual overt movements which were so common in the pre-Reformation Church, and tell of much striving and desire, we find that they were of many kinds. A philosophic historian, who asserts that the problem of our time is to discover the true relation between faith and science, and that the problem of the sixteenth century was to reconcile faith and liberty, says that the problem of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to adjudicate between faith and reason, between Aristotle and St. Paul. In many respects, however, the problem has been the same not only in these three epochs but all through the history of the Church in its conflict with sin and error. Much as men depend on their environment to give form to the expression of their deepest needs, these needs are always the same in virtue of the universal in man ; and in the midst of Medievalism with its strange limitations and categories we meet everywhere the same profound human yearnings, often inarticulate and even blind, it is true, which led to the Reformation in the sixteenth century and which will lead 54 The Arrested Reformation to the final victory of the Gospel, come when that may. " Thou hast made us for Thyself and we can only find true rest in serving Thee " is the interpreta- tion of the spiritual struggles of mankind whether in Augustine's day or Bernard's, in Luther's day or Wesley's, or in our own. Man needs God, and when in his quest he fails to find Him the blackest shadow of all is that which is cast by his perverted ideal the fall of one who was made in the image of God, and is haunting empty broken cisterns in the hope of finding Him. If we are ever to put an end to the arrest which we deplore, we must lay hold of the oneness of the soul's needs alike in the Middle Ages, in the Reformation era, and now. Far from requiring to cut ourselves off from what was best in the Mediaeval Church, we can only complete the Reformers' work by serving ourselves heirs to it all. Men have always needed God, although they have often shown it in strange ways ; and they still need God and can only be brought into one great living unity in Christ on the basis of that need. For the sake of clearness, and at the risk of ignoring many cross divisions, the Mediaeval movements which shed light on the Reformation may be taken as falling into four classes. There were risings against the pretensions of Rome which were almost entirely social or political and in no strict sense anticipations of the sixteenth Risings against Papacy 55 century Revolution. There were heretical move- ments which were neither revivals of heart-religion nor anticipations of the sixteenth century Ref orma- tion. There were revivals of religion which spent themselves along purely sacerdotal lines. And there were revivals which were implicit anticipations alike of the new life of the Reforma- tion and of its supreme principle of the priesthood of all believers. There were risings against the Papacy and its manifestations all through the later Middle Ages, which were far from being either placid or self-satisfied. Many influences contributed to these ; ranging from the effects of the Crusades, which have been described as the Foreign Policy of the Papacy, to the ravages of the Black Death. There were also such solvents as the writings of men like Dante and Marsilius of Padua ; and, on the eve of the Reformation, the invention of printing, the coming of the New Learning, and the discovery of the New World. Much was due likewise to the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire, which, although it had ceased to be either Holy or Roman or Imperial, was in theory the political counterpart of the Church ; the moon in the firmament in which the Church was the sun. Consequent on this came the birth of the nations of Europe very much on the lines along which they have developed since. 56 The Arrested Reformation These Mediaeval protests against Rome were sometimes national and due to the financial ex- actions of the Papacy and its interference in the internal affairs of the nations. There were, for example, the resentment which gave rise to the Statutes of Prsemunire and Provisors in England, and the movement for the independence of the secular power in France in the reign of Philip the Fair, who has been called the Tamer of the Papacy. This attitude of the French people deepened into what is summed up in history as Gallicanism. There were also class risings, born of the intolerable condition of the common people, which assailed the Church in so far as it had become the ally of the rulers and landowners. These social movements were some- times inspired, in part at least, by religious strivings and new light, as in the case of Jack Cade in England. Sometimes, however, as in the French Jacquerie, no such influence can be traced. Such an outstanding phenomenon as the " Babylonish Captivity/' as it was called, must also have had far-reaching effects in destroying the moral influence of the Papacy. In her wars with France, England could hardly respect a Pope who was the puppet of France; and when there were rival Popes who banned each other with much fertility of resource, all the nations began to look on the Papacy with other eyes. The long Medieval Heresies 57 struggle, too, between the Church and the Empire embittered and estranged many; and once and again the doings of the Papal authorities were well calculated to destroy their influence among the nations. It is difficult to speak with certainty of the heretical sects of the later Middle Ages ; and some hold that they were not really heretical. They are sometimes included among the forerunners of the Eeformers, alike by ardent friends and unscrupulous foes ; and the records have been so perverted that it is almost impossible to get at the truth. Certain it is that some of the charges against them are ridiculous, and in the eyes of the Papal authorities their gravest heresy usually was that they opposed the sacerdotalism which was casting its blight on every part of Church life and doctrine. There seems, however, to be some evidence that survivals or revivals of the Gnosticism which even the Apostles had to combat, and of the Manichseism which en- tangled Augustine in his early years, appeared in various tendencies in the thirteenth and four- teenth centuries, regarding which we have only very confused information. The best known name in this connection is that of the Albigenses, who have sometimes been confused with the Waldensians, who happily still survive. Whatever their doctrines were, they were treated 58 The Arrested Reformation with appalling cruelty, and apparently exter- minated by agents of Rome who received their fertile lands as a reward. It was in this connec- tion that the ever-infamous order of Abbot Arnold was given : " Slay them all, God will know His own." A German scholar traces their genealogy thus : The first outflow from the stream of heresy which arose far away in Asia through the contact between Christianity and the Oriental religions were the Manichseans ; the next the Paulicians of the seventh century ; the next the Cathari, who in the tenth and eleventh centuries were very strong in Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Dalmatia. Of these Cathari, the Bogomili, Patareni, and Albigenses were only individual developments. Among others usually included as Mediaeval heretics are the Beghards and Beguines who seem to have been plain simple folk who began well if they ended ill, in their strivings after deliverance from the crushing tyranny of the priest. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, too, there were the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who are charged with holding that the perfect are free from the law and cannot sin, that every pious man is a Christ even as God becomes man, and that whatever is done in love is pure. Some of them may have ended in deeps of immorality ; but apart from monkish embellishments there is no assured proof of this. They banned marriage Attempts at Reform 59 and private property, it is true, but that usually led them to asceticism and not to libertinism ; and so far as the Albigenses are concerned there is evidence that their life was pure. In any case these sects have no bearing on the Reformation except in so far as their story was used in the sixteenth century to prejudice the new movement. If there were communistic libertinism and pantheism in some of the outgoings of the ferment of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they had no part in the religious revival in which the Reformation was born. Its parentage can be traced along very different lines. It must be repeated, too, that it no more follows that all who set themselves against Rome prior to the Reformation were Reformers before the Reforma- tion, than that everything which now calls itself Modernism is synonymous with Evangelicalism. The Reform movements along Romish lines were numerous enough to bear eloquent testimony to the need for cleansing, and impotent enough to show that the sacerdotal system itself was the real source of the evils which abounded, and the great barrier to effective reform. The Reform- ing Councils were always baffled, and with the failure of the Council of Constance and that of Basle all hope of genuine reform of the Church from within faded away. New Orders were instituted with eager faith and many a hope, 60 The Arrested Reformation but they never gave Christ the supreme place and ended in corruption as great as that against which they were begun as protests and remedies. There were also exposures in the writings of the poets and others ; and no one in the Reformation era said harder things about the ecclesiastics and their immorality than had been said by men like Petrarch, Chaucer, and Boccaccio, who never dreamt of aught else than living and dying in the Communion of Rome. Thinkers and states- men, too, assailed the evils which abounded in the Church with extraordinary frankness and vigour; upholding the claims of the national Churches as against the Papacy as even the most " Rome ward " Anglicans still do ; demanding the preaching of the Gospel; and at times even attacking the Romish doctrine of the sacraments. But they all looked for reform from within, as indeed the Reformers themselves did at first, and along with the persistence of Papal rule. Men as diverse as Henry vni. and his victim Sir Thomas More, each with his plan of reform, were Sacerdotalists to the end. There are two outstanding names which are representative of Mediaeval aspirations and heroic self-surrender at their best : Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Their movements, how- ever, like all similar movements, broke on the rock that religion was made a thing of ceremonies and Imitatio Christi 6 1 dogmas rather than of the heart, and that separa- tion from the world was made artificial and unreal. Francis called those of his generation who yearned for freedom from sin and likeness to God to a life of exact imitation of the poverty, celibacy, and obedience of our Lord ; and a genuine revival was the result of his example and influence. But ere long the Franciscans departed from the ideal of Francis ; and by and by the Fratricelli or Spiritual Franciscans were treated as enemies of Rome ; and in spite of fresh waves of reform, through new outgoings of the spirit of Francis, the ignorance and immorality of those who still bore his name in the sixteenth century had much to do with the popular indignation and disgust which found expression in the Reformation. Even the far-famed and justly-prized Imitatio Christi spent itself very largely along Romish lines, although it helped and guided many who were in the true ancestry of the Reformation. It is the finest product of the monastic spirit in literature, and through it there throbs the yearning heart of Mediaeval Christianity. But it is the life of the cloister which is set forth ; and, in the ultimate, imitation is not the Evangelical ideal. The Christian is to be filled with Christ so as to repro- duce Him in the daily life ; and not to copy Him laboriously as art-students copy the great Masters. It is the legal spirit which speaks of men doing 62 The Arrested Reformation their best while they are still rejecting God's Best. At times the so-called imitation of Christ has even been made an excuse for refusing Him and His new life. The Evangelical appeal is that our union to Christ should be such that He lives in us and we live in Him so that we grow into perfect likeness to him, not by constant effort but by living His life and manifesting His Spirit. Evan- gelical holiness is not a manufactured article on which the tool marks can be seen, but a flower of the Holy Spirit's planting, which grows in the Garden of the Lord. When we come to the genuine precursors of the Reformation we meet men like the Mystics, who were in the true Apostolic Succession even if they were Evangelical in reality rather than in form. They were of many types, and for the most part lived a true life of consecration to God without seeking to express their convictions in set terms, or coming into collision with the un- spiritual theories and practices of the official Church. There was Meister Eckhart the Domini- can monk who died in the Roman Communion, and who earned the honourable title of Master of the Holy Scriptures. He did not openly assail the prevalent corruption, but he called men away from empty forms and wordy scholasticism to wait on God. He told them that the remedy for the ills of the time was in their own hands ; that The Mystics 63 they were called to cultivate personal piety in all manner of circumstances. The external form was nothing if the spirit was right. Then there was Nicolas of Basle, " the Great Layman/' who gathered the Friends of God around him to represent the reality of which the Brethren of the Free Spirit were the counterfeit. His great appeal was for union to God through self-renunciation and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. He was burnt as a heretic at Vienna in his extreme old age somewhere about the year 1400. There were the contemporaries John of Ruysbroeck, the Flemish curate, and John Tauler, the preacher of repentance. Tauler is the typical mystic for most, and he lived a life of wonderful courage and usefulness. It was a true instinct which almost in our own time led the Protestants of Strasburg, five centuries after he had gone to his rest, to raise a stone over his grave in the church where he had preached repentance so long before to his fellow-townsmen. There was also a mystic like Henry Suso, the son of a German baron, who became a monk, and one of the Friends of God. Instead of being censured like Eckhart, burned like Nicolas, suspected like Ruysbroeck, or excom- municated like Tauler, Suso was raised to the minor stage of canonisation as the Blessed Amandus, for his loyalty to the Mediaeval Church. These men take us into godly homes and bring us into 64 The Arrested Reformation touch with pious souls who, in the midst of much that was alien to the doctrine and practice of the New Testament Church, lived for God and gave themselves up to do His will. For the most part it was from homes like these that the Reformers were by and by to come forth, to summon the nations to newness of life. Besides the Mystics there were others whose anticipation of the Reformers was so clear and definite as to raise the question once and again, why men like Luther and Zwingli succeeded where men like Wiclif and Hus failed. The only answer is that the fulness of the time had not yet come; and that in the sixteenth century there was a unique combination such as had never been before, through the intellectual revival, the birth of the nations, the invention of the printing press, and the discovery of the New World. Some one has put it that there was now fresh oxygen in the air, so that the fire of Reformation once kindled burned with a steady and consuming flame. " The wind bloweth where it listeth ; so is every one that is born of the Spirit/' Some of these precursors of the Reformers were men of outstanding nobility and gifts. The work of John Wiclif, the Morning Star of the English Reformation as he has been called, for example, was vastly more fruitful than has sometimes been supposed. Writers like Professor Pollard and Dr. Wiclif and Savonarola 65 Rashdall go so far as to say that the English Re- formation was native to the soil, that it borrowed little or nothing from Luther, and that in many particulars it followed the lines laid dov/n by Wiclif long before. When it is said that Wiclif lived before his time that does not mean that he was one born out of due season, but that in his case the interval between the sowing and reaping was even longer than usual. Yet the fact that Wiclif was hearing Mass at the time of his last illness reminds us that he was a precursor of the Refor- mation rather than a Reformer in the sixteenth century sense. That is even truer of another hero in the fight with tyranny and corruption, Savonarola, the great Italian. His latest writing is the most advanced from the Evangelical view- point, but he never quite got away from the limitations which the cloister life begets. Along with evangelical truth and fervour he combined much which was inconsistent with the Evangel ; and it is significant that the Florentines who adhered to him, the Piagnoni or Weepers as they were called, did not favour the Reformation when it became an accomplished fact, and are even said to have persecuted the followers of Luther. Savonarola's greatest book, The Triumph of the Cross, was used as a text-book in Romish schools. Others of this band of noble pioneers whose 5 66 The Arrested Reformation names ought to be held in grateful remembrance are Hus and Jerome, John of Goch and John Wessel. It was of this last that Luther said: " Had I read Wessel before, my enemies would have said, Luther has taken everything from Wessel, so thoroughly do our ideas agree." Weasel's teaching was in harmony with Reformation doctrine in matters so crucial and vital as Scrip- ture, Justification, and the Priesthood of Be- lievers. It was, indeed, only the protection of powerful friends that saved him from the Inquisi- tion ; and many of his works were destroyed by the diligence of the mendicant friars. How complete such destruction could be may be seen from the fate of an Italian tractate, entitled The Benefits of Christ's Death, which appeared in Venice in 1542, and of which no fewer than sixty thousand copies had been sold within six years, besides many reprints and translations thereafter. Yet the extirpation of it was so thorough that thirty years after its appearance it was no longer to be found in the original, and a century later it was believed that no translation of it existed. The genealogies of the Reformation thus show that the ancestry of the Reformers is not to be found in Mediaeval heretics and separatists, but among those who were truly evangelical in spirit in spite of much error, and who had fellowship Augustine s Inheritance 67 with God in spite of every barrier which priest- craft had set up. Similarly the ancestry of the Church of Rome is to be found in those who paved the way for the belief in Transubstantiation and the substitution of a man-made religion for the Divine revelation. The Church of Rome to-day represents only one side of the Mediaeval Church, and that the schismatic. Not only so, but the ancestry of the post-Reformation sects whether on the Anabaptist or the Socinian extreme, used as they have been to vilify Evangelicalism as if they were its logical or legitimate fruits, is to be found in part in Pantheistic, Manichsean, and other heresies which appeared sporadically in the Mediaeval Church, and in part in doctrines of that Church which were never branded as heretical. Much that had been secretly at work in the minds of men found vent after the Reformation which was in no sense bound up with it. How strangely truth and error were often com- bined in the pre-Reformation era may be seen in Augustine himself. The Reformers largely owed their doctrines of grace to him, but he was a fountain of bitter water as well as of sweet. He upheld the celibacy of the clergy, advocating monas- ticism, and had much to do with the introduction of the doctrine of purgatory. " The inheritance of Augustine," says Principal Fairbairn, "was divided. The Catholics succeeded to his polity, the Reformers 68 The Arrested Reformation to his theology." " Augustine's ideas in regard to the Church/' says Harnack, " are full of contra- dictions." The Reformers were not schismatics nor were their doctrines novelties. They represent the triumph of truths and yearnings which were never wholly unknown even in the darkest days. Evangelicalism had been almost crushed out by sacerdotalism, but it had lingered on in the hearts of those who were humble and contrite ; and in the Reformation era, when the Breath of God fanned the smouldering embers into flame, they blazed out into a great conflagration which illumined many a land. CHAPTER III The Principles of the Reformation HOW far the Reformers met the situation with which they were confronted can best be seen by a consideration of the great practical and operative principles which were common to all of them. Such a consideration will also show how deplorable, as well as how un- necessary, was the arrest which ere long laid its icy fingers on the movement which at first went forth conquering and to conquer. That it began well is not open to question. The great conflict and revival of the sixteenth century may be looked at with advantage from various standpoints. The movement may be looked at from the national point of view, and its special features among the different peoples traced and compared. There were the nations where practi- cally the whole community came under its influence such as England, Scotland, and Holland; Norway, Sweden, and Denmark ; and the nations where it failed and which as a consequence ended in reaction such as Italy, France, and Spain. Italy became a mere geographical expression ; while Spain and 70 The Arrested Reformation France were held more grimly than ever under the twofold despotism of the Church and the Crown. The Inquisition may be taken as the symbol of the one despotism and the Bastille of the other. There were also the nations, such as Germany and Switzerland, where it only partially succeeded, and where the results were civil war and the indefinite postponement of the development of their corporate life. It may also be looked at from the stand- point of the division into Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican, which resulted in, and had so much to do with, the arrest which we are considering. Lutheranism became dominant in Germany and Scandinavia ; Calvinism in Scotland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands ,' while Anglicanism pursued a course of its own in England, through its insist- ence on the necessity for the historical episcopate in the Reformed Church. The Reformation may also be looked at as a European movement, and from the standpoint of the common influences which led to a simul- taneous revival in so many lands. And it has to be borne in mind that the Europe of Luther was more susceptible to such a simultaneous movement than the Europe we know, in spite of our modern means of intercommunication. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had, it is true, been the birth-time of the nations of modern Europe, but there was only one Church. When the Reforma- Reformation Europe 7 l tion began, Aberdeen and St. Andrews were ruled from the same centre as Canterbury and York. Frankfort and Copenhagen obeyed the same ecclesiastical rule as Venice, Brussels, and Mar- seilles. Not only so, but the dominant statesmen in all the lands were nearly always Churchmen who used their power for the most part in the interests <of the Papal domination. One result of this universal system was that the same sort of abuses existed everywhere. Every land suffered from the greed and corruption of Rome, and in every land the pious and sincere were alienated from Popery and prepared for the Reformation. The German merchant and the Scottish peasant, the Flemish weaver and the Swiss shepherd, the French nobleman and the English artisan, alike suffered from the exactions of the Papal system, and in person and family, as patriots and men with souls to be saved, had grievances hard to be borne against the greedy, licentious, ignorant, and idle ecclesiastics who swarmed everywhere. There was also the fact that scholars all over Europe wrote and spoke one literary language. Lord Bacon, for example, although he flourished as late as the reign of James the First, rewrote his greatest works in Latin that he might appeal to the scholars and students of Europe. The effects of this common language were, comparative ease in reaching those who had most to do with shaping 72 The Arrested Reformation the public opinion of the time, and a certain community of interest and feeling. Latin was the language of " humanity," and the books and pamphlets which exposed the corruptions of the Romish system and called men to newness of life were read without distinction of nationality. When the new spirit began to move men it appealed at once to Oxford and Paris, to Antwerp and Erfurt. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the Reformation was so widespread, or that it attained European dimensions such as no move- ment since has ever attained. But besides the one Church with its common abuses and the one language with its community of interests, the Breath of God was breathing upon the nations in a wondrous way in that era, and creat- ing everywhere a new sense of sin, with a longing not merely for official pardon, but for true holiness and likeness to God. It was a time of renaissance, of new outgoings and unwonted expectations alike in literature, navigation, and trade ; and the spirit of man was likewise strangely moved by that Wind which bloweth where it listeth, and was profoundly stirred by longings for peace of con- science and fellowship with God. The priest, however, and all the priest stood for, blocked the way. That there were many, indeed, even in the darkest days who surmounted every obstacle and drew near through the Saviour Christ can Reformers and the Bible 73 hardly be doubted, but they did so in spite of the entire Church system ; and whether they knew it or not were rebels against that system. The Reformation meant a return to the beliefs and practices of primitive Christianity. The super- structure which ages of ignorance and craft had built up was overthrown in whole or in part. Some of the Reformed Churches went further than others, and went furthest in proportion as they were most spiritual ; but all of them aimed at the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles. Not only did they go back to the Scriptures, they made a deeper plunge into the meaning of the Scriptuves ; and the principles which were common to all of them may most concisely be described as gathering round a new conception and use of Scripture, justification by faith alone, and the right and duty of private judgment ; and as summed up in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. A New Conception and Use of Scripture. The Reformers' doctrine of the Bible as the only in- fallible source and rule of faith and practice has been described by the theologians as the formal or objective principle of the Reformation ; but more simply put, their doctrine was that in Scrip- ture every believer can hear God speaking directly to him, and that He can be heard by every one in whose hands the Bible is. It is, indeed, often 74 The Arrested Reformation asserted that they simply put the Bible in the place of the Pope, and followed the one authority as blindly and unintelligently as the Romanists followed the other, and in an equally idolatrous spirit. But there is no foundation for the charge. The first thing they did was to claim that the Bible should not be dealt with as a literary prodigy, but should be interpreted like any other book. The Mediaeval doctrine of Scripture had dis- tinguished four senses in which any passage might be interpreted. In addition to the his- torical sense or plain meaning, which could be discovered by the ordinary rules of grammatical interpretation, there were the allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses which were said to teach men respectively what they were to believe, what they were to do, and what they were to hope. As an outcome of this fantastic treatment the historical and only trustworthy meaning came to be the least valued of the four. It lay on the surface and any one might discover it, whereas the other meanings could only be ascertained by the im- aginative and ingenious. Even Erasmus, the greatest of the Humanists, spoke disparagingly of the grammatical method, and asked : " What does it matter whether you read the Books of Kings or Livy's History if you cannot look to allegory ? *' Many even went so far as to advise that those interpreters of Scripture should be Reformers and the Bible 75 followed who departed furthest from the letter. The result was that almost any passage could be made to teach almost anything its expositor wished it to teach. Elaborate doctrines were deduced from the genealogies of Abraham and David, and important rules of conduct from the High- Priest's robes, or our Lord's journey from Caper- naum to Nain. The Reformers set themselves resolutely against this ur scholarly and pernicious system. '' The Holy Spirit," said Luther, " is the all-simplest writer or speaker that is in heaven or on earth, and therefore His words can have no more than one simplest sense which we call the scriptural or literal meaning." " I have observed," he also declared, " that all heresies and errors have orig- inated not from the simple words of Scripture, as is so universally asserted, but from neglecting these simple words and from the affectation of subjective tropes and inferences." Calvin, for his part, held that the Romish method was nothing but a device of Satan for annihilating the dignity of Scripture. In agreement with these repre- sentative Reformers the Westminster Confession of Faith sums up the Reformed doctrine thus : " All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves nor alike clear anto all, yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly pro- 76 The Arrested Reformation pounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other that not only the learred but the unlearned in a due sense of the ordinary means may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." The Bible was thus taken from the theologians and given to the people to be for all time the people's Book. The ecclesiastical media through which the light had shone in such fitful and bewildering ways were set aside, and welcome rays of hope and peace shone from the Word itself into many a lowly, weary, waiting heart. The Reformers, however, were not content with insisting that the Bible should be read and understood like any other book, they dealt with it in a far freer fashion than would be approved by some of their disciples now. Luther, for example, in one connection or another, asked what it mattered whether or not Moses wrote Genesis ; put the date of Ecclesiastes down past the time of Malachi ; wished the Book of Esther was not in the Bible ; said that the story of Jonah was more absurd than the fables of the poets ; and not only denied that the Epistle of James could have been written by an Apostle or could be reconciled with the writings of St. Paul, but called it an epistle of straw as compared with the writings of Peter, Paul, or John. Calvin, too, every- where exercises similar freedom, although he used it with greater discretion. He pronounced Freedom and Faith 77 John viii. 1-11 and 1 John v. 7 to be interpolations ; denied the Messianic reference of some of the Psalms usually held to be Messianic ; and in deal- ing with an apparent discrepancy in the Gospels, said that he did not know how it had arisen and did not very much care. These great exegetes lived when Bible Criticism was in its infancy, and in the fuller light of our time they might have changed some of their textual opinions. As a matter of fact they changed some of them as it was, when they understood the Word better. But in view of such utterances it is ridiculous to say that they made a fetish of the Bible which they had rescued for the people. That they have likewise been accused of having anticipated modern rationalism by their attitude to Scripture suggests that, in a marvellous way, considering the atmosphere in which they were trained, they found the golden mean of manly independ- ence and reverent simplicity. Turning from their negative teaching, as they removed the encrustations of the ages, to their positive teaching about Scripture, we see how fruitful was the conception of the Word with which they enriched mankind. They thought of the Bible as no mere storehouse of information regarding doctrine and morals, but as a means of grace, since God spoke in it directly to the human soul. They taught that men could not 78 The Arrested Reformation only obtain instruction through the study of Scripture but could enter into fellowship with Him whose book it is. For them it opened up the way not merely to knowledge about God but to communion with God. Those who make a diligent and faithful use of it share in the blessed experience of intercourse with God, of which it tells. The Bible was vindicated as the record of that revelation in history by which God in His grace has been training men for Himself, and making the great salvation known to them. It was never a mere book for the Reformers, but a living voice. Their doctrine of the Testi- mony of the Holy Ghost must always be borne in mind in connection with their doctrine of Scripture, for it was only in the light of that Testimony, only because the Spirit of God spoke to them in it, that they made the Bible the ultimate standard by which they tested not only the claims of Rome but every other claim. They clung to the Bible with their whole heart and mind, and made it their constant guide ; but they never worshipped the letter with that devotion which kills. They kept their hearts open to the Spirit who gave them light. And thus they heard the voice of the Father leading them on to higher and holier heights, and knew the life- giving Word of the Living God. If only their successors had been as loyal and wise, the ages Testimony of Holy Spirit which followed would have had a very different tale to tell. Instead of arrested development there would have been that perennial revival and endless growth to which God has called His Church. Then, as now, the Romish theory of the Sacra- ments was that they perpetuate and prolong the work of Christ in such a way that the believer is not left merely to faith in something which took place in a far distant past, but is in touch with the living presence of God. This theory, like most of the Romish theories, has grown out of an actual need. It is salvation here and now that men crave. It is a Saviour who is a present reality for whom the heart yearns. But the Reformers soon saw that this want had been provided for in an infinitely better way than by the Mass or priestly absolution. The Living Word, truly understood, has this ever- present application and power. It speaks through the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Spirit speaks through it in a blessed circle of grace, to the faithful soul here and now, as it has always spoken to those who wait on Him. As the Reformers thought of it and used it, the Bible is the voice of God speaking directly to men in words they can hear and under- stand. When they were asked how they knew it was the Word of God, they replied that there was that in it which made them as sure that God was speaking to them in it, as they were that they 8o The Arrested Reformation could see the light of day. Their interpretation of it verified itself to their hearts by the light and peace which the acceptance of it brought. It is the voice of the Good Shepherd which those who are His are able to recognise as they follow Him. The significance of this is emphasised by the con- trast, already alluded to, between the attitude of the Reformation and that of Rome to the circulation of the Bible. On the part of the Romish authorities there was a growing determination to keep the vernacular Scriptures from the people, and this became explicit and official at the Council of Trent. The Reformers, on their part, hastened to translate the Bible into every language and to put it into every hand. It was at once their daily guide and their court of appeal ; and they held that with God speaking to him in it, the poor man knew more about the way of salvation than Councils or Popes did without its instruction and inspiration. Justification by Faith alone. This doctrine, which for many is the characteristic doctrine of the Reformers, has been called their material or subjective principle, and is closely bound up with their new doctrine of the Scriptures. Faith, for the Reformers, meant more than cold assent to doctrines. It was personal trust in and resting on the personal Saviour who spoke to them in the Word. To tell how this doctrine came to be in ^Justification by faith Si the forefront would be to tell the story of the Reformation. The desire to be just before God is one of the most fundamental in the heart of man. There is an innate yearning to be at peace with God, and the different religions are just the different ways in which men have attempted to meet that yearning ; and when the Reformers had their eyes opened in actual experience of the pardoning grace of God in Christ they saw that the Church of Rome had been leading men in the wrong direction. They found that the chief importance had come to be put on the external; and they heard the indulgence-seller advertise his power to forgive the most flagrant offences in return for money payments. Not only so, but for men who through faith and repentance had been born again, the theory which underlay that system was almost as repugnant as the system itself. That theory was that the Divine pardon could only be pronounced by a priest. The only channel through which God spoke pardon and peace to the penitent soul was the priesthood of Rome, manifestly vicious as it sometimes was. In opposition to all this, the Reformers taught that the penitent can go direct to God in his sorrow for his sin, and in simple dependence on the promises can obtain pardon from God. The Romish system made pardon depend on the mechanical completeness of confession and con- 82 The Arrested Reformation trition, and on adherence to stereotyped forms ; whereas the Reformation doctrine made it depend on the sovereign grace of God in Christ bestowed on all who trust in Him. " Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins and accepteth us as righteous in His sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone." This faith has sometimes been reduced to a mere intellectual assent to doctrines, an affair of the head rather than of the heart ; but with the Re- formers it was always heartfelt trust in a personal Saviour. The penitent sinner goes direct to Him whom he has offended, and who alone can pardon ; and who always pardons those who cry to Him in faith. Grace is the keynote of the whole Reformation system, as became a movement which was primarily a revival of religion ; and in presence of the free grace of God the need for priests with their absolution and indulgences disappears, and the whole fabric of the Romish system of justifica- tion crumbles to the dust. The chief objection which has been urged to the Reformers' doctrine helps to make this obvious. It has constantly been affirmed that it tends to make those who accept it careless in regard to the moral law ; or, as a modern writer has it, that it is an affront on morality. History, however, shows that its tendency is exactly the reverse. The faith Antinomianism 8 3 which brings the sinner into personal touch 'with Christ is of its own nature fruitful in good works. It reaches the deepest springs of holy living and aspiration. It provides the only sure foundation for the Christian life, and opens up the only way by which those who have been sinners can have fellowship with God. Experience has never shown that fear is a more powerful incentive to purity than gratitude, and the yearning to be Christ- like, born of union to Him. If faith meant the mere acceptance of certain dogmas, the objection of Antinomianism might hold ; but when it means, as it meant for the Reformers, that the soul has gone out in loving surrender to Christ, it cannot hold, inasmuch as the highest possible basis and inspiration for the moral life has been secured. With Luther as with St. Paul, with Calvin as with Augustine, the longing for holiness was passionate and overwhelming, and the whole record of the Church is with us to prove that free grace has been immensely more fruitful in holy, tender, Christ- like lives than any system of legalism which has yet been devised. That some are unable to rise to the heights, and that there have been camp- followers in the army of God all through, do not prove that the doctrine of justification by faith is inadequate. There were Antinomians in St. Paul's day, and the nature of his appeals to them bears out the conviction that the Apostolic doctrine 84 Tfie Arrested Reformation was the Reformation doctrine, even as it is still the doctrine of all the Evangelical Churches. " Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound ? God forbid," seems to presuppose the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, and to show that the Apostolic doctrine was misunderstood and assailed very much as the doctrine of the Reformers was. The Right and Duty of Private Judgment. In the Middle Ages under feudal law the rights of man as man were hardly ever recognised in any sphere. The vassal obeyed his lord, and the lord his over- lord. Even the freedom of monarchs was in part mere arbitrary caprice, and in part was subject to the veto of the barons and the limits of taxation. At its best such a system developed personal devotion, and made " spend me defend me " mean that the vassal would share what his lord had. But it was altogether out of harmony with the Divine origin and destiny of men, and the Re- formation demand for freedom of conscience and the right of private judgment struck its death-knell. Luther and many another who followed him may have had no clear perception of all that was in- volved; but Calvin and Knox and others who came a generation later saw clearly enough that freedom could not be confined to one department ; and we see now that it must be claimed for every sphere. Private ^Judgment 85 " Our modern ideas of civil liberty are in the last resort rooted in the Reformation. From the moment when the Reformers swept away all that came between the individual soul and its Creator, asserted the full rights of the humblest being to unrestricted communion with God through Christ, and laid upon him the burden and glory of responsi- bility to the Supreme for the gift of Eternal Life from that hour political liberty became inevitable. The religious truth wrought itself out in the political and economic sphere by virtue of the unity of the soul. Religious conviction generated the spirit of liberty." How could a man who stood before the King of kings admit that he was unfit to share in the social and political government of his own fatherland ? It was not, however, through any explicit claim so much as through the exercise of their freedom that the Reformers laid the founda- tion of the freedom which we now enjoy. The right was implied in the procedure by which the teaching of Rome was rejected in obedience to the teaching of Christ, and right and duty always went hand in hand. Whenever it was seen that pardon comes through a transaction between the soul and God, and that the Bible is such a Divine message that every one who reads it aright can understand it and enter by faith and obedience into the blessedness of which it tells, it was inevitable that the claim should be 86 The Arrested Reformation asserted that man must be free to deal with God for himself and to read and interpret the Bible for himself. Not only so, but in the new light it was by and by seen that it is absurd to interfere with this right. No one can believe to order. Men can only believe what for them is credible, and force cannot take the place of credibility. " Convince a man against his will, he's of the same opinion still;" and even when one wishes to be convinced, conviction can neither be commanded nor forced. A man can no more believe with his neighbour's faith than he can see with his neigh- bour's eyes ; and those who deny the right of private judgment are as stupid as they are tyran- nical. For the Reformers the duty of private judgment was vastly more than the right. We are no more at liberty to abrogate this right or to neglect the exercise of this spiritual faculty for the discovery of necessary truth than we are free to put out our eyes. Those who do not use their right of private judgment are failing in an obvious duty. Many years ago when the late Marquis of Ripon became a Roman Catholic and resigned the Grand- mastership of the English Freemasons at the instigation of his spiritual advisers, it was argued that his right of private judgment had been recog- nised since it was in the exercise of it he had given up the position. But that was to forget that there Priesthood of Believers 87 is a duty as well as a right, and that while rights may be surrendered duties cannot be evaded with- out guilt. Yet how many there are who claim to be the children of the Reformation who are as faith- less to this duty as the devotees of Rome ! No Christian should ever forget that every right in- volves a duty, and that obedience to the duty is the only valid proof of appreciation of the right. These great Reformation principles regarding Scripture, justification by faith, and the right and duty of private judgment, are all summed up in the doctrine of the, priesthood of all believers. The right of access to God's very presence has been conferred by Him on all who are His ; and every believer can and must hear God speaking to him in His Word and by His Spirit. Either there is no priest but Christ, or every believer is a priest ; and no one can be a New Testament priest except in the sense in which every believer is a priest. Every believer exercises the priestly functions of drawing near to God, pleading the all- availing and ever-valid sacrifice of Christ, and making intercession for others and himself. Nor is it open to doubt that in this respect also the Reformation doctrine is the doctrine of the New Testament. There are many names given to Christian ministers there, but never once are they called priests as an order or class. They are called presbyters or elders, bishops or overseers, pastors 88 The Arrested Reformation or shepherds, teachers or preachers, ambassadors, leaders, stewards, and ministers or servants ; but they are never described as sacrificing priests. And the reason is obvious. These other names are all congruous, and on the same plane, and in harmony with the Evangelical doctrine of the ministry and its relation to Christian people. But " priest " takes us into another realm unknown to the Apostolic Church ; and in the New Testa- ment there is no priest except in the sense in which Christ has made all His people kings and priests unto God. Yet the whole edifice of Romanism rests on the assumption that the ministers of Rome are sacri- ficing priests who stand between worshippers and God, and who have power to bring Christ's body to the altar, to offer it in sacrifice, and to forgive sins. The penitent can neither tell God directly about his sin or his sorrow for sin, nor hear God's word of pardon for himself. " None but we of the Apostolic Succession can give the body of Christ to the people " is the Roman claim ; and to every Roman priest at his ordination it is said : " Receive thou power to offer sacrifices unto God, and to celebrate masses both for the living and the dead." In the light of their own experience and with the Bible in their hands all this seemed to the Reformers to be blasphemous as well as mechanical and un- spiritual j and over against it they put their Rights and Duties 89 doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. What- ever difference might prevail as to other matters there was none, and could be none, as to this. It was altogether fundamental and essential; alto- gether central and basal. Any deflection from it meant disaster; and the slightest trace of error could not fail to be "the little rift within the lute" which must by and by make "the music mute, and, ever widening, slowly silence all." And here also the right involves a duty. If only those to whom God's message comes were all to avail themselves of their privilege, this doctrine would soon commend itself everywhere as in harmony with man's deepest needs and most sacred aspirations. Orthodoxy in creed is of no avail unless there is also orthodoxy in practice. Some draw near to God in spite of error, and are better than their creed. Others may never draw near in spite of their correct doctrine, and may have no creed but one of words. It was of the very essence of Eeformation theology that men could only know the doctrine of God if they did His will; that light could only arise for them in proportion as they drew near and had com- munion with the living God. If the work of the Keformers is to be completed and the arrest re- moved, there must be loyalty to their practice as well as their doctrine of the presence of God. BOOK II ON THE FIELD OP HISTORY CHAPTER I The Reformation Movement among the English- speaking Peoples rilHE contrast is great between the abundant literature which gathers round every aspect -- of the Reformation struggle, and the meagre fashion in which the conflict since, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been dealt with. Not a few who are familiar with every phase of the situation in the sixteenth century know hardly anything of the state of affairs now in any other country than their own. Yet although the interest ceased with the heroic age, curiosity might have led far more to follow the windings of the stream thereafter. As for the present situation, more important motives than curiosity may well impel us to see what has been the issue of well-nigh four centuries of strife. Not otherwise can we find what prospect there is of all-round triumph for the evangelical truth and for a perfected Reformation. If the arrest which was put on the expansion of Protestantism after its first series of victories is to be removed, its history must be traced from that point of view. 93 94 The Arrested Reformation So far as the English-speaking peoples are con- cerned, it may be claimed that the Reformation has more than held its own since the line of demarcation was drawn so tragically in the very era of its beginnings. In our confession of failure there must be no exaggeration, nor any suggestion of actual decadence. The failure has only been comparative, and Evangelicalism is strong enough to face the facts whatever they may be. Behind the ramparts which were erected so soon and so unhappily after the great cataclysm it has on the whole lived a strong and vigorous life, and has been gradually overcoming the defects which did so much to hinder its outgoings in the sixteenth century. It has awakened, for example, to the social implications of the Gospel, and our era has seen the unquestioned predominance of social interests and problems. It is still the sorrow of all its branches that the very poorest are so largely outside their borders ; but that very sorrow and the efforts which it inspires are the proof and measure of how far we have travelled. The Reformed Churches led the way in connection with elementary education, and cared for the children of the poor long before education was national, compulsory, and free. They led the way also in connection with Old Age Pensions, Free Libraries, and much else. It is to those who received their inspiration and their training in Hindrances Overcome 95 these Churches that we owe whatever is hopeful in connection with the modern Labour Movement. Everywhere under the leadership of their Saviour men and women are going out in fellowship with Him among the fallen and lonely, the hungry and submerged; and often at eventide they have the joy of bringing home their sheaves with them. Nor has the change been less remarkable in regard to the Missionary obligations of the Evangel. There is still much to be done, but the Keformed Churches are awake as they never were before to the claims of the heathen world. So momentous, indeed, has the change been that many now feel that the waves of revival which are to make all things new at home, to deliver the Church from indifference and heresy, from unbelief and world- liness, and to obliterate the distinction between Evangelical and Komanist in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church realised at last, may come homewards from the foreign field. That would be another of the pathetic ironies of history of which there are many, for God fulfils Himself in many ways ; and the prayer of all who are in sympathy with His gracious purpose of salvation is " Come Holy Spirit ; come directly or from the Far East as seemeth good to Thee ; but oh, come, and come quickly ! " Evangelicals everywhere are now agreed, in theory at least, that whether or not the attitude of the Reformers to g6 The Arrested Reformation Foreign Missions can be vindicated, it requires explanation, in view of the Saviour's unequivocal command. Even as regards the divisions which so soon marred the Reformation, and the failure to dis- tinguish unity from uniformity, or to realise that the Divine purpose is so manifold that it must be fulfilled in many ways, there has been a change for the better, although there also much remains to be done. Union in social effort at home and in mission work abroad has led the various branches of the Evangelical Church to understand each other better, and they have come to know each other as never before in the pathway of obedience to their One Lord. Not only is there co-operation in many fields of service, but there are strivings after actual union. The entente cordiale has passed homewards from the regions beyond. For just as in Canada the movement for the union of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists in one great Evangelical Church, a movement as full of hope as it is of courage, has been inspired and reinforced by the needs of the Far West into which emigrants are for ever pouring, so the pressure of the problems of heathenism is forcing the churches into harmony with each other out at the front, and in the firing line. In India the representatives of no fewer than six Presby- terian Churches have become one Church, and Union Movements 97 others are expected to join them. In Calcutta the Colleges of the Established Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland have joined forces and become one institution to per- meate the new learning in India with the Person and Doctrine of Christ, and to train native Indian converts to evangelise their countrymen. The same unifying process is going on in connection with the famous Christian College at Madras. It is probable, therefore, that the pressure of social problems at home will combine with the pressure from abroad to enable the various Churches of the Reformation to see things from the Divine standpoint, and in their right relations and propor- tions ; promoting a great Christian Brotherhood in which there will be room for charity in all things, along with unity in essentials and liberty in non- essentials, combined with the wisdom truly to distinguish what is essential and to see past every- thing else to their Divine Head. The only Northern country in which the Refor- mation did not take root was Ireland, and it may be that the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle in the sixteenth century were hardly to be ranked among the English-speaking peoples. Ireland had been won for Christianity so early that she repaid the earlier gift of Patrick by the gift of Columba to Scotland, and with him all that lona stood for in these early ages ; and the Irish Church was 7 98 The Arrested Reformation the last in Europe to become Romish. Not only so, although it was the English domination which was the fatal barrier at the Reformation, it was by a Bull of Pope Hadrian iv., the only English Pope, that Ireland was handed over to the English in 1145. In the time of Henry vin. the Irish people naturally spurned the religion of the conqueror, and no wise or pious efforts seem to have been made to win them for Evangelic truth. It was not till 1602, for example, seventy- seven years after William Tyndale had given the English ploughboy the New Testament in his mother-tongue, that there was an Irish New Testament; and that was typical of much else which was left undone. To this day the Protest- antism of Ireland, whether Episcopalian or Presby- terian or of the smaller denominations, is handi- capped by being viewed as the religion of the conqueror, and the identification of Nationalism with loyalty to Rome has been one of the most successful devices of the priests. Patriotic Irish- men are made to feel that loyalty to Ireland demands loyalty to Popery ; although there have been occasions in recent years when the Hierarchy seemed to recognise that unless they went with the crowd it would probably go on without them ; and they preferred being leaders to being left in the rear. The testimony as to how far Evangelical work can be freely carried on in Ireland outside Ireland 99 of Ulster is very conflicting ; but it seems to be tolerated only so long as it is deemed fruitless. Yet, tolerated or not, it is not in vain; and possibly it is most fruitful in districts where all controversy is hushed, owing to the overwhelming predominance of Romanism. Those, however, who are thus won for the Gospel have usually to go elsewhere ; and the line of demarcation still runs where it has run for centuries. Yet relatively to the total population, Protestantism in Ireland is more than holding its own. The number of Presby- terians, for instance, is not much less than it was when the population was considerably greater. But that may be due to the fact that emigration has been most extensive among the Romish section of the community; although, as has been already hinted, that may not be for economic reasons alone. It can hardly be doubted that rapid progress would be made if the din of mere controversy were hushed, and consecrated men and women were free to set themselves to win the unsaved for Christ. Not only do all men need Christ, but there is much in Irish Romanism which altogether fails to respond either to the deepest cravings of the Irish people or to the new yearnings for social amelioration which characterise our generation. There are indications, not a few, that the money exactions of the Hierarchy for IOO The Arrested Reformation buildings and much else, as well as their inter- ference in all the affairs of the people, are keenly resented. The trouble is not " the priest in politics " but " the priest in everything " ; and those who see beneath the surface say that such a subtle influence as that of the different atmo- sphere of the multitude of letters and newspapers, often accompanied by money orders, which come from the expatriated Irish in America to their kinsfolk at home, is telling all round ; and that the heavy yoke of Rome may be thrown off sooner and more completely than is sometimes supposed. As things are, however, a modern writer who knows Ireland well, and from within, has probably good grounds for making one of his characters say : "I don't know how it is in other countries, */ but here you are born one thing or the other, Protestant or Roman Catholic, just as you are born a boy or a girl. You cannot change. At least no one can who has any religion to change/' With the Irish Celts so predominantly Romish it is all the more remarkable that the other Celts in the United Kingdom, whether in England or Scotland or Wales, are as predominantly Protestant. In Wales, in spite of St. Winifred's Well and the much flaunted invasion by ecclesiastical refugees from the Continent, Protestantism is not only overwhelmingly strong but has been revived by wave after wave of new life within modern times : Wales I o i and is now vastly healthier than it was in the Reformation era or long after. Like Ireland, Wales had to meet the call of the Reformation at the great disadvantage that her conquerors were taking the Protestant side, and for long in- difference prevailed ; the English Hierarchy doing little to commend the Evangel to those committed to their care. As the Reformation came to Wales there was nothing in it which was calculated to impress her with the moral grandeur of the new strivings. As Mr. Owen Edwards, however, has shown in The Story of the Nations, the Jesuits came to Wales too late to arouse a national opposi- tion to the Reformation on the ground that it was an English movement ; and both at home and abroad Welsh blood was shed for the Gospel. It is not in accordance with fact for Romanists to suggest that Celts once emancipated are likelier than Saxons to yield to their blandishments. The Official Year-book of the Church of England for 1910 shows how vast the Protestant preponderance is in Wales. The Church of England has 193,081 communicants, while the Nonconformists have 550,280 ; or two communicants between them out of every five persons over three years of age. As for Scotland, although her Protestantism has been somewhat disintegrated, that is more in appearance than in reality ; and it has more than regained the vitality which it lost during the sad IO2 The Arrested Reformation eighteenth century of decline and death. Fortu- nately for her, Scotland had a Second Reformation instead of a Counter-Reformation. Her Pro- testantism has passed through persecution and expansion, through decadence and revival; and, with exceptions which prove the rule, any increase in the number of Romanists in Scotland is due to immigration, mainly from Ireland. As for her divisions, which at times have been little short of a scandal in view of the urgency of her work, some of them are already healed, and there is a widespread desire to draw together to defend the faith, in the best of all ways, by a united attack on everything alien to the rule of Christ whether at home or abroad. ' You have neither law nor parliament for your Church/' was said to John Knox, but his all-sufficient reply was : " We have the authority of God for it " ; and the freedom and simplicity of Presbyterianism which seemed to Knox and his contemporaries to rest broad- based on the will of God and the people's will have never ceased to commend it to the great mass of the Scottish people. Knox himself had no anti- pathy to the Reformed Episcopal Church of England, and at first the Church of Scotland did not differ radically from the Church of Edward vi.; but the General Assembly, which is the key to the democratic system of Presbyterianism, was always an essential feature of its polity. Scotland 103 Nor are the Presbyterians left single-handed to fight the battle of the Evangel in Scotland ; and such is the nature of the fight that there is room in it for all who love the Lord, whether they prefer to follow the banner of Episcopacy or that of Methodism or Congregationalism rather than that of Presbytery. The invasion of Irish Romanists, however, has raised many new prob- lems and created many difficulties. It has made it more difficult, for example, to retain the quiet Scottish Sabbath which did so much to deepen the spirituality of the community ; and the whole relation of Romanism to the preservation of the Day of Rest is one which should not be over- looked. One reward which Scotland has received for the hospitality she has ever offered to refugees from other lands has been that some of them have assailed her most cherished traditions and have sneered at a so-called Judaic Sabbath they never understood. Scottish Evangelicals have the fact ever before them that if the Gospel is to possess the whole land there are many who must be rescued from superstition. The problem of the arrested Reformation is now visible in every Scottish town. The story of the English Reformation is unique from beginning to end ; and at the present time opinions are keenly divided as to the prospects of the Evangel in England. Some fear, as 104 The Arrested Reformation others hope, that the Catholic Revival, as it has been called, will spread until the Church of England is ready to lose its identity in the Church of Rome. Many, however, although they are amazed at the indifference of the people, comfort themselves with the conviction that the Romeward movement at the worst is largely clerical and that the heart of the nation is still sound ; as hostile as ever to papal pretensions ; as much assured as ever that priestism is the enemy of liberty both in Church and State ; and still loyal to the great doctrines of grace which are common to Paul and Augustine, to Martin Luther and John Wesley. They agree with what Cardinal Manning is reported to have said to some of his co-religionists who wished to force the pace, that they should never forget that Oliver Cromwell is not dead but only asleep and may awake at any moment. And it is certainly remarkable that in spite of foreign invasions, and the numbers who have gone over to Rome from among the Ritualists, the Romish population is not increasing in proportion to the whole population ; indeed is hardly increasing at all. The late Cardinal Vaughan wrote in the Ency- clopedia Britannica that in the later years of the nineteenth century the additions to the Church of Rome numbered from eight to nine thousand a year, but that against this has to be set what is England 105 called the " leakage/' " This is a subject," he said, " which has engaged much attention. Apart from neglected children who are picked up by Protestant institutions, there are apparently few Catholics who pass over to the religious practices of other denominations. But the number of those who neglect the practice of their own religion, and lapse into an indifJerentism which either in them- selves or their children tends to become per- manent, must be very considerable, and perhaps balances or even more than balances, the accessions to the Catholic population from other causes/' He added that " the causes of the leakage are not difficult to recognise. The prevalent tone of thought and literature, so anti-dogmatic and agnostic, accounts for much. So too does the want of earnestness about their eternal destiny, which is to be expected in a proportion of the adherents of every religion, and naturally disposes them to abandon a religion whose tenets are dis- liked by a majority in the country where they live. But the most potent cause of all is the absence of proper parental control over the children of the poor in the period of life following on their school- days, an absence largely due to parental neglect, but largely also to the difficulty of exercising such control under the conditions of modern labour." Those who come into contact with the criminal classes and those on the borderland, say 106 The Arrested Reformation that this leakage is even more common among Komanists than among other sections of the population. Not, of course, that that is much consolation for those who wish above all else to resume the arrested development by winning the whole land for the Gospel. Yet so far as Romish progress is concerned it is well to know that whatever increase there is in agents and agencies or in social and political influence, there is none as regards actual adherents. The Eoman Catholic Monitor of 17th February 1912 admitted that whereas a century ago the Romish population of Great Britain and Ireland was roughly one in three of the whole, it is now about one in seven ; and that whereas the non-Romish population of these islands is now about three times as great as it was a hundred years ago, the Romish popula- tion is not much more than it was then. In England, as elsewhere, the Churches of the Reformation are sadly divided, the Free Churches in the aggregate being much more numerous than many suppose. Recent statistics show that while the Established Church has 6,886,972 sittings, the Free Churches have accommodation for 7,848,804, or nearly a million more. Not only so, but the Free Churches have 11,000 more communicants, and 890,000 more in their Sabbath Schools than the Church of England. How far the " Catholic Revival " has helped to put the National Church The Leakage 107 in such a minority can hardly be ascertained ; but it is certain that the claim that the very poor can only be brought within the churches by the adop- tion of ritualistic and other practices closely akin to those of the Church of Rome, has never been proved to be more than a claim. Those who wish such practices know where to get them ; and everything goes to show that if either the masses or the classes are to be won it must be through the preaching of the Gospel by those who themselves have experienced its saving and keeping power. It is noteworthy that in the story of the Eng- lish Church there is no outstanding name bound up with its Reformation like that of Luther in Germany, or Knox in Scotland. There were men like Latimer, the great preacher and heroic martyr ; and Cranmer, the eminent ecclesiastic whose death more than aught else, according to Green, sealed the doom of Popery in the land. There were heroes, too, like Ridley, Hooper, and Rogers ; but no one stands out as supreme. Perhaps the nearest to this is William Tyndale, who gave England the Bible in her own tongue. It was God Himself who said : " Let there be light ; " and it was round the Scriptures that the English Reformation, like every other enduring Reformation, gathered. " Lord open the King of England's eyes " was the dying prayer of the martyred translator. He io8 The Arrested Reformation knew well that the political changes which Henry had introduced were not and could not be the Reformation. Henry burned Protestants because they denied the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and beheaded Romanists because they adhered to the supremacy of the Pope; and those who make a Protestant hero of the sensual despot have little appreciation of what heroes are or of what Protestantism is. When Henry died, his son and heir, Edward vi., was only a boy. He seems to have been a sincere Protestant, but boy though he was he had his father's Tudor love of irresponsible power, and during his brief reign the Reformation was so identified with tyranny and unpopular statesmen that he achieved little more for liberty and light than his father had done. His sister Mary who succeeded him, an earnest, cankered, misguided woman, did more than either her father or brother for the cause she hated. It was in her reign that it was finally decided that England was not to be Romish. She burned the Reformed doctrines into the hearts of the English people, and taught them to hate the system which sent women and children as well as godly men to the stake. History dates the death-blow of Romanism in England from the time when Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer perished in the flames. The poor Queen died broken-hearted and embittered, and the shouts Puritanism 109 of welcome with which her successor was greeted told that the reign of terror had miserably failed to achieve its end. Queen Elizabeth was not a religious woman, but she was far-seeing as few British monarchs have been, and surrounded as she was by some of the ablest statesmen who have ever stood around a throne, she steered the ship of the state splendidly, and soon saw that she must be a Protestant if she was to be a Queen. During her reign England became the great Protestant power in Europe, standing beside Holland against Spain and the Pope. Her suc- cessor James, "the wisest fool in Christendom," roused the deeper side of English Protestantism partly by his pedantic interference and partly by his coquetting with Spain. This deeper side is usually called Puritanism, but might also be called Calvinism ; and whatever else the Calvinists stood for, they alone met the Jesuits with a resolution as great as their own, and kept the Counter-Reformation within bounds. There were two rival forces in the English Church from the first, and it is only in the light of that fact that the present state of affairs in that com- munity can be understood. In Lord Tennyson's Life it is told that when he received the Lord's Supper not long before his death, he explained that he only partook of it on the understanding that it was a communion and not a mass, a life- I IO The Arrested Reformation giving feast and not a sacrifice. That such a pro- test was needed indicates the composite character of the English Church. There has always been a High Church party in it with tendencies which might lead to Rome ; and there have always been those of Evangelical sympathies. Some think that this is one of the glories of the Church of Cranmer and Laud, of Bishop Ryle and Lord Halifax ; but it is only when neither party is very zealous that the two can live quietly side by side. Prior to the Evangelical Revival, although, as Pitt is said to have put it, she had a Popish liturgy, a Calvinistic creed, and an Arminian clergy, the Church had peace, but it was the peace of the ice- age. They were all frozen together. By and by, however, there grew up an Evangelical party led by men like Venn and Scott, Wilberforce and Simeon ; to be met later by the counter-revival on the sacerdotal side led by Newman and Pusey. Many English Churchmen now reject the name Protestant with scorn. They repudiate any con- nection with Lutherans or Calvinists ; but are eager to associate with any Church, however cor- rupt, which claims apostolic succession through a historic episcopate. How this will end no one can say ; but one day the English people, with their love for freedom and fair-play, will probably drive the mass-mongers from place and power, and take their stand once more among the Reformed communities. The Sleeping Cromwell \\\ Protestantism among the English-speaking peoples must not, of course, be simply identified with Protestantism in the United Kingdom. There are great and growing Protestant Churches in the United States of America and in the Greater Britain beyond the seas. In the various Colonial Churches the spirit of union has been more in evidence than in the homeland, and their develop- ment has been rapid. In North America during the last ten years the membership of Y.M.C.A/s has increased 90 per cent., the greatest develop- ment having been in definitely Christian work. Out of twenty-five millions, too, throughout the world who adhere to Methodism in its various forms, nearly twenty millions are to be found on the American Continent ; with half a million in Australasia, and 400,000 in Asia and Africa. On this aspect of our scheme two remarks may be made. The one is that the present state of affairs is far from satisfactory. Even if the heart of the British people is sound, any degradation may come to those who are besotted by indifference to the highest appeals, and careless in presence of the supreme issues. Rome is ever on the alert, her organisation is wonderfully complete, and the sooner the sleeping Cromwell is awakened the better. Fain would Rome find compensation for her losses on the Continent by gains in Britain and America. No form of Christian work is more 112 The Arrested Reformation urgent than to rouse the free peoples of these realms from their lethargy, that they may recognise their duty as well as their right to be free ; and that they may be led to rejoice in that personal living faith in Christ as Saviour and Friend which is the only permanent safeguard against Popery or any other evil. The other remark is that if only the Protestant- ism of the twentieth century were throbbing, as that of the Reformers was, with Christlike compassion for the lost sheep, and for all who are enslaved by error and sin, all would be well. It is a blunder to credit the Romish system not merely with iniquitous designs but with almost superhuman ingenuity and power ; or to pay it the sinister compliment of being afraid of its malign influence. It is well never to despise the foe, but it is fatal to carry that so far as to enter the battle with the conviction that the enemy is mightier than we. The history of Romanism, especially since the Jesuits have been at the helm, has been a history of failure, and never more so than in our own time, and we are well able to overcome as our fathers did if only we trust in God and in Him alone. If we let the light shine and walk loyally in it, Satan will be vanquished by Christ and error will perish like some evil fungus which can flourish only in the darkness. The Good News which won so many for Christ in the sixteenth century is still The Great Consummation 113 the power of God unto salvation ; and if only there were everywhere positive, devoted, faithful, Christian living and exposition of God's free grace, Romish error would not only be overcome, but Romanists would be won for the Saviour Lord as in the brave days of old. CHAPTER II Protestantism on the Continent IN some respects the story of Protestantism on the Continent of Europe is a sad one, since it tells not merely of a Romish Counter- Reformation but of a rationalistic Reformation. Fortunately, however, it is not wholly sad since it also tells of repentance and fresh expansion, and in particular of the great modern outburst of philan- thropy and missionary enterprise which is summed up as the Evangelical Revival. In Germany, the head-centre of the Reformation movement, war broke out between the Emperor and the Romanists on the one hand and the Pro- testant princes on the other, in the year in which Luther died, and went on at intervals until 1555. In that year the Peace of Augsburg put the two religions on terms of formal equality throughout the Empire. The conflict, however, soon began again and was carried on with redoubled violence in the Thirty Years' War. Even the Peace of Augs- burg had been only a maimed one, although it brought more than many had hoped for. Its principle, which seems abhorrent and intolerable Thirty Tears War 115 to us, was cujus regio ejus religio, " the subject follows the religion of the State," or " a man's religion is that of his prince " ; which did not involve genuine freedom for any, while nothing was done for those who were not of the same faith as their rulers. For long, indeed, anything of the nature of true toleration, and still less of perfect freedom, was deemed both impossible and wrong ; and the evil-omened Peasants' War had done much to turn what had been a popular religious revival into a political movement. Where the two parties were nearly balanced there was civil war. Where one was much stronger than the other there was persecution. It was only gradually that the Protestants themselves saw what was involved in their claim to be free before God ; if, indeed, they have all seen it yet. What Christian men claim for themselves they must claim for others, and freedom of conscience necessarily excludes any- thing of the cast-iron and compulsory uniformity which has so often been the impossible ideal of ecclesiastics. The Thirty Years' War began in Bohemia in 1619 and soon spread until Germans and Danes, French and Dutch, Swedes and many others, were in- volved in it ; and it ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. The chief scene of the war was Germany, and although it resulted in the two religions being once more put on an equality of a 1 1 6 The Arrested Reformation kind, the country was ruined. From that time almost till our own, Germany remained a mere lax confederation of petty despotisms with little either of freedom or national feeling. For the most part Protestantism lay dormant. The earnestness and power were gone ; and almost till modern times it held its own only in a negative fashion. In the religious as in the political sense it had ceased to " subdue kingdoms," as was the case also with its great rival. More recently, however, German Protestantism has shared in the Evangelical Revival; and the formation of the Empire within recent times has gone to strengthen the Protestantism of the Fatherland. The Emperor, it is true, patronises the monks at times under the common delusion that Rome stands for law and order, and is a bulwark against militant Socialism. Our own King James had it : ' ' No bishop, no king ; " and many rulers have been inclined to favour Rome and her claims because their rights and privileges seemed bound up with hers, and because they thought that her hostility to change in the Church would make her their ally in resisting changes in the State. As a matter of fact, however, dominant Romanists in our time are ready to ally themselves with the social democracy if need be to promote their own ends. " Political forms are tools in our hands " is their motto. " Religion German Missions 117 has the right to avail herself of anything, even of freedom, in order to rule/' The red cap of the revolutionary can be brought out provisionally to replace the hat of the priest. On the other hand, the recent wrath of the Germans, rulers and people alike, over the slur cast on Luther's memory by the Pope, in connection with the Borromeo cele- brations, has shown that they have no intention of allowing Eoman dictation or of going to Canossa. The line between the two religions, however, remains almost immovable, any change there is being in favour of the Protestants. In 1871 there were 623 Protestants in every thousand of the population as against 362 Roman Catholics ; whereas in 1880 the corresponding figures were 626 and 359 ; and in 1890, 628 and 358. The work of such a Society as that which was formed in 1832 to commemorate the two hundredth anni- versary of the victory and death of Gustavus Adolphus at Liitzen is one of several omens for good. It devotes itself to helping needy Protestant Churches, especially in Roman Catholic districts, and has done much excellent work in this way. The work of the German Missionary Societies has also in it the promise and potency of a new era. Since 1877 the number of these has trebled ; and in 1910 they had over 1300 missionaries in active service, with more than 6000 native helpers, well 1 1 8 The Arrested Reformation over half a million baptized native converts, and more than 3000 schools, with 150,000 scholars. In France as in the other Romance-speaking countries, as well as in parts of Germany, the Protestants followed Calvin rather than Luther and went further from Rome than the Lutherans did. The truth is that Luther did not shake himself altogether clear of the traditions in which he grew up ; and when in his doctrine of Consubstantiation he taught that the body and blood of our Lord are received not merely by the faithful but by the unbelieving participants in the Lord's Supper, he was still under the influence of the magical doctrine of the Sacraments. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the Reformers and their followers felt that they must leave that also behind and come completely out of the house of bondage. And just as the new movement arose in different ways in different countries, sometimes beginning among the people and sometimes among their rulers, so it developed along different lines. In Great Britain, for instance, we have England which changed the least of all the nations and Scotland which changed the most. At first the Reforma- tion movement in France was full of promise. Lefevre, who was Professor of Theology in Paris, published his French New Testament in 1522 ; and in no other country on the Continent did so many of the educated and upper classes sympathise with French Exiles 119 the Protestant cause. In 1559 the French Re- formed Church consisted of 2000 congregations and 400,000 adherents, among whom were the King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde. During the second half of the sixteenth century, from 1562 till 1595, the history of France is mainly that of the Religious Wars, falsely so-called. The massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572, is the most memorable event of a period which closed in 1593, when Henry of Navarre became a Romanist in order to secure the succession to the throne and bring about peace ; saying cynically that Paris was worth a mass. The Edict of Nantes, issued in 1598, secured toleration and certain privileges for the French Protestants, but this was revoked in 1685 by Louis xiv., when a most re- lentless persecution which greatly impoverished France was begun. Hundreds of thousands of her best citizens were driven to Britain, Holland, and other countries to enrich them by their in- dustry, skill, and business capacity. In Britain " the exiles established themselves as silk workers at Spitalfields, cotton spinners at Bideford, tapestry weavers at Exeter, wool carders at Taunton, kersey makers at Norwich, hat makers at Wands- worth, sailcloth 'makers at Ipswich, workers in calico at Bromley, in glass in Sussex, in paper at Laverstock, and in cambric at Edinburgh." " French refugees drilled the Russian armies ; a I2O The Arrested Reformation Huguenot Count became Commander-in-Chief in Denmark ; and Schomberg led the army of Branden- burg and afterwards that of England." It was not till the Revolutionary era that there was any further recognition for the Protestants of France. When Napoleon was First Consul of the Republic he entered into the famous Con- cordat of 1802, which only came to an end in 1905 ; and which not only secured certain rights for them but also a share in the money voted for the concurrent endowment of the various creeds. In recent years, prior to Disestablishment, the sum thus voted annually was 43,000,000 francs, of which 1,600,000 or 64,000 went to the different sections of the Protestants. It was not, however, till the time of the Third Republic, and after a lapse of 213 years, that their General Assembly was able to meet and prepare an authoritative Confession of their Faith. There are now over a thousand places of Protestant worship in France in addition to many mission halls. And as in earlier times the French Protestants still include an unusual proportion of men of influence and ability. Scarcely one in sixty of the whole population is Protestant, yet in one of the early Cabinets of the Republic five out of ten Secretaries of State were Protestant, and only one a Romanist who was believed to go to mass. Unfortunately, however, the French Protestants are sadly divided, The Netherlands 121 and the leaven of rationalism has done deadly injury. But in France, as in Germany, the growth of the missionary spirit is a hopeful sign. French Missions in Basutoland, on the Upper Zambesi, and in the Transvaal have been much owned of God, and their reflex influence on the sons and daughters of the Huguenots at home cannot but be helpful. So also in Senegal, New Caledonia, Madagascar, and elsewhere there are proofs that this Church which was under a cross so long, and is still so tiny, is seeking to follow the national flag with the Divine light. In the Netherlands, especially under the leader- ship of William the Silent, not the Taciturn but the man who could keep his own counsel, deliver- ance alike from the yoke of the Papacy and of Spain came at length and after much anguish. At the Eeformation the whole land was a busy hive of industry where men peacefully followed the pursuits of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and the truth which poured in from Germany, England and France found many ready to respond to it. As the number of Pro- testants increased the influence of France and Geneva became dominant, and the Lutheran type of teaching gave way to that of Calvin. Philip of Spain set himself to put out the light with all the resources of his vast power, but he failed utterly after the most memorable struggle ever waged 122 The Arrested Reformation between patriots and tyrants. Even although William was murdered in 1581 his son Maurice, trained for the work by his father who knew what might happen, carried on the conflict with success. Never did so small a power withstand a great one so long and so successfully. Yet the persecution succeeded so far as Belgium was concerned. That portion of the Netherlands is now one of the most Popish countries in Europe. The Seven Provinces, however, now known as Holland, are as pre- dominantly Protestant, except in Limburg and North Brabant. Holland, according to Dr. William Barry the Romish historian, the only country in Europe where religious freedom was understood or enjoyed, suffered much and still suffers from the ravages of rationalism ; but there also there is an element of hope in the growth of the missionary spirit. During the nineteenth century the number of native Christians in the Dutch colonies rose from 60,000 to 478,000. In Switzerland as elsewhere the course of the Reformation was largely decided by the circum- stances of the people. The Swiss were already free when the Germans were still serfs ; a con- federation of little republics with the motto : " Each for all and all for each ; " and the new movement quickly took root among them. It was far easier for Zwingli than for Luther to break with the past, and it was the Swiss type of the Geneva and Rome 123 Reformation which spread among the other free peoples. Even as in the second generation of the struggle Rome drew herself together and with signal success confronted her now disorganised foes, so it was from Geneva the forces went forth which met the resuscitated power of Rome with a genius, devotion, and self-sacrifice at least equal to her own ; and said " Thus far and no further " to her Counter-Reformation. It was not possible to confront men like Philip or Alva or the Stuarts with the passive resistance which Luther favoured. War to the knife had been proclaimed, and it was those who followed Calvin who took up the challenge. Many of them may have been stern and gloomy, but the times were stern and gloomy and so was the work they had to do ; and they saved Holland and Scotland, and almost saved France. So far as Switzerland itself was concerned, while the more progressive cantons like Zurich, Basle, Berne, and Geneva became Protestant, the Forest Cantons remained loyal to the Medievalism in which they had grown up, with the result that Switzerland, like Germany, was left rent in twain. In the year 1900 the census returns showed 1,918,197 Pro- testants as against 1,383,135 Roman Catholics, and 12,551 Jews. In Scandinavia the Lutherans carried every- thing before them, and whatever loss there may have been in consecration since Reformation 124 The Arrested Reformation days there has been none in numbers. In Sweden, for example, in 1890, out of a population of over five millions under fifty thousand were registered as not adhering to the Lutheran creed, and even of these the greater part were Baptists and Methodists. Only 1390 were Romanists and 3402 Jews. In Norway, in 1896, out of a popula- tion of more than two millions and a quarter only 30,685 were returned as not belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and of these over twenty thousand were Free Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists. Similarly in Denmark in 1890, 98*44 per cent, of the population of over two millions were returned as belonging to the State Evan- gelical Reformed Church ; and besides these there were over ten thousand Free Lutherans, and only 3647 Roman Catholics. It is a question how far this unchallenged supremacy of Lutheranism has been favourable to spiritual Efe, and there is no question but that, like other lands, these Northern nations need another revival on the sixteenth century scale. Some who are eagerly scanning the heavens for signs of the coming showers see a cloud at least as big as a man's hand in the Northern skies in such movements as the Inner Mission in Denmark and the Free Mission in Norway and Sweden. The Foreign Mission work of the Nor- wegians in Madagascar, too, as well as that of the Danes in Greenland and the Far North, has Erastianism 125 been greatly blessed ; while it is said that no other people can show such a percentage of missionary martyrs as the Swedes. The Erastianism of these Scandinavian Churches suggests the reflection that just as one of the forces which made for the Eeformation was the tyranny of the Church over the State, the tendency there- after in many cases was to replace that by the tyranny of the State over the Church, which is equally removed from the ideal of a free Church in a free State. Princes who became Protestant at the Reformation usually favoured Lutheranism rather than Calvinism, and affairs were arranged on an Erastian basis, which has seldom made for the growth of Evangelicalism and has never made for the manifestation of Evangelical fervour. Erasti- anism is no more favourable to the progress of the Gospel than Hildebrandism, and it was one of the influences which made the chariot wheels drive heavily and even come altogether to a standstill. The same spirit which led certain powerful supporters of the Reformation to lay greedy hands on the patrimony of the Church, even where it had been ear-marked for education and charity, led in many instances to legal bonds being imposed which were not only an un- warrantable interference with the freedom which our Lord bestows on all who are His, but did much to prevent the triumph of the Reformation. 126 The Arrested Reformation It is neither unhistoric nor uncharitable to say that just as some were camp-followers of the Evan- gelical army because of the wealth which had hastened the decay of the Mediaeval Church, there were also those who favoured the new movement because of their determination to bring the Church into some measure of subjection to the State. In Bohemia, the land of John Hus and Jerome of Prague, Protestantism took a strong hold at the Reformation. Nine-tenths of the people are said to have come under the influence of the Reformed faith. Their rulers, however, remained fanatically Romanist, and although the Bohemian Royal Charter of 1609 guaranteed freedom of conscience for the Protestants it was ultimately withdrawn in 1621, when a reign of terror ensued. Among other laws, which show how absolutely relentless the persecution was, it was decreed that no non-Catholics could carry on a trade or enter into marriage or make a will. Light and air were denied the Protestants. Yet the real per- versions were very few. Thousands quietly re- mained true to their faith. Thousands more made their way into foreign lands. More than thirty thousand Bohemian families, including five hundred belonging to the aristocracy, went into voluntary exile. So sanguinary were the measures adopted and so remorseless was the per- secution, that whereas Bohemia had four million Persecution and Progress 127 inhabitants when the Thirty Years' War began, it had only seven or eight hundred thousand when it ended. Yet there were still some witnesses for the truth ; and to-day there is a native Bohemian Church which, although it represents little more than two per cent, of the population, is making progress, and has shared to the full in the revival, spiritual as well as racial and political, which has led to the Los von Rom movement in the Austrian Empire. In Hungary, through the influence of the Bohemian Brethren and the Waldensians and of Hungarian students who brought Luther's teach- ings back from Wittenberg, the Reformation spread with great rapidity, especially among the German-speaking portion of the population. The nobles, however, identified reformation in the Church with a revolutionary attack on their privileges and rallied to the defence of the old ways. As early as 1523 Lutherans were declared to be punishable by death and confiscation of their property. Yet the new ideas steadily gained influence, and although still more drastic measures were adopted in 1525 to crush them out, these did more to hasten the downfall of the Hungarian Kingdom than to destroy Protestantism. Meanwhile the Calvinistic form of the Reforma- tion had gained such a hold on the Hungarian- speaking portion of the people and magnates that 128 The Arrested Reformation it was sometimes designated the Hungarian faith. At one time hardly a seventh of the population adhered to Rome ; but through the agency of the Jesuits a reaction set in. Many of the leading families returned to the Papal fold, and power gradually slipped from the hands of the Protestants. All sorts of means, insidious and violent, were used, and in many cases successfully used, to win the people from the Reformed faith ; those who remained loyal joining the Czechs as against the Austrians, realising that the battle for freedom of conscience and worship was practically the same as that for constitutional liberty. At the end of the eighteenth century the Hungarian Protestants received a certain recognition and liberty from the Emperor Joseph 11., the son of Maria Theresa ; and in our time there are nearly three and a half millions of them as against eight and a quarter millions of Romanists ; a truly wonderful result in view of all they have undergone century after century since the Reformation. Even in Spain, the home of the Inquisition and of religious fanaticism, the Reformation was not without its friends ; mainly, however, among men of rank and learning. Spanish merchants bought Luther's works at Frankfort Fair and had them translated into Spanish, and carried across the Pyrenees. Some of the Spanish grandees, too, The Doom of Spain 129 who were at the Diet of Augsburg or in England after the marriage of Philip and Mary, came under the influence of Protestant ideals and doctrines. But by means of a persecution which did not spare suspects as eminent as the Archbishop of Toledo, and which culminated in 1559 and 1560 in autos-da-fe in Seville and Valladolid, where the Evangel had taken root most firmly, the light was put out. The blood of the martyrs is not always the seed of the Church, and to-day there are probably not seven thousand Protestants in Spain out of a population of over seventeen millions. These " acts of faith," however, sealed the doom of Spain, politically and intellectually as well as spiritually. It is to priestcraft and superstition and the corruptions which are their invariable fruits, that she owes her present decrepitude, when none is so poor as do her rever- ence. Popery has brought what was the great world-power in the sixteenth century very low, and has blighted its life all round in literature, science, and art, as well as in religion and the arts of national expansion. In Portugal there was no Reformation story, although to it also seeds of the truth were wafted in that sowing time, and took root in brave responsive hearts. Otherwise her story is that of Spain so far as the desolating domination of Popery is concerned. When the Revolution of 9 130 The Arrested Reformation 1910 let in some light all Europe was appalled at the revelations which were made of corruption and degradation. Honour and honesty seemed to be as scarce as comfort and education. The Inquisition was established in 1536 and (according to the volume on Portugal in The Story of the Nations) it " quickly destroyed all that was left of the old Portuguese spirit, and so effectually stamped out the revival of Portuguese literature that while, towards the close of the sixteenth century, the rest of Europe was advancing in civilisation under the influence of the Renaissance, Portugal fell back, and her literature became dull. The establishment of the Inquisition was followed in 1540 by the introduction of the Jesuits, who speedily obtained control of the national education, and carefully checked intellectual development/' The Protestants of Portugal are said only to number some five hundred out of a population of five millions. In Italy, which saw Popery at its worst but was enriched by the money which was drained from other lands, the friends of reform were numerous and the truths of the Reformation had their noble martyrs. The writings of the Re- formers were widely spread. ' Whole libraries," says Melanchthon, writing probably in 1540, " have been carried from the late fair into Italy/' and Cardinal Caraffa warned Pope Paul in. that Southern Europe a?id Rome \ 3 i " the whole of Italy was infected with the Lutheran heresy, which had been extensively embraced both by statesmen and ecclesiastics." The forces of the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic re- action did their work so well, however, that now, although Italy can hardly be called a Romish country, there are only 62,000 Protestants in her population of over thirty millions, and these include the famous and much enduring and victorious Waldensians. In all these lands in Southern Europe, although the Protestant population is but a fraction of the whole, there is a growing recognition of the fact that Popery saps the vigour of a nation and withers its energies. The growth of nationalism which is everywhere so characteristic of our time has led many to see that there is no enemy to real progress, either as regards national aspirations or the development of national commerce and industry, so deadly as superstition and priest- craft. Only the blind can fail to see the unsatisfac- tory position of Roman Catholic communities as regards education, and their consequent intel- lectual and scientific inferiority. The commercial prizes have passed out of the hands of the Romish nations, like Spain, Portugal, and Italy, which once controlled the world's trade, into the hands of the great Protestant nations, Great Britain, 132 The Arrested Reformation Germany, and America. The new longing for freedom and for a larger share of material comfort for the working classes is opening eyes every- where; and in the dry, modern light many are seeing that absolutism in religion, like absolutism in politics, must go. Unfortunately, however, it is one thing to turn from Roman bondage and another to find freedom in Christ ; and mean- while the Southern uprising against priestcraft, with its baneful and inevitable fruits, has made for infidelity rather than for Evangelism. True Protestantism which began in a religious revival can only flourish through revival, and it is for that all lovers of truth and freedom should ever pray. Only so can the arrested development be resumed, and all the lands be won for a living faith in a living and regnant Saviour King. CHAPTER III The Deformation and the Evangelical Revival rilHE story of the Protestant Churches, as we have seen, is one of decay and quickening, -- of reaction and revival ; and now the forces of degeneration and regeneration are in keenest conflict. Amid much that is discon- certing, however, an element of hope is to be found in the fact that the era of indifference seems well-nigh at an end. If the Reforma- tion was, unhappily, followed by deformation, that in turn has been followed by genuine revival. Sad as the Counter-Reformation was when the Reformation forces were beaten back by violence and craft, the Deformation was still sadder, as lethargy and error crept into the Protestant camp and made progress impossible. It has, indeed, been asserted that this Deformation was not so much a perversion of the Reformation as the legitimate outcome of the principles held in common by all the Reformers. Romanists declare that nothing else was to be expected ; that Rational- ism, with its variants of Deism and Socinianism, 133 134 ^ e ^- rreste( ^ Reformation is the inevitable offspring of the Reformation attitude to authority ; that anarchy could not but be the monstrous progeny of the licence which the Reformers claimed under cover of liberty of conscience. The Rationalists, too, claim that they are the true sons of the Reformers, and that the logic of the Reformation position was bound to banish the supernatural from human life, and to lead to the refusal to allow the miraculous either as regards the inspiration of Scripture or the Person and Work of our Lord. This, however, is not historically tenable. Rationalism is not the necessary result of freedom as the Reformers claimed it and as it has been widely exercised since ; nor did it grow directly or legitimately out of the Reformation. Just as the Reformed Churches represent the true piety of the Mediaeval Church, and the Church of Rome the corrupt and pagan sacerdotalism of the Middle Ages, the Rationalists represent the heretical sects which wt^e usually alien to the Evangelicalism of the Reformers, although they are sometimes looked on as their forerunners. We may even find the precursors of German Transcendentalism, alike in its strength and weakness, in the old German Mystics. The true ancestors of the Rationalists with their hatred of the supernatural are not the Reformers, but such a sect as the Cathari, who, along with a perfectly warrantable revolt against the Roman The True Golden Mean 135 Hierarchy, were misled by a pagan dualism which had come to them from the Far East. Nor is it the case, although loudly proclaimed by some who ought to know better, that there is no abiding resting-place between Sacerdotalism and Agnosticism. The all-sufficient reply to that is the whole history of Keformation truth, arrested although its development has been. Inadequate as its expansion abroad and its manifestation of the Gospel of Grace at home have been, it has proved itself to be God's House Beautiful, in which multitudes have lived lives rich in fruit and full of the power of the Holy Ghost. It has been infinitely more than a half-way house if by that is meant a place of compromise. It represents the true golden mean and gathers up what is best in both extremes while avoiding their errors. It is not open to any who would be loyal to truth to assert that that cannot be which has been and is. Protestantism in the best sense is the most potent fact in modern life, and has given men the freedom they cherish most alike in Church and State. Not only so, it is the meeting-place to which those may yet be drawn who have drifted to the one extreme or the other. Those who have turned to Sacerdotalism through fear of Agnosticism or to Agnosticism through contempt for Sacerdotalism may yet meet in faith and freedom and in the enjoyment of the inspired Word of the Living 136 The Arrested Reformation God, and of all the rights of those who have been made kings and priests unto God, in the good land into which the Reformers were led by the free Spirit of God. Those who have found their way either to the Torrid Zone of Sacerdotalism which enfeebles and enervates and where superstition and priestcraft destroy energy and power of initiative, or to the inhospitable regions of the Arctic Zone of Agnosticism with its arid wastes, ought alike to be drawn into the Temperate Zone of winsome, healthy, open-air Christianity. In that kindly region alone can there be fulness of life, since there men must work if they are to live, but are assured of the reward of their labour if they work. Christianity is the religion of the Spirit, and the Reformers showed how that may best be realised ; and the ideal for all who are their worthy descendants is that Reformation truth, the truth of the Gospel, shall yet gather all men everywhere to worship and serve the King of kings. As to the sad facts of the Deformation and perversion of Protestantism there is no room for doubt. Bishop Butler said of the England of the eighteenth century that it had practically renounced Christianity, and there are many proofs that he did not greatly exaggerate the state of affairs. The general state of the Church was almost incredible in its torpor and death. It is, Deformation in England 137 indeed, difficult for us in these happier times to realise how terrible the condition of things was on the eve of the awakening. But the testimony borne to the reign of deep and almost unbroken darkness is manifold. The eminent lawyer, Blackstone, writing in 1780, says that on his removal from Oxford to London he sought out every outstanding preacher in the Metropolis, and that he did not hear a single discourse that had more of Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero. He said that he could never discover, from what he heard, whether the preacher was a follower of Confucius or of Mahomet or of Christ. Hannah More, too, tells that on one occasion she " saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar, and that was used to prop a flower-pot." ' There is a general decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men," wrote Isaac Watts. There were hardly any traces of moral or religious training among the poor; and that their social superiors were no better may be gathered from the reply of the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon, who had asked her to go with her to hear Whitefield preach. " I thank your lady- ship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive, and are strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in per- petually endeavouring to level all ranks and to 138 The Arrested Reformation do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and breeding/' A plan of reformation suggested by Dean Swift, himself an extraordinary person to be a Church dignitary, throws a lurid light on the depths of the Deformation. In 1709 he wrote an essay entitled " A Project for the Advancement of Religion," in which he declares that " hardly one in a hundred among our people of quality or gentry appears to act by any principle of religion, . . . nor is the case much better with the vulgar." His remedy showed that he was no exception to the rule himself, for his proposal was that persons in power should make religion the necessary step to favour and preferment, meaning by religion decor- ous conduct and attendance at church. ' ' Keligion, " he urged, " must be the turn and fashion of the age." As for Foreign Missions, the Bishop of St. David's, who questioned the right of any people to send their religion to another, may be taken as representing the attitude of the Establishment ; while the reception which William Carey got from his colleagues in the Baptist ministry may be taken as indicating that of the Nonconformists. ' When God wishes to convert the heathen, Formalism and Dogmatism 139 He will do it without your help or ours " was what they said ; although, of course, that was just what God was not prepared to do. He alone can save the world, but He does not save the world alone. But fortunately all this shows not merely how far things had deteriorated in England since the days of Tyndale and Latimer, but also how far they have since improved. Had the Deformation been the last word, few would have cared even to study it in its debasement. Nor were matters any better on the Continent. There also it was being made clear that dis- obedience is the pathway to death and doom. Protestant Scholasticism had spread everywhere, and the churches were frozen by formalism and dogmatism. Not only so, but the darkness became deepest just before the dawn, until even the flickering light which had shone forth through men like Francke and Ziegenbalg was fading away; and out in the fighting line with heathenism the very missionaries were tainted with the fatal rationalistic blight. Tliere were many forces at work against Protestantism and its inner or outer growth the fear of democratic rule on the part of the governing classes ; the intrigues and persecutions of the Jesuits, now the ruling power in Rome ; and much else but her worst foes were those of her own household. The neglect of Foreign Missions which characterised the Reformers 140 The Arrested Reformation became actual opposition on the part of their successors. It was argued that : " Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature " was a command for the Apostles alone, and that it was casting pearls before swine to take the Good News to the heathen. One leader, John Gerhard of Jena, actually persuaded himself that Tartary, Egypt, India, and Abyssinia were filled with Evangelical Christians, while others held that the Gospel had already been preached to the whole world. The result of this disastrous limitation was that their work not only came to a standstill, but the energy which should have been expended in winning the heathen at home and abroad was expended in forming new sects and parties ; until the bitter- ness and hatred of the various sections of the Reformed Churches cast a deep shadow over everything for which they stood. It was not merely that they did not co-operate with each other in the defence of the truth or in self-defence. They persecuted each other and divided their forces in such a way as to invite the enemy to conquer them in detail. Toleration, inadequate as that is as a substitute for freedom, is a plant of slow growth. Even yet it grows mainly in the fields of indifference, where it ceases even to be toleration. Not only so, but much that had worked out in practice better than it appeared Calvinists and Lutherans 141 to be in theory, so long as the warmth of revival saved men from the worst consequences of their logic, became hurtful all round when the religion of forms and creeds began to displace the religion of the Spirit. The evils of devotion to the infinitely little and of division over petty details can only be escaped when there is fervour for Christ and the extension of His Kingdom ; and the differences between Calvinists and Lutherans became serious and disastrous as true spiritual life and earnestness grew less. There are always irregularities where there is strenuous life, but that very life lifts those who differ to a higher plane. It is when faith grows cold that men make a religion of their differences, and when that stage was reached by the Keformed Churches a deadly blow was struck at the truth. The hostility of the Lutheran princes in Germany to Calvinism made them deaf to the appeals of their Dutch neighbours, brethren in the faith, throughout their long - continued struggle with Spain. It is even probable that if the Lutheran Elector of Saxony had gone to the help of the Calvinistic Elector of the Palatinate in his extreme need, Bohemia and Austria would have been Protestant to-day. The English exiles in the days of Queen Mary, persecuted and suffering as they were, were refused hospitality by the Lutherans because they followed not with them ; 142 The Arrested Reformation and such doings were typical rather than ex- ceptional, and were not confined to one church or party or locality. By their divisions in the face of the common enemy and by the evil spirit which begat these divisions and was begotten by them, they doomed themselves to weakness and disaster, morally and spiritually as well as politically. It is not to be wondered at that the deadly upas tree of rationalism took root by and by in such a soil; that the doctrine of pre-destination, which had been viewed as a means of grace by the Reformers, was turned into fatalism ; or that the new scholasticism elaborated doctrines which first of all were put in place of vital religion and then disappeared. Rationalism did not begin by being hostile to the Christian revelation as the Reformers had vindicated it and had found new life in it. At first it merely sought permission to render its authority more secure by estab- lishing it on grounds of reason, as before it had been received on grounds of faith. But it ended by seeking to annihilate all that was distinctively Christian. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, had to be eliminated as incapable of proof or logical demonstration, and with it went the doctrine of our Lord's eternal Sonship. The end was that revealed religion was banished ; while morality was reduced to the one virtue of worldly Pietism and Methodism 143 prudence; and the work of the Reformers was largely undone. Not that the fire on the altar ever went altogether out. Even when things were at their worst, as had been the case in the days before the Reformation, there were godly men and women in all the Pro- testant Churches who never bowed the knee to Baal. In the very heyday of the rationalistic reaction, and long before the Evangelical Revival came, there was a remarkable religious movement which was fraught with blessing for many, and with promise for the whole Church. In Germany it was called Pietism and in England Methodism. It set itself alike against the rationalism which sought to reduce Christianity to being a natural religion, and the formalism which was eating away the very life of the Churches. It sub- stituted fervour and personal devotion to Christ for the barren forms which were all that were left for so many, and its influence was great and widespread. It is significant, too, that at once, as by a Divine instinct, it set itself to do the social and mission work which the Reformers had so largely left undone, and with such disastrous results. Whenever the gentle breath of Pietism began to melt the ice of the Lutheran Church there was organised effort on behalf of the poor and the heathen. It was Francke, whose name meets 1 44 The Arrested Reformation us wherever good work was being done in that era, who founded the Orphanage at Halle, and helped to send out the pioneer missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Plutsche, to Tranquebar. The little Church of the United Brethren sent more missionaries into the field between 1720 and 1740 than the whole of the Reformed Churches had hitherto done in the two centuries of their existence. More than that, as Francke had been used of God to kindle Whitefield, so the Moravians aroused Wesley, one of the mightiest instruments for social amelioration Great Britain has ever known. And the same features characterised the later Evangelical Revival when at length it came in such power that it is not yet spent. Philanthropy went hand in hand with earnest efforts on behalf of the perishing multitudes abroad. As Mr. Green put it : *' The passionate impulse of human sympathy with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported Burke in his plea for the Hindu, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their crusade against the iniquities of the slave trade/' Nothing, indeed, is more noteworthy than this combination of philanthropy and eager Evangel- ism in connection with the Evangelical Revival, alike for its own sake and as throwing light on how the arrest of the Reformation is to be removed. Philanthropy and Evangelism 145 It is only through such a combination that the embargo can be lifted and deliverance from the power of the dead hand achieved. It is at the front, whether at home or abroad, that men come to see things in their true proportions and in the Divine light. Those who have been where their fellows worship the lower animals have little patience with discussions as to whether the members of episcopal and non- episcopal churches may sit together at the Table of the Lord. It is as they do His will that the Churches know His doctrine, and His will is that His message of salvation through Christ should be proclaimed to all mankind, not as a testimony against them but to tell them that the great heart of love is yearning over them. The union of forces in all- round Evangelism will lead to that union which ensures the victory which is twice blessed, blessing the vanquished and the victors alike. Yet it is still one of the disquieting features of the situa- tion that indifference is so widespread. This is partly a legacy from the neglect of the past, and partly due to the antagonism to the unseen which is one of the most subtle modern forms of ration- alism. The same determination to banish the supernatural which still shows itself in certain critical tendencies shows itself also in the sheer worldliness which makes so many occupy their whole life with the things of sense and time. 10 146 The Arrested Reformation In this story of reaction and revival, however, reaction is not the last word ; and although nothing is more urgent than fresh waves of quickening there has been no real return to the state of affairs in the pre-revival days. Everywhere there is the yearning to make Christ real for all, and to bring the love-light into dumb eyes and the deathless hope into despairing hearts. The most disconcert- ing fact is, that even after a century of revival Protestantism is doing little more than hold its own so far as Romanism is concerned. But it is of the essence of Evangelicalism to face discon- certing facts, and to bring gains out of losses ; and in their faith in their holy cause the children of the Reformers will neither ignore the indifference which is such a menace and leads so many to cry " a plague on both your houses," nor forget that their golden age is still in front and that their best is yet to be. CHAPTER IV The Counter-Reformation ALTHOUGH Leo x. looked on the beginnings of the Reformation with contempt, as another quarrel among the monks, Rome would have crushed out the new movement at once had she been able to do so. She had crushed out many another which had begun with as much promise of success. The political situation in Germany, however, made that impossible, and for a time she tried what conference and cajolery could accomplish. The exigencies of the Empire brought it about that the truth was too firmly planted to be uprooted when the full force of the blast fell on it ; and in God's providence even the Turks contributed to this result. For various reasons Charles v, did not allow persecution in the Empire, until persecution was either impossible or too late. Elsewhere, however, there was per- secution in abundance, both dire and grim. In the Netherlands, where such a heroic conflict was waged, thousands died for their faith ; while in France the Huguenots were slain in war, massacred in peace, and hunted down at all times 147 148 The Arrested Reformation as the enemies of the race. It is estimated that in the sixty years from 1520 till 1580 as many as 200,000 Protestants died in various parts of Europe for their religion and their Lord. Nor was the blood of the martyrs in every case the seed of the Church. In Holland and Britain persecution confirmed the people in their devotion to the principles of the Reformation as well as in their determination to be free. As they said in St. Andrews, the " reik " of many a burning infected those on whom it fell, with the new doctrines. According to Knox, Hamilton's martyrdom was the beginning of the Reformation in Scotland ; while, according to Green, Cranmer's finally made it certain that England was lost to Rome. But it was otherwise in Spain and Italy. In these countries nascent Protestantism was literally burned out. Those who were strong enough to avow their faith were exterminated by the prison, the torture, and the flames. There is no reason in the nature of things why persecution should not succeed if only it is sufficiently thorough- going, and in these lands the light was quenched ; and the peoples of Southern Europe, bright with promise and endowed with many gifts, entered on long years of thick darkness and degradation from which they are only now emerging. As Macaulay puts it : " The civil sword in Spain and Italy was unsparingly employed in support of The Blood of the Martyrs \ 49 the Catholic Church. The Inquisition was armed with new powers and inspired with a new energy. If Protestantism, or the semblance of Protestant- ism, showed itself in any quarter, it was immedi- ately met, not by petty, teasing persecution, but by persecution of that sort which bows down and crushes all but a very few select spirits. Whoever was suspected of heresy, whatever his rank, his learning, or his reputation, was to purge himself to the satisfaction of a severe and vigilant tribunal, or to die by fire. Heretical books were sought out and destroyed with the same unsparing rigour. Works which were once in every house were so effectually suppressed, that no copy of them is now to be found in the most extensive libraries. One book in particular, entitled, Of the Benefit of the Death of Christ, had this fate. It was written in Tuscan, was many times reprinted, and was eagerly read in every part of Italy. But the inquisitors detected in it the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. They proscribed it ; and it is now as utterly lost as the second decade of Livy." Not that persecution was the only device of Rome when she was confronted by the Reformation. The Inquisition and the Index by themselves do not altogether account for the Counter-Reformation. Only enthusiasm and faith, along with extra- ordinary self-denial, can explain the inroads which I 50 The Arrested Reformation Rome was able to make on the territories she had lost for a time. One of the outstanding features of the post- Reformation era was the outbreak of new zeal in the Romish Church as soon as it was clearly seen how formidable the Protestant movement was threatening to be. " In the course of a single generation," to quote Macaulay again, "the whole spirit of the Church of Rome underwent a change. From the halls of the Vatican to the most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great revival was everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently devised for the propagation and defence of the faith were furbished up and made efficient. Fresh engines of still more formidable power were constructed. Everywhere the old religious com- munities were remodelled, and new religious communities called into existence. Within a year after the death of Leo, the Order of Camaldoli was purified. The Capuchins restored the old Franciscan discipline the midnight prayer and the life of silence. The Barnabites and the Society of Somasca devoted themselves to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine Order a still higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same with that of our early Methodists to supply the deficiencies of the parochial clergy. . . . The members of the new brotherhood preached to great multitudes in the streets and in the fields, The Roman Revival 151 prayed by the beds of the sick, and administered the last sacraments to the dying." It is not possible to understand the Counter-Reformation with a view to a resumption of the Evangelical triumphs which were then brought to a close if it be imagined that the revival of Roman Catholicism was merely official or external. This is not a question of despising the enemy, but of understanding him ; and in so far as that revival was real, it was one of the collateral results of the Reformation. How far it was also a case of the good being the enemy of the best is another matter ; and it sometimes happens that such a good can do evil work better than the worst. But to quote Macaulay yet again : " The Court of Rome itself was purified. During the generation which preceded the Reformation, that Court had been a scandal to the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be ministers of religion. . . . But when the great stirring of the mind of Europe began when doctrine after doctrine was assailed when nation after nation withdrew from communion with the successor of St. Peter, it was felt that the Church could not be safely confided to chiefs whose highest praise was, that they were good judges of Latin compositions, of paintings, and of statues, whose severest studies had a pagan character, and who 152 The Arrested Reformation were suspected of laughing in secret at the sacra- ments which they administered, and of believing no more of the Gospel than of the Morgante Maggiore. Men of a different class now rose to the direction of affairs men whose spirit resembled that of Dunstan and of Becket. The Roman Pontiffs exhibited in their own persons all the austerity of the early anchorites of Syria. ... As was the head, such were the members. The change in the spirit of the Catholic world may be traced in every walk of literature and art." We do not sufficiently honour those whom they defeated, unless we give these new protagonists of Rome the credit that is their due ; even although we insist that it was the Protestants themselves who gave regenerated Romanism the great oppor- tunity of which it so amply availed itself in the Counter-Reformation. In addition to some who for one reason or another remained in the Church of Rome, although they were in sympathy even with the doctrinal aspects of the Reformation, there were many who were anxious to effect real reforms in the government of the Roman Church, although they viewed any doctrinal reforms either with indifference or dread. Charles v. was far from being alone in calling for a General Council which might reunite distracted Christendom by the removal of abuses which no one could defend. Luther himself had appealed to such a Council, Council of Trent 153 although not to one Pope-ridden and Jesuit- controlled, like that which ultimately assembled at Trent. The meetings of that Council, with which the Counter-Keformation must always be asso- ciated, took place at intervals during the years from 1545 to 1563. They were held at Trent as technically within the bounds of the Empire, and yet not too far from Italy to prevent it being dominated from Home. During these eventful years Luther died and war began in Germany in 1546, Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558, the first French Reformed Synod was held at Paris in 1559, and the Scottish Church was reformed in 1560. The composition of the Council, from which less and less was looked for as its character and limitations became known, was predominantly Italian, and of the Italians many were absolutely dependent on the Pope. No unfettered discussion was allowed ; nothing could be introduced but by the Papal legates, nor anything decided except with the Pope's consent. The voting was by individuals and not by nations, and it was never for one moment a free council. As Archbishop Laud pointed out, it was against all law, Divine, natural and human, that the Pope, the chief person to be reformed, should sit as president in it and be chief judge in his own cause. From the first the Protestants had no voice in it, although it had been intended by the 154 The Arrested Reformation Emperor that their case should be stated by them- selves ; and its bias against genuine concessions to them became more and more marked as it went on. Various abuses were abolished ; provision was made for the better training of the priesthood ; the organisation of the Hierarchy and the discipline of the Church were improved ; but, on the other hand, the anti- evangelical elements in Medisevalism were perpetuated and made dominant, and Home, instead of reuniting the warring sections of the Church, became hopelessly a sect. Not only were the main abuses left untouched and the current Roman contentions reaffirmed, the supremacy of the Pope as against Councils was established as never before. The tendency was then blessed and made official which finally triumphed in the decree of the Papal Infallibility in 1870. Since the Council of Trent the unity of the See of St. Peter has become increasingly the all-dominating mark of the Roman Church. No goodness is of any value, nor is any love or devotion recognised as Christian which is not accompanied by absolute submission to the Pope. Since then, the Romish system has been more logical and coherent, but it has been less possible than before for men and women Evangelical at heart to be nurtured in Rome or to remain in her communion; even allowing for the incalculable element in human nature, the obstinate irrationality The 155 of the heart of man, and the power of faith to live in unexpected places. There is far less room for controversy and far less scope for change than there was a difference which is not borne in mind as it ought to be by those who argue as if the Church of Rome now were very much the same as the Church in which Luther and Calvin, Knox and Zwingli, grew up and were converted. The movement which began at Trent and was consummated in our own day, and which made unity of organisation and absolute submission to the Pope the supreme tests, was chiefly the work of the Jesuits, who emerged on the scene as the great dominating force before the second assembling of the Council in 1551, and whose influence was supreme throughout its later doings. Their policy was not merely to put an end to the idea of reunion through reform, but to silence the cry for compromise. " Cease your discussions and crush Protestantism " was their motto ; and for a time their success was extraordinary. They secured the removal of the grosser abuses which weakened Rome ; they carried Romish doctrines among the heathen in an era when there were no corresponding Protestant missions ; and they drove back the Reformation movement to the limits which are still its practical boundaries. The disciples of Ignatius Loyola were the " Calvinists " of Rome who carried war into the enemy's camp ; I 5 6 The Arrested Reformation and they received conditional sanction in 1540, and unconditional approval three years later. The change they wrought was as vast as it was rapid, but their power became so great that it not only raised up enemies against them but led to cor- ruptions within their own ranks, with the result that not much more than two centuries after its inception the Order fell amid the execration of civilised mankind. After having been expelled from such Popish countries as Portugal and Spain, the Society of Jesus was abolished by the Pope on 21st July 1773. It had saved the Roman Church in the time of its greatest need, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it seemed to be without a friend. In the British Museum the medal struck by Pope Clement xiv. to commemorate the dissolution of the Order may be seen. The reverse shows our Lord, followed by St. Peter and the Pope, driving out three Jesuits with the words : " I never knew you : depart from me ye all." Underneath is a Latin reference to Psalm cxviii. 23 : " This is the Lord's doing ; it is marvellous in our eyes." The Society of Jesus was resuscitated after the fall of Napoleon and in that era of reaction which proved that to forget nothing and learn nothing was no monopoly of the Bourbons. It is probable, too, that its influence and power were never greater than they are now when it has become The Power behind the Pope \ 5 7 " the power behind the Pope/' and its General, the Black Pope, dictates terms to the titular Pope. Yet the lessons of its fall remain to show that somehow or other this remarkable Order has gathered widespread suspicion and hostility around it, among Romanists as well as Protest- ants ; and that it has been dogged by failure throughout. Their entire history suggests that we pay the Jesuits too high a compliment when we think of them as irresistible. They have not only come short of enduring success in their enter- prises, but their ultimate failure is inevitable. When men are degraded morally and intellect- ually to the level of automata they cannot do their best work ; and it is significant that even in the realm of education, Jesuit successes have been in connection with the exact sciences rather than in philosophy or theology, where personality and individuality count. The Power in the universe which makes for righteousness is supreme after all ; and when any body of men set themselves in opposition to it they are bound to fail, no matter how great their ability or how absolute their devotion. The Jesuits are not immoral as the old monks were in their idleness and ignorance ; but probably they are even more fundamentally at variance with the moral order of the universe, with their doctrines of probabilism, mental reserva- tion, and the end justifying the means. The folly 158 The Arrested Reformation of the wise and the blindness of the far-seeing are manifest on every page of the history of the Jesuits, even the latest. For now as ever, they are handi- capped by the essential and fundamental limita- tions of the subjection to which they have doomed themselves ; a subjection which would ennoble were it rendered to God, but which cannot but de- grade when it is rendered to men. The Dreyfus case was simply one of the latest proofs that they who make use of edged tools will cut themselves ; that they who use the sword will perish by the sword ; and that they who corrupt a community cannot but be involved in the inevitable disaster. " He who sits in heaven shall laugh," as when the consummation of the oft-baffled machinations of the Jesuits in the Infallibility Decree of 1870 weirdly coincided with the loss of the Temporal Power. As one of the most recent writers on this theme, Count von Hoensbroech in his Fourteen Years a Jesuit, points out, their successes have always been lacking in endurance and magnitude. They have frittered away their vast political in- fluence in a variety of intrigues, and in small disputes which universally lack statesmanship on a large scale. They cannot point to a single far-reaching success in the domain of universal politics. They train machines and not men. They destroy individuality and are wanting there- fore in independent thought and action. Even The Folly of the Wise 159 their devotion and self-sacrifice are mechanical ; and " smoothly gliding balls trace no deep furrows, they leave only light, easily effaceable marks." The General Election in Canada in 1911 pro- vided another instance of how the Jesuits over- reach themselves and miss their mark just when success seems assured. One of the leading members of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's defeated govern- ment says that the " indiscreet, unwise, and impudent " sermons of Father Bernard Vaughan at the Eucharistic Congress the year before were largely responsible for a result which was very gratifying to the militant Protestantism of the Dominion. It would be foolish on our part to despise their power and craft, for our free institu- tions may be involved in the ruin which the enemies of truth and freedom cannot but bring on themselves ; and it will be no consolation that they have failed to subject the nations to the Papal sway if they end in disgusting modern Europe with Christianity through their identi- fication of it with corruption and intrigue. But it would be equally foolish for those who believe in God to tremble before the worldly wisdom which within a few years has contrived to lose Italy, France, and Portugal to the Roman See ; and seems likely to lose the half-pagan half-popish Central and South American States as well. All we need in order to win in the world-conflict is to be 160 The Arrested Reformation open-eyed and loyal to the Gospel of the grace of God, and to meet the devotion and self-surrender of the Society of Jesus with whole-hearted consecra- tion to our Lord. As for the suspicion and hatred which the Jesuits have inspired, not only among Protestants but among Romanists, securus judicat orbjs terrarum what all the world says must be true. It is not for nothing that the English dictionary, which has neither ecclesiastical nor political leanings, defines "Jesuitry" as implying " deceptive practices, subtle distinctions, or political duplicity ; or craft ; " or that the French " escobarderie," the equivalent of subtle lies, comes from Escobar, the Spanish casuist who came under Pascal's lash in the Provincial Letters. We owe it to the deadening and baneful influ- ence of modern Jesuitry that in our own time men of pure and even of devout life have been parties to the Congo, Philippine, Dreyfus, and Ferrer horrors. " That a few negroes should be flogged by white men instead of tortured by their own chiefs, or that one wretched Jew should be punished unjustly, cannot weigh for one moment against the interests of the Church and the con- sequent salvation of souls." In its wider application, as summing up the entire Romanist reaction, the Counter-Reforma- tion was due to a variety of causes. There were the superficial reforms of the Council of Trent. The Society of jfesus 1 6 1 There was the power of the Inquisition and the Index which united to wage war against freedom in every guise. There was the influence of Spain, the great world-power of the age with its gold still thought to be inexhaustible, and its sword which still seemed to be invincible. There was the revival of Mediaeval piety as seen in men like Carlo Borromeo and Francis de Sales. There were the well-grounded fears of kings and nobles that the victorious Evangel would put an end to their privileges, so often tyrannous and inde- fensible. There were the failures and divisions of the Reformed Churches themselves after the first waves of revival had spent their force. But above all else there were the genius and deter- mination of the Society of Jesus which inspired and dominated the movement throughout. The extent of the reaction has already been indicated, but it is of the essence of any inquiry into the Arrested Reformation to emphasise how far- reaching it was. It meant the repression of the strivings after reform which had manifested them- selves among the nations of Southern Europe, a repression which not only involved destruction for Evangelism but the disappearance of freedom, literature, and art. It made a desert of the fairest parts of Europe and called it peace. It also meant that in Germany and Switzerland, which at first seemed likely to be wholly won for the ii 1 62 The Arrested Reformation new light, the waves of reaction swept over district after district, with the result that there were divided interests and desolating wars. In 1558 a Venetian traveller reported that only a tenth of the German people remained true to the Roman See, but by and by great territories like Bavaria, Baden, and the Rhine Provinces were won back. It likewise meant that the empire of Austria is now predominantly Romish, although at one time more than half of it had welcomed Evangelical truth. " Bavaria, the Rhine Provinces, the Duchy of Austria itself/' says Principal Lindsay, " were, according to contemporary accounts, more than half Protestant. Nearly all the seats of learning were Protestant. The Romanist universities of Vienna and Ingolstadt were almost deserted by students. Under the skilful and enthusiastic leadership of Peter Canisius, the Jesuits were mainly instrumental in changing this state of things. They entered Bavaria and Austria. They appeared as the heralds and givers of education, and took possession of the rising generation. They established schools in all the principal centres of population. They were good teachers. They produced school books of a modern type; the catechism written by Canisius himself was used in all their schools (it trans- planted into Romanism the Lutheran system of t Conquests 163 catechising) ; they charged no fees ; they soon had the instruction of the Koman Catholic children in their hands. The astonished people of town and country districts began to see pilgrimages of boys and girls, conducted like modern Sunday- school treats, led by the good fathers, to visit famous churches, shrines, holy crosses, miraculous wells, etc. The parents were induced to visit the teachers ; visits led to the confessional, and the confessional to the directorate. Then followed the discipline of the Spiritual Exercises, usually shortened to suit the capacities of the penitents. Whole districts were led back to the confessional . . . the parents following the children. The higher education was not neglected. Jesuit colleges founded at Vienna and Ingolstadt peopled the decaying universities with students, and gave them new life. ... A generation of ardent souls were trained for the service of the Roman Church, and vowed to combat Protestantism to the death." The territorial principle, that each district should be of the same religion as its rulers, was now used for the overthrow of the Reformation. Romish rulers with Protestant subjects were induced to withdraw protection from them, and many migra- tions resulted which have left their mark on Europe. The Jesuits set themselves, too, to secure the perversion of Protestant rulers, and were strangely successful. In 1614, for instance, they 164 The Arrested Reformation won the Count-Palatine, Wolfgang William of Neu- burg, and paved the way for the Romanising of the whole of the Palatinate in 1685. They even won an Elector of Saxony, who went over in 1679 that he might qualify himself for the Polish crown. In the preceding era they won Duke Albert v., and thus secured Bavaria and then Baden for Rome. And so the work went on. In Bohemia, Protest- antism was nearly extirpated. In Silesia thou- sands were forced to migrate. In Hungary, where the victory of the Reformation had been almost assured, the 2000 congregations of Protestants at the end of the sixteenth century were represented by little more than 100 at the end of the eighteenth. The reaction in France lay outside the Counter- Reformation proper, but its results were equally far-reaching and significant. Had the French become Protestant, as at one time seemed likely, the results would have been unspeakably moment- ous, and there would probably have been no Counter-Reformation. So irresistible was the Re- formation movement in France for a time, that in 1551 Queen Catherine, as the only way to pre- serve Catholicism, called on the Pope to allow the removal of images, the administration of the sacrament in both kinds, and the abolition of private masses. Yet by such colossal crimes as the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the revoca- tion of the Edict of Nantes, France doomed herself The Reaction Checked 165 not merely to Romanism but to the absolutism which led to the Revolution in 1789, and to the infidelity which has weakened her at home and abroad. Strictly speaking, the Counter-Reformation did not affect England ; but it might be argued that the retention of the forms and phrases which have lent themselves, willingly or unwillingly, to the Ritualistic reaction in our own time, was a phase of it. Certain it is that her whole-hearted adhesion to the Reformation cause, as that was understood in Germany and Scotland, would have changed the whole face of Europe in the days when the conflict was most critical. Strangely enough, the dry rot which began to weaken Protestantism at the very time when it seemed destined to carry everything before it, began to affect Rome in turn as disastrously, after she also had had her share of success. ' The great southern reaction began to slacken," says Macaulay, " as the great northern movement had slackened before. The zeal of the Catholics became cool ; their union was dissolved. The paroxysm of religious excitement was over on both sides. The one party had degenerated as far from the spirit of Loyola, as the other from the spirit of Luther." Unhappily, however, the line had by that time been drawn which still persists ; and in addition the spirit of the Counter-Reforma- tion still lives and moves and has its being in those 1 66 The Arrested Reformation who seek to get rid of their personal responsibility in spiritual things by casting the burden on others. In the phases of Reformation and Counter-Reforma- tion, of reaction and counter-reaction, of revival and decline which we have been considering on the large scale, we have " writ large " what is being enacted day by day in many a life. The never- ceasing prayer of God's remembrancers should be, that erelong the era of the Counter-Reforma- tion may be really at an end ; and that the spirit and fruits of the Reformation, the graces of the Evangel, may reign supreme in every land. ' Wilt Thou not revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice in Thee ? " CHAPTER V Roman Catholic Missions THE problem of the Arrested Reformation is complicated by the fact that the Church of Rome was never more aggressive than she is now. Alike as an ecclesiastical organisation and a home and foreign mission agency, she measures her strength everywhere with that of her rivals. Man shall not live by bread alone, and even the Church of Rome, with all her subtle adaptation to human weakness and human pride, could not flourish by mere craft and intrigue. She is many- sided in her efforts, and with all her logic is often admirably inconsistent. Semper eadem has been her proud boast, but it can hardly be said to have been her practice either in conduct or creed. Father Sacchi and his Roman observatory are not only a curious commentary on the dealings of the Inquisition with Galileo, but are an allegory of much else which is of far greater importance. Rome has, indeed, been ever the same as regards her intolerance of independence and freedom, and as regards her determination to identify unity with a ruthless uniformity, and to reduce every other 167 1 68 The Arrested Reformation question to that of absolute submission to the Papal See. She has, however, given many proofs in recent times of her readiness to adapt herself to modern circumstances, and even to add to her doctrines, as well as to readjust her methods of work. With regard to doctrinal innovations, if it be said that the Infallibility of the Pope was implicit in her system, at any rate since the Council of Trent, the facts remain that it was not a doctrine of the whole Church until modern times, that it was always obnoxious to many of her greatest theologians, that in spite of all the efforts of the Jesuits at Trent no decision regarding it was arrived at there, and that its promulgation in 1870 was only accomplished by means : of far-reaching coercion. As regards aggressive work, Rome has never been hampered by the semper eadem principle as she sought to win the heathen abroad or heretics at home. Instead, she has shown a readiness to be all things to all men in the unworthy sense, if only she could win them. That in the summer of 1911 Arch- bishop now Cardinal Bourne consecrated a motor caravan to serve as an itinerating chapel for scattered communities, shows that her agents are quite up to date in their efforts to extend the sphere of their influence. A preacher as eminent as Father Vaughan went through East Anglia in the autumn of the same year with what Romish Home Missions 169 he called a propagation van. In the manufactur- ing districts, too, missions are sometimes held before six o'clock in the morning, when the work- people begin their work. There is nothing stereo- typed in the mission methods of those who are seeking to bring outsiders into the fold of the Church of Home. According to the late Cardinal Vaughan, the registered gains of Eome in England numbered between eight and nine thousand per annum during the later years of the nineteenth century. Many of these recruits were doubtless obtained through the so-called Catholic revival in the Church of England, while others may be due to the assiduous and subtle efforts which are made to influence public opinion through the newspaper press. It is also probable that some are obtained through the educational propaganda which is carried on so persistently by refugee nuns and others. By creating the impression that their schools are " genteel " ; by underselling their rivals ; and by covering up the teaching for the sake of which their schools exist, under a fair show of imparting " Parisian French " they have obtained a hold in various parts of the country which is a menace to evangelical truth. Much is also done to influence the careless by such demo- cratic agencies as the sodalities which now play such an important part in the life of the Roman 170 The Arrested Reformation Catholic population. The Sodality of the Holy Family in Limerick as organised by the Redemp- torist Fathers numbers more than 6000 members ; which, even although the subscription paid at each monthly meeting is no more than twopence, means an income of more than 600 a year. These sodalities serve Rome in three ways. They raise money which is entirely at the disposal of the priests. They get the people to attend the sacraments ; those who are absent being marked down as black sheep. They act as an intelligence department for the priests. Not a visit can be paid, not a copy of the Scriptures can be circulated, not an effort to speak a word for Christ can be made, without a report to the clerical superin- tendent from one or other of the members who are everywhere in the workshops and the homes of the people. Yet another line along which aggressive work is carried on in the homelands by Rome, is that followed by the Guild of our Lady of Ransom, which has the conversion of England to Roman Catholicism as its object. Lectures are given at public meetings where questions are invited by expert debaters who are well qualified to influence the ignorant and unsettled. The report of such a lecture given in a London suburb to a large audience shows that the subject was " Why I am not a Protestant ; " and that the lecturer dealt with Romish Lecturers 171 the philosophic uncertainty of Protestantism ; the practical inconsistency of Protestantism; and the failure of Protestantism as evinced by recent sociological research. He made the most of the aberrations of the New Theology and the Higher Criticism, and of our social evils, as proofs of the failure of the Keformation. Some of the arguing was specious enough, and much of the treatment of the facts of the case, alike in the past and the present, both superficial and misleading ; but there was enough that was true in what was said to make those with little foundation of personal religious experience and accurate knowledge imagine that the conclusions which were drawn were also true. In the foreign mission field Rome's record alike in the Reformation era and in our own day is a remarkable one. The likelihood is that on the whole she is seen at her best there ; and that the worthiest of her agents have found an outlet for their energies in such work, as the least likely to involve them in what they disliked or to bring them into conflict with their superiors. There are two sides to the 'propaganda de fide. There is that which tells of the efforts of an ambitious Hierarchy to find compensation for their losses at home by gains abroad, and of their readiness to make use of compromise and accommodation in so doing. But there is also that which tells of 172 The Arrested Reformation heroic self-denying men and women seeking to share what they have with others whose need is greater than their own, and doing it with a sublime forgetfulness of self even where they did it in ignorance and superstition. In connection with the work of the Jesuit Order, for example, the best men from the moral view-point are those who have usually no voice in its government. Those who are naturally sympathetic, kindly, and self-denying sincerely anxious to do their duty to God and their fellow-men are greatly valued by the Order, although they are not allowed to rule. " From the ranks of the Fathers who have taken only three vows come the men whose work gives to the Society amongst devout Roman Catholics a reputation for holiness, and, in the foreign mission field, for heroic devotion to what they believe to be their duty. . . . They do the work which gains for the Order renown and praise." It is left to others to do the kind of work which has given the word " Jesuit " its English dictionary significance. It is noteworthy in this connection that while the foreign mission work of the Romish Church in modern times is partly due to the revival of the Jesuit Order in 1813, and to the entrance of other Orders into the field, as well as to the in- fluence of the missionary colleges, it is most of all due to the zeal of " A few humble and obscure Missionaries 173 Catholics " as they described themselves, who at Lyons in 1822 founded an " Institute for the Propagation of the Faith." They did not send out missionaries. They simply collected money which they gave to the various Orders and Societies, to enable them to extend their opera- tions gradually to the whole world. In 1843 the income of this voluntary association was 141,000, and it was assisting 130 bishops and 4000 priests. Since then its resources and work have more than doubled. During the first seventy years of its existence it raised 10,714,000, of which three millions came from France. Since 1843 it has had an auxiliary " Society of the Holy Children," through which the children help the children, and which has now about five million subscribers of a halfpenny a month, and educates 146,000 children in over six hundred orphanages and three thousand schools. The extent of the foreign mission work of the Roman Church is not only enormous but there are great districts in the heathen world where the only form of Christianity proclaimed is that of Eome. It is cause for sincere regret that so many of those who are being called out of heathen darkness receive their first impressions of Christ and His salvation through channels defiled by pagan sacerdotalism. Co-operation with Romish mis- sionaries in the foreign field was advocated by 174 The Arrested Reformation more than one speaker at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. Dr. Wardlaw Thompson of the London Missionary Society said : "I long for the time when we shall see another Conference and when the men of the Greek Church and the Roman Church shall talk over things with us in the service of Christ. The kingdom will not come until every branch of the Church can unite together in some common effort of service for the Lord." Bishop Brent of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in the Philippine Islands, said : " There is a wonderful, a great, and venerable Church sitting apart to-day, in an aloofness that is more pathetic than it is splendid. It is not co-operating with us as we can compel it to co-operate, that is, if we set our minds upon it. Shall we wait for the Roman Catholic Church to lead us or shall you and I lead and compel the Roman Catholic Church to come to us ? They will never come to us until we go to them. ... In any scheme, practical or theo- retical, for unity, we must take into our reckoning the .Roman Catholic Church, which is an integral part of the Church and of the Kingdom of God. . . . There are occasions when we must fight the Roman Catholic Church, and I have done this in our Church, but remember that fair fighting is one of the elements in Christian co-operation and the promotion of unity." The Bishop of South wark Co-operation with Rome 175 also said : " If we are indeed to reach unity, if, indeed, ' only one Church of Christ ' is to be founded in new countries, the unity must com- prehend the great communion of Rome as well as the great Church of the East. Both are Churches rich with past associations and present gifts of devotion and spiritual life. It seems as though the separate channels were worn far too deep for the streams ever to meet. But till they do, language which speaks of Christian unity as come or coming is simply unmeaning. There are, however, some considerations which may encourage the faith that looks to Him with whom everything is possible. The letter from a Roman Catholic Archbishop read to the Conference yesterday shows how near to us some great souls within that Communion are. We owe another illustration to an English Roman layman, Baron von Hiigel. There is hardly, I will venture to say, any instructed member of this Conference who, if he read his book on the Mystical Element in Religion, would not say this man would have to be in the first rank of citizens in a united Church of Christ. We include at this Conference in our statistics the figures, the enormous figures of Roman Catholic work in the mission field. Perhaps when next some Conference like this shall gather, the spirit of unity may have brought it to pass that some representatives of that Church may be 176 The Arrested Reformation able to enter into personal conference with their separated brethren." There is no evidence that these sentiments were approved by many at the Edinburgh Conference, and there is abundant evidence that they are held in utter detestation by most of those who know the situation at first hand. As a matter of fact, Rome will not co-operate with Evangelicals. The subject was fully discussed at the London Mission- ary Conference in 1888, and the men who were most in love with mission work and most eager to do everything that would bring success, all spoke sorrowfully and solemnly of the objectionable methods and baneful results of Roman Catholic missions as they had come into actual contact with them. They testified with one voice that the agents of Rome often make use of unworthy means, that they trust to the crucifix, the adoration of angels, the Virgin, and the Host, as well as to the con- fessional, austere penances, and gorgeous cere- monial, rather than to the Gospel. In his Missionary Achievement, Dr. W. T. Whitley tells of a " Protestant visitor to South India twelve years ago who watched a Roman Catholic open-air service for twenty minutes under the impression that it was a gorgeous heathen function." Xavier himself, the greatest of all their missionaries, has left descriptions of his methods, which show how impossible co-operation Xaviers Methods 177 must be until Rome has undergone a complete change. " Here am I almost alone, " he says in one passage, " from the time that Anthony re- mained sick at Manapar ; and I find it an incon- venient position to be in, in the midst of a people of unknown tongue without the assistance of an interpreter. Roderick, indeed, who is here, acts as an interpreter in place of Anthony ; but you know well how much they know of Portuguese. Conceive, therefore, what kind of sermons I am able to address to the assemblies, when they do not understand me nor I them. I ought to be an adept in dumb show. Yet I am not without work ; for I want no interpreter to baptize children just born, or those whom their parents bring, nor to relieve the famishing and the naked who come my way. So I devote myself to these kinds of good works and do not regard my time as lost." Nor is this sort of superstitious and magical work a thing of the past. In the returns made by the Roman Catholic authorities in February 1910 to the Board of Indian Commissioners of the United States, it was stated that there are 106,000 Roman Catholics among the Indians, but part of these are actually referred to by the Director as " baptized pagans." In the year 1895 the Propaganda returned the number of the adherents of the Church of Rome in the heathen world as 3,606,000, and as that did not include all their work the total would probably 12 178 The Arrested Reformation be nearly four millions. At the end of the nine- teenth century the Societe des Missions Strangers, a Paris society, and the largest Roman Catholic missionary society, had 34 bishops, 1100 mission- aries, 680 native priests, with a native following all over Eastern Asia of nearly a million and a quarter. At the same period the Jesuits had 3989 mission- aries at work in various parts of the world ; and the other Orders are also largely represented in the foreign field. In the year 1908 the professing Christians in Japan were divided into 73,000 Protestants, 62,000 Roman Catholics, and 30,000 belonging to the Greek Church. In China at the same date there were 1200 European Romish priests and nearly a million members. It is not possible to rejoice unreservedly in all this work, but it would be ungenerous to ignore the enter- prise and devotion of which it tells. On the Congo, for example, Cardinal Lavigerie's white- robed Fathers have been at work since 1883, dividing to some extent the honours with the Protestant missionaries. Yet, even there the cloven hoof has been shown by the way in which the representatives of Rome condoned the in- iquities of the agents of the late King Leopold against the unanimous testimony of all other missionaries ; and as even the Belgians do not now condone them ; apparently for political and ecclesi- astical reasons. The Cloven Hoof In the year 1899, according to their own reports, the agents of the Societe des Missions Etrangers baptized 155,000 children of pagans in articulo mortis. Bishop Caldwell, the learned and devoted S.P.G. missionary at Tinnevelly, went so far as to say that " the Roman Catholic Hindus, in intellect, habits and morals do not differ from the heathen in the smallest degree." Miss Gordon Gumming in Two Years in Ceylon said that she had seen the very identical devil-dancers engaged from the temples of Siva to accompany the pro- cessions alike of heathen gods and of Roman images of Christ and the Virgin Mother. She had seen the image of Buddha opposite the image of the Virgin in the same chapel, and apparently receiving equal adoration. She had seen Hindus, Buddhists, and Roman Catholics alike paying their vows together at the shrine of St. Anne, by whom certain miracles were believed to have been wrought. The Madras Census Report for 1891 stated that wherever the native Christians were mainly Roman Catholics, as in Tanjore and Madura, the percentage of educated Christians was low ; whereas of Tinnevelly, where the S.P.G. and the C.M.S. divide the land, the official report was ; " This is one of the few districts where a large percentage of the population is classed as educated." Even Romanists, however, must see that the 180 The Arrested Reformation methods by which the transitory triumphs of the sixteenth century were won by their missionaries now stand condemned at the bar of history. Nothing in all the annals of the Christian Church is more melancholy than the results of the work of Xavier and his successors. In China, for instance, the work ceased to advance whenever the authorities at home forced the missionaries to limit the extent to which conversion by " accom- modation " was carried. It is all very well to discover points of contact between false religions and the true; but to adopt as the name of Grod the Chinese character for the Supreme Being in the ancient classics, and to permit ancestor worship in a modified form seemed even to the papal authorities to be going too far. Urban vni. and Innocent x. both declared the ceremonies permitted by the Jesuits in China to be super- stitious and idolatrous, as well they might when images of Buddha with a slight application of the chisel served for images of Christ ; and the roadside shrines of Kwanyin, the goddess of mercy, were adapted to Mariolatry. And just as in Brittany, Calvaries were placed on the top of menhirs so as to intercept pagan worship, so the wearing of the Brahminical cord, and the smearing of ashes on the forehead are still permitted to Roman converts in India. It has also to be borne in mind that the records Conversion by Accommodation 181 of what was actually achieved by the earlier Romish missionaries are often unreliable. The Secretary of the Congregatio de propaganda fide said in a report to Pope Innocent xi. that " it seems to be the constant opinion of all the members of the Congregation, that little credit is to be given to the Relations, Letters, and Supplications that come from the Missionaries." By the end of the eighteenth century Romish foreign mission work was almost at a standstill and the native Churches were either dead or dying. Evangelisa- tion by dumb show had been weighed in the balances and found wanting. In the old kingdom of the Congo, for instance, although the entire population had been Christianised in the Roman sense, and the capital still bears the name San Salvador, Christianity had quite disappeared when in 1879 the Baptist missionaries began their work in what to all intents and purposes was a heathen land. In Canada, California, and Mexico, also, there is little to show for more than three centuries of work. In South America, where there were once extensive missions on the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and the River Plate, all are practi- cally gone. And so likewise with the early Romish efforts in India, China, and Japan. The missionaries meddled with politics and trade, and were the tools of European powers seeking new markets 1 82 The Arrested Reformation and territorial expansion ; and they frequently incurred the hatred and contempt of those among whom they worked instead of winning their confidence and affection. Their boasted celibacy, too, with some advantages, has many drawbacks ; and those who speak from experience say that one Christian missionary home, with a Christian wife and family, does more to humanise, elevate, and evangelise a corrupt community than twenty celibate men. Perrone held that married priests would not go with the same readiness among barbarous nations as men who were un- married. But the Protestant churches have never lacked those who were ready to spend and be spent for their Lord ; and the old custom of the Mor- avians, who are in the front rank of missionaries, was to make their agents marry in order to add to their efficiency. There is one feature of Rome's work in heathen lands which cannot be ignored; the intrusion of her agents into Protestant fields. The testimony to this treason in the very firing line is uniform ; and in cases where the heathen have been neglected and Protestant converts assailed with all sorts of allurements, it has actually been argued, "the heathen may be saved by the light of nature, but there is no hope for you Protestants ; therefore we come to you first." In India and Africa, in New Zealand and the North- West of Canada, Co-operation Impossible 183 the experience of Protestant missionaries has been the same. It may be that what has been so uni- formly done is nothing more than was to be ex- pected, but it throws a somewhat lurid light on the suggestion that there can be co-operation with Romish missionaries in winning the world for Christ. The truth is that whether we look at the Old World or the New, at the homelands or the foreign field, at the sixteenth century or the twentieth, we find that whenever the deadly virus of sacerdotalism, by which Rome now stands or falls, enters in, all sense of honour and fairplay, all sense of tolerance and good-feeling, withers away until little or nothing is left of the mind which is in Christ. The only co-operation worth having is round the Gospel with its open Bible and the priesthood of all believers. " While therefore," as Dr. Eugene Stock puts it, " we are bound to acknowledge the self-denial and devotion of many of the Roman missionaries, and not to doubt that there have been among them not a few who, knowing Christ as their own Saviour, have earnestly preached Him to the heathen, it is impossible to shut our eyes to the plain facts of history as recorded by themselves, or to the actual circumstances of the mission-field at the present time. With every desire to show large-mindedness and charity, no well-informed Christian can suppose that, as regards a very 184 The Arrested Reformation large portion of Roman missionary work both in the past and in the present, its character could command the Divine blessing." With every desire to be generous as well as just we cannot but regret that any heathen people should begin the Christian life by coming under the Romish yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear. Writing of South America, Dr. Robert E. Speer, the eminent authority on missions, gives six striking reasons for prosecuting mission work there, which throw much light on what Roman missions may mean: (1) The moral condition of the South American countries warrants and demands the presence of the force of Evangelical religion, which will war against sin, and bring to men the power of righteous life. A temperate and fair-minded writer asserts that in these lands " male chastity is practically unknown." (2) The Protestant mis- sionary enterprise, with its stimulus to education and its appeal to the rational nature of man, is required by the intellectual needs of South America. It may justly be called an illiterate continent, although many of the upper classes have been educated abroad. (3) Protestant mis- sions are justified in South America in order to give the Bible to the people. There are Roman Catholic translations both in Spanish and Portu- guese, but the Church of Rome has discouraged or forbidden their use. The priests themselves are South America 185 ignorant of the Scriptures ; and but for the Bible Societies and Protestant missions the people of South America would be without the Word of God. (4) Protestant missions are justified and demanded in South America by the character of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Everywhere on that continent there is evidence, legally con- vincing as well as morally sickening, that the stream of the Church is polluted at its fountains. (5) Protestant missions in South America are justified because the Roman Catholic Church has not given the people Christianity. The testimony is overwhelming that few in the Roman Catholic Church know the facts of Christ's life, and that fewer still know Christ. Even the dead Christ who is set forth in place of the living Saviour is a subordinate figure. The central place is given to the Virgin. (6) Protestant missions are justified in South America because the Roman Catholic Church is at the same time so strong and so weak there. The priest stands in place of God, and even where his life is vile, the people distinguish between his functions as priest in which he stands as God before the altar, and his life as man in which he falls into the frailties of the flesh. The Church has a hold on politics and family life and society which is paralysing. On the other hand, it has not the power it has been supposed to have and the inefficiency of its work is pitiful. It 1 86 The Arrested Reformation is steadily losing ground in spite of its enormous resources. The churches are mostly ill-attended save on festivals. The priests are derided and reviled. The religious teachers of South America have made the men of the continent irreligious. They have discovered that what was taught them is false, and they have flung away the faith which they now call superstition. CHAPTER VI " Los von Rom " THE phrase " Los von Rom," away from Rome, has special reference to the deeply in- teresting movement which in recent years has been going on in Austria, pre-eminently the land of the Arrested Reformation. There have, however, been kindred movements elsewhere, and the situation which has resulted is full not only of interest but of hope. In France, the eldest daughter of the Church, it has been computed by a Romish ecclesiastic in Paris that if the number of loyal Roman Catholics were to be ascertained from the payment of Easter dues, the falling away from Rome is such that there are not more than four millions loyal out of its thirty-nine millions. The Church authorities themselves compute that at a recent Easter not more than five millions, including children, took communion. Nowhere, indeed, has the drift from Rome been on such a scale as in France, although probably nowhere has it been less a drift to the Evangelical faith. As a matter of fact, nations never drift to. Christ. Mere 1 88 The Arrested Reformation momentum does not take men to Him. They must turn in penitence and faith. But not only has the French legislature disestablished the Romish Church in the land, the French people have repudiated it almost with contempt. In one general election after another the whole influence of the Church has been used in vain against the anti-clericalism which is in power and is so aggres- sively hostile ; and amid all the Cabinet changes no change is in favour of the Church. The movement in France has at least three elements in it making for revolution if not for reformation. There is the political movement which was made inevitable by the attitude of Romanism to the Republic. The monks and nuns have been bitterly reactionary, and the Dreyfus conspiracy showed that they are prepared to set aside all the restraints of patriotism and even of ordinary morality in their determination to control the life of the nation in the interests of Rome. There has also been widespread revolt among the priests against the determination of the Vatican to prevent any arrangement with the civil authorities. Many priests have already left the Church of Rome ; in some cases having entered into the light of Christ, in other cases having become infidels. No fewer than two hundred priests are said to be abandoning Romanism every year ; not many, perhaps, out of 56,000, but a Romanism in France 189 proof that disintegrating elements are at work. There are likewise movings among the people, some of them indicating that eyes and hearts are turning towards the light, and all of them that revolutionary changes may be impending. It would appear that the Gospel is touching the finest minds in the nation, and that Pro- testantism is compelling attention by means of its literature. And it is also compelling attention by what is even better than the best literature. A writer in a Roman Catholic magazine, seeking to stir up his co-religionists to emulation, says that " Protestantism has far more influence than one would expect from so small a handful of men, were they not inspired by the principles of tolerance, righteousness, and justice, which alone can carry moral and social reform. In France everything which is expressive of moral strength the struggle against intemperance, against immorality, against all social evils whatever they may be is the work of the Protestants." Another French writer, reared in the Roman Church, has described the other side of the situation in equally striking words : " Owing to her organisation, her frame- work, and her sacerdotal strength, Roman Catholic- ism has every appearance of strength and grandeur, but spiritual life has gone out of her. It is with her as with the Pontiffs of Rome, who are covered after their death with the richest pontifical robes, 190 The Arrested Reformation crowned with the tiara, dressed in the stole, and carried thus triumphantly before crowds who prostrate themselves as if the Pope could still bless them. Take away the draperies, shake off the bandages, you will find decomposition and worms. The Angel of death has passed over her." Unfortunately, however, this anti-clericalism in France manifests itself mainly in hatred of all religion. The name of the Deity has been erased from the school-books in the communal schools, and fools say openly that there is no God. Yet Evangelical work is being developed, and in recent years Protestant congregations have been formed in places where no assemblies for Reformed worship have been held for three centuries or more. In the district of the Charante, for instance, once bathed with the blood of the Huguenots, where there were 51 Reformed congregations in 1598 and only 3 in 1807, there were 43 agents at work in 1900, three of them converted priests, and the number has since been increased. It may be that even yet the blood of the martyrs will be the seed of the Church. Some hold that the coming conflict in France will not be between Romanism and Protestantism but between Christianity and an atheistic Socialism, and the Christianity which will conquer in such a strife must be filled with evangelical fervour and be supremely loyal to the Gospel of the Divine Romanism in Italy igi grace. Many noble workers are busy sowing the good seed. The forces of evil are numerous and mighty, but He who is the truth is mightiest of all, and the victory will remain with those who put their trust in Him. When we turn to the other Latin peoples we find the same sort of strivings and doings. In Italy the detestation of Romanism is even deeper than in France. Crispi, the well-known statesman, once said in the House of Deputies that the day was coming when Christianity would kill Roman Catholicism ; and Dr. Raffaele Mariano, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Naples, and once a devoted Romanist, has described the Church of Rome in Italy as the antithesis of Christianity. Meanwhile, however, this wide- spread hostility to the Vatican has not been accompanied by any corresponding Evangelical revival. Materialism in its grossest forms has lifted up its head in opposition to every form of religion, and threatens the family and the home as well as the Church and the State. Yet some progress is being made. A great place has been secured for the circulation of the Bible. Not only have the British and Foreign and other Bible Societies developed their noble work, but a Roman Catholic Society has been formed to circulate the Scriptures. In 1888, an Italian newspaper published an edition of the Bible 192 The Arrested Reformation in 210 parts, which were sold at one halfpenny each ; and in five years as many as 50,000 sets were sold. Italy is beginning to realise that the Bible is not a foreign book, but the heritage of all the nations. In June 1902 the Society of St. Jerome issued from the Vatican Press an edition of the Gospels and the Acts, in one volume with notes ; and this has since been sold in very large numbers at a cost of from twopence to fourpence an enormous step in advance, even with the notes. Such a departure from the traditional policy of Rome is full of significance, and speaks volumes for the strivings of Italy after something better than she has. During the meetings of the Vatican Council in 1870, some one wished to refer to a passage of Scripture in arguing against the pro- posed decree of Infallibility, and not only was there not a Bible in the Church where they were met, but no one present had a copy. This Romish Council ended in borrowing a Bible from the Protestant chaplain of the Prussian Embassy. In 1902, however, the Society of St. Jerome not only received the approval of some two hundred bishops for its work of circulating the Scriptures, but the Pope granted an indulgence of three hundred days to any of the faithful who read its version for at least a quarter of an hour a day. By the year 1908 not far short of a million copies of it had Romanism in Spain 193 been circulated, and the remainder of the New Testament was being prepared for publication. But difficulties then began to be put in the way. The circulation of the vernacular Gospels was denounced by many as a dangerous propaganda, and in 1911 The Bible in the World had to report : " Information from a trustworthy source shows that, though the Society has not been dissolved by any express official act, it is nevertheless practically stifled. The Curia has not killed it directly, but has so managed that it should expire gradually, slowly, of itself." This is hardly to be wondered at perhaps, but we can rejoice in what has been accomplished, for the dissemination of the Scriptures cannot but lead to the spread of the Evangel. Who knows but that many of those who have seen Italy become a nation, will be spared to see her freed not only from the Grand Dukes but from the priests. In Spain also some progress is being made. In that land brought down from her high estate, according to Dollinger, through idleness taught by the numerous monks, cruelty taught by the Inquisition, and ignorance produced by the Index till but yesterday there was no place for the Gospel. Now, however, meetings for religious purposes may be held without legal hindrance ; buildings may be constructed for Reformed worship in the ordinary form of churches ; and avowedly 13 IQ4 The Arrested Reformation Evangelical schools may be carried on. Just as the issue of the war with Prussia did much to discredit the Papacy in Austria, the issue of the war in Cuba did much to open the eyes of the thoughtful in Spain to the inevitable results of subjection to the priests. They could not fail to see that in the shock of war the Popish nations go down as of necessity before the Protestant; and the most popular plays in their theatres are those which lay bare the intrigues of the priests, and show how much the nation has suffered at their hands. Anti-clericalism in Spain, how- ever, as elsewhere in Romish countries, is social and political rather than religious, and many drift from Rome into sheer unbelief. Yet the movings in Spain are not to be despised any more than those in Italy; while recent events in Portugal remind us that we know not what a day may bring forth. The revolution in Portugal, followed by the closing of many convents and monasteries, has prepared the way for legislation abolishing the privileges of the Roman Church. In spite of the widespread hatred of all religion, there is good reason, too, for expecting that a door will be opened for Bible Societies, Evangelical Schools, and other New Testament Missions. The dis- establishment proposals reveal how profound the hatred of the new rulers of the nation is for the Portugal and Belgium 195 Church, which they deem mainly responsible for its degradation. And when we reflect that these proposals emanate from those whom the Church baptized and educated from childhood, their significance is increased. The Jesuits are famous educationists, and are credited with saying that if they get the children till they are seven, they care not who gets them thereafter. But in this generation alone they have lost millions whom they had till long after they were seven. They may be able to give their pupils such a bent that they lose few of them to the Evangelical faith, but the fact remains that they are losing multitudes of them so far as Rome is concerned. Belgium is another Popish country where there is fierce conflict. The people are overwhelmingly Ultramontane, with what seems the inevitable concomitant, a large atheistic element ; and the Evangelical element is painfully small. Yet the success of the Belgian Christian Missionary Church has been most remarkable. Its membership now consists of over eleven thousand, almost all of whom have been won from the Roman Church. Numerous schools and other agencies for good are also at work, and in one district alone since 1906 more than 500 families have openly broken with Rome. The Gospel is still the power of God unto salvation to all who believe, even if they have been educated by the Jesuits ; and Evangeli- 196 The Arrested Reformation cals in happier lands ought to do everything in their power, in these critical days, to flood the awakening nations with the truth as it is in Christ. He alone can fathom their aspirations and hallow their strivings for freedom. Most of the ministers of the Belgian Missionary Church have come from Switzerland, having left their much-loved mountains and valleys to labour in rough mining villages on miserably inadequate incomes. The sacrifice involved in such work is not one whit less than that of those who go to India and China ; and such work in hitherto Komish nations ought to be undertaken in the same spirit as work in pagan countries is. When men and women press in at the open doors in emancipated Europe as they press in at the open doors in Africa or the Far East the day of Europe's redemption will be at hand. In Switzerland itself ominous changes are taking place in some of the Roman Catholic Cantons, on lines which are now familiar wherever Rome has had unquestioned sway. In Ticino, for example, whereas the number returning them- selves as " confessionless " in 1900 was only 583, in 1910 it was 5710. The corresponding figures in Lucerne were 97 and 1047. It is in Austria, however, once so hopeful but so long in bonds, that we find the Los von Rom most fruitfully at work. There more than anywhere else it has resulted in genuine religious revival ; Romanism in Austria 197 and is due to the yearning for nearness to God and not to indifference to Divine truth. To it alone the description, " a new reformation," can be ap- proximately applied. Some, indeed, hold that it is essentially a political movement, and probably the political element predominated at first. But it has since deepened and broadened as men were obedient to the truth ; and as if to prove how truly religious it has become, some who joined it at first for political reasons have now abandoned it. As the light has spread, as the truth has grown on those who were loyal to it, and as Rome has been true to herself as intolerant and perse- cuting, the movement has deepened into a far- reaching Evangelical awakening. Ever since the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866, and the consequent decline in the import- ance and influence of the German-speaking portions of the Dual Empire, the conviction has steadily grown among them that it is through Protestantism alone that their German nationality, of which they are proud, can be preserved. Gradually, too, their eyes have opened to the fact that it is by no accident that the progressive peoples are Protest- ant and the Romish peoples reactionary ; and so the watchword of the German national party in Austria has increasingly become Los von Rom we must be free from Rome. They see that the leadership of the German-speaking race has 1 98 The Arrested Reformation passed from Komish Austria to Protestant Ger- many because the rule of the priests puts an arrest on enterprise, and saps the strength of a nation. They are embittered, too, by the way in which the influence of Rome has been thrown into the scale against them and their claims in the racial and lingual strife which distracts the Austrian Empire. They have been led on from politics to religion, from patriotic aspirations to the longing for peace with God. It is always difficult to elimin- ate politics from a revolt from Rome, but this movement in Austria has now lost its political character so thoroughly that the Czechs, or Slav portion of the population of Bohemia, have joined hands with their German compatriots to develop the good work. Such a movement as this among the German- speaking Austrians has naturally aroused much interest in the German Fatherland. Generous help has been given by the Gustav- Adolf- Verein, and during the period from 1898 to 1908 the Evangelicals of Germany sent no fewer than a hundred pastors into Austria to extend the work. Much has also been done by friends of the Gospel to promote the movement by means of evangelical literature, and especially by the circulation of the Bible. The result is that those who had turned their back on all religion are now sitting at the Saviour's feet. New life and hope have come to Los von Rom 199 those who were sunk in sin. Hungry souls have been fed with the Bread of Life. The long-crushed Protestantism of Austria has had a new spirit breathed into it. The dispirited descendants of Hus and Jerome have been delivered from their lethargy, born of the all-pervading power of Popery, and have come to a new sense of their responsi- bility, as lights in the midst of a darkness so dense. Mission and philanthropic work is being undertaken in a new fashion, and active evangelical com- munities are being built up. There has also been a moving among the dry bones within the Romish Communion. The official attitude is to decry the movement as political, and identify Protestant- ism with disloyalty to the Empire ; to predict that it will be a mere riverside eddy like the Old Catholic movement ; and to strain the re- sources of the law in order to persecute wherever that is possible. Yet many who have not left the Church, and may never leave it, have been quickened, and some of them co-operate with the Evangelicals. The Los von Rom movement has also strength- ened the ranks of the Old Catholics, who provide a sort of half-way house for those who cannot go all the way. They also provide a half-way house for those who only halt on their way to whole- hearted Protestantism. This probably accounts in part for the slowness of their progress. They 2OO The Arrested Reformation have members in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy, in the Old World ; as well as in Mexico and among the Poles of the United States, in the New. Yet in spite of the fact that in Austria alone thousands of Roman Catholics have joined them in recent years, their entire membership is probably not more than a hundred thousand, and they do little more than hold their own. In doctrine they stand on the decisions of the first seven General Councils. Auricular confession is not obligatory on their members, nor is celibacy obligatory on their clergy. The vernacular tongue is used in nearly all their services, although Latin is retained in part of the ritual of the Mass. Valuable, however, as this movement has been for those in the tran- sition stage, it must go further before it can become a great popular movement. The Evangel must be put much more definitely in the forefront. But unto the upright light arises, and the Old Catholics have proved themselves brave and truth-loving and loyal to the light they have. Alike in Austria and Germany secessions from one Church to another must be registered, and from the autumn of 1898 till the end of 1904 the number of those who were registered in Austria as having left the Church of Rome and become Protestants was 33,176. That did not include those who attached themselves to Missions or the The Old Catholics 201 smaller Protestant churches of which the State takes no cognizance, so that probably about 38,000 seceded during these six and a half years, in addition to nearly 12,000 to the Old Catholics ; or a total of about 50,000. Nor has the movement spent itself. The returns for 1910 show that in German-speaking Bohemia 1502 Romanists were registered as having been received into 37 Protestant congregations, an increase of 413 over the previous year. During the last twelve years no fewer than 7476 secessions have been registered in the Province of Styria alone. These converts include many men of influence, priests, and intellectuals, who, however, seldom sound a trumpet before them when they make the great surrender in an empire still so Romish. It is noteworthy in this connection that there are at least 32 Protestants in the Austrian Parliament, nearly all them converts from the Church of Rome, about three times as many as the Protestant proportion of the population would warrant. In Germany this Austrian movement is not only arousing much interest but is telling in many ways for heart-religion. Recent events have shown how sensitive the German people are as regards interference from Rome, and how deter- mined they are not to allow the Vatican to go beyond its own sphere. The Ne Temere Decree, for instance, has not been allowed to be pro- 2O2 The Arrested Reformation mulgated in the Fatherland. There, as else- where on the Continent, Rome has prepared many for atheistic Socialism, and in the General Election of January 1912 the greatest increases in the Socialist vote were in Romish constituencies. But in addition to such leakage the secessions to Protestantism have been numerous. From 1890 to 1900, 46,000 Roman Catholics were registered as having become Protestants, as against 6820 Protestants who became Romanists. The ratio of secessions is on the increase, too, and principally among the middle classes and the artisans in the towns. A Jesuit writer in a German Jesuit organ acknowledges that in Baden between 1825 and 1890 Roman Catholicism lost about a hundred thousand souls; that the loss in the nineteenth century in the whole of Germany amounted to one million at least, three hundred thousand having been lost since 1871 ; and that through mixed marriages a hundred thousand children have been lost in recent times. Alongside of these actual secessions, too, there are indications of intellectual revolt, social discontent, and religious yearnings within the Roman Church which may result in much vaster secessions in the near future. It is thus evident that on the Continent of Europe Rome is losing ground, and that ere long we may see greater things than these. It also is evident that the Churches of the Reformation only win, and Rome and Revolution 203 only deserve to win, when they are frankly Evangelical. No revolt from Eome which does not rest on the Gospel can accomplish much. Whatever its political fruits are it must be religious first of all. It cannot but result in social and political reform, but if it is to set men free it must be definitely religious all through. Those who are set free in soul by the Divine grace will not remain serfs, but this political freedom can come only as the outcome of the religious work which has been calling sinners to the Saviour. The insinua- tion that the modern movement towards Protest- antism is associated with, and even responsible for, revolution and mob-rule, regicide and sabotage, is as insolent as it is ridiculous. It is Popery which has driven so many into indifference and hostility to all religion, by its worldliness and corruption, and hindered legitimate reform by its association with tyrants. By her intolerant and persecuting spirit Rome has alienated many who have either left her altogether, or are looking out on the strange happenings of these days with eyes friendly to freedom and truth. No attitude is less warrantable among earnest Evangelicals than that of the pessimist ; even as none is more barren. Probably there never were so many as there are now who are striving to lift up the fallen, to safeguard the tempted, and to help the unfortunate. If only believers 204 The Arrested Reformation everywhere were fired with love for God and a passion for souls, the progress of the Reformation would be resumed on a scale commensurate with the needs of men, in harmony with the great doings of old when modern Europe began to live, and in line with what is best in the yearnings of our age. CHAPTER VII Rome in the New World AMERICA never played so great a part in the world's affairs as now, and it is de- stined to grow in influence as the years go past, and not merely the United States but Canada becomes a great world-power. The Church of Rome is not alone in seeking to redress its losses in the Old World by gains in the New ; and many a cause is trying to find room for development in the New World which vested interests and inveter- ate habit denied it in the Old. Already, too, the reaction of the New on the Old is vast. It has been shown above that the fate of the early Romish missions in North America was both sad and suggestive. There was the usual mixture of clay and iron ; subordination of the spiritual to the political, and readiness to enter into com- promises which were fatal to enduring success, along with marvellous courage and self-denying toil. The first Romish missionary to receive ordination in America was the Dominican Bartholo- mew de Las Casas, the most eminent missionary of his age. He set himself to deliver the hapless 205 206 The Arrested Reformation natives from the slavery into which the Spaniards had reduced them, but the adventurers with whom he had to contend were usually able to thwart his efforts. In his eagerness to help the aborigines, " he crossed the sea twelve times ; he traversed every then known region of America and the Islands; he made repeated journeys from Spain to Flanders and Germany, to see the Emperor on the affairs of his Mission." Yet all the while his literary labours would have been remarkable even in a scholar who had no calling outside the quiet of some private study. The one blot on his reputation is that he sanctioned the beginnings of the African slave trade and the introduction of negro slaves into America. His reasons for doing so were that he wished to spare his converts, and that Africans could toil in that climate without the same danger to health and life. But he lived to deplore bitterly that he done such manifest evil in the interests of a very problematic good. His repentance, however, came too late to undo the mischief. He was dealing with men who were besotted by the lust for wealth and power, and the vile traffic grew in spite of him ; while alongside of it the degradation of the natives also increased. Lower California was entered by Jesuit mission- aries in 1697, and they maintained their hold at various points until 1767, when they were expelled by the King of Spain, who transferred their pro- Early Romish Missions 207 perty to the Franciscans. Later, however, the Dominicans held Lower California; while the Franciscans withdrew to Upper California, where they flourished until Mexico became independent of Spain in 1822. From that time they lost ground and finally were broken up in 1840. " The treat- ment by the fathers of the natives of the country," says Professor Whitney in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, " was successful so far as the accumula- tion of material wealth was concerned, but not in the slightest degree conducive to their intellectual advancement or development, as the so-called converts were simply the slaves of the ' good fathers/ ' The hold of the Romish missionaries among the Indians of the North- West Territories has, however, been more permanent than that of those who wrought among the aborigines of the East or the South. Of 99,000 Indians in British North America about 27,000 are still in paganism ; and the others are about equally divided between Protestant and Roman Catholic missions. One of the historians of the Jesuits says that through their work among the Red Indians the tribes " learned to mingle Jesus Christ and France in their affections," a dubious compliment which explains much ; and which reminds us that one of the outstanding features of the modern situation in Canada is the influence of the French-speaking Romanists in the Province of Quebec. Owing to 208 The Arrested Reformation arrangements made long ago the hierarchy there enjoy enormous wealth and great political power. They have much to do with interpreting the laws as well as making them. There, as elsewhere, however, priestism tends to defeat itself by the arrogance of its pretensions, and the old-world claims of Borne are increasingly felt to be altogether out of place in the New World. The air of Canada is not favourable to despotism either in the Church or the State. There are now over 30,000 French Protestants in the Dominion, and it is computed that the converts to the Reformed faith among the French Canadians who have emigrated to the United States number at least 40,000. Not only so, but Romanists persist in sending their children to the public schools in spite of the opposition of their priests, and show in many other ways that the old restraints and prejudices are losing their power and new standards are coming into operation. Nor is this good work among the Romanists of Canada confined to the East of the Dominion. In Alberta, which has been called the " melting-pot of the nations," many Ruthenian emigrants are com- ing under Evangelical influences. Their ancestral faith is Roman Catholicism, but large numbers of them have thrown off Rome's fetters, and the Presbyterian Church of Canada is meeting with much encouragement in its many-sided work on their behalf. South America 209 As regards the condition of South America, it has been indicated already that history has prob- ably no more terrible indictment of any system than that which the state of " the neglected con- tinent " after she has had unlimited sway for centuries, furnishes against the Church of Eome. The only parallel to be found is in the condition of the Italian States prior to their deliverance in our own era from the depths into which they had sunk, under the immediate rule of the Popes and their agents. There also, as in South America, Romanism, rectified by no contact with Protest- antism, showed what its true nature is in such circumstances, and reached almost incredible depths of superstition, ignorance, and fanaticism. Even the revolutionary movements which have made republics of one after another of these South American States did little or nothing at first to lessen the power of the priests, although the prin- ciples of religious freedom were usually embodied in the new constitutions. In Brazil, Protestant marriage only ceased to be regarded in law as concubinage in 1851, and civil penalties only ceased to follow excommunication in 1870. The Jesuits, however, were expelled in 1874, two years later than they had been similarly dealt with in Guatemala ; and in 1884 the increasing numbers of monks and nuns from Europe led the Government to appoint a Commission to carry 14 2io The Arrested Reformation out a law which had been passed in 1870 for the secularisation of all monastic property, after providing pensions for those entitled to support. In the same year all naturalised non-Catholics were made eligible for election to Parliament and the provincial assemblies. In Ecuador as recently as 1862 a concordat was concluded with the Curia which put education under the Jesuits, and absolutely prevented any worship but that of the Church of Rome. In 1875, however, the Jesuits left Quito in disgrace, and the concordat was abrogated. In Chile as recently as 1863, when more than two thousand women and children lost their lives through the burning of a church during the festival of the Immaculate Conception, the priests pro- nounced the calamity an act of grace of the Blessed Virgin, who wished to give the country a vast number of saints and martyrs. Eleven years later the Chilian Bishops put the president and members of the National Council and of the Lower House under the ban, because they had favoured liberty of worship. Their day was over, however, and the ban was unheeded. Yet it was not till 1883 and after a long struggle, in the course of which the Papal Legate was sent out of the country, that the perfect equality of all forms of worship was decreed ; a step which had been taken in the Argentine only eighteen years before. Peru would Chile and Peru 211 now appear to be the only South American State in which Protestants are still without re- ligious liberty, and even there the struggle for freedom is going on. Still, however, the Bible is publicly burned in Peru, and filth, degradation, and disease abound. The Incas are in many cases absolutely without the knowledge of the Gospel. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, they have with the exception of a few remote tribes adopted Christianity, but in other respects they retain the habits of life practised by their Inca forefathers. This, which is so characteristic of those whom Rome " Christianises," recalls the Samaritans of whom the Scriptures say that " they feared the Lord and served their own gods." Yet, as Charles Darwin was forward to acknow- ledge, even the most degraded of these South American peoples, the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego, have been elevated by the Gospel when it was proclaimed in purity and power, alike in doctrine and life. The story of Puerto Rico, too, is significant as showing what the Evangel has wrought among those old Spanish communities when it got the opportunity. A church census taken in 1911 of the Protestant and Romish churches in 23 municipalities containing 40 per cent, of the population of the islands, showed that the Romanist attendances numbered 8094 as against Protestant attendances of 8870, or 776 212 T-he Arrested Reformation in favour of the Reformed churches. Yet Protestant Missions in Puerto Rico only began ten years ago, whereas Rome had a monopoly for nearly four centuries. Nor is there any reason to doubt that similar results will be attained elsewhere throughout South America whenever the good work is carried on as it ought to be. This view is confirmed by what has happened in Mexico, which has so much more in common with South America than with the North. It was not till 1873 that the Jesuits, everywhere in these con- flicts associated with misgovernment and absolut- ism, were driven out and a check put on the enor- mous pretensions of the priests. But already an interesting religious awakening had begun through the conversion of a priest named Francis Aguilar and a monk named Manuel Aguas. They laid the foundations of the Iglesia de Jesus, composed of converted Mexicans, which within twenty-five years had over 70 congregations throughout the country, with ten thousand adherents. If the Protestant churches in Great Britain and America had viewed these Central and South American lands as they should, as calling for foreign mission work, there would even now have been a great positive work of Evangelisation going on alongside of the negative work of disintegration and revolt. Even as things are, however, there are not a few men and women seeking to carry the light of the Mexico and Brazil 213 Gospel into the midst of pagan and sacerdotal darkness. And it is through their work, sporadic as it has usually been, that any progress towards civilisation is being made. Most of all, it is due to the circulation of the Bible that the light is breaking, and the incubus of corruption, social and political, moral and spiritual, is being lifted. In Brazil, for instance, where the priests in three hundred years of supremacy had done nothing to get rid of slavery, one who has shared in the work says that freedom " came through the missionaries from the United States with the open Bible in their hands, aided by your British and Foreign Bible Society and by the Societies of London who had scattered millions of copies of God's Word, and had so taught the people of Brazil that they should love their neighbour as themselves. That sentence had brought a revolu- tion in the minds and hearts of Brazilians. The Government would not stop the abolition move- ment, and so in fifteen days from the day when the Government presented the Bill, the slaves were free." Nor is the failure of Rome in these regions to be wondered at when we find that a Council of the early Jesuit missionaries, held at Lima, decided that on the ground of intellectual difficulties it was not expedient that any act of Christian devotion except baptism should be imposed on their South American converts without 214 The Arrested Reformation the greatest precautions. The veneer of Christi- anity was of the thinnest, and the fruits have just been what might have been looked for from such ambiguous seed. " From Mexico southwards/' says a writer in Blaclcwood's Magazine for November 1911, " the disorders of the clergy, secular or regular, are notorious. Decently behaved clerics can only be obtained by importing them. The men who possess what passes for education in South America are as destitute of all religious beliefs as of sexual morality." When we turn to the fortunes of Rome in the United States we are brought face to face with a situation which more than any other throws light on our problem whether the arrest on the Re- formation can be removed. The official returns for 1910 show that in round numbers there are fifteen millions connected with the Church of Rome in the United States. The exact figures were 14,618,761. But the estimate of prominent mem- bers of the Roman Church in America is that if they had held all who were once theirs there ought to have been forty millions a leakage which has with much moderation been described as " well-nigh startling." If it had been in America, as it has so often been on the Continent, that those who drift from Rome became indifferent or hostile to revealed religion, the situation there would have been not only The United States 2 I 5 startling but sad. As it is, however, there is hardly an Evangelical congregation in the Union in which there are not converts from Rome, and in some congregations their number is large. Sta- tistics show that at least a tenth of the members of the various Protestant churches in the United States have once been Romanists, a fact without parallel anywhere else. Such a landslide has naturally given rise to much heart-searching among those who deplore it, and the explanations offered are very significant ; even although they do not include the power of the Gospel to meet the essential needs of those who were made in the image of God, and the effect of freedom on the sacerdotal pretensions of Rome. Among the reasons given by Romanist writers and speakers there are five which are outstanding. (1) The influence of the national public schools. In many of these the Bible is read, and even those who do not come specially under its influence learn to look on it without suspicion. Even where the Bible has no place there is a free atmosphere with nothing of sacerdotalism to lead to mental or moral atrophy. The Roman Catholic Church fights the public school with all the weapons in her armoury ; and her hatred of it is the measure of its power for good. Her champions describe it as pestiferous and baleful, but even those who might be expected to do so seem to pay little heed 2 1 6 The Arrested Reformation i to their envenomed remonstrances. (2) The part played by mixed marriages. Some of the priests put this as the foremost cause of their losses. In Europe such marriages often play into the hands of Rome, but in the freer air of America they usually mean the loss of the children, and often of the Romish parent as well. The Ne Temere Decree may be taken as the measure of Rome's dread of such unions. (3) The effect of the notorious association of Roman Catholics with the liquor trade. This association superficially viewed is a lucrative one for the Church, but she has appar- ently to pay a big price for it in the end. A Canon of the Church has thus pointed out the tremendous loss of influence which is involved : " If the drunken neighbourhood is the Catholic neighbourhood ; if the drunkards' names in the police reports are notoriously those of Catholics ; if the saloon-goers and the saloonists are Catholics ; if the ' boodlers ' who thrive by saloon politics are Catholics ; if the saloon-made paupers and tramps are Catholics then, as a moral force among men, Catholicity is done for in that com- munity." It would appear that not only do the great majority of the saloon-keepers in the Republic belong to the Roman Church, but that at least 90 per cent, of the criminals in the prisons of the Republic are Romanists although only 14 per cent, of the population is Romanist. (4) The American Leakage 217 The effect of the rapidly-growing discrimination in the minds of the masses between Christ and the Church. That not only means that when Christ's voice is heard His message is very different from that of the Church, but that Rome has put the Church where Christ should be. On the continent of Europe, where Protestantism is sometimes in- visible, Christ has often to bear the odium of the corruptions which have been associated with His worship. But in America it is easy to institute comparisons between w T hat is and what ought to be ; and thus many of those who are lost to Eome are won for Christ. (5) The results of neglect of the rural classes. According to this view the J immigrants as they scatter all over the vast terri- tories of the States are not followed up as they ought to be. The efforts of the Hierarchy and priesthood alike, it is said, have been far too much absorbed by the urban populations. Not only so, but their machinery was borrowed from the Old World and has prevented them from caring as they should for the negroes, the Indians, and scattered communities. When the great emigration from Europe, and especially from Ireland, led to an enormous increase in the Roman Catholic population, the Church was for long unable to provide priests or services for them, and such organisation as existed was confined to the towns. The result was that many drifted into 2 1 8 The Arrested Reformation Protestant churches, a process which was acceler- ated by the fact that at that time the priests were mostly French. "And so," says a Komish writer, " we lack a sturdy, intelligent, rural class. " Besides these, other explanations are given for a leakage which all feel demands explanation. Among these are the strife between capital and labour, the anti-Catholic tendencies of the Govern- ment, the influence of pernicious literature, the lack of literature of a helpful kind, and the neglect of congregational singing. In addition to these there are the organised movements for freedom and reform which have led to large secessions, and the whole group of tendencies and aspirations which have been summed up under the term Americanism. It seemed at first as if Americanism were to obtain the patronage of leading members of the American Hierarchy, but they were not of the stuff of which even quasi-martyrs are made, and hastened to declare to the authorities at Rome that they had never meant what everybody thought they did. It is easier, however, to set such forces in operation, or to coquette with them, than to hush them to sleep when they prove troublesome; and most manifestly they have to be reckoned with. The history of the United States has shown that freedom and Romanism do not go together. From the days of the War of Independence freedom in the State has reacted Americanism 219 on the Church, and very early the Roman Catholic laity in South Carolina claimed the power to administer the property of the Church. In 1832 a Romish bishop calculated that of f.fty thousand descendants of Roman Catholics in the two Carolinas not more than ten thousand belonged to the Church of their forefathers. A year later it was stated that the young men of the United States did not think of entering the priesthood, nor did their parents urge them to do so. The result was that the clergy were recruited from the more ignorant classes, and were the social inferiors of the Protestant pastors. Among the more definite movements, apart from the general tendency to Americanism, two are outstanding, that of Hecker and the Paulists, and that among the immigrant Poles. Many who emigrate from Europe to America do so, in part at least, in order to get away from priestly domina- tion, and even to break altogether from Rome in a new environment where such a step does not involve social ostracism and loss. Discontent with Rome has to do with much of the emigration of Bohemians and Poles, and probably also of the Irish. Many of these emigrants have already in spirit broken with the Church, and the others cannot but feel that they can now think for themselves after a new sort, and that they can now follow their convictions. " The great and 22O The Arrested Reformation continuous defection from Catholicism of the Irish in America," said Mr. Sydney Brooks in The Fortnightly Review for February 1912, "is a phenomenon at least as much explicable by the environment they have left as by that they have entered." Hecker began life as a Methodist; and only became a Komanist when he was twenty-five years old, and after he had already been an inmate of a socialist community. As might have been expected he proved a restless Romanist. He set himself to Americanise his new religion, and to free it from the taint of being a foreign institution. With this in view he founded the Paulist order, which has not, however, accomplished very much ; its significance consisting mainly in its recognition of the fact that if Rome is to appeal to the American mind and thrive in the soil of the Republic it must borrow from Protestantism. But this is just what the Encyclical of Pope Leo xm. ex- plicitly forbade it to do. The movement among the Poles in America first took definite shape in 1881, when a congregation in Chicago declared themselves independent of Rome because they were denied the right to take part in the manage- ment of the temporal affairs of the Church, along with the clergy. Others were added to their numbers until in 1897 a bishop was chosen by those who then called themselves the Polish Rome and freedom 2 2 I Catholic Independent Church of America, and he was consecrated at Berne by prelates of the Old Catholic Church. In 1903, however, he and his people to the number of 80,000 members were admitted into the American Episcopal Church. A similar movement among the Poles in Penn- sylvania resulted in the formation of an independent Polish National Church, which held its first synod in 1904. There were 150 lay delegates present along with twenty priests, who came from five States. They also have chosen a bishop of their own. Movements of the same sort have taken place among the Czech and Italian immigrants. A considerable number of Czech congregations have been organised, composed of converts from the Roman Church; and an Italian Alliance has been formed of Italian converts. And the end is not yet. At Trent, Rome condemned herself to Medievalism, and whatever unity and strength that brought it also brought essential weakness. It has been made manifest that Medievalism cannot thrive in America. It may soon be made manifest that it cannot now thrive anywhere. BOOK III CAN THE ARREST BE REMOVED? CHAPTER I The Significance of Trent THE Church of Rome which must be evangelised if the arrest on the Reformation is to be removed dates from the Council of Trent, and in this fact lies the supreme significance of that Council. Mr. Froude held that it is not possible to magnify its importance ; but its far- reaching issues have often been missed, sometimes through lack of historical perspective, and some- times because of the very multiplicity of the details of its proceedings and decrees. In some respects it did for the Church of Rome what the revocation of the Edict of Nantes did for France. It involved a permanent impoverishment and loss of light and truth. It was a kind of moral and intellectual suicide. Since then Rome has been bound hand and foot with the graveclothes of Medisevalism and priestism ; and whatever is new has in anticipation been condemned as untrue. The doors and win- dows of the great cathedral were then closed, so that with all its magnificence the light and air might no longer find their way in even fitfully as before. 226 The Arrested Reformation In certain essential respects that Council and not the Reformation was the watershed between the old and the new, the dividing line between pagan clericalism and New Testament evangelicalism. It professed only to formulate what had always been held, but it changed in formulating ; closing open questions; making the irregular null and void ; and with a sinister instinct and ingenuity causing the worse part to appear the whole. Till then there had been the possibility that some com- mon ground might be discovered for all who wished reform, some basis on which the unity of Western Christendom might be preserved, and in which loyalty to the essentials of the Gospel might be combined with freedom in their detailed applica- tion. But Rome then made explicit choice of obscurantism in preference to light ; and has found no place for repentance since. It is true that she set herself to remove certain abuses, and thereby reassured some who were wavering in their allegiance. She likewise perfected her organisa- tion, regimenting her priesthood so that no new revolutionary movement need be feared. The burden of her doctrinal definitions, however, was that she deliberately separated herself from the friends of the Evangel, not a few of whom had hitherto found it possible to maintain a precarious existence within her borders. As Reformation Genealogies show, it was not the Reformers who Dexterous Ambiguity 227 separated themselves from Catholicism even as it had existed in the later Middle Ages. It was Rome who was schismatic, and she separated herself formally from the unity of the Church at Trent ; that Council which cursed so much which not a few had fain hoped it might bless. The vital questions regarding this Council are not those which concern its legality or authority, but those which concern its spirit, and, above all, its attitude to the past. It matters little now that it was neither catholic nor free, for however they were arrived at we must accept its decisions as momentous facts. Until then the Western Church had to some extent been like a nation with an unwritten constitution, and the Decrees of Trent mark her transition to the comparative im- mobility and bondage of a written constitution. Controverted, and in part open, questions were replaced by unalterable dogmas ; varying tradi- tions by definite and inflexible decrees ; and an inconsistency, which left room for genuine if irregular triumphs of faith, by a grim logic which in alliance with a dexterous ambiguity enslaved the spirit of those who became subject to it. A uniformity was established in matters of faith and discipline which had never existed before, and which was to be an impregnable bulwark not merely against innovations but against the possibility of further illumination and growth. The path was 228 The Arrested Reformation deliberately made straiter in order that it might be more secure. Rome lost in extension what she gained in intension, and it is a question whether such a Reformation as that of the sixteenth century could possibly begin now within her ranks. It may gratify Romanists to believe that it could not, but that proves that their Church is not that of pre-Reformation days. The Church of the Reformers did not go out into the world poor and bare like a manumitted bondmaid. She took her property with her ; the best traditions of the Mediae- val Church, the real treasures of the Church uni- versal. It was not Rome but those whom she anathematised as heretics who were in the true line of the Apostolic Succession. In the earlier sessions of the Council itself there was room for opinions for which there was no room when it closed. Even as regards such funda- mental matters as the Canon of Scripture, the relation of Scripture and tradition, the doctrine of original sin, the nature of the atonement, the meaning and effect of justification, the theory of the sacraments and the claims of the episcopate, views were freely advocated by those whose ortho- doxy was not in question which were anathema when the Council was at an end. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable than the way in which divines of unquestioned loyalty as well as conspicuous ability gave expression to opinions closely allied Rome Schismatic 229 to those of the Kef ormers. Every subj ect awakened controversy; and what was ultimately decreed not only restated old propositions but framed new ones, and shut many a door which had at least been ajar. Even if it had been the case, as it was not, that the final decisions were in harmony with what had always been the doctrine of the Church, it remains that difference of opinion was no longer tolerated. Freedom was destroyed in the name of unity and logic. The voice of controversy was hushed, so that the Church of Rome, instead of perpetuating the unbroken Christendom of the West prior to the Reformation, became a sect, the thing she professes so heartily to abhor. Under the guidance of the Jesuits a " new body of doc- trine " was substituted for the ancient doctrines ; a body of doctrine which became complete in our own time through the promulgation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, and the Papal Infallibility, with the enthronement of the Liguorian morality. The determination of the managers of the Council and never was Council more systematic- ally managed to identify Protestantism with the old Mediaeval heresies shows how conscious they were of all this. The Reformation doctrines are always exhibited in an exaggerated form, and mixed up with real heresies which the Reformers condemned as heartily as the Romanists. The Reformers were the lineal descendants of the 230 The Arrested Reformation Mediaeval saints and not of the Mediaeval heretics, as the Jesuits insinuated ; and were no more responsible for such aberrations as post-Reforma- tion Socinianism than Rome was for similar aberra- tions in pre-Reformation days. Not only so, but as the Council went on Rome increasingly identified herself with Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresies as against Augustinianism, and left it to those whom she condemned to stand for what was at the heart of what was best in the days of the un- divided Church. In their codification the theo- logians of Trent did not go as far back as Paul or Augustine, but only as far as Thomas Aquinas. The sphere of free grace was limited by the need for finding a place for the sacerdotal view of the sacraments. In the earlier sessions there was a certain Augustinian flavour of the sovereignty and sufficiency of Divine grace, owing to the influence of the great Dominican theologians ; but as the Jesuit influence became supreme this disappeared. Every way was now to lead to Rome, and ways which led elsewhere were diverted or closed. The decree concerning justification is usually regarded as a masterpiece of dexterity ; but this very dexterity proves that more than codification took place. The Reformation doctrine of justifica- tion by faith alone had to be rejected. Yet justice had to be done to the followers of Aquinas, who were not unfriendly to a moderate presentation The y&uit Triumph 2 3 I of that doctrine ; opposed though they were to the Evangelical doctrines of the sacraments and the Church. A place had also to be found for the doctrine of merit derived from good works. The result is that what seems to be given with one hand is taken away by the other ; and while much is said with which Evangelicals can agree, room is left for a system of righteousness by works. Instead of making justification consist in an act of God performed for the sake of Christ on the exercise of faith, the decree makes it consist in an act of God performed for the sake of what has been done in man to occasion it. The all-sufficiency of Christ as Saviour is obscured, and men are led to seek acceptance with God through the cultivation of dispositions, the doing of good works, and the observance of rites. Here and there concessions are made to the Augustinianism which had had a surprising hold on their best minds, but the decree is anti-evangelical throughout, and this is the measure of what was effected under cover of de- finition. Not that the extent of the change was realised by all who were at the Council. There was too much theological ignorance, to say nothing of graver defects, for that. Indeed, dexterous as the decree is, there was enough of Augustinianism left in it to make Jansenism possible in days to come. But Jansenism was no more than a flicker- ing flame. As Principal Lindsay has put it : " It 232 The Arrested Reformation is sufficient to say that the theologians of Trent do not seem to have the faintest idea of what the Reformers meant by faith, and never appear to see that there is such a thing as religious experi- ence." As regards the central doctrine of justi- fication, it was the heretical and not the orthodox tendencies which prevailed ; Pelagius and not Augustine, Abelard and not Bernard. The only representative of England in the Council, Cardinal Pole, keen Romanist though he was, left it in disgust when the doctrine of the Church as it was to be had been denned, so convinced was he that it was not the true orthodox doctrine of the saints. The extent of the changes thus effected at Trent under cover of codification and formulation can best be seen by reference to the details of the lead- ing decrees. In connection with the doctrine of Scripture, for example, the magnitude of the departure from the practice of the best days is very manifest. All through the Reformation con- flict the defenders of Rome made a use of the Bible which was not allowable to obedient sons of the Church after Pius iv. issued the creed which bears his name, and which sums up, sometimes not very fairly, the official interpretation of the decrees of Trent. Every Mediaeval theologian held that the whole doctrinal system of the Church was based on the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. When the Reformers made their Doctrine and Scripture 233 appeal to the Bible there was no sense of novelty in their doing so, and their opponents, far from challenging that appeal, made it themselves. But since the Council of Trent the faithful can only interpret Scripture in accordance with the unanimous consent of the Fathers. " No one shall interpret the Scriptures against that meaning which Holy Mother Church has held and holds, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation ; nor shall dare to interpret the Holy Scriptures contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers." But the Fathers are never unanimous about anything, and although it had not the courage to say so, the intention of the Council clearly was to place the authoritative exposition of Scripture in the hands of the Pope. If, however, there is one thing as to which the Fathers were unanimous it was as to the absolute sufficiency of Scripture as revealing all necessary doctrines both of faith and practice, and in re- pudiating every claim of authority for themselves in their interpretations. They all held that their conclusions must be tested by Scripture. It is probable that there is some warrant some- where in earlier writings for everything in the Tridentine doctrine of Scripture, and that that doctrine represented the trend of later Romish belief ; but the significant thing is that what was only a part of what had been held, and the less 234 T/ie Arrested Reformation worthy part, was made the whole. This comes out in every section of the decree ; as, for instance, in the new importance which was put on tradition as a source of revelation. It was proclaimed that " traditions, whether relating to faith or to morals, dictated either orally by Christ or by His Holy Spirit, and preserved in continuous succession within the Catholic Church/' were to be received " with an equal feeling of piety and reverence " as the books of Holy Scripture. Not only was this an entirely novel position so far as the early Church was concerned, but at the Council itself a speaker was still free to pronounce it an ungodly thing to pay equal respect to tradition and to Holy Scripture. The final decision of the Council, however, in making binding on all what had never before been an article of faith, provided the means for warding off any attack based on the Bible alone ; while its logical issue was the declaration of Pius ix. that the decrees of a Pope speaking ex cathedra are on a level with the Word of God, since nothing was said as to where the guardians of this dogmatic tradition were to be found. It would almost seem that they were determined to serve themselves heirs to our Lord's denunciation of those who teach as doctrines the command- ments of men and make the Word of God of none effect by their traditions. The same sinister genius for choosing the worse A Sinister Genius 235 part appears in connection with the exaltation of the Vulgate as the authoritative text of Scripture. This was not only new but in violent opposition to the best usages of the Mediaeval Church. " It cast aside," says Principal Lindsay, " as worse than useless the whole scholarship of the Renaiss- ance both within and outside of the Mediaeval Church, and on pretence of consecrating a text of Holy Scripture, reduced it to the state of a mummy, lifeless and unfruitful." The Council deliberately made itself the slave of the letter ; and since many of its members had shared in the Humanist revival, this ridiculous decision was very keenly debated. It was, indeed, not only unscientific, but was a characteristic attempt to shut out the light. The Vulgate was an old and faulty translation, a manifestly incorrect version of a corrupt text ; yet it was foisted on the Church in deference to the exigencies of an un- scriptural doctrine of Scripture, and a mechanical doctrine of the Church. In deference to Erasmus and the new learning, however, it was admitted that there must at least be a new and scholarly edition of the Vulgate, now so highly exalted ; and the attempts to obtain such an edition are a strange commentary on the claims which were made for the Pope as head of the Church. The question was referred to Rome, and a committee under Cardinal Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul IV., 236 The Arrested Reformation advised corrections in accordance with rules framed for the purpose. But Pope Sixtus v. framed other rules, and took the matter into his own hands ; and in 1590 published the official edition of the Vulgate under the name of the Sixtine edition. This was put forth with full apostolical authority as henceforth unalterable on pain of the greater excommunication ; and with the assurance that he had corrected the misprints with his own hands. But he soon had occasion to be alarmed at his handiwork, and caused the most serious errors to be covered up with slips of paper. After his death it was suggested that his work should be suppressed, but ultimately in accordance with Bellermine's advice a new edition containing as many as two thousand emendations appeared in 1592, still under the name of Sixtus ; and so far as possible the earlier edition was quietly set aside. The same tendency to make the worse part the whole comes out further in connection with the growing unwillingness of the ecclesiastical authorities to allow the people to read the Bible for themselves. It helps to show how real the possibilities of a universal reformation had been that the division on this point in the Council was acute ; but, as usual, obscurantism prevailed. The Mediaeval Church had never encouraged a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures, but the practice had not been uniform ; and even in Spain Transubstantiation 237 there had been vernacular translations. Now, however, the Spanish bishops sought to have all Bible reading in the mother tongue prohibited; whereas the German bishops demanded whether children were not to be taught the Lord's Prayer in a language they could understand. But in the end the interpretation and, by inference, the study of the Bible by private persons was pro- hibited; and in 1564 Pius rv. made the reading of Komish translations of Scripture depend on the permission of the bishop or officer of the Inquisi- tion, in accordance with the advice of the father- confessor. After Trent, Rome increasingly felt that her doctrines could not bear the light of Scripture ; and thus one after another the better influences which somehow had persisted in face of sacerdotal and pagan opposition were banished. In the choice between light and darkness the Romish authorities rejected the light which con- demned what they were determined was now to be supreme both in doctrine and practice. Even in regard to the doctrines of Transub- stantiation and the Mass, which lay at the root of most of the aberrations and corruptions of the later Mediaeval Church, the Council of Trent was far from summing up or including all that had been generally held. Here also there had been more than one stream of tendency, and the pagan stream was chosen as that which alone was to 238 The Arrested Reformation flow in the days to come. On the whole subject of the sacraments the Council was faced with great difficulties owing to opposition between the earlier and more evangelical Thomist and the later Scotist and Nominalist theology ; and these were surmounted by dexterous ambiguity, by statements at variance with the facts of history, and by giving the real victory to the Jesuits. The propositions ultimately adopted, with many anathemas on all who did not accept them, were only arrived at by majority votes, and amid a conflict of the most irreconcilable opinions. That in this also the part was put in place of the whole comes out in various ways. In 1551, for example, while the Council was still in session, the Bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tonstal, issued a treatise in which, Tyndale's enemy as he was, a doctrine is set forth which is quite different from that of Trent, and nearly approaches that of the Liturgy and Articles of the Church of England. And so with other great Roman divines. The canon of the Mass itself contained prayers which provided the first arguments against Transubstantiation which suggested themselves to the Reformers. When Rome selected one of the discordant views which were advocated even in the Council she belied her claim that her doctrine represents what the unbroken Church had held always and every- where. The Power of the Pope 239 What holds true of these palmary decrees holds true also regarding the place assigned to the Pope. Choice was again made of a part, and that the unworthy part, to be the whole. Everything was made to turn on absolute submission to the Papacy. Even those who emphasise the reforms which were agreed to, although some of them were never carried out, admit that the " chief point was, and continued to be, the establishment of the unimpeachable legitimacy of the Papal chair as the main pillar of the newly-found uniformity." Not only was the power of the Pope, which had been one great source of the abuses which were to be rectified, left untouched, the form of sub- scription to the creed involved a promise of obedience to the Pope. The very ambiguities which were left or introduced, and the chaos of authority resulting from the new place given to the amorphous Fathers in connection with Scrip- ture, were used to identify religion with a blind and unreasoning submission to the Church identi- fied as the Pope. For those who were Romanists first and Christians afterwards, all this may have been involved in the theories which had prevailed on the eve of the Reformation ; but there were likewise other theories which had been strenuously held by the more spiritually- minded, and had never been denied a place before. These, how- ever, were now anathema, and since then all the 240 The Arrested Reformation doctrines of Rome have been gradually reduced in practice to one article, submission to the cult of the Papacy. This same sinister tendency showed itself at Trent in connection with the new organisation which made all else subordinate to the new abso- lutism ; the new uniformity falsely called unity. Even the improvement in regard to the education of the priests, which some episodes at the Council itself showed was much required, proceeded on lines which brought everything more and more completely under the domination of the ecclesi- astical authorities. Seminary-trained priests be- come the creatures of the Papacy as those who are educated along with their fellow-men in ordinary schools or universities seldom do, and these are the agents which Ultramontanism wishes. In view of all this it is an enormous interference with the facts of history and experience to pre- sume that Rome is the heir of the undivided Church ; a claim which seems to fascinate some. The only parallel to it is the assumption that she alone is the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; which is monstrous in face of the fact that she has often been rent by the bitterest divisions, that she has often been defiled by the grossest vices, that she has separated herself from multitudes of those who hold the faith as it is in Jesus, and that the problem of the ages is how Reformed Churches Catholic 241 to account for her fundamental divergences from the Church of the Apostles. For true Catholicity we must turn to the Re- formers. For them the Catholic Church is universal in the sense that it includes all the faithful disciples of Christ in every age and land. The Reformed churches were and are Catholic as receiving the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and the Catholic canon of Scripture which contains the teaching of our Lord and His apostles. They are in the Apostolic Succession as holding the teaching which has come down from the Apostles ; and as (f sent " just as the Apostles were. In the later Middle Ages, under the influence of Hilde- brandism, Catholicity was thought of as consisting in union with the Roman Church ; but even prior to the Reformation the study of Roman law had led men back to the older conception embodied in the Theodosian and Justinian codes, that Catho- licity consists in the acceptance of the Nicene doctrine of the co-equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The claim of the Reformers always was that they could renounce the Papacy without ceasing to be members of the Catholic Church, and even those of them who did not make insistance on the historical episcopate essential have never been without a clear and consistent doctrine of the Church as consisting of those who have the one Lord, the one faith, and the one 16 242 The Arrested Reformation baptism. As Dr. James Walker says in his Scottish Theology, they could " meet the Church idealism of Rome, in many ways so grand and attractive, with a nobler Church idealism. They could throw back the charge that Protestantism dismembers and breaks up the Kingdom of God upon earth, with the reply that Protestant unity is as much a reality as Roman unity, only the centre of it is in heaven, not on the banks of the Tiber." It cannot be too strenuously insisted on that it is those who stand for the decrees of the Council of Trent who are the separatists and schismatics, and not those who are loyal to Reformation truth. CHAPTER II Rome and the Modern Spirit FTHHE significance of the Council of Trent was Xthat the Church of Home then shut the door on the new light which God has promised to those who do His will, and are responsive to the leading of the Divine Spirit who has so much to say to those who are able and willing to hear Him. In anticipation it condemned the new as not true ; and prepared the saddest of all dilemmas for the Romanist who wishes to be loyal to his upbringing and his Church, and yet knows well that much of the new appeal and aspiration of our age is of God. The philosopher Hegel held that the real tragedies of life do not emerge in the conflict between the false and the true, but in the conflict between two truths ; and such a tragedy has darkened the life of many who have grown up in the Church of Rome, and yet would fain obey the beckoning hand which they believe to be Divine. That one representative Romanist Abbot Gasquet can say, that even if he could not follow or fully understand the Papal Encyclical against Modernism, he would deem it his obvious 244 The Arrested Reformation duty and only safe way to bow to the directions it contains; and that another can argue that " since the Church is enlightened by the Holy Spirit it is really absurd to urge upon her renovation or regeneration, as though she could be liable to defect or dulness," shows how helpless Romanism is in presence of the modern spirit with all its promise and potency for good, and all its possi- bilities of unsettlement and unbelief. The modern spirit may be described as the attitude of mind generated by and manifested in the rise of the democracy, the supremacy of social questions, the triumph of physical science, and the application of critical principles to Holy Scripture. Never has there been a more searching era than ours for the Christian Church. Never was there so much unrest or so much indifference. Criticism of all sorts, fair and unfair, was never so intrusive or so ceaseless. Every institution, even the most venerable and stable, is on its trial. Every dogma, even the most sacred and universal, is in the melting-pot. In every case credentials are being called for and exposed to the keenest scrutiny and the fiercest light. This applies to all the Churches, and there are mani- festations of the modern spirit which are hostile to all religion. But it applies in a special sense to the Church of Rome, inasmuch as she claims to be above criticism. Just because she has Graveclothes of Clericalism 245 made herself the slave of the letter, and bound herself with the graveclothes of clericalism, she is helpless in presence of the conditions which now prevail. Even those who are least aware of it have changed their outlook, and a Church which is committed to Medievalism in days when men find it difficult even to appreciate what Medisevalism was, is altogether unable to sanctify the new temper for high and holy ends. The appeal to mere authority now avails with few even among those who are hardly conscious of how much their world has altered ; and much that was accepted as inevitable or indubitable even fifty years ago is now either discredited or on its trial. This is the era of the religion of the Spirit ; and those who live as Christians should, in the expectation of fuller light, know that all things will work together for good no matter how searching the inquiry or how thorough the revolution. If Home refuses to acknowledge what is legitimate and true in the modern spirit, so much the worse for Rome. It is for Evangelical believers to show the better way ; to make it manifest that freedom and reverence may be combined so that they can respect the rights of man; not in opposition to the rights of God, but because they find rest and peace in Him. Not that what calls itself Modernism is right just because it is in conflict with Rome. Much of it is 246 The Arrested -Reformation no more true than it is new ; as when it sets itself to ignore the supernatural, or to shut the spiritual and unseen out of human life. In so far as Modernism means revolt against the miraculous either in Scripture or in ordinary life ; the denial of the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Our Lord and His rising from the dead, and the unique inspira- tion of the Bible ; it would be very short-sighted for any believer to rejoice in its victories over Rome. Yet even where anti-clericalism views all ministers of religion as priests and impostors, and all the doctrines of the Christian faith as super- stitious, it may break the power of the priest and dispel superstition so that the preacher of free grace can get a hearing as he cannot where Rome is dominant. Nor is it ungenerous to an enemy who is down to suggest that Rome has brought most of her troubles on herself, just as she has cast deep shadows over the whole realm of Evangelical truth, by her alliance with despotism, by her opposi- tion to freedom, and by forcing so many to identify New Testament Christianity with her corrupt and inadequate representation of it. Neither the anti- clerical feeliDg which is so widespread, nor the anti-religious aspect of the manifestations of the modern spirit so common in countries where Rome has been supreme for centuries, is matter for sur- prise ; and in God's grace the Kingdom of His Son may come erelong in these misguided and much- Modernism 247 wronged lands through the healthy detestation of tyranny and unreality alike in Church and State. The light of Divine truth may break for those who are sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, even through revolution and unbelief. It is becoming less and less possible for men to build on mere tradition, since each must face the eternal issues for himself, and be led into saving fellowship with the unseen, if the joy of the Lord is to be his. If those who profess to know what all this means had greater faith in their Lord, the coming of His Kingdom in every land would not be long delayed. They are often " sicklied o'er " with the half-unconscious fear that what they call faith may only be superstition : and the only cure for that is to live in the open, to walk in the light, to be loyal to the truth in its fulness, and be glad in the Lord ; since nothing is so infectious or so much required as the joy of salvation for the weary and heavy laden. It is no part of the Christian faith to act as if God has nothing more to say to those who are able to hear Him. When the Pilgrim Fathers were setting out in the Mayflower to claim the New World for freedom and God, Pastor Robinson besought them to expect fresh light from Him who is the light ; and even yet the half has not been told us of what He has in store for those who do His will. All light and truth are of God, and it is not the Christian attitude 248 The Arrested Reformation to tremble for the ark. We must try the spirits whether they are of God, since the new is not necessarily the true ; but we must always be willing to readjust our outlook in loyalty to what- ever is of God ; in the faith that nothing which is truly from above can conflict with His revela- tion of grace in Christ. But that is just what Romanism since the Council of Trent cannot do. Her boasted logic and her proud claim that she never changes have become her Nemesis in days when the tide of life is running so swiftly. To imagine that the record is closed or that God has nothing to say to His people through all the wondrous events of our time is unbelief as well as folly ; but since she finally put herself in bonds Rome can neither appreciate nor hallow the modern spirit as a Church of Christ should. Our era will rank with that of the Reformation as epoch-making ; and amid the solvents which are at work the Church of the Living God must be free to respond to every word He speaks, and to follow His hand wherever it beckons. Our faith in the ministry of the Holy Ghost should mean nothing less than that ; and that is just what it cannot mean for the Church of Rome. Among the many signs and portents of the revolution which confronts us, nothing is more remarkable than the changes which are taking place in the Roman Catholic communities in every Rome's Nemesis 249 land. If Ireland is an exception, it is the excep- tion which proves the rule. And even in Ireland, where Rome is strong because she has sided with the popular party, disintegrating forces are at work, and we know not what a day may bring forth. The reception given to the Papal Encyclical against Modernism showed that the Pope and his advisers might as well have tried to sweep back the Atlantic with a broom, or turn back the hands on the dial of time, as bid men cease to breathe the atmosphere of their generation, and order those who were made at first in the image of God to cease thinking in days when the ends of the world have come on us. Even among the well-disciplined followers of the Jesuits there have been mutterings of revolt. Even those who accept the dogma of the Papal Infallibility are aghast at its practical application, and cannot shut their eyes at the bidding of the Pope, as if modern science were a heretical fiction. Our generation has had another illustration of the folly of the wise, and has seen that an infallible Pope may be a very inadequate guide. The Curia has never made more blunders in practical politics than since it was decreed that it is presided over by one who is infallible. Those who longed for an unerring guide must be disconcerted when the white light shows that the Pope is as fallible as any other of the leaders of men. Soon after the Encyclical appeared, a letter was 250 The Arrested Reformation addressed to the Pope by some of the Romish clergy in Wurtemberg, explaining that he had made a mistake. They pointed out that the theologians whose work was condemned were men devoted heart and soul to the Roman Catholic religion and the Apostolic chair, and that their aim was to defend the Christian religion with new weapons suitable to modern times. The methods of meeting error, they said, which may have been successful centuries ago are of no avail now ; and any attempt to compel their application to-day is merely a useless endeavour to turn the wheel of time backwards. On the same week it was also announced that the Pope had excom- municated the anonymous writers of an Italian pamphlet entitled Tine Programme of the Modernists, written in reply to the Encyclical, and which the faithful were forbidden to sell or read. It was announced, too, that Father Tyrrell had been deprived of the sacraments because of two articles he had published in criticism of the Encyclical, a step which evoked a remarkable protest from the journal called Vanity Fair. Written as if from within the Romish Church it says : '' The sooner the Vatican composes its quarrel with Father Tyrrell the better for the Vatican. The feeling against the punishment meted out to him is growing more and more bitter among English Catholics. The Vatican has been losing touch The Papal Encyclical 251 with English Catholic thought for a good many years ; it seems not to have the slightest idea how thorough is our sympathy with Father Tyrrell's refusal to become an accomplice in the profanation of allowing the sacred edifice of the Mass to be used as an instrument of government and moral coercion, how strong is our support of his refusal to submit his correspondence with those who come to him nearly always secretly and privately as to one to whose secrecy they can trust, to censor- ship and ecclesiastical supervision. Between the Ultramontane point of view and the English Catholic point of view there has always been very little in common ; and nowadays the wise and enlightened English Catholics are more than ever opposed to the Italian policy of robbing the Church of the help of the really vital and pro- gressive forces within her bosom. Every blow struck at Father Tyrrell is a blow struck at English Catholicism." In Germany, too, even Romanists resent the defamation of the national hero. In 1904 a Roman Catholic professor in the University of Wurzburg got into trouble for protesting as others have done against the slanders published about Luther, and against the extravagances of the Ultra- montanes. Since then the Senate of the University of Tubingen has intervened on behalf of Professor Gunter, who had been ordered by his bishop to 252 The Arrested Reformation discontinue his lectures on Church History because of the suspicion that he was propagating Modernist views. They described such action as an inad- missible interference with freedom of teaching. In France also the light is spreading and the resentment against papal tyranny deepening. After the Encyclical was published the Cardinal of Paris set a vigilance committee to work to keep watch over all publications and all teachers infected by the new views ; and writings meant for the faithful had to pass a censor. Several bishops, however, have resigned in protest against the policy of the Vatican ; and one of these, the Bishop of Tarentaise, in bidding farewell to his clergy, said : " There has been a radical change in the intellectual habits of our countrymen. They will no longer be treated as children. Hence- forth the priest must combine with his capacity as minister of God, the prestige and influence which are given by a good education, and also that straightness of character which is regarded to-day as the chief of social virtues." If the conflict in France is actually between Medisevalism and straightness of character we need not be surprised that another spokesman, himself a Romanist, insists that a "Church handed over to the unchecked control of Pius x. and the persons who satisfy his ideal of a good Catholic can have only one future. Its ruin will be swift and complete, and in a com- Clericalism and Freedom 253 paratively few years it will be an insignificant sect." An outstanding feature of the modern spirit is its yearning for social and political amelioration; and the epigram attributed to James I. : " No bishop, no king," is not nearly so true as the counter-statement that the priest and the " sover- eign people " cannot flourish side by side. Many a priest has been a patriot. There have even been prelates who stood for freedom for others as well as for themselves. But clericalism is the enemy of liberty, and in practice has always tended to pride and vanity, to tyranny and intolerance, to Hilde- brandism and Ultramontanism. Clericalism in this sense has led the men of the Latin races to revolt from revealed religion, in their ignorance of New Testa- ment Christianity which has no priest but Christ and is the friend and inspirer of the rights of man. Even in the Old Testament the priest, divinely appointed as he was, required the corrective of the prophet to save religion and the freedom of the spirit of man from forms and rites which had lost their spirituality and power. It has been computed that during the last seventy years no fewer than one hundred and eighty millions of the people of Europe have been set free from bonds in the State, and it was in- evitable that those who had been enfranchised in politics should begin to think for themselves in 254 The Arrested Reformation connection with religion ; a step which is fatal to the claims which Rome makes for herself and her priesthood. Many are of the opinion that Great Britain is allowing Rome to abuse her hospitality and her free institutions, and liberty ought never to be allowed to degenerate into licence. But wisdom is justified of her children, and in the end freedom will vanquish every foe as the sunshine and the open air vanquish disease. Where there is vigilant loyalty to Evangelical truth, Popery cannot continue to flourish in a free State. It is a fungus which perishes when exposed to the light ; and although the statistics of buildings and functionaries seem to prove the success of the Romish invasion, the statistics of loyal men and women tell another tale. Not only is there a constant leakage, there is conflict where outsiders suppose there is nothing but harmony ; and changes are going on which show how vain is the semper eadem cry. It is not possible for us to tell what is in the minds of the wiser ecclesiastics in Britain or Germany, America or France, but there are indications that not a few of them are seriously disquieted by the doings of the present Pope. Nor is it the Pope alone whose actions suggest the ancient saying that those whom the gods would ruin they first of all make mad. Reference has already been made to the anti-Roman spirit Prancing Pro-Consuls 255 aroused in Canada by the boastful words of Father Bernard Vaughan, and it is interesting to find that Cardinal Moran did the same kind of work in Australia in connection with Empire Day, 1911. He instructed his priests that it was not to be regarded as Empire Day, but as Australia Day, and that if a flag were hoisted it was to be the Southern Cross and not the Union Jack. Taken in conjunction with the introduction of the Ne Temere Decree this has united the Protestant de- nominations there against the Romanists, who are only a fourth of the population, as they have not hitherto been united. Freedom seems to act like new wine on these prancing pro-consuls of the Papal See : and nothing is clearer than that Rome does not believe in the sovereignty of the people as against her own claims to be supreme. She can adapt herself to circumstances, and can use a democracy as well as an oligarchy. But she does not love a free atmosphere ; and the Jesuits in particular have a deep and universal hatred of modern civilisation, and make use of modern weapons to destroy it wherever they can. They use education to prevent education, and freedom and free institutions to make freedom impossible. Even where Church societies with a democratic appearance are allowed, there is always the veto of the Church at the crucial point ; and it is the duty of those who love freedom to proclaim from 256 The Arrested Reformation the housetops that priestism and liberty cannot flourish side by side. Neither a free press nor freedom of public meeting has a place in the Romish programme; and any semblance of either is to be found only where free Protestant institutions have compelled her to come to some extent into line. She can appeal to the populace against their rulers, but her normal appeal is to the rulers as against the rights of the people. She claims that she stands for authority, for law and order, and that governments which do not support her doom themselves. What this means in practice was shown in the Italian State not fifty years ago, when the authority on which the Church smiled and which she herself exercised meant intolerable tyranny and almost incredible corruption. The liberty of the Catholic Church has always meant bonds for the Catholic people. A.S for patriotism, the priest has no nation but Rome, and between him and the claims of father- land come the claims of the Church. Alike in Italy and Austria in the last generation, and in Spain and Portugal in this, the movement for freedom has found the Church of Rome set for the defence of despotism, the apologist of men who trampled on every sacred right of those whom Christ has called to be free. What is true of the modern yearning for freedom in the State is true also of the modern spirit of The Spirit of Inquiry 257 inquiry which is everywhere at work. That spirit may become lawless and lay unclean fingers on the very Ark of God, but the Spirit of God is a free Spirit and the Word of God is not bound. It is not for those who believe in God to act as if Christianity could not stand criticism or live in the open air. But Rome takes refuge from the spirit of inquiry, legitimate and illegitimate alike, behind the walls of tradition, authority, and papal infallibility ; as if God the Holy Spirit had no new light for His people, for the present duty and the present distress. She is seeking to meet the terrible artillery of modern warfare with the old and broken shields of Medievalism, and her treatment of a man like Antonio Fogazzaro shows how incapable she is of distinguishing between what is good and what is evil in the tendencies of our time. He was accused of being a Modernist, although his writings make it evident that he was no partisan of Loisy or Tyrrell^ but simply a liberal Romanist who wished to put the reading of Scripture and loyalty to the precepts of the Gospel in the place occupied by puerile devotions and political intrigues. In his last book he disclaimed any idea of innovating on received doctrines, and protested his obedience to the Hierarchy and the Pope. But he was dealt with as a soldier would be who dared to criticise his officers in a time of war ; and it was made clear 258 The Arrested Reformation that there is as little room as ever there was for independence among the members of the Roman Church. That incident also shows, however, that with all her power Rome cannot shut the opening door. The Index now advertises more than it extin- guishes ; and, as Mr. Lathbury says, " the Pope has shut up his army in an eighteenth-century fortress, and has left the enemy in unchallenged command of all the heights from which his posi- tion may be shelled/' Medievalism may save the schools of the Church from open discussion of modern problems, but it cannot protect them from inroads which must be met with living truth and the love of truth. Those whose life is hid with Christ in God are set for work and not for discussion, yet if they refuse to examine the foundations of their faith they doom themselves to mental paralysis. Dollinger held that with the exception of Newman none of the English Churchmen who became Romanists in his time continued to write as well after the change as before. The intellect suffers through obscurantism as well as the spirit. Of Manning he said that warmth and depth of religious feeling disappeared before reserve and even suspicion. So Bishop Gore says : " Candour, an attempt to fairly produce the whole case, a love of the whole truth, . . . this seems to have A Bankruptcy in Morality 259 vanished from their literature, and its place is taken by an abundant skill in making the best of all that looks Homeward in history and ignoring the rest. Indeed, it seems to be not only in dealing with the Papal claims that the Roman Church is disqualified from dealing broadly and frankly with facts. She has adopted a fatal tone of distrust towards the critical reason altogether, so that she seems by her whole method to put herself at a disadvantage in dealing with some of the most pressing problems of our time which are coming up for solution." " In other words, there seems to be an impassable gulf between the haughty isolation of the Roman Church on the one hand, and the intellectual hospitality of the modern age on the other. . . . While the one aims at the establishment of a sacerdotal autocracy resting on suppression and stagnation, the other aims at unrestricted development and a wide view of human possibilities." No wonder that Dollinger could also say that the dogma of papal infallibility had produced a general bankruptcy in morality ; for mental paralysis like this can hardly fail to end in moral debility. There is an impassable gulf between Romanism and the spirit which is set for freedom, for the rights of man, and for the emancipation of the human mind. It is probable that the attitude of Rome to the modern spirit is due to the fact that the Pope 260 The Arrested Reformation is in the hands of men cleverer and less scrupulous than himself, who are determined to complete the victory of 1870 by converting the Papacy into an absolute despotism, with the Society of Jesus as the power behind the throne. But that victory only completed the Jesuit victory at the Council of Trent ; and pagan sacerdotalism is simply showing itself in its true colours ; making it more manifest than ever that Home cannot consecrate the new situation which has arisen, nor take her part in staunching the wounds from which modern society is slowly bleeding to death. Indeed, Eome has inflicted some of the wounds which are worst of all to heal. It is not that she is opposed to learning itself. She has many learned men in certain departments ; and, as Macaulay pointed out long ago, those who expect Romanism to dis- appear before mere learning are greatly mistaken. So long as scholars subject themselves absolutely to the decrees of the Vatican, and pride themselves on accepting what in itself is incredible, the light will be kept out and inquiry will be stifled. Yet the world moves and the light spreads. The one question is whether the modern spirit is to be mainly destructive or is to lead those who are in the stream of doubt across to a fuller and nobler faith in God. Only those Protestants who are also Christians will count in the world conflict which has already begun. Mere tradition is of The Spreading Light 261 as little avail on the one side as on the other. Every man must face the eternal issues, as he must learn the multiplication table, for himself. The cry " let us be done with religion altogether " is only too often heard, and there are those who teach that freethinkers alone are the enemies of super- stition. It is said that in recent times only one President of the French Republic has been inside a church, and that he explained that he went to Notre Dame with the Czar as part of his official duty. Protestantism must be made winsome through those who are free from prejudice because they are walking in the liberty which their Lord has purchased for them. Deep down in the heart of man under every system, there is the longing for that peace which nothing but living fellowship with Christ can bring, and those who live His life and manifest His free Spirit will do most to hasten the overthrow of all that is of anti-Christ, His ceaseless foe. CHAPTER III If Rome is to be Won she must be understood CAN Rome be won ? Can the frozen streams of blessing melt in the sunshine of a new consecration and flow to the ends of the earth with healing and beauty and hope ? Can the river of God which grows deeper and deeper till it is ankle-deep, and then up to the loins, now reach the desert and the Dead Sea, as the river of Ezekiel's vision did, so that everything shall live ? That is the one end which is really worth working for. There is no longer the neglect of the social implications of the Gospel that there was in the Reformation Era, nor such manifest failure to obey the Great Commission of our Lord. Ours is the era of social reform, and the yearning prayer of every loyal believer is that the solution of our social problems will come under the leadership of Christ and not under an alien lord. As regards Foreign Missions, the entire outlook has so changed since the Reformation Age that the hope is wide- spread that all the earth shall hear the good news in the lifetime of some who are already in the work. 263 Lack of Untty 263 The rock of offence created by the spirit of disunion is, however, a rock of offence still. It is true that we have got beyond the conception of the sixteenth century, which explains so much of its blundering, that there is room for only one Church in a land. It is also true that it is not so easy as it used to be to fan the embers of controversy into flame, although some controversialists still do their worst or their best ; but that is as much due to indifference to vital truth as to a nobler and purer perception of what is really essential. It is like- wise true that there are many who are now ready to co-operate in inter-denominational work, especially in connection with the heathen and the lapsed and the great charities. Still, however, there is a sad and notable lack of that true and essential spirit of unity which our Lord Himself says is a prerequisite to convincing the world that He is the Sent of the Father. The spirit of unity often exists where there is not ecclesiastical union, and there may be more unity alongside of apparent separation than there is in certain forms of external unity. There are sects in Romanism which are as far apart as the Evangelical denominations. But we are still far from that oneness of con- secration and aim which will send the Reformed churches once again to their work, conquering and to conquer as one army of the Living God, and claiming the whole earth for Him. 264 T/ie Arrested Reformation The year of grace 1911 saw two significant illustrations of how difficult it is for professing Christians to cultivate a true sense of proportion, and to see things from the standpoint of the world's need and the Saviour's love. In con- nection with the Coronation, the Bishop of Hereford arranged a Communion Service in his Cathedral to which he invited the Nonconformists of the Diocese ; a very innocent and suitable thing to do, as many think. But even men in the forefront among the Anglican leaders denounced his action, apparently on the ground that every- thing must stand or fall by confirmation by bishops who claim to be in the line of the Apostolic Succession. Along these lines there can be no triumphal advance on the citadels of Rome. In the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, too, where the question of the validity of Wesleyan " orders " was discussed, the decision was of the nature of a compromise ; in spite of powerful appeals for brotherly recognition. The " orders " in question were not pronounced invalid, but neither were they acknowledged to be valid. Thus the penalty of division is continued division ; and even although lines of demarcation disappear in actual work rather than in dis- cussions, there is little likelihood of Eome being won for the Evangel by those who cannot unite round what is really fundamental ; a living union Difficulties in the VPay 265 to Christ, a love for souls born of fellowship with Him, and baptism into His Spirit, along with liberty to differ on matters which are of less moment and in regard to which the mind of God has not been made so clear. It is obvious, then, that there are difficulties yet in the way preventing the liberated waters from flowing freely in every land. There are still refrigerators freezing the streams of blessing. But it is through obedience the blessing comes, and Rome will never be won by those who wait till every difficulty has been removed. The Red Sea only opens up before those who obey the command and tell the people " that they go forward." Mission work will be fruitful in pro- portion as those who hear the call are loyal in their response, and the barriers which still separate those who are loyal to the One Lord and are all one in Him, will disappear only as those who have the light walk in it in singleness of heart. To understand Rome does not mean merely that those who would win her through the Evangel must know all about her doctrines and practices, her failures and successes. Some who had the most intimate acquaintance with the entire Romish controversy never won a soul for Christ, and never seem to have tried to do so. It is not enough to study Romanism for what it truly is, a great masterpiece of constructive genius, or to 266 The Arrested Reformation see ita consummate ability and logic, or the subtlety of its response to the needs of man. Students have followed these lines who have not accom- plished much in the way of conquest. " The Reformation is an event long since past," said Macaulay in a eulogy which like many such is not borne out by the facts. ''' That volcano has spent its rage. The wide waste produced by its outbreak is forgotten. The landmarks which were swept away have been replaced. The ruined edifices have been repaired. The lava has covered with a rich encrustation the fields which it once devastated, and after having turned a beautiful and fruitful garden into a desert, has again turned the desert into a still more beautiful and fruitful garden." How far that is from being literally correct has been already shown ; and the spectator who would see only unity and beauty, recovery and power, must stand afar off. What is necessary is to understand the whole system with sympathy for the souls of men. There must be spiritual insight to grasp the secret of the fascination of Rome, and to understand its persistence in spite of so many defeats. Easy solutions are usually inadequate anywhere, and are manifestly useless where the whole power of the Satanic has been at work all through to pervert and defeat the Divine. There is a sense in which all the deterioration which has made Easy Solutions Inadequate 267 a wilderness of what was once the Garden of the Lord can be explained by the germs of the sacerdotalism which originated in the paganism which so soon crept in like the sands from the Sahara on the fertile plains of Egypt, and spread until everything was contaminated. But that is not all the truth. If it had been, the structure would have gone to pieces long ago. There is a sense, too, in which the whole Papal system may be looked at as the outcome of the fatal determina- tion which has been at work throughout, and is one of the proofs of fche place which paganism so soon assumed, to work out a religion for the unregenerate man which satisfies him after a fashion, but leaves him unregenerate still. As the religion of the natural man, Kome has met needs which ought to have been met on other and Christian lines. "It is a development which is the result of an overreckless self-accommodation to the un- regenerate natural instincts in religion," says Bishop Gore. But again that is not all the truth. We must also bear in mind the extraordinary humanness of the system on which Professor M'GifEert has been laying emphasis : " The way in which it recognises and makes a place for common human impulses, putting even the least worthy of them to some use." The needs and yearnings which Rome meets after her own fashion must be understood if she is to be won. 268 The Arrested Reformation The satisfaction which she has provided on the lower level must be provided along lines which lead men ever upwards to God. It is a strange mixture which is found in the system which we call Popery, and the secret of its age-long hold on so many of our fellow-men can only be discovered by those who recognise the iron as well as the clay. Some of the old monks were sensualists and some of them were saints. And still alongside of unmeasured superstition and ignorance wonderful devotion and self-forgetting love are to be found. " How can a man be home- sick who has no home ? " was the striking reply of a Romish missionary to one who spoke to him of the isolation of the sphere to which he was being sent ; and even when we resent the subjection which turns into automata those who were made for God, and the cunning which makes things easy for the unspiritual by making them difficult, we must not only earn the right to criticise or denounce by showing the better way, we must do justice to whatever is noble and good. Protestants who are not as obedient to Christ as ordinary Romanists are to their ecclesiastical superiors have not earned that right ; and when the victory of the Evangel is complete the Saviour's garland must include even the wilderness flowers. Raymund Lull, the missionary, may be taken to show, for the pre-Reformation era, how much Romish Saints 269 true piety there may be alongside of much error. Dr. Speer says that he was the greatest missionary who has ever gone out to the Moslem world. " He was a Christian of the modern spirit of Catholicity : neither Roman nor Protestant ; a man of spiritual judgment, of Divine love. He saw the futility of authority in matters of religion at a time when other men were busy with the most devilish expression of belief in authority ever conceived the Inquisition. He loved Christ with a passionate love and saw that the only true method was the method of love." He had no idea that Christi- anity was not a complete and sufficient religion. He did not study other religions with the purpose of providing from them ideals which Christianity was supposed to lack. Nor did he propose to reduce out of all religions a common fund of general principles more or less to be found in all, and regard these as the ultimate religion. He studied other religions to find out how better to reach the hearts of their adherents with the Gospel, itself perfect and complete, lacking nothing, need- ing nothing from any other doctrine. With him there was a difference between Christianity and other religions not in degree only, but in kind. In his arguments with the Moslems it is striking how little there is which is distinctively Komish. It is Evangelical to the core, and it is not at all surprising that the Jesuits have always been hostile to his 270 The Arrested Reformation memory. Indeed Rome long hesitated whether to condemn him as a heretic or recognise him as a martyr and a saint. He is as far as possible from being typical ; and is rather the exception which proves the rule. In seeking to understand Rome, however, it is necessary to recognise the excep- tions as well as the rule. Nor are such exceptions to the rule altogether a thing of the past so far as genuine piety is con- cerned ; although of necessity they are more exceptional than ever since the door was shut on the Gospel at Trent, and they are no longer of the evangelical type like Raymund Lull. Yet even since that consummation of the great apos- tasy there have been men like Carlo Borromeo, Philip Neri, and Francis de Sales ; and difficult as it is for those who live in the sunshine and the open air of the Evangelical faith to under- stand how superstition and the persecuting spirit can persist side by side with self-surrender and devoutness, it would be churlish to belittle their piety such as it was. Even where those whom Rome beatifies and canonises are unhealthy, un- genial, and unattractive, not to say repellent, because of that sort of detachment and absorption which can be associated with much that is essenti- ally un-Christian " with its consequent deadness to mere human virtue and earthly goodness," they must be understood if Rome is to be evangelised The Devotional Life 271 and everything that is worthy is to be carried forward into the enduring sum and aggregate of the new unity. That is true likewise of certain phases of the devotional life which the Church of Rome has cultivated and from which something may be learned in spite of its hothouse atmosphere. It is of the essence of loyalty to the coming Kingdom of the Lord Christ to claim "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report," no matter what their environment may be, for the King. Not otherwise can justice be done to a very com- plex situation and an overwhelmingly difficult problem. It is manifestly in the interests of enduring conquest for our Lord that nothing helpful or true should be lost ; and that that which gives influence or power or charm, for certain natures, to such books as the Garden of the Soul, or to writers like Challoner and Alban Butler, should be sympathetically understood. It is very futile to imagine that the last word has been said about the morals of Romanism when we have unearthed the scandals which have so often gathered round the confessional and monasticism ; or have shown that there seems to be something in the very genius of sacerdotalism which makes men strain at gnats and swallow 272 The Arrested Reformation camels. It is easy to denounce living by rule as ultimately hostile to Christian freedom, and to speak disparagingly of cloister piety and of holiness which is nurtured on manuals of devotion ; for beyond question that sort of thing tends to become not merely sentimental but mawkish, and in the end unreal and therefore immoral. Yet if Home is to be understood with any expectation of setting her free from her errors in doctrine and practice alike, she must be taken at her best as well as at her worst. Those who are themselves coarse and self-indulgent, the creatures of impulse and caprice, have no right to indulge in harsh criticism of those who follow John the Baptist rather than Christ, even although they misrepresent the free, healthy, moral life to which Christian men and women are called. Only those whose righteous- ness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees can hopefully assail their sins and short- comings, and along with their own freedom they must have everything that is admirable in those who at their best are producing a torso and not the whole man. It is perfectly obvious that the doctrines of the Roman Church must be understood in the light of their vitality and power if there is to be victory for the Evangel. To seek a mere dialectical triumph, for example, in connection with the great central doctrine of the priesthood almost The Priesthood 273 savours of indecency. The corruption and strength of Romanism both grow from the same root, the belief that the Roman priesthood possesses mystical power conferred through episcopal or- dination. But how is it that the name "priest," which is never once applied to the Christian ministry as such in the New Testament, with all it stands for, has come to be favoured by the great majority of those who have borne or still bear the Christian name, and profess to be guided by the New Testament ? What is the need which is met or pandered to ? What truth has been perverted ? The situation cannot be sufficiently accounted for by the ambition of worldly ecclesiastics for power, or even by the gradual corruption which was due to the persistence of Judaic elements or the entrance of paganism. In any case, it is only if the need which has been so disastrously met can be under- stood that it can be met aright by the practice of the doctrines of the priesthood of all believers, the unique priesthood of Him who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and the abiding ministry of the Holy Ghost who has come to abide with us for ever. The word " priest " is not used in this connection in the New Testament church because the thing which it denotes does not exist there. There is no ministering priest because there is now no atoning sacrifice to offer. The only, because all-availing, sacrifice of which the Gospel knows is that which 18 274 The Arrested Reformation Christ once offered when He gave Himself for us ; and Christianity has no place for the sacerdotal conception because that presupposes an order of men who stand between God and their fellow-men, and through whose ministrations alone the sinner can be accepted of God. But on the other hand there are the essential facts of human experience in all the ages which have to be reckoned with, that man needs God, and that his sin has blocked the only way by which he can draw near. The sinner cannot approach of himself, and unless he knows of Him who is the great High Priest, and knows that He is not merely a historical personage but a living Lord who can be with him here and now, he will not see how Christ can take the place which the Roman priest professes to occupy or meet the need which he professes to meet. The very essence of priesthood is that it should be ever available, and from this viewpoint and in relation to a need which is so real and which must be met, far more should be made of the ministry of the Holy Ghost as the other Comforter who is to be with us to the end. Not only so, but there is nothing more urgent than that those who rightly proclaim the priest- hood of all believers should exercise their office continually. It is not for nothing that believers are called priests unto God in the New Testament, and orthodoxy in theory is of no avail unless there The Confessional 275 is also orthodoxy in practice. Logic, no matter how unassailable, is never enough unless there is also life ; and it is those who have the love-light in their eyes and the thrill of fellowship with the Saviour in their souls who will conquer Rome for Christ. Those alone can understand Romish error, and minister to the need which gives that error its power, who are themselves priests, draw- ing near for themselves and others through the sacrifice once offered by their great High Priest, and through the Divine Spirit. Closely allied to this doctrine of the priest in Romanism is the doctrine and practice of Confession, which must also be understood if there is to be victory. It has gathered much that is evil round it, and has immensely increased the illicit power of the Roman priesthood ; and it is very difficult for those who know it only from without to under- stand in any measure how certain phases of it can be tolerated among those who are rational and free. That, however, makes it all the more necessary to inquire what the other phases of it are in virtue of which it still occupies the place it does. There must be many who go to con- fession not merely to get a clean slate on which to proceed to inscribe a new account of transgressions which are by and by to be similarly forgiven, but because they hate evil, and come away with a lighter heart after they hear the words of priestly 276 The Arrested Reformation absolution. It is in their bone and sinew, in the very warp and woof of their being, there through heredity and environment alike, to believe that their burden has really been removed ; and the history of faith-healing and mind-cure shows how much such a belief means for those who still possess it. How long this belief can persist on any wide scale in these days of disintegration and criticism it is not possible to say. For the most part the men, certainly the educated men, in many Roman Catholic countries seem to possess it no longer; and education and unrest may do for the women of the next generation what they have done for the men of this. But those who would not have any lif e left empty even if it be swept and garnished, will seek with sympathy and insight so to under- stand the situation that the Spirit of truth shall enter in and occupy the emptied life for God. On one side of it the confessional tells of one of the many ways in which Rome has betrayed her sacred trust and sold the pass, and has shackled the spirit of man. From the other side of it, and from the viewpoint of those who find their way into it in simplicity and sincerity, it also tells of the intolerable burden of unforgiven sin, and of the yearning of the awakened conscience for pardon and peace. It brings us face to face with the deepest needs of sinning and suffering mankind, The Mass 277 and although the surgeon who would heal must deal sternly with the corruptions both social and moral which have gathered round this system, he will deal tenderly with the needs out of which it grows, and will show that here and now the true penitent can hear the words of the great High Priest Himself as He says : " Thy sins are for- given thee." If that makes a demand on faith, it is because there can be no genuine repentance without faith ; and it also needs faith to hear the words of absolution from the priest so as to find comfort and relief in them. The evangelical demand is not the greater of the two, and it en- nobles in proportion as the other degrades. A similar attitude must be taken up in connection with the doctrine of the Mass and its allied doctrine of Transubstantiation, bound up as it is with the doctrine of the priest, if it is to be hopefully under- stood. That doctrine also tells of the perversion of a truth rather than of falsehood from beginning to end. That which is wholly untrue cannot persist as the Mass has done. It is true that there is now no semblance left in the gorgeous ceremonial of Rome to the Supper in the Upper Room ; and that the process of perversion can be traced. The Mass ministers to the senses rather than to the spirit. It rests on a God-dishonouring Manichsean doctrine of the flesh. It is idolatrous and super- stitious. But it gets much of its power from the 278 The Arrested Reformation yearning of man's heart for something that is not historical merely, a sacrifice once offered and never to be repeated ; a yearning, which must be met somehow, for something which is here and now for present worship and present need. The spirit of man rejects as altogether inadequate the merely commemorative theories of the Lord's Supper ; and if its deepest emotions and longings seem illogical and even irrational at times, that means that the logic of the spirit is profounder than the logic of the schools. The true Church must insist on the objective aspects of the Supper being kept in the forefront to meet this need; and at the same time must insist that that Sacrament is primarily a Divine means of grace in which we are the recipients, rather than a human ceremony in which we make an offering. That the first celebration in the Upper Room was a true com- munion ; that unbelievers who participate receive no spiritual gift ; and that men are on the down- grade whenever they begin to think of the ele- ments as offered in any way, or as in any sense a sacrifice ; must never be overlooked or obscured. So long as we apply the principle that we are primarily receivers and not givers at the Table of the Lord, we shall not come into bondage to the sacrificial conception which worked so dis- astrously throughout the centuries. Besides their insistence on the priestly office The Holy Spirit 279 of every believer, the unique priesthood of our Lord, and the positive and objective aspects of the Lord's Supper, Evangelical Christians must make more than they have hitherto done of the ministry of the Holy Spirit as taking of the things of Christ and showing them unto us, and as that other Comforter who has come to perpetuate the Redeemer's work and be with His Church for ever. In rejecting the errors of the Roman Church we must not overlook the great truths which she has perverted. The yearnings and needs which have been so inadequately and unworthily met, just as they have been so clearly proved, by the doctrine of the priest and the mass and by the persistence of the confessional, are all met graciously and tenderly and divinely by the indwelling Spirit who makes the past of Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary ever present with us, and gives the sense of pardon and the joy of salvation to those who receive Him. If anything like the time and thought which have been expended on the doctrine of the Second Person of the Trinity had been spent on the Person and Work of the Third Person, it would have been clearly shown how fully His ministry covers the whole realm of human need and aspiration as these have been laid bare in the strivings and failures and victories of the Christian centuries. His preventing grace, His 280 The Arrested Reformation enlightening grace, His sanctifying grace, divinely satisfy great fundamental needs of human nature which have often been perverted and mis- understood. Through Him, in the Sacraments and otherwise, Christ and the benefits of the New Covenant are represented, sealed, and applied to believers. He is a Free Spirit and is not tied to the Sacraments or the ordinary means of grace. His ministry is personal. His acts are free, personal acts. The true witness-bearing which is to win Rome must be the religion of the Spirit. Through Him alone can the perversions be reversed and the true disentangled from the false. Through Him alone can the mysterious forces which have held so many in bonds be rescued from their degradation. Through Him alone can spiritual satisfaction take the place of carnal, or true spiritual unity be realised. It is the unity of the Holy Spirit, as He enlightens every believer, and makes him one with all the rest in truth and love, which must be sought, and not that external uniformity which rests on the annihilation of individual responsibilities and rights. CHAPTER IV If Rome is to be Won it must be by Positive Evangelical Truth IF Rome is to be won, she must be evangelised as well as understood. Dr. Horton says that " Protestantism will never vanquish Catholicism, nor will Catholicism ever recover Protestantism into its stereotyped and artificial unity." " But," he adds, " we may cherish the conviction, and work towards its realisation, that Christianity, like a swelling tide, will yet rise and overflow Catholicism and Protestantism alike, merging them in a far better and purer Catholicism than has yet been conceived." Professor Rothe, who held that " it is a terrible thought that a cultivated man in our day should be capable of considering Roman Catholic Christianity in all seriousness as the true Christianity," said : " The Evangelical Church will never conquer the Catholic Church, but Evangelical Christianity will conquer Catholic Christianity in the Catholic Church, and in spite of it ; and, indeed, it has already done so in no insignificant degree." " Protestantism, as a moral power, has been victorious over that part 282 The Arrested Reformation of Christendom which has remained in the Roman Catholic Church." In some respects, however, that is a hard saying, for as things are the Roman Catholic Church is not only a menace to spiritual religion, as well as to human progress and freedom, she is a nucleus for legalism and corruption. She has been thought of as holding the masses in a merely human organisation as the Evangelical churches cannot, even as she appeals alike to oligarchies and autocrats ; but in the present distress and in- difference to churches, if not to religion, she is not only as helpless as any, but is doing much to increase the indifference among those who have the misfortune to know Christianity only as she represents it. She has alienated the masses where she has been mightiest ; and even those who imagined that they might win the crowds by imitating her spectacular methods are acknow- ledging their failure. If the masses are to be won for religion, they must be brought into touch with Divine realities ; they must be evangelised, that is, and won through the Gospel which has gained every triumph that has made all things new in the days which are gone. To say, as some do, that we are concerned only with Rome as an organised system, which has an exclusive spirit and makes intolerant and intolerable claims, has no meaning for believers Romish Expectations 283 in Christ. Politicians might say that, having regard merely to its social and public bearings, as the very antipodes of the freedom which is the ideal. But those who are set for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth are concerned not only with Komanism, but with Komanists, and wish all of them to rejoice in the liberty wherewith Christ makes men free. That is vastly more than wishing to make them Protestants ; for even as Francis de Sales said, " There are good Catholics who are very bad Christians ; " there are some who bear the Evangelical name who give no evidence that the Gospel has been God's Good News for them. Nothing but a widespread revival of heart-religion like that which led to the Reformation, but on a still larger scale, can meet the situation in which we find ourselves, or effectively solve our problems. The Reformation was but a prophecy of the con- summation which is yet to be. In The Dawn of All, Monsignor Benson shows that many Romanists expect that it will be Rome and not Protestantism which will win; that Clericalism, " Tenfame, 1'ennemi," will strangle Christianity. He shows, too, that they will not shrink from persecution to bring this triumph about. The leading conception of Ultramontanism is that of domination at any cost. If the Gospel is to win, those who believe in it must act on 284 The Arrested Reformation the offensive ; and surely there never was a warfare into which the true-hearted might enter more eagerly than into this which is to chase error away by means of the truth, to set the nations free, to put the government on the shoulders of Christ and many crowns on His brow, to put darkness and error, misunderstanding and prejudice, for ever to flight by letting the light of the Saviour God shine forth in all its beauty and power. It is very significant that at the Reformation the best description of all the branches of the Reformed Church was found in the word " Evan- gelical." Not that the name " Protestant " de- serves the reproaches hurled at it as emphasising merely the negative side of the Great Revival : a protest against error rather than the positive side of preaching the Gospel, which alone is the power of God unto salvation. Philology and history alike show that it stands for a protesta- tion for the truth as much as for a protest against error. As contrasted with the legalism of Rome, Reformation theology has always laid the supreme emphasis on the free grace of God and on the fact that the only plea which sinners in their penitence require is their need. The New and Completed Reformation would be hastened by a tide of Evangelical revival flooding all the Churches the Church of Rome along with the others with new life from God. The true Evangelical Evangelicals 285 is convinced that if Christ be lifted up from the earth He will draw all men unto Him, and that in proportion as we lift Him up in our lives, in purity, freedom, and faith, all men everywhere, within Rome or without, will be won for Him. " Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered." Such a work as this can never be done if minis- ters and evangelists alone take part in it. It can be done, and it must be done, by all who know the Gospel for themselves, and there is a wide and needy field for the operations of all who are ready and qualified to enter it for their Lord. ' The most effective way of meeting the peril which is involved in the pernicious activity of the priestly agents of the Roman Curia," says an American writer, "is to promote the evangelisation of the Roman Catholic people by putting before them those fundamental truths of the Gospel which most of them practically never hear from their priests for the simple reason that, speaking generally, the priests do not know them them- selves. The most useful way to do this is by testifying to individuals as to what Christ has done in the heart and life of the speaker not by attacking doctrines and dogmas of the Papal Church. Most ' good ' Roman Catholics are sincerely desirous of rinding acceptance with God ; and in their hearts they know that going to mass, doing penance, and obtaining absolution, com- 286 The Arrested Reformation pletely fail to give peace to their souls. They do not know that they can go to the Heavenly Father through the Saviour direct, but have been taught from their childhood that it is only through the Church they can receive good things from God. The fact that Jesus Christ is able to save to the uttermost all who come to Him in faith and repentance, and the fact that He is able to keep them from falling, will be quite new ideas to most of the reader's Catholic friends/' And thus all who know the truth of the Gospel in its simplicity and power are called to share in the work of all-round evangelisation. For many, the great doctrines of the faith have been hardened into formulas which have become barren as the soil of the trodden footpath, and they must all be made to live and glow with passion and reality if Popery is to be vanquished by that victory which turns enemies into friends. As has been seen, for the most part we have to deal with perverted truths rather than with sheer falsehood, with worthy ends pursued in unworthy ways, with mixed motives and mixed men ; and nothing can meet such a situation but letting the pure and holy light shine forth through the faithful presentation of the whole counsel of God and the entire message of salvation. Sound doctrine is involved where there is the true Gospel, but it is doctrine on fire with conviction born The Light must Shine 287 of actual experience of the saving grace of God which alone will suffice. It was so in earlier days, and nothing less will suffice in our day. There must be intellectual conviction of the truth of ihe great doctrines of the faith, but there must also be conversion. Nothing but regeneration is sufficient, and however much the lecture hall and the study may be in the background the work will only be done by the preaching of the Gospel by all who have the Gospel to preach. Mere controversy of itself is of little avail, although it must often be engaged in in defence of the truth. Unless there is direct exposition of the fundamentals of Christianity nothing effective or enduring can be achieved. Those who would deal faithfully and fruitfully with Romanists or Romanism must show forth the absolutely free grace of God in the Gospel, with its immediate message for all and its promise not only of for- giveness but of eternal life. Scriptural views alike of sin and salvation must be set forth ; the conscience must be aroused to feel its need of Christ ; the heart must discover its true Lord in Him ; and the whole life must be yielded up gratefully and entirely to Him. Superstition is best denounced by making the truth known. The darkness is only overcome when the light shines in. No human power can sweep away a fog ; but those who climb the hill can get above 288 The Arrested Reformation it to where the sun is shining in the clear sky ; and the Evangel of God's grace can take sinners out of the mists and fogs. The experience of the McAll Mission in France is one of many illustrations and proofs that the enduring work must be done by evangelisation. Controversy may be an ally, but it may also be obtruded so as to hinder rather than help. It is the positive truth, which is the engrafted Word, which is able to save the soul. That Mission has now not only Gospel halls in Paris and throughout France, but carries on work along other lines. Motor cars carry Gospel preachers among the communes, where there is now unlimited freedom to proclaim the truth as it is in Christ ; while two missionary boats ply on the Seine and its tributaries with the very best results. Nor is it otherwise elsewhere when such work is done; and all that is needed for the crowning victory is that it should be carried on everywhere, and that all who know the truth should live and proclaim it with enthusiasm and originality, with the wisdom of the serpent and the gentleness of the dove. There are some whose Protestantism seems to consist wholly of protesting, and is bound up with mere antagonism and controversy ; as well as some whose Protestantism is not winsome, as the Gospel should always be. For while it is true that there is nothing winsome in it for those Protesting not Enoug/i 289 who are wedded to sin, it is also true that men are strange mixtures, with many survivals and reminders of the fact that they were made for God, and can find no true rest apart from Him ; and there is something in every one to which the Gospel can appeal. It is noteworthy that the 66th Canon of the Church of England expressly directs that Evan- gelical work should be carried on among the Roman Catholic population. Each bishop is in- structed to seek diligently for all such in his diocese, and to direct the clergy of the parishes to labour by all means to win them from their errors. If the vicar is not able to do so, a special preacher is to be appointed for the work, and, failing this, the bishop is directed himself to do the work. Nor should it be overlooked in this con- nection how much there is inherent in Romanism to which the Gospel message can appeal. Over- laid although it so often is with error and supersti- tion, the fundamental truth of salvation through the sacrifice offered by our Lord on Calvary is there far more truly than in the rationalism of some of the enemies of the Papacy. Many are better than their creed, just as some are worse ; and those who would win Rome must set themselves so to preach the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation, as to be able to begin with what is common ground for Evangelicals and 290 The Arrested Reformation Romanists, that without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. It is probable, indeed, that there should be a clearer distinction observed between Romanism as an ecclesiastical system and Romanism as a religion dealing with conscience and the salvation of souls. As an ecclesiastical system it is a des- potism of the most pernicious sort; but many Romanists are its victims rather than its instru- ments, and are in a state of more or less conscious protest against it. Those who deal with these victims of the system must make the most of the elements of Evangelical truth which are to be found in the Romish religion, and which help to explain why it has endured as it has done, and how it has met, after its own fashion, the needs of multitudes throughout the centuries. There are other elements which contradict and partly nullify what there still is of the Evangel, but fair white lilies may grow in a bed of meadow-muck, and those who would engage hopefully in the work of world-wide evangelisation must take their stand on the Gospel in all their dealings with members of the Church of Rome. The true Church cannot live in the past, even the past of the Reformation, although the past may live through it to ever fairer issues and ever fuller revelation and satisfaction. The only effective defence is attack ; and the attack must The Positive Message 291 primarily be along the lines which were so fruitful in the great days of old, and are fruitful yet where they are loyally followed. The Church of Christ can only flourish, and only deserves to flourish, where it is true to the truth, which is still good news for the weary and sinning and empty-hearted. Mere controversy about doctrines is easy, but it may have as little religion in it as controversy about fiscal reform. It is tempting, too, to show that the so-called One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is neither One, nor Holy, nor Catholic, nor Apostolic ; and in some respects is not even a Church, since it has become very largely an organisation of human skill and craft. But while this side should never be left wholly in abey- ance, it must be no more than a subsidiary line of attack. The first line, the line ever in evidence, must be the positive message with which the Gospel comes, and all experience goes to show that it is along these lines the great consummation can alone come when all men everywhere shall serve the One Lord. All who love their Lord and long for the coming of His Kingdom should set themselves to make their faith as attractive as they can, and while entering into no compromise with sin should set what is positive in the forefront. To well- informed people the great name of Protestant has never suggested an undue emphasis of the merely 292 The Arrested Reformation negative side ; since nothing can thrive on nega- tions alone. But neither must it be allowed to suggest any undue emphasis on mere doctrines, no matter how correct they are ; for of all things it grew out of a personal experience of God, and must con- tinue to do so if it is to be vital and progressive. Nor must it be taken as suggesting that any one period or episode is to be stereotyped. Our God is the God of the living and not of the dead, and we cannot walk in borrowed or reflected light. God must be as near us as He was to the Apostles or Reformers. In their loyalty to the past genuine Christians welcome reverent inquiry and court new light. They are not obscurantists, but believers in the Holy Ghost. Even the straitest of the Evangelical churches have looked for fresh light to break forth for them, and their history has been one of steady illumination and growth. They have heard the call to study the Word of God, not only in Scripture but in His dealings with His people throughout the history of the Church. They know that their Lord has many things to say to them when they are able to hear them. " Justification by faith " may become a parrot cry ; the right of private judgment an empty formula. The Church of Christ which is to bring in the Kingdom will have open eyes and a responsive spirit, and will show that through the Triune God, who is with His Confidence in the Truth 293 people here and now, all that is claimed for the mass and the priesthood as the organ of the Divine guidance is enjoyed by those who wait upon the Father through the Word and Spirit. No claim will suffice unless it is attested in fact. Some who have made much of the right of private judg- ment have forgotten how barren it must be unless there is loyalty to the corresponding duty. Every right involves a duty; and those whom God has endowed with reason and surrounded with re- sponsibility must be free in fact, and must decide for themselves as in His presence. In its jealousy for the truth the true Church is never intolerant. It knows that what men claim for themselves they must claim for others. Christianity can only lose by violence and force ; it can only gain by truth and love. In a sense truth cannot tolerate error, and what some call toleration is just indifference. To them it does not matter what a man believes, because they believe nothing as they ought, and so they build their pantheon for all the gods. But in another and nobler sense those for whom truth means most will be in sympathy with all others who believe, even if they look at things from other view-points than theirs and see them in other lights and pro- portions. Their confidence in the truth is such that they believe that the truth-loving will be led to Him who is the Truth. At the Reforma- 294 The Arrested Reformation tion it was the true men who found the truth, the devoted seekers who were led out into the wealthy place of the Spirit of God; and still it is to the upright that light arises in the darkness. The consummation which must be sought is to show the best men and women in the Church of Eome that their deepest yearnings such as that assurance of pardon and eternal life which is denied them as a heresy to be anathematised can be satisfied only through obedience to the call to untrammelled fellowship with God, and to be kings and priests unto God through the one great High Priest. No one is a true Evangelical who believes that the truth requires more than a fair field and no favour. Rome is never satisfied even in the foreign field unless she has the civil arm on her side ; but nothing is clearer from history than that the civil arm has brought weakness and confusion from the days of Constantine until now. The times of genuine spiritual triumph have been when the truth had to struggle against the forces of evil. The times of decline, of pagan intrusion and moral decay, have been when the Church of God compromised herself by worldly alliances and consented to be buttressed by ambitious monarchs and scheming statesmen. Here, at any rate, force is no remedy, and the gains which come through imperial decrees mean weakness and not strength. Force may keep Force no Remedy 295 down brutes but can never make men. It may silence the enemy but it can never lead to con- versions. The Reformation could not but end in the emancipation of the whole circle of human life. It meant intellectual freedom; and science in the works of Lord Bacon and philosophy in the writings of Descartes soon entered on a development, independent of theology, such as was not possible before that revolution took place. Even if it would, true Protestantism cannot stifle inquiry, irregular though it be. If it were able to do that it would commit suicide. Serfs may be driven in regiments, but the Gospel has to guide and inspire the free. It is possible to crush out differences and call the desert unity ; but the unity of the Kingdom is one which recognises difference and subordinates no legitimate rights or healthy outgoings of the spirit of man. Far too often, however, the Protestant ecclesiastic has shared in the intolerance of his Roman brother. He was ready to provide a much longer chain, but still there was a chain ; whereas the only teaching which can triumph must be that of the Spirit, which makes men free all round. Even loyalty to the past may become a fetish unless there are open eyes for the new fresh light of the Spirit of God. Even when it is discouraged by indifference and defeat genuine Protestantism is not dismayed. 296 The Arrested Reformation Truth is great and will prevail. Those who trust in God can take long views and await the far results. " Truth pressed to earth shall rise again, the eternal years of God are hers." But those who are the children of the Reformation must do the deeds of the Reformation ; walking in the light of God ; rising above every tradition of the past to the new needs and the new promises of the present ; and passing beyond doctrines, even the purest, to personal fellowship with the Saviour Christ. There is a very suggestive picture in one of Wiclif s Bibles. A tiny fire has broken out in the midst of a company of priests. It is burning inside the covers of a Bible and spreading rapidly. They all gather round it and try to blow it out ; but the more they blow the more it burns, until at last they are compelled to flee to escape its consuming flames. The Word which Rome has always dreaded and tried to suppress is a living Word for those who are free; and an adequate doctrine of Scripture, as ever responding to every true need, would do much to meet the cravings which Rome has attempted to meet by so many unhappy and ruinous devices. In the first days of Christianity every believer was of necessity an evangelist, a city set on a hill, a centre of light and leading, a citadel and stronghold of the truth. It was so also in Reformation times, when even the timid had to show whose side they were on Revival 297 and witness for the Saviour and His perfect salvation. Nor can the final triumph of the faith be attained otherwise in our era. Revival must begin at the House of God if the regions beyond are to become the garden of the Lord. It is from the Evangelical side that the arrest can and must be removed, so that the water of life may flow all over the earth; and it is to attain nothing less than that, that believers are called. It may be argued that it is not the Reformation merely that has been arrested but Christianity, inasmuch as its enemies were never more numerous or virulent than they are now, and lack of power is the most manifest feature of the situation. To that it is sufficient to reply that in connection with Christianity also the most urgent need of our time is to lift the arrest, to put an end to the ice age, to rise to the heights of its imperial and imperious claims. All things are possible to those who believe, and no loyal Christian dare doubt that if all those who truly believe were to rise to the height of their responsibilities and were to go forward in the power of the Spirit of God and His Word, the Roman Catholic peoples would ere long be won, even if the framework of the Hierarchy were left as a hopeless remainder. Nor is this too great a task for the lovers of the Gospel if God be for them ; and it is probable that if they advanced in faith they would discover 298 The Arrested Reformation that already the victory of the Evangel and freedom has been greater than sometimes appears, and that there is more sincere vital aggressive Christianity in the world now than ever there was before, in spite of materialism and agnosticism, of Popery and indifference. In speaking of the arrest of the Reformation there is no suggestion that the Reformation has in any sense been a failure. The very significance of its arrest lies in the fact that it has done so much as to make it marvellous that it has not done more. All that is best in our modern life, whether in public or private, and all the institu- tions of which we are proudest come to us through the Reformation. The new tenderness for child- hood, the new honour paid to womanhood, the new yearnings to chase poverty and disease away and to abolish misery and crime all that fills men's hearts with hope comes to us through the Reformation. But those who have the Spirit of Christ can- not but long for greater things than these, for realisation where there is only hope, for the universal empire of their Lord, for victory over error and superstition, over sin and unbelief, to the very ends of the earth. It would be much to set humanity free from the incubus of Rome. It would be infinitely more to bring all men into living personal surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. The Grand Result 299 It is a great honour to be called to share in such a work, and a great inspiration. Those who hear it may well give themselves up to it with ardour and self-surrender, proud to follow in the footsteps of the heroes and heroines of the days which are gone, and filled with the courage and faith which come from great ideals and from the call to nothing less than the conquest of the whole earth for their Lord. INDEX " ACCOMMODATION," CONVERSION by, 179-182. Albigenses, 57, 59. Americanism, 218-220. Ancestry of Reformation, 48-68, 134, 242 ; of Modern Roman- ism, 67, 225-242. Antinomianism, ancient and modern, 83. Arrested Reformation : the prob- lem, 3-24; causes of, 12-20; tacitly accepted now, 20 ; how it can be removed, 263-299. Augustine, his divided inheritance, 67, 230, 232. Austria : Reformation in, 6, 126- 128 ; Los von Rom in, 196-201. " BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY," 56. Bavaria, Reformation in, 7, 162. Belgium, Los von Rom in, 195. Bernard of Clairvaux, 42, 51. Bernard of Clugny, 52. Bible, Rome and the, 37, 40, 43, 45, 80, 193 ; Ritualists and the, 39. Bunyan and Giant Pope, 21. Butler, Bishop, 136. CALVIN, AND MISSIONS, 19 ; AND Scripture, 75-76 ; and Anti- nomianism, 83 ; and freedom, 84. Calvinists v. Lutherans, 70, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 141. Catherine of Siena, 60. Celts and Reformation, 100. Charles v., 147, 152. Chesterton, quoted, 22. Civil Freedom and Reformation, 85. Confessional, the, 275-277. Constantine, 27 ; his fatal gift, 28. Co-operation with Rome, 174-176, 183. Councils : Toulouse, 38 ; Con- stance, 59 ; Basle, 59 ; Trent, 6, 80, 153-155, 221, 225-242, 260, 270 ; Vatican, 22, 158. Counter- Reformation, 6, 14, 18, 31, 114, 123, 147-166. Cranmer, 107, 149. Cyprian, 29. DANTE AND CORRUPTION OF Church, 28, 55. Decadence of Romish nations, 4, 129-132, 194, 197. Deformation, the, 18, 133-146; Foreign Missions during, 138- 140. Disunion among Reformers, 12, 14, 96, 97, 141 ; in modern times, 263-164. Dollinger, quoted, 193, 258, 259. ECKHART, THE MYSTIC, 62. Edict of Nantes, 119, 164. Elizabeth, Queen, 109. Emigration to America, one cause of, 21, 99, 219. England, Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors, 56 ; Reformation in, 65, 70, 103-110; Deforma- tion in, 136-139. Erasmus, 9, 18, 36, 74, 235. Erastianism, 16, 28, 125. Europe in Reformation Era, 70-72. Evangelicals, before Reformation, 48-50 ; in Reformed Churches, 284-294 ; and philanthropy, 144-145. 301 302 Index FAILURE OF EARLY ROMISH Missions, 181, 205 seq. Fairbairn, Principal, quoted, 67. Faith, Reformers' doctrine of, 80, 82. Fenelon, 48. Feudalism, 84. Fogazzaro, 257. Foreign Missions, 19 seq., 138; Danish, 124; Dutch, 122; French, 121 ; German, 117 ; Norwegian, 124 ; Swedish, 125 ; Romish, 171-186, 205 seq. France, 4, 118-121, 164, 137-190, 252, 261. Francis of Assisi, 60. Froissart, quoted, 51. Froude, quoted, 34, 225. GALLICANISM, 56. Gambetta and clericalism, 13. Gasquet, abbot, quoted, 243. Genealogies, Reformation, 48-68, 134 ; modern Romanist, 67, 225-242. Germany, Reformation in, 114- 118 ; Los von Rom in, 198, 201- 202, 250-251. Gore, Bishop, quoted, 258, 267. Grace, in Reformation theology, 82. Green, J. R., quoted, 144, 148. HARNACK, QUOTED, 68. Henry vm., 10, 60, 108. High Church party in England, 110. Hoensbroech, Count von, 37, 158. Holland, Reformation in, 121 ; and freedom, 122. Holy Spirit, Reformers and, 78- 80 ; doctrine of, 279-280, 292. Horton, Dr., quoted, 29, 42, 281. Hungary, 164. Hus, 50, 64, 126, 199. Hymn writers, Mediaeval, 51-53. " IMITATIO CHRISTI," 61. Infallibility, papal, 155, 234, 236, 249. Inquisition, 32, 149. Ireland and the Reformation, 97- 100. Irenaeus, 29. Italian Humanism, 35. Italy and the Papacy, 130, 148- 150. JAPAN, MISSIONS IN, 178. Jesuits, 6, 14, 31, 128, 155-163, 172, 212, 213, 229, 260 ; power behind Pope, 42, 157, 260. John, King of England, 33. Justification, by faith alone, 80- 84 ; at Trent, 230-232. Justin Martyr, 29. KNOX, JOHN, 84, 102, 107, 148. LAS CASAS, 205. Laserre, Henri, 41. Latin peoples and Reformation, 4, 69. Latin as the literary language, 70-72. Laud and Council of Trent, 153. Lindsay, Principal, quoted, 162, 231, 235. Loisy, 257. " Los von Rom," 180-204 ; In Austria, 196-201 ; Belgium, 195 ; Canada, 208 ; France, 187-190, 252; Germany, 198, 201-202, 250-251 ; Italy, 191- 193 ; Mexico, 212 ; Portugal, 194; Spain, 193; United States, 214-221. Lull, Raymund, 268-270. Luther, had defects of qualities, 14 ; and the Arrest, 11 ; and peasants, 15 ; and John Wessel, 66 ; and Scripture, 75, 76 ; and Antinomianism, 83 ; and freedom, 84. Lutherans and Calvinists, 70, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 141. McALL MISSION, 288. Macaulay, quoted, 34, 148, 150, 151, 165, 266. M'Giffert, Professor, 267. Manichgean heresies, 57-59, 67, 277. Manning, Cardinal, 104. Mass, doctrine of, at Trent, 237- 238; 277-279. Mediaeval, heresies, 50, 57-59, 134, 229; hymn writers, 51-53; movements, 50, 53-60 ; poets and the Papacy, 60 ; Reformers, 64-66; Saints, 50, 66. Index 303 Melanchthon, at Diet of Ratisbon, 5; 14, 130. Methodism, 103, 111, 143. Mexico, Rome in, 212. Missions, Danish, 124 ; Dutch, 122 ; French, 121 ; German, 117 ; Norwegian, 124 ; Swedish, 125; Romish, 167-186, 205 seq. Missionary obligations of Church, 18, 195. " Mixed Multitude," the, 9. Modernism, 243-261. More, Sir Thomas, 9. Mozley, quoted, 27. " Mystery of Iniquity," 13, 28, 29, 48. Mystics, 62-64. NATURAL MAN, ROME AND THE, 4446. Ne Temere Decree, 201, 216, 255. Netherlands, Reformation in, 121. Nicolas of Basle, 63. Non- Biblical Christianity, 37. OLD CATHOLICS, 199-200. Origins and Principles, 25-89. Origins, Reformation, 48-68, 134, 242 ; Romish, 67, 225-242. PAGANISM, IN MEDIEVAL CHURCH, 13, 27 ; in Mediaeval heresies, 50, 57-59, 229. Papacy, doctrine, at Trent, 239 ; its failures, 21 ; risings against, 55. Pascal, 160. Peasants' War, 14, 16, 115. Persecution, 147-149. Piagnoni and Reformation, 65. Pietism, 11, 143. Pole, Cardinal, 9, 232. Pollard, Professor, quoted, 14, 64. Popes : Leo I., 30 ; Hadrian iv., 98 ; Alexander vi., 31 ; Paul m., 5; Julius n., 30; Leo x., 30, 147, 150; Paul IV., 235; Pius iv., 232, 237 ; Sixtus v., 236; Innocent x., 180; Urban vm., 180; Innocent xi., 181 ; Clement xiv., 156 ; Leo. xn., 40 ; Pius IX., 234 ; Leo. xm., 22, 220 ; Pius X., 252. Portugal, Rome in, 129, 194. Priest, the, in Romanism, 81, 88 ; in New Testament, 87-89, 273. Priesthood of all believers, 87-89, 272-275. Principles of the Reformation, 69-89. Private judgment, right and duty of, 84-87. Protestantism and Rationalism, 133-136. Protestant Scholasticism, 139. Puritanism, 109, 247. RATISBON, CONCILIATION AT Diet of, 5. Reformation, failed as well as succeeded, 3 ; divided the nations, 4 ; possibility of com- plete, 5 ; its real strength, 7, 9 ; not the golden age, 9 ; problem of arrested, 3-24 ; should be completed, 10, 20, 93, 112; of the serfs, 16 ; absolute necessity for, 31-33 ; a great revival, 8, 47, 68, 72, 82; principles of, 69-89 ; and civil liberty, 85. Reformation in Austria, 6, 196- 201 ; Bavaria, 7 ; Belgium, 6, 122, 195 ; England, 10, 65, 70, 103-110; France, 6, 118-121, 187-190, 252; Germany, 113- 118, 198, 201-202, 250-251 ; Hungary, 127 ; Ireland, 97- 100; Italy, 130, 191-193; Netherlands, 121 ; Poland, 7 ; Portugal, 129, 194; Scandi- navia, 123 ; Scotland, 10, 101- 103; Spain, 128, 148, 193; Switzerland, 122, 196; Wales, 100-101. Reformers, catholicity of, 241- 242 ; and social implications of Gospel, 14 ; and Foreign Mis- sions, 19 ; true ancestry of, 50, 59, 61, 64, 66 ; before Reforma- tion, 50, 227-228. Reforming Cardinals, 31 ; Coun- cils, 59. Renaissance, 35, 36, 55, 64, 72 ; Transalpine and Cisalpine, 35. Romanism and national de- cadence, 4, 69, 129-132 ; and conversion, 43-46. Rome, and the Bible, 37, 40, 43, 45, 80, 193, 233-237; and Index democracy, 22, 253, 256; schismatic, 229 ; and the de- votional life, 271 ; and Foreign Missions, 174-176, 178-179, 183, 205 seq. ; and reform, 6, 32,150-153; in British Colonies, 159, 255. Ruskin, quoted, 44. SACERDOTALISM, LEAVEN OF, 13, 27-30, 38, 46, 57. Savonarola, 50, 65. Saxon Chronicle, 34. Scandinavia, Reformation in, 123. Scotland, Reformation in, 10, 101-103 ; Irish immigrants and Sabbath in, 103. Scott, Sir Walter, 32. Scripture, Mediaeval doctrine of, 74 ; Reformers and, 73-80, 107 ; Rome and, 37, 40, 43, 45, 80, 193, 233-237 ; Westminster Confession and, 75. Serfs and Reformation, 16 ; their demands reasonable, 17. Shorthouse, Mr., and non-biblical Christianity, 37. Social implications of Gospel, 12, 94. South America, Rome in, 181, 184-186, 209-211, 213. Spain, Reformation in, 128, 148, 193. Speer, R. E., quoted, 184-186, 269. Suso, the Mystic, 63. Swift, Dean, quoted, 138. Switzerland, Reformation in, 122, 196. TAULER, 63. Temporal Power, the, 22. Tennyson and Lord's Supper, 109. " Testimony of Holy Ghost," 78. Teuton peoples and Reformation, 4, 69 ; and Humanism, 35. The Benefits of Christ's Death, 66, 149. Thirty Years' War, 12, 115, 127. Thomas of Celano, 52. Transubstantiation doctrine, at Trent, 237-238. Trent, Councils of. See Councils. Tyndale, Wm., 98, 107, 139. UNION MOVEMENTS, 96-97. United States, Rome in, 214- 221. VULGATE, ROME AND THE, 235- 236. Vaughan, Cardinal, quoted, 104. 169. WALDENSIANS, 57, 127, 131. Waldo, Peter, 50. Wales, Reformation in, 100-101. Welz, Baron von, 19. Wesley, John, 10, 144. Wessel, John, 66. Westphalia, Peace of, 7, 14, 115. Whitefield, 137, 144. Wiclif, 38, 50, 64, 65, 296. XAVIEE'S MISSIONARY METHODS, 178-179. Y.M.C.A.'s IN NORTH AMERICA, 111. ZWINGLI, 14, 64, 121, 155. 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