But, although the contest which Luther initiated had, long before his death, resulted in complete and irreparable rupture between the contending parties, it is certain that in order to understand the true nature and origin of that contest we must go back to events long anterior to 1517; while in order fully to estimate its effects we must follow the history of events long after 1545. In Germany, for example, the Reformation can hardly be regarded as finding even a formal consummation before the peace of Augsburg (1555); in Switzerland the movement went on with important modifications down to the death of Calvin in 1564; in France the onward progress was not materially checked before the massacre on the eve of St Bartholomew (1572); in Bohemia its independent and peculiar fortunes found a final solution only with the battle of the White Hill in 1620; while in England and in Scotland, in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia, in Italy and in Spain, the movement assumed so much variety of character, and was decided by circumstances of time and ¡)lace of so different a kind, that its essential features often become merged and almost lost in their combination with other and altogether extraneous elements, e Nor are the considerations arising out of diversities of race, divergencies of political interests, and varied issues the only difficulties which attach to any attempt to treat the movement as a whole. We must also bear in mind the very different conceptions of the end to be attained which at successive stages of its history have modified its teaching and its organization, and eventually in a great measure determined its geographical limits. These conceptions may be distinguished as those involving (1) a reform of discipline, (2) a reform of doctrine, (3) a modification of the current dogmatic teaching. Of these three distinct conceptions the first, taking its rise in the generally admitted corrupt practice of the Roman Church, aimed at little more than a restoration of discipline,—a reform of morals, that is to say, among the clergy and the monastic orders, and the abolition of those various abuses which had grown up under the lax administration and baneful examples of successive popes and of the Curia; the second, although demanding a reform of doctrine as well as of discipline, sought simply to restore what was believed to be the teaching of the primitive as opposed to the mediaeval church; while the third, guided in the first instance rather by an only half-conscious instinct than by any avowed standard of belief, sought eventually to establish the right of private judgment, to the almost entire repudiation of authority, whether as expressed in the decrees of councils, in the confessions of the Reformed churches, or in the creed of Trent. And it is from this last point of view that the Reformation has gradually come to be regarded as a new commencement rather than as a restoration of belief,—as a point of departure towards a higher and more enlightened faith rather than as a return to an ancient, imperfectly ascertained, and possibly obsolete standard.

But, by whichever of these aims the movement in favour of reformation was guided, the dominant conception has not unfrequently operated quite independently of the other two. Demands for reform of discipline not unfrequently resulted in disunion w r here disagreement with respect to doctrine did not exist. The further definition of already accepted doctrine, again, even when made in connexion with some minor article of belief and involving but an almost imperceptible divergence of interpretation, often proved productive of a serious schism where in questions of discipline there was perfect unanimity. The right of private judgment, when urged in contravention of any of the newly formulated standards of discipline or belief, involved an equally decisive rupture with those who recognized only the traditional sources of doctrine. It is evident, therefore, that the Reformation, when regarded from a fairly comprehensive point of view, must appear as a highly complex movement carrying in itself the elements of further controversy and conflict. Even the theory which would seem to afford the most satisfactory solution of its varied phenomena—that which teaches us to look upon it as a Teutonic revolt, intellectual no less than religious, against the traditions which the Latin Church in the course of centuries had invented and imposed on the faith and habits of thought of Western Christendom— often fails us as a clue to its widely different manifestations, and other disturbing causes seem to forbid the effort to refer them to any general principle. The character and policy of the reigning Roman pontiff, the jealousies and divergent interests of the several European states and the special aims of their several rulers, the spell winch imperial institutions and traditions long continued to exercise over the minds of all but the most advanced and independent thinkers, are all important factors in the movement. If, however, w r e endeavour to assign the causes which prevented the Reformation from being carried even to but partial success long prior to the 16th century, we can have no difficulty in deciding that foremost among them must be placed the manner in which the mediaeval mind was fettered by a servile regard for precedent. To the men of the Middle Ages, whether educated or uneducated, no measure of reform seemed defensible which appeared in the light of an innovation. Precedent was the standard whereby every authority, lay or clerical, was held to be bound; and to this rule the only exceptions were a general council and the supreme pontiff. Even Gregory IX. or Clement V., when he assumed to promulgate additions to the existing code of the Universal Church, was understood to do so simply in his capacity of infallible expounder of essential and unalterable doctrine; while no reform, how-ever seemingly expedient or however recommended by its abstract merits, was held to be justifiable if it could be shown to be in conflict with ancient and authoritative tradition. The Reformers themselves always maintained that the doctrines which they enforced rested on Scriptural precedent and primitive example. Their assertion w r as frequently challenged by their antagonists; and it may reasonably be doubted whether even Luther or Calvin could have commanded any considerable following had not their doctrinal teaching been combined with a demand for a reformation of discipline which rested on undeniable precedent, and to - which the circumstances of the time imparted new and irresistible force,—a force, however, which had been long accumulating and had been derived in no small measure from the blind obstinacy of the Roman see in times long antecedent.

The existence long before the 16th century of a strong] desire to bring about a reformation of discipline within thechurch itself is attested by evidence which it will suffice j to pass by with little more than an allusion. Among the j most notable instances are those afforded by the rise of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in the 13th century and of the Brethren of St Jerome (or the Brethren of the Common Life) in the 14th century,—efforts based upon general conviction, which resulted in spontaneous combinations. Similar in origin, though more strictly ecclesiastical in character, were the designs of the great councils which successively assembled at Pisa (1409), at Constance (1414), and at Basel (1431). Among those who were distinguished in these assemblies by their strenuous advocacy of reform, Pierre d’Ailly and his pupil Jean Charlier de Gerson, both successively chancellor of the university of Paris, and Nicholas de CRmenges, archdeacon of Bayeux, were especially conspicuous. Each alike upheld in the plainest language the superiority of a general council to the pope, and the obligation that rested on such a body to address itself to the task of church reform whenever the necessity might arise, and the supreme pontiff himself be found either incapable of such a labour or unwilling to initiate it. Of the widespread necessity for such reform, as shown by the condition of the clergy and the monasteries, the remarkable treatise by Nicholas de Clemenges, De Corrupto Ecelesix Statu , affords alone sufficient evidence. By Michelet this powerful tractate has been compared, for its vigour and the effect which it produced, to the De Captivitate Ecelesix Babylonica of Luther; and it is a striking proof of the deep-rooted corruption of the whole church that such flagrant abuses should have continued to exist for another century with little or no abatement.

Clemenges deplores in the strongest terms the state of the church in his day,—a condition of appalling degeneracy, which he ascribes mainly to the increase in wealth and luxury that had followed upon the development of a worldly spirit in its midst. His strictures leave no order or degree of either the ecclesiastical or the monastic life untouched,—the overwhelming ostentation of the Curia; the pride and rapacity of the cardinals, their immorality and addiction to simony; the prevalence of the same vices among the episcopal order, filled with beardless youths, who, scarcely liberated from the dread of the schoolmaster’s ferule, hastened to assume the pastoral office; the lower clergy in general so sunk in vice and sloth that scarcely one in a thousand (“vix inter mille unus ”) was to be found living a godly and sober life; the nunneries, which he declares were brothels rather than sanctuaries (“non dico Dei sanctuaria, sed Veneris execranda prostibula ”). We can feel no surprise at finding that in the 16th century Clement VII. thought it necessary to place this burning diatribe by a great doctor of the church in the Index Expurgatorius. A few years later we find the evils to which Clemenges called attention emphasized by one of the most eminent ecclesiastics of the age, — the cardinal Julian Cesarini, when he was endeavouring to dissuade Pope Eugenius IV. from his design of dissolving the council of Basel (see Popedom, vol. xix. p. 502). In this letter he affirms that so strongly is popular feeling stirred against the clergy by their neglect of their duties and scandalously immoral lives that there is reason to fear that, if some remedy be pot devised, the whole fabric of the Roman Church may be overturned.

The complete failure of these successive efforts to bring about any comprehensive measure of church reform is a familiar fact in European history. And not only were the evils which it was sought to abolish suffered to continue with but little abatement, but dissent even from the recognized discipline of the church was placed under a ban, and made, in common with dissent from doctrine, an offence punishable with the severest penalties. The mediaeval theory of the Roman hierarchy had indeed been reaffirmed by Eugenius IV. and his successors with a success which seemed almost to preclude the possibility of its ever being again challenged. But the main point here to be noted is that in none of these several efforts in the direction of reform, whether resulting from conciliar or popular action, was the doctrine of the church once called in question. The fate that overtook John Huss and Jerome of Prague appears to have been very generally regarded as a necessary example of just rigour in the suppression of heresy. We find, accordingly, that, when in the following century it was sought to associate the efforts of the reformers in the direction of doctrinal change with the efforts of a party within the church itself in the direction of disciplinary reform, the defenders of the traditional Catholic faith challenged the assumed precedent and altogether denied the parallel. “It is,” wrote Bossuet in the 17th century, “an obvious illusion; for among all the passages which they adduce there is not one in which those teachers have ever dreamed of changing the belief of the church, of amending its worship, which consisted chiefly in the sacrifice of the mass, or of overthrowing the authority of her prelates and especially that of the pope, all which was the primary design of this new reformation of which Luther was the architect.” It is not easy to gainsay the reasonableness of Bossuet’s criticism. It was the fundamental theory of ' the Reformation that it involved the setting aside of the development given in mediaeval times to the doctrines and teaching of the early church, and proposed to substitute for these a totally different interpretation, which rejected the successive decisions of councils and popes as arbitrary and erroneous. Such a theory, however, necessarily imposed on the Reformers the task of proving the validity of their own position, by showing that their repudiation of a practice and of precedents which had been accepted for so many centuries was justified by an appeal to yet more ancient and unquestionable authority. If indeed they failed in so doing, they must look forward to sinking in the estimation of Christendom to the level of heretics, and be prepared to stand before posterity in the same category as the Arians, the Albigenses, the Lollards, and the Hussites, and those other sects which, by their unwarranted assertion of the right of private interpretation, had provoked and incurred the formal condemnation of the church. It is not within the scope of this article to attempt to estimate the justice of the theological arguments by which the Reformers sought to vindicate their position; but there is good reason for concluding that the argumentative powers and personal influence of Luther and Calvin would have failed, just as the efforts of preceding reformers had failed, in effecting the desired result, had not the conditions and circumstances of the age been such as to lend new force to the arguments which they urged in favour of a fundamental change in the standpoint of religious faith.

The most notable feature in connexion with traditional belief which challenges our attention at the commencement of the 16th century is the manner in which the popedom was becoming less and less in harmony with the spirit of the age, and with those new forces which were now developing in the midst of Teutonism. The intolerance of the church in the repression of heresy had become more pronounced and was pressing with increasing rigour on free thought, when, owing to the influences of the New Learning, that thought was everywhere on the point of seeking to break through the traditional trammels; the corruption of the Curia and of both the regular and the secular clergy, the extension of the temporal power of the pontiffs in Italy, and the extortion of their emissaries in other countries had reached a climax just as, owing to the more independent spirit generated by the consolidation of the nationalities, the ruler and the people in each kingdom or principality were becoming increasingly impatient of the existence of such abuses. A brief consideration of these several features becomes, accordingly, quite indispensable, if we wish rightly to comprehend the forces at work in Europe at the time when the Reformers arose to combine them and give them more definite direction.

Not a few, and some very memorable, efforts had been made before the 16th century to bring about a reformation of doctrine, but these had almost invariably been promptly visited with the censure of the church. Long after the “heresies” of the 4th century had died away and after the controversies of the turbulent 9th century—such as those on the Eucharist between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus, and on predestination between John Scotus Erigena and Gottschalk—had been silenced by the decisions of the pontiffs, we find movements arising, which, however much they differ in other characteristics, all attest the existence of a widespread desire among large sections of the community to revert to a simpler form of i־eligious belief and practice. The Paulicians (or Manichaeans of the East), the Albigenses (or Manichaeans of the West), the Waldenses, the Cathari, and the Leonists (or Poor Men of Lyons)—sects which made their appearance mainly in the 12th and 13th centuries, and for the most part in Switzerland, Languedoc, and northern France—the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, may be looked upon as the ancestors in faith of the Huguenots and the Puritans of after-times, and were all more or less characterized by an aversion to the Roman ritual, to splendid churches, to crosses and crucifixes, combined with a more definite denial of such doctrines as that of baptismal regeneration, of transubstantiation, of masses for the dead, and of the obligation to observe Lent. The ultimate fate of these different sects was singularly similar. Of their earlier history, indeed, we have but few memorials, for their records, if any existed, have mostly perished; and, as with their prototypes in the earlier Christian centuries, it became almost necessarily their policy to avoid all external demonstrations which would be likely to arrest the attention of the world. An inquisitor of the 13th century, when describing the Leonists (c. 1250), whom he speaks of as both the most ancient and the most widely spread of the sects then existing, represents them as by no means guilty, to all external appearance, of practices which could fairly be stigmatized as blasphemous, but as wearing a great semblance of piety, as being of good repute among their neighbours, and chiefly blamable as given to speaking against the Roman Church and its clergy and thus gaining, only too easily, the ears of the laity at large. To such characteristics, however, the Albi-genses in the 12th century had presented a remarkable exception. At the commencement of the pontificate of Innocent III. (1198) his legates had found nearly the whole of the rich and prosperous territory extending from Carcassonne to Bordeaux dominated by this powerful heresy,—a form of doctrine associated, moreover, not with austerity but with voluptuousness of life, with a profound contempt for the priestly profession, and with a warm admiration for the conceptions of chivalry and the poetry of the troubadour,—a heresy enriched by the devotion of its adherents to an extent which made it far wealthier than the church itself in those regions, and before which the representatives of the Roman orthodoxy seemed threatened almost with extinction. The suppression of this heresy by Simon de Montfort is a well-known episode, and would seem to have formed the point of departure for a new and more rigorous policy on the part of the church in its dealings Avith like manifestations of disobedience. In the year 1229 the statutes of the council of Toulouse formulated, as it were, the code of persecution, and, aided by the Inquisition, which probably took its rise about the same time, supplied a new machinery for the detection and suppression of heresy. To the terrorism thus established, after the sword of De Montfort had done its work, we may fairly refer the changed characteristics of the adherents of the heresies in France, as above described, in the middle of the 13th century.

! But, the suspicions of the church having once been thoroughly roused and the secular power incited and guided to its task, external conformity and inoffensive life, the mountain hamlet and the secluded valley, proved alike unavailing to avert the cruelty of the persecutor. The Cathari in Italy did not long survive the fall of the Holien-staufens, from whom they had received effective protection and support; and it added not a little to the offence of the doctrines proclaimed by the Spiritual Franciscans, whose tenets were condemned by the council of Vienne in 1311, that, while the order had taken its rise in a spirit of protest against the corruptions of the Curia, its members were known to be ready to favour and aid by all the means in their power the restoration of the imperial ascendency in Italy. The Spiritual Franciscans were the forerunners of the Apostolic Brethren, one of the most widely spread of the new sects, and must also be looked upon as the precursors...