The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

schism, and this Council made a serious attempt at church reform. After reuniting the Church under one Pope, it drew up a list of abuses which it ordered remedied (R. 149). It also attempted to establish a democratic form of organization for the government of the Church, with Church Councils meeting from time to time to advise with the Pope and formulate church policy, much like the government of a modern parliament and king. Had this succeeded, much future history might have been different [4] and the civilization of the world to-day much advanced.

But the attempt failed, and the absolutism of the reunited Papacy became stronger than ever before. Protests of princes, actions of legislative assemblies, [5] protests sometimes of bishops, [6] the failing allegiance of men of affairs, the increasing condemnation and ridicule from laymen and scholars—all signs of a strong undercurrent of public opinion—seemed to have no effect on those responsible for the policy of the Church.

 

That the different rebellions and refusals of reform helped directly to the ultimate break of Luther is not probable, as Luther seems to have worked out his position by himself. Each of these earlier defiances of authority and the later defiance of Luther were alike, though, in two respects. Each demanded a return to the usages and beliefs and practices of the earlier Christian Church, as derived from a study of the Bible and of the writings of the early Christian Fathers; and each insisted that Christians should be permitted to study the Bible for themselves, and reach their own conclusions as to Christian duty. In this demand to be allowed to go back to the original sources for authority, and the assertion of the right to personal investigation and conclusions, we see the new intellectual standards established by the Revival of Learning in full force. After 1500 the rising demands for moral reform and the recognition of individual judgment could not be put aside much longer.

Unless there could be evolution there would be revolution. Evolution was refused, [7] and revolution was the result.

 

DISCONTENT IN GERMAN LANDS. It happened that the first revolt to be successful in a large way broke out in Germany, and about the person of an Augustinian monk and Professor of Theology in the University of Wittenberg by the name of Martin Luther (1483-1546). Had it not centered about Luther the revolt would have come about some one else; had it not come in Germany it would have come in some other land. It was the modern scientific spirit of inquiry and reason in conflict with the mediaeval spirit of dogmatic authority, and two such forces are sooner or later destined to clash.

Whether we be Catholic or Protestant, and whether we approve or disapprove of what Luther did or of his methods, makes little difference in this study. Over a question involving so much religious partisanship we do not need to take sides. All that we need concern ourselves with is that a certain Martin Luther lived, did certain things, made certain stands for what he believed to be right, and what he did, whether right or wrong, whether beneficial to progress and civilization or not, stands as a great historical fact with which the student of the history of education must take account. That the same or even better results might have been arrived at in time by other methods may be true, but what we are concerned with is the course which history actually took. [8]

 

There were special reasons why the trouble, when once it broke, made such rapid entry in German lands. The Germans had a long-standing grudge against the Italian papal court, chiefly because it had for long been draining Germany of money to support the Italian Church. Germany’s greatest minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1228), three centuries before Luther had sung to the German people how the Pope made merry over the stupid Germans.

 

“All their goods will be mine,

Their silver is flowing into my far-away chest; Their priests are living on poultry and wine, And leaving the silly layman to fast.”

 

Many positions in the German Church had been filled by the Pope with Italians, who not infrequently drew the perquisites, but did not reside in Germany. The princely and feudal Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, Cologne, and Salzburg, with their fortified castles and lands and troops and large governmental powers, frequently proved to be serious sources of irritation. The most widespread discontent, though, arose over the heavy church taxation, which drained the money of the people to Italy. The whole German people, from the princes down to the peasants, felt themselves unjustly treated, that the German money which flowed to Rome should be kept at home, and that the immoral and inefficient clergy should be replaced by upright, earnest men who would attend better to their religious duties (R. 150). It was these conditions which prepared the Germans for revolt, and enabled Luther to rally so many of the princes and people to his side when once he had defied authority.

 

THE GERMAN REVOLT. The crisis came over the sale of indulgences for sins by the papal agent, Tetzel, who began the practice in the neighborhood of Wittenberg, where Luther was a Professor of Theology, in 1516. There is little doubt but that Tetzel, in his zeal to raise money for the rebuilding of the church of Saint Peter’s at Rome, a great undertaking then under way, exceeded his instructions and made claims as to the nature and efficacy of indulgences which were not warranted by church doctrines.

Such would be only human. The sale, however, irritated Luther, and he appealed to the Archbishop of Magdeburg to prohibit it. Failing to obtain any satisfaction, he followed the old university custom, made out ninety-five theses, or reasons, why he did not believe the practice justifiable, detailed the abuses, set forth what he conceived to be the true Christian doctrine in the matter, and challenged all comers to a debate on the theses (R. 151). Following true university custom, also, these theses were made out in Latin, and in October, 1517, Luther followed still another university custom and nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg. Luther was probably as much surprised as any one to find that these were at once translated into German, printed, and in two weeks had been scattered all over Germany. Within a month they were known in all the important centers of the Western Christian world. They had been carried everywhere on the currents of discontent. Luther at first intended no revolt from the Church, but only a protest against its practices. From one step to another, though, he was gradually led into open rebellion, and finally, in 1520, was excommunicated from the Church. He then expressed his defiance by publicly burning the bull of excommunication, together with a volume of the canon law. This was open rebellion, and such heresy (R. 152) must needs be stamped out. Luther took his stand on the authority of the Scriptures, and the battle was now joined between the forces representing the authority of the Church versus the authority of the Bible, and salvation through the Church versus salvation through personal faith and works. [9] Luther also forced the issue for freedom of thought in religious matters. It was, to be sure, some three centuries before freedom in religious thinking and worship became clearly recognized, but what the early university masters and scholars had stood for in intellectual matters, Luther now asserted in religious affairs as well.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 88. SHOWING THE RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS]

 

We do not need to follow the details of the conflict. Suffice it to know that great portions of northern and western Germany followed Luther, as is shown in Figure 88, and that the Western Church, which had remained one for so many centuries and been the one great unifying force in western Europe, was permanently split by the Protestant Revolt. The large success of Luther is easily explained by the new life which now permeated western Europe. The world was rapidly becoming modern, while the Church, with a perversity almost unexplainable, insisted upon remaining mediaeval and tried to force others to remain mediaeval with it. Adams expresses the situation well when he says: [10]

 

A revolution had been wrought in the intellectual world in the century between Huss and Luther. At the death of Huss the world had only just begun the study of Greek. Since that date, the great body of classical literature had been recovered, and the sciences of philology and historical criticism thoroughly established. As a result Luther had at his command a well-developed method … impossible to any earlier reformer…. The world also had become familiar with independent investigation, and with the proclamation of new views and the upsetting of old ones. By no means the least of the great services of Erasmus to civilization had been to hold up before all the world so conspicuous an example of the scholar following, as his inalienable right, the truth as he found it and wherever it appeared to lead him, and honest in his public utterances as to the results of his studies…. His was the crowning work of a century which had produced in the general public a greatly changed attitude of mind toward intellectual independence since the days of Huss. The printing press was of itself almost enough to account for Luther’s success as compared with his predecessors. Wycliffe made almost as direct and vigorous an appeal to the public at large, and with “an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people,” but Luther had the advantage in the rapid multiplication of copies and in their cheapness, and he covered Europe with the issues of his press…. Luther spoke to a very different public from that which Wycliffe or Huss had addressed,—a public European in extent, and one not merely familiar with the assertion of new ideas, but tolerant, in a certain way, of the innovator, and expectant of great things in the future.

 

A revolution it undoubtedly was, but a revolution in thinking much more than a political revolution. It was but a further manifestation of the inquiring and questioning tendency awakened by the Revival of Learning. It might in a sense be dated from Wycliffe and Huss, as well as from Erasmus and Luther. Luther did not create the Reformation. He rather popularized the work of preceding protesters, giving the impress of his powerful personality to the movement, and directing and moulding its form.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 89. HULDREICH ZWINGLI (1487-1531)]

 

REVOLTS IN OTHER LANDS. The outbreak in Germany soon spread to other lands. Lutheranism made rapid headway in Denmark, where the German grievances against Italian rule were equally familiar, and in 1537 the Danish Diet severed all connection with Rome and established Lutheranism as the religion of the country. Norway, being then a part of Denmark, was carried for Lutheranism also. In Sweden the Church was shorn of some of its powers and property in 1527, and in 1592 Lutheranism was definitely adopted as the religion for the nation. This included Finland, then a part of Sweden. An independent reform movement, closely akin to Lutheranism in its aims, made considerable headway in German Switzerland contemporaneously with the reform work of Luther in Germany. This was under the leadership of a popular humanist preacher in Zurich by the name of Huldreich Zwingli. In 1519 he began a series of sermons on real religion, as he had learned it from a study of the New Testament writings.

Zwingli, being supported by the people, made many changes in church practices and worship, eventually even abolishing the mass. Many other towns took up this reform movement, and civil war was the result. Zwingli was killed in battle between Swiss partisans of the old