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

regime and reformers, in 1531, but his work though checked persisted, and German Switzerland became mixed Catholic and Protestant. [11]

 

In England the struggle came nominally over the divorce (1533) of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, though the independence of the English Church had been asserted from time to time for two centuries, and a free National Church had for long been a growing ideal with English statesmen.

In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) which severed England from Rome. By it the King was made head of the English National Church. The change was in no sense a profound one, such as had taken place in Lutheran Germany. The priests who took the new oath of allegiance to the King instead of the Pope as the head of the Church, as most of them did, continued in the churches, the service was changed to English, some reforms were instituted, but the people did not experience any great change in religious feeling or ideas. This new National Church became known as the English or Anglican Church.

 

So far as the early history of America is concerned, the most important reform movement was neither Lutheranism nor Anglicanism, but Calvinism. In 1537 John Calvin, a French Protestant who had fled to Switzerland, [12]

was invited to submit a plan for the educational and religious reorganization of the city of Geneva, and in 1541 he was entrusted with the task of organizing there a little religious City-Republic. For this he established a combined church and city government, in which religious affairs and the civil government were as closely connected as they had ever been in any Catholic country. During the twenty-three years that Calvin dominated Geneva it became the Rome of Protestantism. Calvin’s The Institutes of Christianity, published in Latin in 1536, and in French in 1541, was the first orderly presentation of the principles of Christian faith from the Protestant standpoint, [13] while his French Catechism

(1537) was extensively used [14] in Calvinistic lands as a basis for elementary religious instruction.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 90. JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564) (Drawn from a contemporary painting)]

 

From Geneva a reformed Calvinistic religion spread over northern France, [15] where its followers became known as Huguenots; to Scotland (1560), where they were known as Scotch Presbyterians; to the Netherlands (1572), where originated the Dutch Reformed Church; and to portions of central England, where those who embraced it became known as Puritans.

Through the Puritans who settled New England, and later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presbyterians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American education. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anglican Church, known in America as the Episcopalian, came in through the landed aristocracy in Virginia and the later settlers in New York. The early settlement of America was thus a Protestant settlement, while the migration to America of large numbers of peoples from Catholic lands is a relatively recent movement.

 

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS WARFARE. Of course the revolt against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be extended to others. This the Protestants were not much more willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious toleration, [16] though established in principle by the revolt, was an idea to which the world has required a long time to become accustomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, during which Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western Europe were willing to stop fighting and begin to recognize for others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When religious tolerance finally became established by law, civilization had made a tremendous advance.

 

The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civilization of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of religious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devastation of these religious wars left neither the energy for nor the interest in educational or political progress.

 

The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was postponed for twenty-five years—due to outside pressure, chiefly that of the Turks in southeastern Europe—from the time that the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (1521). Finally, in 1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty years, when religious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the period known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). Though fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so reduced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth century that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. More than half the population and two thirds of the movable property were swept away. The people were so reduced by starvation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of the inhabitants of the Duchy of W�rtemberg were left alive. Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the generation which survived the war came to manhood without knowing education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able to make any significant contribution to education or civilization, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did parts of Germany come to have as many people or cattle as before this devastating religious war broke out.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 91. A FRENCH PROTESTANT (c. 1600) A restoration, Mus�e d’Artillerie, Paris]

 

From 1560 to 1629 in France, also, a period of carnage and devastation prevailed, due to an attempt to exterminate the Calvinistic Huguenots. In the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s eve, in 1572, ten thousand Protestants are said to have perished in Paris alone, and forty-five thousand additional outside the city. Though the Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted religious toleration, this never was fully accomplished, and in 1685 the Edict was revoked. The Huguenots were now given fifteen days to become Catholics or leave France. The demands were enforced with great severity, and the sect, which embraced one tenth of the population of France, was stamped out and France became once more a Catholic country. In a short time four hundred thousand thrifty and highly intelligent Huguenots had left France for other lands. In Southern German lands, Holland, England, and America many found a new home.

 

CHANGED ATTITUDE TOWARD THE OLD PROBLEMS. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the bloody Thirty Years’ War, itself the culmination of a century of bitter and vindictive religious strife, has often been regarded as both an end and a beginning. Though the persecution of minorities for a time continued, especially in France, this treaty marked the end of the attempt of the Church and the Catholic States to stamp out Protestantism on the continent of Europe. The religious independence of the Protestant States was now acknowledged, and the beginnings of religious freedom were established by treaty. This new freedom of conscience, once definitely begun for the ruling princes, was certain in time to be extended further.

Ultimately the day must come, though it might be centuries away, when individual as well as national freedom in religious matters must be granted as a right, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind finally be firmly established by law. [17]

 

The end of the period of bitter religious warfare, too, was followed by a reaction against religious intolerance which contained within itself the germs of much future liberty and human progress. Paulsen has well expressed the change, in the following words: [18]

 

The long and terrible wars to which the ecclesiastical schism had everywhere given rise—the wars of the Huguenots in France, the Thirty Years War, and the Civil War in England—had, in the end, created a feeling of indifference toward religious and theological problems. Did it really pay, people asked themselves, to kill each other and devastate each other’s countries for the sake of such questions? Could these problems ever be decided at all? If not, was it not much more reasonable to let everyone believe what he could, and, instead of wasting breath and arguments, convincing to nobody, on transubstantiation, predestination, and real presence, to cultivate sciences which really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all…. Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the changing intellectual attitude of the times. [19]

 

Physically exhausted, and recognizing at last the futility of fire and sword as means for stamping out opposing religious convictions, but still thoroughly convinced as to the correctness of their respective points of view, both sides now settled down to another century and more of religious hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, and to a close supervision of both preaching and teaching as safeguards to orthodoxy. During the century following the Peace of Westphalia greater reliance than ever before was placed on the school as a means for protecting the faith, and the pulpit and the school now took the place of the sword and the torch as converting and holding agents.

 

RELIGIOUS REFORM. The effect of the Protestant Revolts on the Church was good. For the first time in history Catholic churchmen learned that they could not rely on the general acceptance of any teachings they promulgated, or any practices they saw fit to approve. The spirit of inquiry which had been aroused by the methods of the humanists would in the future force them to explain and to defend. If they were to make headway against this great rebellion they must reform abuses, purify church practices, and see that monks and clergy led upright Christian lives. Unless the mass of the people could be made loyal to the Church by reverence for it, further revolts and the ultimate break-up of the institution were in prospect. The Council of Trent (1545-63) at last undertook the reform which should have come at least a century before.

Better men were selected for the church offices, and bishops and clergy were ordered to reside in their proper places and to preach regularly. New religious orders arose, whose purpose was to prepare priests better for the service of the Church and for ministry to the needs of the people.

Irritating practices were abandoned. The laws and doctrines of the Church were restated, in new and better form. Moral reforms were instituted. In most particulars the reforms forced by the work of Luther