ceived an ideal more in accordance with that of the New Testament, and, from beyond the waning glamour of the Medieval Church, the more solid form of the Christianity of the Reformation was coming to view. It may indeed have seemed, when the Catholic system of the Middle Ages fell, that the last effort of the Christian Church had failed; and the fifteenth century seemed to bear out the complaint. The Church was confessed at the Councils of Constance and Bâle to need reform in the head and in the members, but the reform seemed to be impossible; and in the atmosphere of the Renaissance it could be believed that religion had died, and that learning and art, without morality, must henceforth suffice for mankind. We now know that that epoch was the prelude to the greatest outburst of the Christian spirit, except that of the first century, which the world has ever seen. The spiritual needs of men cannot be suppressed, and the resources of God are infinite. Age after age the Christian spirit renews the attempt to bring mankind under the dominion of its true King. It casts aside the systems of the past only to weave a more fitting vesture for the new generation. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure. As a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed, But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.'

LECTURE V.

THE CHURCHES OF THE REFORMATION.

REVELATION i. 19, 20.

Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; the mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches; and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.

THE attempt to reduce the whole world under the dominion of Christ must be made in each successive age according to its special powers and opportunities. The efforts of the past must be studied in order to throw light upon the future. We write the things which we have seen in history, that we may better write of the things which are and the things which shall be hereafter. If we find in the past grounds for warning, we find none for despair. Where the attempt to make the world Christian has failed, the failure has never been absolute; and the vision which men have sought to realize has been made more vivid to mankind by the attempt. The Imperial Church under Constantine and Theodosius failed partly because the world was not ripe for the great change: though the conviction of mankind

had been won, the heathenism of its life presented too strong a resistance. It failed also in part because the attempt which it made was only partial. It did not face the complete problem. The Medieval church under Charles and the great Popes seemed much nearer to success. Nominally indeed it succeeded; and for some six or seven centuries it held Christendom together. But it failed and fell; partly because of the fatal dualism, the contrast between the spiritual and the temporal, which, except in its highest ideal, it presented; partly because, in fact, it became a system not of a Christian Church and a Christian Empire, but of two rival worldly powers, each aiming at a dominion which could not belong to both; partly also because the triumph which the Papacy gained over the Empire was the triumph of the clerical order, who were quite unfit to rule, and who did not even understand the meaning of the Kingdom of God. The Medieval system, long hollowed out and become destitute of spiritual force, was blown to pieces by the Reformation.

Yet the Imperial and Medieval Church left behind it the idea of unity, and of an organized social system of which Christianity should be the inspiring power; and towards the realization of this idea the churches of the Reformation were bound to work. Only they must recommence the process from another side. The Imperial and Medieval Church had insisted too exclusively on the principle of unity. It had made little account of the nation; it had trampled upon the individual. But the New Testament had represented the Spirit as working first in the individual, afterwards in the community.

And it had spoken not only of the Church, but of the Churches. The mystery of the Apocalypse is not that of a single spirit, but of seven; not of one candlestick, but of its seven branches. The unity of Christendom must be one in which all its component parts have their full rights and their free development. The great tyrannical Empire-Church was shattered. The work of reconstruction must begin anew with the separate national churches. This was the task of the Reformation.

It is one of the greatest of historical errors to represent the Reformation as primarily a negative movement1. All great movements of reform have in them a negative element, and it is the first which strikes the eye. But no movement can live on negation. The Ten Commandments are negative, since almost all of them say, Thou shalt not; but at their root lie the central affirmations of all religion and morality. Our Lord's teaching was negative in its denunciations of the Pharisaic system, but its strongest negations gained their force from the

1 M. Guizot (Civilisation in Europe, Lect. xii.) seems to limit the effects of the Reformation to the enfranchisement of thought. It had no effect politically, he says, but it abolished and disarmed the spiritual power, the systematic and formidable government of thought.'

M. Comte's dislike of Protestantism is well known. He habitually speaks of its 'purely negative doctrine,' 'the anarchical character of its principles,' &c. See especially Positive Catechism (Congreve's translation), p. 415.

This view of the Reformation finds its extreme expression in the lately published work of Ed. v. Hartmann, The Self-Destruction of Christianity and the Religion of the Future. Its task,' he says (p. 12), 'in relation to the dogmatic of Christianity is one of absolute negation, destruction, and tearing down.' 'Catholicism sought to preserve the corpse with the appearance of life; the historical task assigned to Protestantism was to dissect the corpse limb by limb, and to obtain the public recognition of the fact that it was actually dead.' He says in his Preface, 'I recognize Ultrainontanism as the true representative of historical Christianity, and its championship against modern culture as the last effort made by historical Christianity for its own preservation.'

underlying demand for a worship in spirit and in truth. The sun in the spring-time is negative, in that it breaks up the frost barriers by which the world has been held fast; but the heat which destroys is life-giving. And so the Reformation pulled down only because of its eager resolve to rebuild a sounder fabric. In whatever aspect you look at it, it was primarily constructive, only secondarily and by necessity destructive.

The Reformation was the uprising of positive religious conviction. The assertion of the doctrine of justification by faith was the demand that each man should himself look up directly to the Eternal, realizing his personal responsibility and claiming without intervention the divine forgiveness and grace. Incidentally it was negative; for, if this conviction was personal and immediate, it could not be a matter of ceremony and of system; and therefore the whole fabric of medieval superstitions fell before it.

The Reformation, again, was the beginning of a great era of popular enlightenment. The Renaissance was intellectual and artistic, the means of culture to the few; the Reformation was religious and popular. When Luther and Tyndale gave the Scriptures to the laity, and demanded that every man should have the faculty of reading them given to him, they awoke a thirst for knowledge in the people, which has resulted in popular education and popular power. Incidentally the follies of monkhood and the unreal system of the school-philosophy were shattered. Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriæ, laughed to scorn the absurdities which had been the intellectual aliment of the preceding centuries.