through literature, Unitarian ideas passed to England, where they attracted sufficient attention to evoke an act of Parliament in 1648, making the denial of the divinity of Christ a capital offence.

It was not an accident that this movement had its origin in Italy. Like the humanistic reformation which Le Fèvre d'Étaples, Colet, and Erasmus conceived and laboured for, it had its roots in the Italian Renaissance and its precursors in Italian thinkers. The renaissance of Christianity by a return to the sources was a natural counterpart of the renaissance of classical antiquity by the same means. The New Testament itself was a piece of the ancient world, and better understood by those who had steeped themselves in the thought of antiquity and interpreted it as other ancient authors are interpreted than by those who read it through the eyes of medieval schoolmen or of the Fathers. They interpreted Paul, not by Augustine, but in the light of Neoplatonic and Stoic ideas which seemed to them not only to be the acme of ancient philosophy, but to embody eternal verity, and they discovered the same sublime philosophy in Paul's Epistles and the Gospel of John.

Erasmus, in his "Enchiridion Militis Christiani" (1502), set forth in simple and popular form what would to-day be called "the religion of Jesus," as the essence of Christianity, without the modern antithesis to "the Christianity of Paul," but instinctively recognising the fountainhead of Christianity, and making the last step in the ascent to the sources. In his view the teaching of Jesus is a compendium of universal religious and moral truth; Christianity is in substance identical with all the true religion and morality that ever was, to which it adds the authority of Christ and the help of divine grace.

The Italian reformers with whom we are here concerned were the heirs of this spirit; but while Erasmus and such as he laboured for a revival of pure Christianity within the church, their successors, two or three generations later, coming after the schism and in the midst of the reaction, saw

hope of a restoration of true Christianity only outside the church, and were restrained from radical conclusions neither by affection for the church and desire to maintain the unity of Christendom, nor, it must be added, by historic sense. There was none among them comparable in learning or intellectual acumen to the great humanists, or to many of the theologians of their day, Catholic or Calvinist; nor were they men of broader minds, but they pushed their biblical rationalism to its consequences, whatever they might be.

The doctrine of the Trinity was criticised by Socinus and his successors, on both biblical and rational grounds. Christ is for Socinus a man of extraordinary kind, miraculously conceived, endued with divine wisdom and power, raised from the dead, and exalted to a place of power beside God, and therefore properly worshipped. His work was primarily that of a prophet; he gave a new and deeper meaning to the law, promised us eternal life, and set us the example of a moral perfection which he sealed with his death. Like the humanists, with their ultimately Greek conception of sin as a voluntary act, Socinus maintained the freedom of the human will, with a theory of divine grace which was promptly branded as Pelagian.

Especially incisive was his criticism of the theory of satisfaction in the Anselmic doctrine of the atonement, as it was held by both Catholics and Protestants. He denies, on Scotist premises, that there is in God any necessity for satisfaction, and declares that the punishment of the innocent in place of the guilty conflicts with the justice of God. Remission of sins and satisfaction for sin are contradictories; the one excludes the other. Vicarious satisfaction in the case of personal punishment is impossible; to allow such substitution would be the height of injustice. Moreover, since the deity is incapable of suffering, the death of Christ, if conceived as substitutionary, could have only the value of a single human life, and therefore could not suffice for the whole world; while, if the substitution were intrinsically equivalent, it would necessarily operate unconditionally to

the salvation of all, and its efficacy would not be dependent on faith. The whole unbiblical and unreasonable doctrine is immoral in itself, and has an immoral influence on men. Upon the ground of the juridical conception of the satisfaction of Christ, entertained particularly by Protestants, this criticism was in fact so telling that it moved Grotius to a reconstruction of the doctrine of the atonement in which he endeavoured to avoid the Socinian objections.

In this theory the death of Christ is neither humanity's amends in the person of the God-man to God's injured honour (Anselm) nor the execution upon him of the penalty which retributive justice demanded of the whole human race for violated law (Protestant doctrine). The necessity of Christ's death lay not in the satisfaction by an equivalent of offended honour or of inexorable penal justice, but in the maintenance of public justice. The moral government of the world cannot be maintained without law and its sanctions, nor would these be effective to secure that conformity which is necessary to public welfare if the ruler uniformly remitted the penalty on the simple condition of repentance, for men would think that he did not take his own law seriously and that they need not. The death of his Son, inflicted by God and voluntarily undertaken by Christ, shows in the most impressive way how grave a thing sin is in the eyes of God, and is above all things apt to move men to repentance, faith, and righteous life. Abelard conceived the moral influence of the death of Christ as grateful love; for Grotius it is rather the fear of what a God in whose sight sin is so heinous will do to unrepentant sinners.

The Grotian theory prevailed among the Arminians, and was taken up by influential schools of Calvinism, particularly by Jonathan Edwards and his successors in New England. With many modifications it is at the bottom of most modern "moral influence" theories of the atonement.

CHAPTER XIII

CHRISTIANITY

THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

The Council of Trent-Reform Decrees-Doctrinal Decrees-Scripture and Tradition-Justification-The Sacraments-Orders of the Ministry-Professio Fidei Tridentina-The Roman Catechism— Catholic Dogmatics, Polemics, Historical Studies-Ignatius Loyola and the Society of Jesus-Missions, Catholic and Protestant.

FROM the beginning of the conflict in Germany the call for a council of the church to correct abuses and settle disputed questions of doctrine had never ceased to be heard. The emperor Charles V had urged one pope after another to call such a council, but the reluctance of the popes to convoke a council under the conditions on which the Germans insisted, the bad terms on which they habitually were with Charles, and the political complications of the times prevented, and it was not until December, 1545, that a general council at last was convened in Trent, a city of the Empire on the Italian side of the Alps. Things had by that time gone so far that there was no longer any reasonable hope that the council could achieve the end which had been originally desired, namely, to heal the dissensions by the institution of reforms the necessity for which was acknowledged on all hands, and by a free discussion, and, if possible, a common understanding upon the contested points of doctrine. Whereas in 1537 the more moderate Protestants were in favour of participation in a council, the Protestant members of the Diet at Worms in 1545 refused to have anything to do with it. Consequently the Council of Trent found its task, not in endeavouring to reconcile the differences between Catholics and Protestants, but in a precise definition of Catholic doctrine in opposition to Protestantism and in far-reaching reforms in church order and discipline.

Nineteen years elapsed between the first session of the council, on December 13, 1545, and the last, December 4, 1563. Its history falls into three periods. It sat in Trent from December, 1545, to March, 1547, when the pope transferred it to Bologna. Two sessions only were held at Bologna, and then Julius III moved it back to Trent again, where it continued its labours for a year, May, 1551, to April, 1552. During this period representatives of the Protestant princes and free cities, at the instance of the emperor, made their appearance in the council, but with demands which it could not in any case have granted, even if new political complications had not broken off its deliberations. Not until January, 1562, was it able to convene again, and although an invitation was again given to the Protestants to participate, this proposal met no response. In the meantime the religious peace of 1555 had formally recognised the division, and established the rights of the religion of the Augsburg Confession in the Empire; consequently the remaining sessions of the council were devoted exclusively to matters of Catholic interest.

The reform decrees of the council left hardly any side of the church life untouched. At the very beginning they deal with instruction in the Scriptures in the higher and lower schools, and with preaching in the churches, which was enjoined upon the parish clergy under the oversight of the bishops. The reforms are throughout in a conservative spirit. They nowhere depart from long-established and universally recognised principles of Catholic church order and discipline, but upon these principles they correct a multitude of abuses which prevailed in almost every sphere; and although the promulgation of the decrees and the best effort to enforce them could not in a day put an end to evils which were the growth of centuries, and although some of the good plans of the council did not prove practicable, it must be recognised that the Council of Trent inaugurated a new era not only in the administration but in the life of the church. The doctrinal decrees of the council deal chiefly with