John Tulloch · 3 of 27

Introduction. · Part 1

THE Reformation of the sixteenth century can only be fully understood when we recognise it as the result of a long preparation. On the first view it seems a sudden outburst of spiritual life and intellectual freedom, led on by a few great men, whose energy and success appear almost miraculous in the face of the obstacles amidst which they contend; but, on a nearer and more comprehensive inspection, we discern several series of converging forces running through the preceding ages, all tending towards the same end,—and whose long-gathering impulse, as represented and expressed in the Leaders of the movement, more than anything else, precipitates the crisis. These Leaders must always fix our main attention: they not only cover the scenes of the actual movement by their great figures, but what they said and did forms the highest expression of the spiritual and intellectual influences previously in operation, and which then reached their highest point of development. Yet these men will also be better appreciated, when we view the gradual lines of advance which they headed, the “increasing purpose” of reform which manifested itself in the earlier centuries, and which, continually stifled and interrupted, nevertheless renewed itself with a deepening intention and meaning. The great actors on the stage become more intelligible and more interesting when we obtain a glimpse of the springs which moved them, and the prior and long-maturing conditions out of which their teaching and influence grew.

The preparation which led to the great crisis of the sixteenth century, may be said to carry us back to the first ages. The light of primitive truth was never entirely extinguished. It flickered indeed but feebly amid the encroaching darkness, yet we can still trace it here and there; and when the earliest Reformers appealed, as they did, to the primitive and apostolical character of their teaching in contrast to the sacerdotal corruptions and abuses against which they protested, there is no reason to doubt that their appeal often rested on a true succession of “simpler manners and purer laws,” which had never been altogether lost. This succession appears especially in the south of Europe, along the Mediterranean coast, and in the romantic country which separates Italy from what we now call France. From Vigilantius, the opponent of Jerome, and the earnest denouncer of the increasing licence of monasticism in the fifth century, to Claude of Turin in the beginning of the ninth century—who distinguished himself by hostility to the idol-worship patronised at Rome, and who declared, as to the Pontiff, that “he is not to be called apostolic who merely occupies the apostolic seat, but he who fulfils the functions of an apostle,”—there were, no doubt, many witnesses to the like truth and faith which they defended. The same Alpine valleys which sheltered the last days of Vigilantius, saw the rise of Claude, and it is not likely that in the interval there should have been an entire lack of the reformatory spirit which animated them. There is reason to think, indeed, that the spirit which three centuries later broke out with such intrepid intensity in these very valleys, had lived on from the very first ages, obscure, and often ignorant, but never altogether submissive or absorbed in the ecclesiastical life, which spread from Rome, and sought to mould everything to its own dictates.

Rome, however, made a steady advance during all this period. From the alleged donation of Constantine to the grants of Pepin, it continued to grow in power and in centralised dominion. When, in return for the protection and privileges conceded to it, Leo III. placed the imperial crown of the West on the brow of Charlemagne (800), the Papacy may be said to have been fully consolidated, and to have entered upon the career of triumph which, amid all temporary reverses and disgraceful pollutions, it maintained for five centuries. From the middle of the eleventh to the close of the thirteenth century its career culminated. This is the time of its greatest ascendancy, of its proudest names—Gregory VII. (Hildebrand), Innocent III., and Boniface VIII. By the light of these names, separated from each other by about a century, we trace the highest successes of the Roman Pontificate. It reigned supreme, not only in the realm of religious thought, and over all the movements of ecclesiastical life, but it claimed to be the arbiter between contending sovereigns, to exercise feudal as well as spiritual supremacy over many kingdoms, and even to dispose of crowns, and award empire according to its will.

The spirit of religious opposition had sunk to its lowest ebb during the earliest part of this period. Throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, there is no reforming name which can be said to arrest our attention. The following age, however, was destined to be one of extraordinary intellectual and religious conflict. While the Papacy reached its most scornful height towards the close of the twelfth century, and was enthusiastically supported by some of the most striking manifestations, both of its thought and activity,—the mysticism of Bernard, the scholasticism of Peter Lombard, the fierce bigotry of the Crusades—a series of reformatory energies at the same time broke out, and assailed it from different sides. Two of these were of an especially powerful and interesting character. The one, intellectual in its origin, passed into a movement of practical reform, directed against the overgrown temporal power of the Pope and the clergy generally; the other, spiritual in its beginning, maintained throughout an entirely religious character. The former is deeply important in its twofold speculative and political aspect the latter moves us by the terrible pathos of the sufferings which mark its course, and the tragic picturesqueness of its incidents. Abelard and Arnold of Brescia are the great names which signalise the one; Peter Waldo, the poor men of Lyons, and the peasants of the Cevennes and the Val de Sesia are the heroes of the other. Both were crushed beneath the heel of the triumphant hierarchical despotism, but both left their enduring trace on the mind of Europe.

It may seem singular to conjoin Abelard and Arnold of Brescia—the profound and subtle intellectualist and the stern practical reformer—the philosopher and the demagogue but there is no doubt that Arnold imbibed his spirit of life and zeal from Abelard, although it assumed in him a very different direction from that which distinguished it in his great master. When the latter retired from the Abbey of St Denis to a lonely priory near Troyes, Arnold was one of the eager and enthusiastic students who gathered in crowds around the famous teacher. His intellectual independence and ethical ardour kindled in Arnold an intense disgust at the worldly lives of the clergy, and led him to devote himself to an energetic mission of reform on his return to his native country. He appeared as the apostle of a primitive simplicity, setting an example, in his own life, of complete self-denial to all the pleasures of the world, and calling upon the clergy to renounce their secular callings and worldly positions. A secularised church, he held, was no longer a true church, and priests and bishops plunged in the affairs of the world were no longer the true ministers of Him whose kingdom was not of this world. The inspiring idea of all his movements was to restore the purity of the early faith, and to renovate the spiritual order after the pattern of the apostolic ritual. The influence of Arnold extended. widely. Many who did not sympathise with his religious sentiments, hailed him as the hero of a political emancipation from the Papacy. Expelled from Brescia, he fled for a time beyond the Alps and settled in Zurich, where he may have scattered the seeds which afterwards ripened into the teaching of Zwingli; but the popular spirit which had spread in Italy, very much as the result of his teaching, drew him back to Rome in 1145, where he and his party established a republic, and for nearly ten years upheld its ascendancy. Under the terrors of ‘an interdict, however, he was again expelled. He sought shelter in Campania, but was at length seized by order of the Emperor, transferred to Rome, and executed with such secrecy and despatch, that the mode of his death remains uncertain. Only one thing is known, that his ashes were flung into the Tiber, lest the devoted populace should pay honour to the remains of the martyr to their liberties.

This abortive but magnanimous movement of Arnold is only one of many symptoms of revolt that marked the first half of the twelfth century. We have mentioned how it connected itself with the teaching of Abelard and Abelard himself, in his inquisitive and rationalistic theology, may be said to follow, although he does not appear to have been influenced by Berengar of Tours, in the end of the preceding century. Differing in many respects, and without any common aim, these three names stand forth together as antagonists of Catholicism in the greatness of its fame. Nor do they stand alone. In the south of France, where the spiritual agitation of the times seems to have been concentrated, various disturbing elements may be traced.—some of them the mere reflex of the great Manichean schism, casting forth its troubled energies from. the East, but others of them of native growth, marking the insurrection of the religious principle in behalf of evangelical simplicity and practical earnestness.

The distinction should be carefully observed between these two classes of phenomena. Sometimes they may have mingled with and crossed one another. The Bogomiles, the Catharists, and the Pasagians, are apt to appear confounded with the Petrobrusians and Henricians; but they were in reality very different. The former were all offshoots from the decaying trunk of Manicheism—expiring fragments of the great Gnostic heresy, which, attacking Christianity in the beginning of the second century, clung to it with a fatal tenacity through the most varying developments. They have no interest in our point of view. They were not signs of reviving health. Their opposition to Rome did not spring from any new excitement of the religious feeling. They were sects by long descent, and dragged out their existence in the midst of persecution from the mere lingering strength of the profound but half-forgotten principle in which they originated, rather than from any vitality of spiritual coherence. The latter were the expressions of a really reforming Christian spirit. Occupying in part the same area as the others, they have no affinity with them, save in opposition to the Papacy. Springing from within the bosom of the Church, they mark an awakening spiritual life, and not a decaying intellectual subtlety.

Peter of Brueys was a preacher of Languedoc, and Henry, a monk of Cluny. The restoration of a simple and less worldly religion was the aim of both, called forth by the same spectacle of ecclesiastical corruption which had moved Arnold of Brescia. Along with this practical bent we detect in the former certain theoretical tendencies similar to those of the later Anabaptist; but upon the whole a spiritual zeal and earnestness for the truth governed both. Both, like Arnold, were eminently preachers of righteousness, and not theosophists or rationalising mystics. They were the forerunners, in fact, of the great spiritual movement which burst forth in the second half of the century, and which, as it was more pervading and permanent, has become more historical than their comparatively insulated efforts. It absorbed these latter, and gathered under a common name the wide-spread spiritual excitement which at this time had nearly alienated from the Church of Rome the whole of the south of France, the fair region of Provençal song and civilisation. It was this, more than any singular power in their leader, or any traditionary inheritance of the truth, such as has been sometimes arrogated to them, that gave to the Waldensian, or, to adopt the still more general name, the Albigensian movement, which marks the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, its great significance and most lasting influence. The spiritual forces which had been long in action, springing out here and there, at length spread themselves into a general stream, which drew the attention of the whole Church, and required the most consummate efforts of policy and cruelty to counteract and destroy it.

The special origin of the Waldenses seems clearly settled, notwithstanding the controversy which has gathered round the subject. Peter Waldo (Pierre de Vault) was a rich citizen of Lyons in the middle of the twelfth century. While attending a meeting of his fellow-citizens, one of them suddenly fell down and expired. The incident made a deep impression upon him, and returning home he resolved to give himself to the study and advancement of religion. He disposed of his wealth among the poor, assumed himself the garb of poverty, and invited others to share with him a life of evangelical simplicity and self-denial. In so far, we see in him only the same characteristic reaction against clerical worldliness that distinguishes all the Reformers of the period; but his love of Scripture, and the means which he took to promote its knowledge, give to his labours a peculiar and enduring stamp. Unsatisfied with the mere fragments of Scripture retailed by the preachers or accessible in the ritual of the Church, he employed two persons with competent attainments to translate for him the whole of the Gospels, and other portions of the Bible, into the Romance language. These he studied with great avidity, and multiplied and spread abroad copies among the people. Gradually he had the whole or the greater part of Scripture translated and widely circulated; and from this source of knowledge and quickening, more than from anything else, the movement connected with his name made progress and gathered a permanent meaning and influence. This connection with Scripture, and the vigorous and unextravagant evangelical life which was the consequence, signalise the Waldensian Reformation from the similar attempts that mark the age, and enabled it to absorb them, thereby warranting the popular idea which brings the Waldensian movement more prominently than any that preceded it into connection with the Great Reformation.

Peter Waldo and his followers seem at first to have had no inclination to separate from the Church. They desired rather to be recognised within the Church—to be allowed to study Scripture and follow their self-chosen mission of instructing the ignorant and neglected under its highest sanctions. For this purpose, when they were forbidden by the Archbishop of Lyons to expound Scripture, they appealed to the Pope, Alexander III. They sent delegates to Rome, bearing a copy of their Romance version of the Bible, and soliciting the approval of the Holy See to their formation into a spiritual society. The knowledge of this fact we derive from the account of an English Franciscan monk, who was present in Rome at the time, and who has left us a graphic account of the external aspect of the poor men of Lyons, as they appeared in the streets of the Holy City, but who discovers too plainly, at the same time, that he did not understand the spirit that animated them. “They go about barefoot, two by two,” he says, “in woollen garments, possessing nothing, but, like the apostles, having all things in common—following naked Him who had not where to lay his head.” The Pope appointed a commission to converse with the poor men, and inquire into their story. The members of the commission, of whom the Franciscan monk was one, performed their part ill. When they could find no harm or heresy in the men, they sought to cover them with ridicule, and by their advice the Pope refused the request of the deputation. It was one of those critical moments in the history of the Papacy when its usual penetration and policy forsook it, and its very consciousness of strength proved a source of weakness. The opportunity once passed, it could never be recalled. The Waldenses. had no wish to separate from the Church; but the thought of abandoning their mission of Scriptural instruction and preaching never entered into the minds of these simple men, and the result was, they were driven outside of the Church, to which they might have given a new life and strength, throughout the south of Europe. Innocent III., with his higher discernment, saw the mistake of his predecessors, and sought to correct it by forming the now widely spread sect into a church society of Pauperes Catholici, but it was then too late. They had by that time learned to look with indifference on the sanction of the Church, and assumed somewhat of an attitude of hostility to it.

In the course of thirty years the poor men of Lyons had multiplied into the great Albigensian sect, covering the whole of the south of France. It was in 1170 that the deputation waited in Rome the decision of the Lateran Council in their case; it was in the opening of the thirteenth century that a special embassage, headed by no fewer than three papal legates, met on its pompous journey a Spanish ecclesiastic, who condoled with its members on the almost universal disaffection towards the Church of the fair district through which they passed. Something more than condolence, however, was already moving the heart of St Dominic. He saw far more clearly than his companions the real state of matters, and the remedy that was needed. “It is not by the display of a pompous procession, by the celebration of worldly dignity and a host of retainers,” he said, “that the cause of the truth will be advanced among these poor and ignorant, but zealous and simple-minded people. Zeal like theirs must be met by zeal, humility by humility, preaching falsehood by preaching the truth.” Such was the great work which he undertook amongst them. Now, as later, zeal called forth zeal, earnestness without the Church awoke earnestness within it; and Dominic, at the head of his black friars, was the historical reaction, within the Church of. Rome, of Peter Waldo and his followers without it. Dominic, however, or at any rate his followers, soon brought more than spiritual weapons to their aid. The Inquisition, with all its gloomy horrors, was set up in Toulouse, and its secret and terrible power soon reached to every village and family of the suspected heretics. Unmoved by friars’ preaching, unyielding before the darkest tortures, the bloody sword of the Crusader was finally invoked to crush the poor peasants of Languedoc. Under the leadership of one of those men who live in history, branded by its vilest stigma of religious ruffianism—Simon de Montfort—a war of devastation was carried into those beautiful provinces. Men, women, and children were massacred or driven from their homes to seek a precarious shelter amid the wild fastnesses and lonely valleys, whose romance still receives its most hallowed charm from the sanctified memory of their faith and the pathetic glory of their sufferings.

Temporarily strengthened by such a bloody triumph and the earnestness and zeal everywhere called forth by her new mendicant orders, the Church of Rome seemed once more alone in its proud predominance—its enemies crushed and its members elated with the fire of a freshly kindled energy. During a century and a half longer, it may be said to have maintained the unchallenged ascendancy to which the rivalrous zeal of Dominican and Franciscan, the tortures of the Inquisition, and the sword of the Crusader had once more raised it. This long period, indeed, was not without witnesses to the reforming earnestness for which Arnold of Brescia and Peter of Brueys had suffered, and the simple truth for which the poor men of Lyons had been massacred or driven from their homes. Robert Grostête, of Lincoln, by his simple and quiet dignity, and blameless holiness of life, withstood the insolent pride of Innocent III. in his last years. William of Occam attacked the scandals of the Papacy by his withering satire. The Fraticelli and Spirituals, as they were called among the Franciscans, and many of the Tertiaries or secular fraternity attached to the same body, raised their voice against the disorders of the Church; and in a book, entitled the ‘Everlasting Gospel,’ supposed to be the production of the Abbot Joachim, anticipated a reformation destined to come through the humble power of the preaching of the Word. The spirit of evangelical purity and simple-minded and benevolent zeal which so prominently characterised the movements of the twelfth century, continued to live, especially in Flanders and Germany, in societies known under various names, such as Beghards and Cellites, and the “Vineyard of the Lord.” Through these different undercurrents the unextinguished Christian life of the twelfth century propagated itself onward to the fourteenth century, but none of them assumed any historical prominence; in none of them did the opposition to Rome rise into any consistent vitality or vigour.

In the course of the fourteenth century, the Papacy, by its own weakness, may be said to have invited the extensive movement of opposition which then again set in against it. The enforced residence of the Popes at Avignon during the first seventy years of the century, and the disgraceful schism which followed their return to Rome, and lasted for the next forty years, proclaimed the weakness of the great power which had hitherto governed Christendom. Not only so, but those very orders whose first institution had done so much to reinvigorate Catholicism, and before whose preaching and regular organisation no less than before the sword of the Crusader and the arm of civil authority, the heretics had been crushed and driven out of sight, had now yielded almost everywhere to the process of corruption that seemed inherent in every species of monasticism. The friars, black and grey, had ceased to be the self-sacrificing and earnest preachers that in the beginning they had been. Their simplicity and zeal had perished, and ignorance and cupidity taken their place. They wandered about from country to country, vending relics and disposing of pardons to the highest bidders: their sermons had become mere fables—“chronicles of the world, and stories from the siege of Troy.” The ignorant crowds that gathered around them in the villages through which they passed were pleasantly deluded by their lies; their letters of fraternity were a passport to self-indulgence. It is not to be wondered at that a cry of indignation arose against them from many of the regular clergy, as well as all in whom there remained any reality of religion.

It was at such a time that John Wicliffe appeared, the greatest of all the “Reformers before the Reformation,” and who initiated a movement which not only spread throughout England and the south and west of Scotland, but also reached to Bohemia, and whose suppressed but powerful agitations lasted till the great outbreak of the sixteenth century. There are two distinct periods in the reforming career of Wicliffe, in the first of which he appears as the great opponent of the Mendicants, and the intrepid advocate of national rights and liberties against the usurpations of the Papacy—in the second of which he assumes the higher character of a doctrinal reformer, denouncing not merely the ecclesiastical abuses but the false teaching of the Papacy. In both points of view he rises far above all preceding Reformers, if not in the consistency and heroism of his character, in the clear and thorough comprehension of the principles from which he argued, and in the intellectual power and moral dignity with which he maintained them. We recognise in him, the more we know of him, a man who was not merely moved by a violent hatred of the papistical abuses amidst which he lived, and who stood forward in a half-political, half-religious attitude against them, but who was moreover animated by the most liberal culture of his day, and took a foremost rank among the leaders of its thought. He remains undoubtedly the greatest reforming spirit that England has produced—the hero, more than any one that has followed him, of its democratic religious sympathies—the embodiment, in the fourteenth century, of the principles and energies which, in every Protestant country more than in England in the sixteenth century, brought forth men of heroic mould, reaching far above their contemporaries.

Wicliffe’s hostility to the monks was first stimulated by his regard for the privileges and interests of the University of Oxford, of which, in the course of twenty years of residence, first as a scholar, and then as a fellow of Merton College, he had become a distinguished member. The Mendicants swarmed in Oxford as in Paris and the other universities, and strove zealously to acquire and keep all academic influence in their hands. They sought to regulate the degrees according to their pleasure, and to facilitate, in defiance of certain statutes, the course by which a youth could become one of their number. Parents became alarmed, and students rapidly and greatly diminished. The university was violently divided; and Wicliffe, not content with resistance to them on this particular matter, boldly denounced their whole system as an imposture.

A dispute affecting his own academic position and rights no doubt quickened his zeal. He had been appointed to the head of Balliol Hall, and almost immediately afterwards to the head of a new college instituted by Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, which received the name of Canterbury Hall. According to its original constitution, this college was to be partly composed of monks and of secular priests; but the keen rivalry of the two classes rendered such a constitution impracticable. The archbishop accordingly expelled the monks and the warden, whom he had set at their head, filled their place with secular students, and appointed Wicliffe to be warden; but, having died in the following year, the new primate, Langham, himself a monk, restored the expelled members and their former warden to their position, and in fact converted the new college into a monastic establishment. Wicliffe appealed to Rome, although with little hope of receiving justice in such a quarter.

While Wicliffe’s own case was still pending at Rome, a question of great national importance occurred betwixt the King of England and the Papacy. Urban V. had made a demand for the payment of the arrears of the one thousand merks which Innocent III. had extorted from King John as the annual acknowledgment of the alleged fealty of the kingdom to the Roman See. The tax had been intermitted for thirty-three years, and the unwise demand for it was encountered on the part of nobles and King with proud and high-hearted resistance. “Julius Cæsar exacted tribute by force, which can give no perpetual right; let the Pope come and take it by force—I am ready to stand up and resist him.” Such was the spirit that animated not only one of the warlike peers that Edward consulted in his council-chamber, but the country. After all that had happened, and with the red blood of Cressy and Poictiers still fresh in the memories of men who had gloried in the national triumph, it was not to be supposed that a French Pope should be quietly permitted to exact tribute from England. Wicliffe, who had been advanced to be one of the King’s chaplains, and who, in this capacity, had been present at the debate on the subject in the King’s council, was called upon to reply to a defence of the papal claim which had been anonymously sent abroad. He ingeniously set forth his arguments in the name of the bold barons who had resolved to resist the claim; and in this manner, while protecting himself as yet from direct conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities, he assumed the front, as it were, in a great national movement against the pretensions of the Papacy. Occupying such a position, it may be imagined that his interests were not likely to thrive in Rome; and in 1370, accordingly, decision was pronounced against him in reference to the wardenship of Canterbury Hall.

This result did not seriously affect his position at Oxford. He was appointed Doctor and Professor of Divinity; and from this time we may date the growing enlightenment of his mind as to the whole subject of the Papacy, the unscriptural character of its doctrines, at well as the unnational and degrading effects of its worldly pretensions. For some time still, however, we merely see him in the capacity of a practical reformer, leading on a general national movement supported by the King and the Parliament. Great dissatisfaction had long prevailed at the papal interference with the royal patronage in the appointment to livings, and especially at the number of rich benefices bestowed upon foreign prelates, and the constant drain of the national resources in consequence toward the papal court. The grievance was of old standing; and, in order to avert it, the first statute of Provisors had been passed in the reign of Edward I. The abuse, however, had continued, to the indignation of the Parliament as well as the King. The most determined resolutions were formed to withstand all further encroachments of the papal see. The Pope, on his part, complained that his apostolic briefs were not allowed to be published in England, and that his nuncios were ignominiously prevented from entering the country. A commission was appointed to confer with the papal legate at Bruges on the disputed point, and Wicliffe was nominated as second in the commission. The result of the negotiation was a compromise between the contending parties, which removed special difficulties that had occurred in the course of the dispute, but which did not attempt to deal with the general question, and settle the rights on either side.

On his return Wicliffe was promoted to a prebend, and received the Rectory of Lutterworth, so associated with his last years. He may be said to have now stood at the height of his fame—a name of power in the country, allied with that of his great friend and protector the Duke of Gaunt, the King’s brother—a terror to the monks—an apprehension to the hierarchy. His brief residence at Bruges, and what he learned there in intercourse with the papal legates, had deepened his dislike to the system, and at length he hesitated not to attack it openly. The Pope had become to him Antichrist,—“the proud worldly priest of Rome—the most cursed of clippers and purse-kervers!” The extortionate spirit which the Papacy everywhere manifested kindled his keenest indignation. “Though our realm had a huge hill of gold,” he said, “and never another man took therefrom but only this proud worldly priest-collector, in process of time the hill would be spent; for he is ever taking money out of our land, and rendering nothing back but God’s curse for his simony, and some accursed clerk of Antichrist to rob the land more for wrongful privilege, or else leave to do God’s will, which men should do without his leave.” Looking to the frightful evils which had sprung out of the worldly grasping of the clergy, with the Court of Rome at their head, Wicliffe was led to adopt views fundamentally at variance with all right of Church property and the endowment of the Church. The Roman bishop who accepted the endowed protection of Constantine, he considered to have introduced ecclesiastical corruption, and he boldly and passionately called upon the King and Parliament to withdraw the temporal property of the Church, and restore it to its primitive condition of evangelical purity and usefulness; for, “by reducing the clergy to meekness and useful piety, and ghostly travail, as lived Christ and His apostles, sin should be destroyed, and holiness of life brought in, and secular law strengthened, and the poor communion aided, and good government, both spiritual and temporal, come again; and, what is best of all, as Christ’s Word would run to and fro freely everywhere, many men would wing their way to heaven.”