Church; she had always accepted it, and consecrated it by using it in celebrating throughout the East her sacred Mysteries. It was the official language of the Greek Church before the Greek schism, and is used now in celebrating mass by the United or Catholic Greeks, as well as by the schismatic. Latin is not, and never was, the only official language of the Church. How then could Reuchlin, by insisting on its study, favor the Protestant movement? What was it that pointed the wit of Erasmus, that Voltaire of the sixteenth century, and enabled him to cover the monks with ridicule, and to destroy their character in the public estimation? What was it that rendered effective the dull, filthy, and disgusting Epistolæ Virorum Obscurorum of Ulrich von Hutten? The public must have been previously prepared for these, as well as for the Reformers themselves..

Nothing is more unphilosophical than to ascribe great events, whether good or bad, to petty causes. The effect cannot exceed the cause, any more than the stream can rise higher than the fountain. There must have been operating in the sixteenth century some cause of the Protestant Reformation adequate to its production, equal in magnitude to the effect produced. What was it? In our judgment, while the magnitude of the Reformation is not overrated, we are too apt to overrate the magnitude of the work done by the Reformers. It is a mistake to suppose that Protestantism in any of its essential features was a product of the sixteenth century. That century was by no means as Catholic in its beginning as is commonly imagined. Luther found, he did not create or introduce, his Protestantism. Protestantism, if analyzed, may be reduced to four elements; -1. The rejection of the Papacy; 2. The rejection of the Christian priesthood or sacerdotal order; 3. The denial of all dogmatic theology; and 4. The adoption of religion as a mere sentiment of the heart,

* Reuchlin also was the great patron of Hebrew. The study of Hebrew, however, meant in his mind not so much the study of the Hebrew language as intercourse with the Jews and study of the Jewish writings, which were Antichristian in their doctrine and tendencies. It is not impossible, moreover, that the Jews and the occult heretics of the time had a very good understanding with one another. Were not the viri obscuri of Ulrich von Hutten so called, to intimate to the initiated a relationship to the secret heretical organizations?

THIRD SERIES.

VOL. III. NO. I.

9

V

called by some Love, by others Faith. We do not, of course, pretend that all Protestants go the full length of . these four elements, but these four elements embrace all of Protestantism. Luther did not formally reject all dogmatic theology, but he did reject the Papacy and the Christian priesthood; for his principal spite was directed against the Pope, and he maintained, as the great body of Protestants do now, that under the New Law every believer is a priest and a king. His doctrine of justification by faith alone is the virtual rejection of dogmatic theology; for it is with him the essential element of the Gospel, and faith in his sense is simply a sentiment of the heart. Some Protestants go further, much further, in the developments of Protestantism, than Luther and his brother Reformers went, but none of them go further than the four elements we have specified, and these elements may therefore be said, though not embraced by all Protestants, to embrace all Protestantism.

Now all these elements were held in Christian Europe by vast multitudes, many of them in the external communion of the Church, passing themselves off as Catholics, though in fact occult heretics, centuries before Luther was born. At no period was Christian Europe, in point of fact, as Catholic as first appearances indicate, and at no period were all the real heretics outside of the external communion of the Church. Protestants cannot, indeed, maintain for their party or doctrines an apostolic origin, but they can trace their succession from the apostolic age. Through the Bohemian Brethren, Lollards, Beghards, Cathares, Patarins, Albigenses, Bulgarians, Paulicians, Manichæans, and Gnostics, they can ascend to the very times of the Apostles. These sects were all of the same family, and were all essentially Protestant. They were all condemned, indeed, by the Church, but by means of secret organizations and outward conformity to Catholicity they always contrived to maintain themselves to a fearful extent in her external communion. From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, Europe to the superficial observer was, save in the East, exclusively Catholic; but in point of fact she was little more Catholic than now. Catholicity was indeed the official religion, but even in the thirteenth century, regarded by a modern school as the culminating point of the Ages of Faith, virtual Protestantism was hardly less rife than in

the sixteenth, and there was, we verily believe, more real Catholicity in the seventeenth century than in either the fourteenth or the fifteenth. Whoever would explain the origin and causes of the Protestant Reformation must study profoundly the heresies, political movements, and social changes of the last three centuries of the Middle Ages. They will find its origin and causes in these heresies, and in the growth of nationalism* and royalism, or absolute monarchy, more especially in Germany, France, and England. These heresies, essentially Protestant, were then, it is true, openly professed by a smaller number than in the sixteenth century; but there is no lack of evidence that they were professed in a secret society, which spread over a large part of Europe, and to which belonged kings and emperors, princes and nobles, bishops and presbyters, courtiers and bards, lawyers and counsellors of popes and of monarchs, nominally, sometimes ostentatiously, Catholic in public, before the Church and the world, enjoying her honors, fattening on her revenues, and using their position to undermine the Papal authority, and to render Catholicity odious. So were organized, and so acted, the formidable body of heretics known in history as Patarins, Cathares, or Albigenses, now conceded to have been Manichæans, and therefore a branch of the old Gnostic family, and whose abominable doctrines and abominable practices are still far in advance of the great body of modern Protestants.

*It may be necessary to say here to those who misunderstand, and insist on misunderstanding, our remarks on Native Americanism in our Review for last July, that we mean here nothing against the preference of our own nation, and conformity to its general spirit and character, in subordination to the law of God. In our remarks on Native Americanism we merely spoke against offering a gratuitous offence to the American nationality, and attempting to subordinate it to a foreign nationality. In relation to foreign nationalities, be they what they may, we assert the right of American nationality to reign on American soil, and insist on the duty of all naturalized citizens to conform to it, and of all foreign residents to treat it with respect. But in relation to religion, to the law of God and its requirements, we know no nationality. So long as nationality confines itself to the temporal order, we respect it, and are, perhaps, as intensely national as any one; but when nationality seeks to enter into the spiritual order, and to make itself supreme in spirituals as well as in temporals, we call it nationalism, and oppose it as hostile to religion, which, if religion, is and must be Catholic, not national. By nationalism we do not understand the love and support of our own nation in preference to every other, but that a buse of the national spirit which would subject everything, religion as well as poli ics, to itself, which is simply gentilism.

We regard modern Protestantism as the lineal descendant of the Patarin or Albigensian heresy of the thirteenth century; in fact, as only a continuation, with various modifications of ancient Gnosticism, which at different epochs showed itself openly, and at others concealed itself in the bosom of the Church as an occult heresy, wearing the external garb of Catholicity, and speaking its language, though with a sense of its own, as in the Divina Commedia of Dante, the Sonnets of Petrarca, the Lays and Roundelays of the Troubadours of Provence, and the poems of the Ghibelline poets generally. It was obliged to conceal itself during the Middle Ages, because nationalism and royalism were too weak to permit them to set at defiance the public law and the Catholic organization of Europe. In the sixteenth century this ceased to be the case, and they could openly avow themselves. Through their own secret exertions, the natural course of events, the efforts of the German Emperors, and the sacrilegious attacks on the Papacy in the person of Boniface the Eighth by Philip the Fair of France, who appealed to the French nation and invoked the States General to sustain him, nationalism, that is, gentilism, was revived, and royalism, or centralized monarchy, was introduced and consolidated. Royalism. became independent, and the way was prepared for monarchy to become absolute. The Emperor and the Ghibelline princes rendered Italy a scene of anarchy and confusion, of rapine and bloodshed, and compelled the Popes to seek security by deserting Rome and taking up their residence at Avignon. This brought the Roman court under French influence, filled the Sacred College with French cardinals, and prepared the way for the great Western schism, which greatly impaired the power of the Holy See, depreciated the Papacy in the popular estimation, and gave to nationalism and royalism the predominance throughout Christendom. We see this in the Council of Constance, where princes and their ambassadors play so distinguished a part, and where in the earlier sessions the unheard of anomaly is introduced of voting by nations. The Papacy, it is true, was not without lustre under the pontificates of Martin the Fifth, Eugenius the Fourth, Nicholas the Fifth, and Calixtus the Third; but it never, till after the Reformation, if even then, recovered its former splendor, and Julius the Second is obliged to place himself as an Italian prince at

the head of his troops, to defend the patrimony of St. Peter against the professedly Catholic invaders. Nationalism was so strong and royalism so much in the ascendency in 1517, the date of Luther's thesis against Indulgences, that heretics, as to this world, had little to fear from any source except the temporal prince-in his heart anti-Papal, and supporting Catholicity, if at all, only from policy and the national sentiment, always, in so far as national in spiritual matters, anti-Catholic. They were then in most places free to throw off the mask, and to do openly what they had long been doing, not without success, in secret; and it is probable that the open position assumed by Luther really weakened their power, and served, instead of injuring, the cause of Catholicity.

The Protestant Reformation, as we regard it, was not so much a falling away from the Church of those who were really Catholics, as the coming forth from her communion of those who had previously been in it without being of it; and we must explain the rapid and almost marvellous diffusion of Protestantism as soon as publicly proclaimed, by the occult heresy, more or less developed, with which the population that voluntarily embraced it were already infected. Whether the secret organization of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries continued down to the sixteenth, we are unable to say; but that it did to some extent is probable, and hence, perhaps, the reason why the reform broke out on so many points of Europe almost simultaneously. But be this as it may, the enemies of the Church certainly had not decreased in number during the wars and revolutions of the fifteenth century, and this much must be conceded, that Luther found a large part of Europe either totally ignorant of the Catholic religion, or but feebly attached to it. The intelligent Catholic of to-day can see nothing in the doctrines or the practices of the Reformers calculated to make a favorable impression on a Catholic mind or heart, and he is unable to believe that they ever gained one real convert to the reform. Protestantism promised something to the licentious, to populations impatient of restraint, weary of fasts and vigils, of works of mortification and penance, and who wished to find an easier road to heaven than that of self-denial and the crucifixion of the flesh, or of that inward purity and sanctity, sound faith and true charity; but its doctrines, together