A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 32

The Company had another, not less important, field of work. The Peace of Augsburg had left the management of the religion of town or princ.i.p.ality in the hands of the ruling secular authority. The maxim, _Cujus regio ejus religio_, placed the religious convictions of the population of many districts at the mercy of one man. Many Romanist Princes had no wish to persecute, still less to see their princ.i.p.alities depopulated by banishment. Some of them had given guarantees for freedom of conscience and limited rights of worship to their Protestant subjects. The Jesuits set themselves to change this condition of things. They could be charming confessors and still more delightful directors for the obedient sons and daughters of the Papacy. They were invited to take charge of the souls of many of the Princes and especially of the Princesses of Germany. They set themselves to charm, to command, and, lastly, to threaten their penitents. Toleration of Protestants they represented to be the unpardonable sin. They succeeded in many cases in inducing Romanist rulers to withdraw the protection they had hitherto accorded to their Protestant subjects, who, if they stood firm in their faith, had to leave their homes and seek refuge within a Protestant district.

Thus openly and stealthily the wave of Romanist reaction rolled northwards over Germany, and district after district was won back for the Papacy. This first period of the Counter-Reformation may be said to end with the sixteenth century; the second, which included the Thirty Years' War, lies beyond our limit.

The savage struggle in France, culminating in the Ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew, did not belong to the New Roman Catholicism, and lay outside of what may be called the Counter-Reformation proper. The force of this new aggressive movement was first felt in the formation of the Holy League, which had for its object to prevent Henry of Navarre from ascending the throne of France. The League was the symbol in France of this Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits never attained a preponderating influence in that country until the days of Marie de Medici; but they were the restless and ruthless organisers of the Holy League. The Jesuit fathers, Auger, Henri Saumier, and, above all, Claude Matthieu, called the _Courrier de la Ligue_, worked energetically on its behalf. The Company issued tracts from their printing-presses a.s.serting the inalienable rights of the people to govern and therefore to choose their rulers. They taught that while G.o.d had given spiritual power into the hands of one man, the Pope, He had bestowed the secular power on the many. Kings, they a.s.serted, do not reign by any divine right of hereditary succession, but by the will of the people and of the Pope.

Hence all Romanist France was justified in setting aside the King of Navarre and putting in his place the Cardinal of Bourbon, his uncle.

The arguments they laid before the English people were based on principles altogether different, even contradictory. There they extolled hereditary and legitimate succession. Elizabeth was illegitimate, and Mary of Scotland had divine rights to the throne of England. It is needless to relate the efforts made by the leaders of the Counter-Reformation to bring England back to the Papacy--the College at Douai, the English College at Rome, both erected to train missionaries for service against the heretical Queen; the mission of the Jesuits, Parsons and Campion. The student of history can scarcely fail to note one thing,--that the sailing of the Spanish Armada marks the flood-tide of the first period of the Counter-Reformation. After the ruin of the great fleet the first wave of the reaction seems to have spent itself.

The League failed in France, and Henry IV. secured the rights of his Protestant subjects in the Edict of Nantes. The Hollanders emerged triumphant from their long war of liberation. Even in Germany the defeat of the Armada dates in a rough way the end of the impetus of the Romanist reaction. The German Protestants a.s.sumed the offensive again, and an energetic and aggressive Calvinism redeemed the halting character of the Lutheran Reformation.

Mr. Symonds, in his brilliant sketches of the forces at work to make the Romanist reaction, thinks that the part of the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation has rather been exaggerated than insufficiently recognised. "Without the ecclesiastical reform which originated in the Tridentine Council; without the gold and sword of Spain; without the stakes and prisons of the Inquisition; without the warfare against thought conducted by the Congregation of the Index,--the Jesuits alone could not have masterfully governed the Catholic revival."[729] This is perhaps true; but what would all these things have come to apart from the activity of the Company of Jesus? They were little better than the mechanism to which the enthusiasm and the indomitable work bred from enthusiasm gave the soul. Stern, relentless, savage repression can do much. It can make a desert and call it peace; but it cannot requicken with renewed life. The gentle piety of Carlo Borromeo, the sweet languishing tenderness of Francis de Sales, the revived mediaeval mysticism discernible in the Romanist reaction, had neither the religious depth nor the endurance needed for the times. Ignatius breathed the Spanish spirit, at once wildly visionary and intensely practical, into his Company, and they transfused it throughout the Church of the Counter-Reformation--the exalted devotion, the tenacity which no reverses could wear out, and the unquenchable religious hope.

They ruled it as the soul governs the body.

It was the time of Spanish domination. Spain grasped the New World and hoped to subdue the Old. Her soldiers were the best in Europe. They dreamed of nothing but conquests. The Jesuits brought the Spanish spirit into the Church. Others might scheme, and wish, and wonder. They worked.

They reaped the harvest which hard and unremitting labour gathers in every field. It was not for nothing that Adrian and other papal statesmen dubbed Luther another Mahomet; the word kindled in every Spanish breast the memory of their centuries of war with the Moslems and its victorious ending. If the gold and sword of Spain were at the service of the Counter-Reformation, it was the Spanish spirit incarnate in the Company of Jesus that made such dry bones live.

We must remember that in the first period of the Romanist reaction we have to do with the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, and must banish from our minds the history of the Order in the two centuries that follow. Its worst side had scarcely appeared. Its theory of Probabilism, by which directors were trained to transform all deadly sins, even murder, adultery, and theft, into venial offences, and casuistry became a method for the entire guidance of souls, belonged to a later period. It was not till the seventeenth century that the forgiveness of sins had been reduced by them to a highly refined art.

Their shameless neglect of religion and morality, when the political interests of the Church and of the Society seemed to require it, was also later. What the depressed Romanists of the sixteenth century saw was a body of men whom no difficulties daunted, who spent themselves in training boys and girls and in animating them with religious principles; who persuaded boys and youths to attend daily Ma.s.s, to resort to monthly confession, to study the articles of their faith; who elevated that obedience, which for generations they had been taught was due to the earthly head of the Church, into a sublime religious principle.

All this the Romanism of the Counter-Reformation owed to those three unknown men, who crept into Rome through the Porto del Popolo during Easter 1538 to beg Pope Paul III. to permit them and their companions to enroll themselves in a new Order, for the defence of the faith.

It is true that men can never get rid of their personal responsibility in spiritual things, but mult.i.tudes will always attempt to cast the burden upon others. In all such souls the spirit of the Counter-Reformation lives and moves and has its being, and they are sustained, consciously or unconsciously, by that principle of blind obedience which its preachers taught. It is enough for us to remember that no weakened sense of personal responsibility and no amount of superst.i.tious practice can utterly quench the conscience that seeks its G.o.d, or can hinder that upward glance to the Father in heaven which carries with it a living faith.

THE END.