The History of Education Part 28

8. Characterize Colet's Introduction to Lily's Grammar (140).

9. What was the educational significance of such a bequest as that of William Sevenoaks (141)?

10. What did the founding of a chantry grammar school (142), instead of a song school, indicate as to the progress of education?

11. Would the action taken by the authorities of the City of Sandwich (143) indicate that the humanistic grammar school had taken a deep hold on English thought, or not? The same with reference to the course given in a small English country grammar school, as described by Martindale (145)?

12. Just what does the instruction described as given by Campion (146) indicate?

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

* Adams, G. B. _Civilization during the Middle Ages_.

Jebb, R. C. _Humanism in Education_.

Laurie, S. S. _Development of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance_.

Laurie, S. S. "The Renaissance and the School, 1440-1580"; in _School Review_, vol. 4, pp. 140-48, 202-14.

* Lupton, J. H. _A Life of John Colet_.

Palgrave, F. T. "The Oxford Movement in the Fifteenth Century"; in _Nineteenth Century_, vol. 28, pp. 812-30. (Nov. 1890.) Seebohm, F. _The Oxford Reformers of 1498; Colet, Erasmus, More_.

* Stowe, A. M. _English Grammar Schools in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth_.

* Thurber, C. H. "Vittorino da Feltre"; in School _Review_, vol. 7, pp. 295-300.

Watson, Foster. _English Grammar Schools to 1660_.

* Woodward, W. H. _Vittorino da Feltre, and other Humanistic Educators_.

* Woodward, W. H. _Education during the Renaissance_.

Woodward, W. H. _Desiderius Erasmus, Concerning the Method and Aim of Education_.

CHAPTER XII

THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY

THE NEW QUESTIONING ATt.i.tUDE. The student can hardly have followed the history of educational development thus far without realizing that a serious questioning of the practices and of the dogmatic and repressive att.i.tude of the omnipresent mediaeval Church was certain to come, sooner or later, unless the Church itself realized that the mediaeval conditions which once demanded such an att.i.tude were rapidly pa.s.sing away, and that the new life in Christendom now called for a progressive stand in religious matters as in other affairs. The new life resulting from the Crusades, the rise of commerce and industry, the organization of city governments, the rise of lawyer and merchant cla.s.ses, the formation of new national States, the rise of a new "Estate" of tradesmen and workers, the new knowledge, the evolution of the university organizations, and the discovery of the art of printing--all these forces had united to develop a new att.i.tude toward the old problems and to prepare western Europe for a rapid evolution out of the mediaeval conditions which had for so long dominated all action and thinking. This the Church should have realized, and it should have a.s.sumed toward the progressive tendencies of the time the same intelligent att.i.tude a.s.sumed earlier toward the rise of scholastic inquiry. But it did not, and by the fifteenth century the situation had been further aggravated by a marked decline in morality on the part of both monks and clergy, which awakened deep and general criticism in all lands, but particularly among the northern peoples.

The Revival of Learning was the first clear break with mediaevalism. In the critical and constructive att.i.tude developed by the scholars of the movement, their renunciation of the old forms of thinking, the new craving for truth for its own sake which they everywhere awakened, and their continual appeal to the original sources of knowledge for guidance, we have the definite beginnings of a modern scientific spirit which was destined ultimately to question all things, and in time to usher in modern conceptions and modern ways of thinking. The authority of the mediaeval Church would be questioned, and out of this questioning would come in time a religious freedom and a religious tolerance unknown in the mediaeval world. The great world of scientific truth would be inquired into and the facts of modern science established, regardless of what preconceived ideas, popular or religious, might be upset thereby. The divine right of kings to rule, and to dispose of the fortunes and happiness of their peoples as they saw fit, was also destined to be questioned, and another new "Estate" would in time arise and subst.i.tute, instead, in all progressive lands, the divine right of the common people. Religious freedom and toleration, scientific inquiry and scholarship, and the ultimate rise of democracy were all involved in the critical, questioning, and constructive att.i.tude of the humanistic scholars of the Renaissance.

These came historically in the order just stated, and in this order we shall consider them.

HUMANISM BECAME A RELIGIOUS REFORM MOVEMENT IN THE NORTH. In Italy the Revival of Learning was cla.s.sical and scientific in its methods and results, and awakened little or no tendency toward religious and moral reform. Instead it resulted in something of a paganization of religion, with the result that the Papacy and the Italian Church probably reached their lowest religious levels at about the time the great religious agitation took place in northern lands. In the latter, on the contrary, the introduction of humanism awakened a new religious zeal, and religious reform and cla.s.sical learning there came to be a.s.sociated almost as one movement. In England, Germany, the Low Countries, and in large parts of northern France, the new learning was at once directed to religious and moral ends. The patriotic emotions roused in the Italians by the humanistic movement were in the northern countries superseded by religious and moral emotions, and the constant appeal to sources turned the northern leaders almost at once back to the Church Fathers and the original Greek and Hebrew Testaments for authority in religious matters.

Colet, from England, who had spent the years 1493-96 in Florence (p. 254), during the period when Savonarola (1452-98) was preaching moral reform there, returned home, not only a humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of _Utopia_), among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom were also deeply interested in a reform of the practices of the Church.

Erasmus, in particular, labored hard by his writings to remove religious abuses. His _Colloquies_ (1519), a widely used Latin reading book, was banned from the cla.s.srooms of the University of Paris (1528), and forbidden to be used in Catholic lands by the Church Council of Trent (1564), because of the way in which it held up to ridicule the abuses in the Church, the superst.i.tions of the age, and the immoralities in the lives of the monks and clergy. His work as Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, his numerous editions of the writings of the Church Fathers, and his Latin-Greek edition (1516), of the New Testament [1] all alike tended to turn theological scholars back to the original sources instead of to the scholastics for the foundations of their religious faith. In Germany such men as Hegius (p, 271), Reuchlin (p. 254), and Melanchthon (p. 270) began, by similar methods, to go back to Greek and Hebrew sources and to the Church Fathers for new interpretations as to religious doctrines. In so doing they discovered that many practices and demands of the Church, all of which had grown up during the long mediaeval period, were not in harmony with the earlier teachings of Christ, the Apostles, or the early Fathers. In France, Jacques Lefevre (c. 1455-1536), a humanist and a pioneer Protestant, contended for the rule of the Scriptures and for justification by faith, and translated the Bible into the French (New Testament, 1523; complete, 1530) that the people might read it.

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION. The reaction against the mediaeval dogmas of the Church and the demand by the humanists of the North for a return to the simpler religion of Christ gradually grew, and in time became more and more insistent. This demand was not something which broke out all at once and with Luther, as many seem to think. Had this been so he would soon have been suppressed, and little more would have been heard of him.

Instead, the literature of the time clearly reveals that there had been, for two centuries, an increasing criticism of the Church, and a number of local and unsuccessful efforts at reform had been attempted. The demand for reform was general, and of long standing, outside of Italy and southern France. Had it been heeded probably much subsequent history might have been different. A few of the more important attempts at reform may be mentioned here, as a background for our study.

The first organized revolt against the Church occurred in southern France, in the early thirteenth century, and the revolters (_Albigenses_) were so fearfully punished by fire and sword that it was not attempted there again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 86. JOHN WYCLIFFE (1320?-84) A popular English preacher (Drawn from an old print)]

In 1378 there was a disputed papal election, and for nearly forty years there were two Popes, one at Rome, and one at Avignon in southern France, each attempting to control the Church and each denouncing the other as Antichrist. The discussions which accompanied this "Great Schism" did much to weaken the authority of the Church in all Christian lands. In England a popular preacher and Oxford divinity graduate by the name of John Wycliffe was led, by the sad condition of the Church there, to a careful study of the Bible. He came to the conclusion that many of the claims of the Popes and many practices of the Church were wrong (R. 147) and he refused to accept teachings of the Church for which he could not find sanction in the Bible. His revolt was as direct and vigorous as that of Luther, in German lands, a century and a half later (R. 148). So great was his zeal for reform that he and his scholars attempted a translation of the Bible [2]

into English (see Figure 93), that the people might read it, and he and his followers (called _Lollards_) went about the country teaching what they believed to be the true Christianity. What had before in England been a widespread but undefined feeling of disaffection for the rich and careless clergy and monks, the work of Wycliffe organized into a political and social force.

Due to the then close connection of the English and Bohemian courts, through royal marriages, Wycliffe's teachings were carried to Bohemia, where a popular preacher and university theologian by the name of John Huss (1373-1415) expounded them. He denounced the evil conduct of the clergy, and he and his followers tried to introduce several new customs into the Church. For this Huss was first excommunicated, and then burned at the stake as a dangerous heretic. [3] After a series of terrible ma.s.sacres his followers were forced, in large part, to accept once more the old system.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 87. RELIGIOUS WARFARE IN BOHEMIA Sacking a village in true German style (From a picture in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg)]

In 1414 a Council of the Church was called at Constance, in Switzerland, to heal the papal schism, and this Council made a serious attempt at church reform. After reuniting the Church under one Pope, it drew up a list of abuses which it ordered remedied (R. 149). It also attempted to establish a democratic form of organization for the government of the Church, with Church Councils meeting from time to time to advise with the Pope and formulate church policy, much like the government of a modern parliament and king. Had this succeeded, much future history might have been different [4] and the civilization of the world to-day much advanced.

But the attempt failed, and the absolutism of the reunited Papacy became stronger than ever before. Protests of princes, actions of legislative a.s.semblies, [5] protests sometimes of bishops, [6] the failing allegiance of men of affairs, the increasing condemnation and ridicule from laymen and scholars--all signs of a strong undercurrent of public opinion--seemed to have no effect on those responsible for the policy of the Church.

That the different rebellions and refusals of reform helped directly to the ultimate break of Luther is not probable, as Luther seems to have worked out his position by himself. Each of these earlier defiances of authority and the later defiance of Luther were alike, though, in two respects. Each demanded a return to the usages and beliefs and practices of the earlier Christian Church, as derived from a study of the Bible and of the writings of the early Christian Fathers; and each insisted that Christians should be permitted to study the Bible for themselves, and reach their own conclusions as to Christian duty. In this demand to be allowed to go back to the original sources for authority, and the a.s.sertion of the right to personal investigation and conclusions, we see the new intellectual standards established by the Revival of Learning in full force. After 1500 the rising demands for moral reform and the recognition of individual judgment could not be put aside much longer.

Unless there could be evolution there would be revolution. Evolution was refused, [7] and revolution was the result.

DISCONTENT IN GERMAN LANDS. It happened that the first revolt to be successful in a large way broke out in Germany, and about the person of an Augustinian monk and Professor of Theology in the University of Wittenberg by the name of Martin Luther (1483-1546). Had it not centered about Luther the revolt would have come about some one else; had it not come in Germany it would have come in some other land. It was the modern scientific spirit of inquiry and reason in conflict with the mediaeval spirit of dogmatic authority, and two such forces are sooner or later destined to clash.

Whether we be Catholic or Protestant, and whether we approve or disapprove of what Luther did or of his methods, makes little difference in this study. Over a question involving so much religious partisanship we do not need to take sides. All that we need concern ourselves with is that a certain Martin Luther lived, did certain things, made certain stands for what he believed to be right, and what he did, whether right or wrong, whether beneficial to progress and civilization or not, stands as a great historical fact with which the student of the history of education must take account. That the same or even better results might have been arrived at in time by other methods may be true, but what we are concerned with is the course which history actually took. [8]

There were special reasons why the trouble, when once it broke, made such rapid entry in German lands. The Germans had a long-standing grudge against the Italian papal court, chiefly because it had for long been draining Germany of money to support the Italian Church. Germany's greatest minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1228), three centuries before Luther had sung to the German people how the Pope made merry over the stupid Germans.

"All their goods will be mine, Their silver is flowing into my far-away chest; Their priests are living on poultry and wine, And leaving the silly layman to fast."

Many positions in the German Church had been filled by the Pope with Italians, who not infrequently drew the perquisites, but did not reside in Germany. The princely and feudal Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, Cologne, and Salzburg, with their fortified castles and lands and troops and large governmental powers, frequently proved to be serious sources of irritation. The most widespread discontent, though, arose over the heavy church taxation, which drained the money of the people to Italy. The whole German people, from the princes down to the peasants, felt themselves unjustly treated, that the German money which flowed to Rome should be kept at home, and that the immoral and inefficient clergy should be replaced by upright, earnest men who would attend better to their religious duties (R. 150). It was these conditions which prepared the Germans for revolt, and enabled Luther to rally so many of the princes and people to his side when once he had defied authority.

THE GERMAN REVOLT. The crisis came over the sale of indulgences for sins by the papal agent, Tetzel, who began the practice in the neighborhood of Wittenberg, where Luther was a Professor of Theology, in 1516. There is little doubt but that Tetzel, in his zeal to raise money for the rebuilding of the church of Saint Peter's at Rome, a great undertaking then under way, exceeded his instructions and made claims as to the nature and efficacy of indulgences which were not warranted by church doctrines.

Such would be only human. The sale, however, irritated Luther, and he appealed to the Archbishop of Magdeburg to prohibit it. Failing to obtain any satisfaction, he followed the old university custom, made out ninety- five theses, or reasons, why he did not believe the practice justifiable, detailed the abuses, set forth what he conceived to be the true Christian doctrine in the matter, and challenged all comers to a debate on the theses (R. 151). Following true university custom, also, these theses were made out in Latin, and in October, 1517, Luther followed still another university custom and nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg. Luther was probably as much surprised as any one to find that these were at once translated into German, printed, and in two weeks had been scattered all over Germany. Within a month they were known in all the important centers of the Western Christian world. They had been carried everywhere on the currents of discontent. Luther at first intended no revolt from the Church, but only a protest against its practices. From one step to another, though, he was gradually led into open rebellion, and finally, in 1520, was excommunicated from the Church. He then expressed his defiance by publicly burning the bull of excommunication, together with a volume of the canon law. This was open rebellion, and such heresy (R. 152) must needs be stamped out. Luther took his stand on the authority of the Scriptures, and the battle was now joined between the forces representing the authority of the Church _versus_ the authority of the Bible, and salvation through the Church _versus_ salvation through personal faith and works. [9] Luther also forced the issue for freedom of thought in religious matters. It was, to be sure, some three centuries before freedom in religious thinking and worship became clearly recognized, but what the early university masters and scholars had stood for in intellectual matters, Luther now a.s.serted in religious affairs as well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 88. SHOWING THE RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS]

We do not need to follow the details of the conflict. Suffice it to know that great portions of northern and western Germany followed Luther, as is shown in Figure 88, and that the Western Church, which had remained one for so many centuries and been the one great unifying force in western Europe, was permanently split by the Protestant Revolt. The large success of Luther is easily explained by the new life which now permeated western Europe. The world was rapidly becoming modern, while the Church, with a perversity almost unexplainable, insisted upon remaining mediaeval and tried to force others to remain mediaeval with it. Adams expresses the situation well when he says: [10]

A revolution had been wrought in the intellectual world in the century between Huss and Luther. At the death of Huss the world had only just begun the study of Greek. Since that date, the great body of cla.s.sical literature had been recovered, and the sciences of philology and historical criticism thoroughly established. As a result Luther had at his command a well-developed method ... impossible to any earlier reformer.... The world also had become familiar with independent investigation, and with the proclamation of new views and the upsetting of old ones. By no means the least of the great services of Erasmus to civilization had been to hold up before all the world so conspicuous an example of the scholar following, as his inalienable right, the truth as he found it and wherever it appeared to lead him, and honest in his public utterances as to the results of his studies.... His was the crowning work of a century which had produced in the general public a greatly changed att.i.tude of mind toward intellectual independence since the days of Huss. The printing press was of itself almost enough to account for Luther's success as compared with his predecessors. Wycliffe made almost as direct and vigorous an appeal to the public at large, and with "an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people," but Luther had the advantage in the rapid multiplication of copies and in their cheapness, and he covered Europe with the issues of his press.... Luther spoke to a very different public from that which Wycliffe or Huss had addressed,--a public European in extent, and one not merely familiar with the a.s.sertion of new ideas, but tolerant, in a certain way, of the innovator, and expectant of great things in the future.

A revolution it undoubtedly was, but a revolution in thinking much more than a political revolution. It was but a further manifestation of the inquiring and questioning tendency awakened by the Revival of Learning. It might in a sense be dated from Wycliffe and Huss, as well as from Erasmus and Luther. Luther did not create the Reformation. He rather popularized the work of preceding protesters, giving the impress of his powerful personality to the movement, and directing and moulding its form.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 89. HULDREICH ZWINGLI (1487-1531)]

REVOLTS IN OTHER LANDS. The outbreak in Germany soon spread to other lands. Lutheranism made rapid headway in Denmark, where the German grievances against Italian rule were equally familiar, and in 1537 the Danish Diet severed all connection with Rome and established Lutheranism as the religion of the country. Norway, being then a part of Denmark, was carried for Lutheranism also. In Sweden the Church was shorn of some of its powers and property in 1527, and in 1592 Lutheranism was definitely adopted as the religion for the nation. This included Finland, then a part of Sweden. An independent reform movement, closely akin to Lutheranism in its aims, made considerable headway in German Switzerland contemporaneously with the reform work of Luther in Germany. This was under the leadership of a popular humanist preacher in Zurich by the name of Huldreich Zwingli. In 1519 he began a series of sermons on real religion, as he had learned it from a study of the New Testament writings.

Zwingli, being supported by the people, made many changes in church practices and worship, eventually even abolishing the ma.s.s. Many other towns took up this reform movement, and civil war was the result. Zwingli was killed in battle between Swiss partisans of the old regime and reformers, in 1531, but his work though checked persisted, and German Switzerland became mixed Catholic and Protestant. [11]

In England the struggle came nominally over the divorce (1533) of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, though the independence of the English Church had been a.s.serted from time to time for two centuries, and a free National Church had for long been a growing ideal with English statesmen.

In 1534 Parliament pa.s.sed the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) which severed England from Rome. By it the King was made head of the English National Church. The change was in no sense a profound one, such as had taken place in Lutheran Germany. The priests who took the new oath of allegiance to the King instead of the Pope as the head of the Church, as most of them did, continued in the churches, the service was changed to English, some reforms were inst.i.tuted, but the people did not experience any great change in religious feeling or ideas. This new National Church became known as the English or Anglican Church.

So far as the early history of America is concerned, the most important reform movement was neither Lutheranism nor Anglicanism, but Calvinism. In 1537 John Calvin, a French Protestant who had fled to Switzerland, [12]

was invited to submit a plan for the educational and religious reorganization of the city of Geneva, and in 1541 he was entrusted with the task of organizing there a little religious City-Republic. For this he established a combined church and city government, in which religious affairs and the civil government were as closely connected as they had ever been in any Catholic country. During the twenty-three years that Calvin dominated Geneva it became the Rome of Protestantism. Calvin's _The Inst.i.tutes of Christianity_, published in Latin in 1536, and in French in 1541, was the first orderly presentation of the principles of Christian faith from the Protestant standpoint, [13] while his French _Catechism_ (1537) was extensively used [14] in Calvinistic lands as a basis for elementary religious instruction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 90. JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564) (Drawn from a contemporary painting)]

From Geneva a reformed Calvinistic religion spread over northern France, [15] where its followers became known as _Huguenots_; to Scotland (1560), where they were known as _Scotch Presbyterians_; to the Netherlands (1572), where originated the Dutch Reformed Church; and to portions of central England, where those who embraced it became known as _Puritans_.

Through the Puritans who settled New England, and later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presbyterians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American education. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anglican Church, known in America as the _Episcopalian_, came in through the landed aristocracy in Virginia and the later settlers in New York. The early settlement of America was thus a Protestant settlement, while the migration to America of large numbers of peoples from Catholic lands is a relatively recent movement.