The History of Education Part 29

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS WARFARE. Of course the revolt against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be extended to others. This the Protestants were not much more willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious toleration, [16] though established in principle by the revolt, was an idea to which the world has required a long time to become accustomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, during which Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western Europe were willing to stop fighting and begin to recognize for others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When religious tolerance finally became established by law, civilization had made a tremendous advance.

The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civilization of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of religious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devastation of these religious wars left neither the energy for nor the interest in educational or political progress.

The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was postponed for twenty- five years--due to outside pressure, chiefly that of the Turks in southeastern Europe--from the time that the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (1521). Finally, in 1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty years, when religious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the period known as the _Thirty Years' War_ (1618-48). Though fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so reduced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth century that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. More than half the population and two thirds of the movable property were swept away. The people were so reduced by starvation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of the inhabitants of the Duchy of Wurtemberg were left alive. Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the generation which survived the war came to manhood without knowing education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able to make any significant contribution to education or civilization, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did parts of Germany come to have as many people or cattle as before this devastating religious war broke out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 91. A FRENCH PROTESTANT (c. 1600) A restoration, Musee d'Artillerie, Paris]

From 1560 to 1629 in France, also, a period of carnage and devastation prevailed, due to an attempt to exterminate the Calvinistic Huguenots. In the ma.s.sacre of Saint Bartholomew's eve, in 1572, ten thousand Protestants are said to have perished in Paris alone, and forty-five thousand additional outside the city. Though the Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted religious toleration, this never was fully accomplished, and in 1685 the Edict was revoked. The Huguenots were now given fifteen days to become Catholics or leave France. The demands were enforced with great severity, and the sect, which embraced one tenth of the population of France, was stamped out and France became once more a Catholic country. In a short time four hundred thousand thrifty and highly intelligent Huguenots had left France for other lands. In Southern German lands, Holland, England, and America many found a new home.

CHANGED ATt.i.tUDE TOWARD THE OLD PROBLEMS. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the b.l.o.o.d.y Thirty Years' War, itself the culmination of a century of bitter and vindictive religious strife, has often been regarded as both an end and a beginning. Though the persecution of minorities for a time continued, especially in France, this treaty marked the end of the attempt of the Church and the Catholic States to stamp out Protestantism on the continent of Europe. The religious independence of the Protestant States was now acknowledged, and the beginnings of religious freedom were established by treaty. This new freedom of conscience, once definitely begun for the ruling princes, was certain in time to be extended further.

Ultimately the day must come, though it might be centuries away, when individual as well as national freedom in religious matters must be granted as a right, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind finally be firmly established by law. [17]

The end of the period of bitter religious warfare, too, was followed by a reaction against religious intolerance which contained within itself the germs of much future liberty and human progress. Paulsen has well expressed the change, in the following words: [18]

The long and terrible wars to which the ecclesiastical schism had everywhere given rise--the wars of the Huguenots in France, the Thirty Years War, and the Civil War in England--had, in the end, created a feeling of indifference toward religious and theological problems. Did it really pay, people asked themselves, to kill each other and devastate each other's countries for the sake of such questions? Could these problems ever be decided at all? If not, was it not much more reasonable to let everyone believe what he could, and, instead of wasting breath and arguments, convincing to n.o.body, on transubstantiation, predestination, and real presence, to cultivate sciences which really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all.... Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the changing intellectual att.i.tude of the times. [19]

Physically exhausted, and recognizing at last the futility of fire and sword as means for stamping out opposing religious convictions, but still thoroughly convinced as to the correctness of their respective points of view, both sides now settled down to another century and more of religious hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, and to a close supervision of both preaching and teaching as safeguards to orthodoxy. During the century following the Peace of Westphalia greater reliance than ever before was placed on the school as a means for protecting the faith, and the pulpit and the school now took the place of the sword and the torch as converting and holding agents.

RELIGIOUS REFORM. The effect of the Protestant Revolts on the Church was good. For the first time in history Catholic churchmen learned that they could not rely on the general acceptance of any teachings they promulgated, or any practices they saw fit to approve. The spirit of inquiry which had been aroused by the methods of the humanists would in the future force them to explain and to defend. If they were to make headway against this great rebellion they must reform abuses, purify church practices, and see that monks and clergy led upright Christian lives. Unless the ma.s.s of the people could be made loyal to the Church by reverence for it, further revolts and the ultimate break-up of the inst.i.tution were in prospect. The Council of Trent (1545-63) at last undertook the reform which should have come at least a century before.

Better men were selected for the church offices, and bishops and clergy were ordered to reside in their proper places and to preach regularly. New religious orders arose, whose purpose was to prepare priests better for the service of the Church and for ministry to the needs of the people.

Irritating practices were abandoned. The laws and doctrines of the Church were restated, in new and better form. Moral reforms were inst.i.tuted. In most particulars the reforms forced by the work of Luther were thorough and complete, and since the middle of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church, in morals and government, has been a reformed Church. Above all, attention was turned to education rather than force as a means of winning and holding territory. A rigid quarantine was, however, established in Catholic lands against the further spread of heretical text books and literature. Especially was the reading of the Bible, which had been the cause of all the trouble, for a time rigidly prohibited. [20]

Such, in brief, are the historical facts connected with the various revolts against authority which split the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. These have been stated, as briefly and as impartially as possible, because so much of future educational history arose out of the conditions resulting from these revolts. The early educational history of America is hardly understandable without some knowledge of the religious forces awakened by the work of the Protestants. To the educational significance and consequences of these revolts we next turn.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. How do you explain the difference in the effect, on the scholars of the time, of the Revival of Learning in Italy and in northern lands?

2. How do you explain the serious church opposition to the different attempts of northern scholars to try to turn the Church back to the simpler religious ideals and practices of early Christianity?

3. Explain how opposition to the practices of the Church could be organized into a political force.

4. Explain the a.n.a.logy of a heretic in the fifteenth century and an anarchist of to-day.

5. a.s.suming that the Church had encouraged progressive evolution as a policy, and thus warded off revolution and disruption, in what ways might history have been different?

6. How can the bitter opposition to the reading and study of the Bible be explained?

7. Show the a.n.a.logy between the freedom of thinking demanded by Luther, and that obtained three centuries earlier by the scholars in the rising universities. Why were the universities not opposed?

8. Enumerate the changes which had taken place in western Europe between the days of Wycliffe and Huss and the time of Luther, which enabled him to succeed where they had failed.

9. Explain in what ways the Protestant Revolt was essentially a revolution in thinking, and that, once started, certain other consequences must inevitably follow in time.

10. Was it perfectly natural that the reformers should refuse to their followers the same right to revolt, and separate off into smaller and still different sects, which they had contended for for themselves? Why?

11. On what basis could Catholic and Protestant wage war on one another to try to enforce their own particular belief?

12. Compare the individualism of the Greek Sophists with that of the Protestant reformers. Did Greece attempt to deal with them in the same way?

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections are reproduced:

147. Wycliffe: On the Enemies of Christ.

148. Wycliffites: Attack the Pope and the Practice of Indulgences.

149. Council of Constance: List of Church Abuses demanding Reform.

150. Geiler: A German Priest's View as to Coming Reform.

151. Luther: Ill.u.s.trations from his Ninety-Five Theses.

152. Saint Thomas Aquinas: On the Treatment of Heresy.

153. Henry VIII: The English Act of Supremacy.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Was Wycliffe's attack (147) as direct and fierce as Luther's (151)?

2. Explain the difference in the results attained by the two attacks?

3. Was the challenge of Wycliffe's followers on indulgences (148) any less direct than that of Luther (151)?

4. Does the list of items drawn up by the Church Council of Constance (149) indicate a general recognition of the need for extensive Church reform?

5. Try to state the possible change in the progress of human history and civilization, had the demands of the Council of Constance (149) been carried out in good faith.

6. Considering the nature of heresy at the time, does the extract from Thomas Aquinas (152) indicate a narrow or a liberal att.i.tude?

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

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

Beard, Charles. _Martin Luther and the Reformation_.

Beard, Charles. _The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge_. (Hibbert Lectures, 1883.) Fisher, George P. _History of the Reformation_.

Gasquet, F. A. _Eve of the Reformation_.

Johnson, A. H. _Europe in the Sixteenth Century_.

Perry, George G. _History of the Reformation in England_.

CHAPTER XIII

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS

I. AMONG LUTHERANS AND ANGLICANS