per modum suffragii was also offered, and for such an indulgence nothing was required except, as Tetzel said, 'the rattling of the penny in the box'. He simply put into crude German what the Popes had written in scholastic Latin. He did it with the zeal of a revivalist and the acuteness of an auctioneer, and in due time he was rewarded with the degree of Doctor of Divinity.

Luther was resolved to test the real doctrine of Rome on the subject, and for this purpose he nailed up on the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, the University church where notices were usually posted, ninety-five short theses concerning Penance and Indulgences.1

The theology of the theses into which Luther flung his indignation, and the history of the subsequent controversies, I cannot explain at length. But there are two facts which must be borne in mind if we are to understand the religious significance of his action. They are quite apart from the scandal that a money payment had been taken for the release of souls already in purgatory. The first is that throughout his early protest against indulgences Luther held that a Christian who has truly repented and has been truly absolved is by grace in union with Christ and shares in the benefits of the merits of Christ and of His whole mystical body, the Church-and that therefore the Pope can give him no further indulgence except a remission of ecclesiastical penalty: an argument which appears to be unanswerable unless it be openly stated by papal authority that any indulgence beyond a remission of ecclesiastical penalty is not a pardon, but a prayer for more abundant grace. The second fact is that it is proved by his conference with Cardinal Cajetan that Luther had to defend himself

1 These theses and all the important documents of the Indulgence controversy are printed in B. J. Kidd, Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation (Oxford, 1911).

against the charge of having maintained that it is necessary for a person who approaches the sacrament of penance to believe that he is obtaining grace. It is possible that in this connexion a heterodox meaning might be put upon his words sola fides verbi Christi iustificat. But his statement as a whole is an attempt, not to disparage sacramental confession to a priest, but to make it more serious and less perfunctory, to treat it as a real means of grace in which the penitent takes Christ at His word.

It is one of the greatest tragedies in history that a man with such an overwhelming force of character, a born leader of men, did as a result of the unmeasured violence of his language and the one-sided nature of his doctrine bring no moral deliverance to his people. Luther's more patient friend Melanchthon tells us how at Ratisbon in 1541 he and the other Protestant representatives came to an agreement with the Roman theologians on the central doctrine of justification by faith. And in the joy which he felt at that agreement our Cardinal Pole wrote, 'I give thanks to God through Christ'. But Luther was implacable. His own doctrine of justification by faith was an eager and passionate attempt to revive the doctrine of St. Paul. But his doctrine is by no means purely Pauline. He was familiar with the scholastic distinction between fides informis and fides formata cum charitate. But while the schoolmen said that only a faith formed with love rendered a man acceptable to God, Luther said that this love was not necessary for justification, and that it would introduce the idea of winning acceptance by good works. This inadequate and unscriptural view of faith, a view which finds expression in his contemptuous reference to the Epistle of St. James, was attended by other no less serious mistakes. From his experience of the power of sin and of the miserable weakness of the human will, and his deep sense of the need of a Saviour, Luther concluded, like the later Calvinists, that human nature has been

totally corrupted by Adam's fall, a theory which in time prompted men to deny that there is any inherited defect in the nature that is ours by physical descent. Next he denied the freedom of the human will, and thereby lessened man's sense of responsibility. Thirdly, he took a most pessimistic view of the character, or rather the nature, of even the converted Christian. He held, and the Calvinists did the same, that the tendency to wrong desires within us, the concupiscentia from which no Christian is wholly free, is in itself sin. The infirmities which cannot be avoided are confused with the sin which can be avoided, and the fundamental distinction between the mere feeling of an incitement to sin, and a deliberate consent of the will to that feeling, is destroyed. And the sinner is then consoled by the doctrine that when he believes, and so long as he believes, all his sins are as venial sins. It was therefore, though rhetoric, not mere rhetoric, when Luther wrote, 'Be a sinner, and sin lustily, but be more lusty in faith and rejoice in Christ.

Sin will not pluck us away from Him, even though a thousand times, a thousand times a day, we commit fornication or murder.'1

What is that but an indulgence—an indulgence no longer purchased by money but by an emotion? And what was the effect of this teaching? It is needless to quote his enemies. It is enough to read his own words, and the evidence is thus summed up by an admirer: 'In passage after passage Luther declares that the last state of things was worse than the first; that vice of every kind had increased since the Reformation; that the nobles were greedy, the peasants brutal; that the corruption of morals in Wittenberg itself was so great that he contemplated shaking off the dust of his feet against it; that Christian

1 Epistolarum D. M. Lutheri, tom. i, a Jo. Aurifabro collectus, p. 345 b. Jhenae, 1556, Bodl. Tratt. Luth. 370; and Enders, Dr. M. Luthers Briefwechsel, iii. 208 (Kalw u. Stuttgart, 1884).

liberality had altogether ceased to flow; and that the preachers were neither held in respect nor supported by the people.' 1

For the whole study of Continental Protestantism it is of the first importance to remember that by minimizing human freedom, and by teaching that there is only one effective Will in the universe, Luther prepared for Pantheism as well as for Antinomianism, and the Pantheism of the classical German writers has been one of the greatest barriers in the way of any revival of Christianity in modern Germany.

The beginning of Church reform in Italy shows a consciousness of the antagonism which existed between the Italian Renaissance and the Gospel. This antagonism some of the Popes had tried to disguise by uniting paganism and Christianity in their own persons. Other men saw more deeply and understood what an abyss had separated life and faith. And before we consider the important part which was taken by Spain in promoting the Counter-Reformation, we must recall what Italian brains were able to accomplish. Italy was not only the cradle of the Renaissance which became the torchbearer of the Reformation. It was also the home of a reformed Papacy which was able to arrest the progress of the Reformation. Italians were able to set in motion the gigantic machinery which at the end of the sixteenth century affected the whole world then known to civilized mankind. A religious reaction had begun in Italy several years before the Papacy had thoroughly roused itself to reform. Almost immediately after Luther's excommunication we find in Italy itself a growth of new religious orders, some of which were concerned directly with the education and improvement of the clergy. Such were the

1 Charles Beard, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 145 (Williams & Norgate, London, 1883). See too J. Chevalier, Revue Catholique des Églises, Mai 1908, p. 287 (Paris, 83 Rue des Saints-Pères).

Theatines and the Barnabites, with whom may be mentioned the Capuchins, who endeavoured to bring back the Franciscans to their primitive severity of life. Other orders were devoted to the instruction of the young. To these belong the Somaschans, founded for the care of orphans, and the Ursulines, a sisterhood founded for the education of girls, famous at a later time for their work in Quebec and New Orleans.

We find also in Rome, in Venice, in Padua, and especially in Naples, little groups, little societies of well-educated ecclesiastics, literary men and noble ladies, animated by a really religious spirit, disturbed by the thought of the moral disorder and theological degeneracy which weakened Christianity. They were deeply interested in the nature of faith and justification through the redemption won by Christ. Interest in these questions gradually developed three distinct tendencies. The first tendency was that of the men who went not only as far as Luther but far beyond him in their negation of traditional Christianity, a tendency represented by Peter Martyr, Bernardino Ochino, and afterwards by the Sozzini whose teaching was merely on the frontier of Christianity. The second tendency appears in John Valdes, a Spaniard who lived at Naples and was the author of several original mystical writings;1 and we find in sympathy with the same central tendency Morone, Bishop of Modena, Cardinals Pole and Sadoleto, and Gaspar Contarini, the leader of the party. They represented the highest and the most uncorrupt Catholicism of Italy, and for a time their fervour seemed likely to become a fashion. But the programme of Contarini was abandoned amid the tangle of political events and the tightening grip of Spain upon a distracted Italy. The movement for a reformation

1 Among them the Hundred and Ten Considerations. All copies of the original edition were suppressed by the Spanish Inquisition. It is of special interest to English Churchmen as it was translated from Italian into English by Nicholas Ferrar at the instigation of George Herbert and published at Oxford in 1638.