facts, they are modified by external circumstances, by special relations corresponding to the mental and political state of society. Their availability and the ease of their extension depend upon the state of society, upon the demands, the aspirations, and the readiness to accept the new comer. For this reason ideas, longings and needs, more or less generally felt, were often suddenly seized, at the most propitious time, appropriated and embodied by a special nation rather than a race, which was in a more favorable condition for the new task or mission.

In the course of ages Romanism became all-powerful, oppressive, endangering the destinies, the mental and political progress of the European, or Christian Western world. Society in its mental life as well as in its political government and civil relations, was to be detached forcibly from the Vatican for the sake of preservation. In various ways Europe longed for emancipation, for freedom of worship or of conscience, for separation of church and state, or for giving to every church a national organization independent of Rome. Previous to the 16th century, the papal temporal power had as many friends as violent enemies in Italy. Arnold of Brescia, mentioned before, was one of the martyrs of this idea. The small Celto-Romanic tribe of the Albigenses and Waldenses never submitted to the Roman papal spiritual power, and the wholesale murders of these populations, carried out by fanaticized Franks, directed, sanctioned by popes, saints, bishops, and by all kinds and degrees of the priesthood, will for ever remain in history as the true exponents of Romanism. The Bohemians, the Moravians, all of Slavic stem, fought and suffered for the independence of teaching, and the free construction of the Gospel, as proclaimed by Huss. They extorted from the papacy and from the imperial power, which was subservient to it, the right to administer the

Lord's Supper in both kinds, before the Reformation firmly established this order of worship. Even the celebrated Thirty Years' War, which established Protestantism on fixed foundations in Germany, was started not by Germans, but by the Bohemians.

Thus in different lands and at different times, the idea of emancipation from Rome burst out and kindled into a flame. It was, however, suppressed previous to the apparition of Luther.* The time for its easier expansion approached, and the soil was moved by the previous mental as well as positive attempts. The reform of the 16th century was in all minds. Luther applied the spark to the mine. He embodied the general longings that were confusedly felt. The religious reform may justly be considered as having contained within its womb all the subsequent reforms and revolutions of Europe, as having produced or facilitated not only the religious and mental, but likewise the social and political emancipation of society. But as to Luther himself and his immediate supporters, friends and disciples, it can be said that all of them were the decided enemies of political reform; they did not wish to touch in the slightest way the social and political organism. Luther's sole idea was to put an end to the power of Rome over the dogmas, the worship, and the organization of the church; to emancipate the individual reason in affairs of conscience. Otherwise he was wholly devoted to the existing organization of society, to the power of sovereigns or princes. There was no more stanch supporter of the absolute, nay, the divine power

* About the year in which Luther was born, died in Switzerland a fugitive Dalmatic bishop, who was pitilessly persecuted by Rome, for proclaiming the necessity of the same reforms which afterwards were preached by Luther. See in Joh. v. Müller's History of Switzerland.

of the emperor than Luther, even to the extent of not opposing his authority even if he used violence against the Protestants. When Francis Lambert, a Frenchman, attempted to instil into the reformation a revolutionary and democratic spirit, Luther strenuously opposed it. The German peasantry, galled to the quick by the reckless and arbitrary oppression of the nobles, embraced in their minds the union of the two reforms, the religious and the political, but they found in Luther the most bitter and decided enemy.

It must not pass unobserved, that the rising of the German peasants against the nobles, was far posterior in date to the French Jacqueries, and to the war against the nobility, or the battle of spurs in Flanders; occurrences in which the original Celto-Gauls attempted to break down the yoke under which they suffered. All those insurrections of the people in France, in Germany, as well as that of the Kentish boors, prove that similar reasons and causes produce similar results in this or that race, nation, or form of government.

Luther and most of the Lutherans were not moved by the grievances and the projected reforms of the Saxon and Franconian rustics, who in a short but brilliant strife, for a moment forced princes and nobles to accept and sign the submitted reform. Four centuries back those simple men, those genuine democrats, put the German question on more tangible and practical grounds than did the science and. statesmanship of professors in 1848. The peasants moderately demanded the cessation of all kinds of tithes, and of every other species of grinding injustice. They asked for the introduction of a uniform currency, and of uniform weights and measures, the abolition of serfdom, of internal custom houses and duties, the abolition of privileges of caste, free popular courts of justice, bails for imprison

ment, etc.; in one word, their demands embraced all the fundamental and not subversive principles of a free and well organized state. To all this Luther answered, that "A pious Christian should rather die a hundred deaths than give way a hair's breadth to the peasants' demands. The government should exercise no mercy; the day of wrath and the day of the sword was come, and duty to God obliged them to strike hard as long as they could move a limb. Whoever perished in this service was a martyr of Christ."

Altogether the first Protestants or Lutherans in Germany stood on the side of legitimacy. "Cujus regio ejus religio," said Luther, transferring thus to the sovereigns the power over the church that had been wrested from the popes, and investing the princes with the exclusive power of the reformation. The Lutherans further maintain, that God alone sets princes and sovereigns over the human race. They insisted upon the duty of submitting to unjust and censurable sovereigns. The English or Anglo-Saxon reform carried out by Henry VIII., as the Episcopal Church, was the most faithful to the spirit of Lutheran principles. If, therefore, the spirit of reform is analyzed and classified according to certain predispositions or aptitudes of races, the spirit originally evinced by the German race with all its branches, the English or AngloSaxon included, was a conservative one in all social and political questions. From another language, from another race came the breath, by which the spirit of reform acquired its full, all-comprehending signification and fulfilment. The social, democratic ideas of Lambert were taken up by Calvin to the great dislike and repugnance of Luther, and of the immense majority of German reformers. Without Calvin a Frenchman, the reformation would have preserved its monarchist character. Calvinism gave to it

the republican and democratic one; to Calvinism belongs the merit of having thoroughly reinvigorated and renovat ed the Christian world. Calvinist writers, as Languet and others, maintain that the people make a state and not the sovereign; that the states can exist without the prince, but not without the people. Such principles were professed by the French and Flemish Huguenots, and brought to Scotland by Knox. The Scotch presbyterians and puritans, not by any means the descendants of Anglo-Saxons, but Huguenot and Flemish refugees, introduced these principles into England. There they fructified in independents and puritans, those founders and inaugurators on this continent of a new evolution of humanity.

Democratic in principle was the life of the primitive Christians, sustained and animated by fraternity and equality. The example of the primitive Christians, the principle of election prevailing among them, moved to imitation the Calvinistic and puritan reformers, and not the inspirations resulting from a distinction of race. Even in the Catholic hierarchy a shadow of democratic principle was preserved; as dignities were conferred by a kind of election, and functions bestowed according to mental capacity, and the people likewise originally participated in the election of Bishops. Democratic tendencies were spread and working, previous even to the reformation, among the Italians. Rienzi Savonarola proclaimed the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Even the Jesuits, those stanchest apostles of absolute power, and of legitimacy, in cases of need paid homage, in their peculiar manner, to the principle of the supremacy of the people. Parsons, Allen in England under Elizabeth, Bellarmine in Italy, and many others of these fathers wrote and asserted: "That God has not bestowed the temporal or worldly power and authority on any one in particular; whence it follows that he has bestowed it on the