CHAP. XVI. he shocked? Because the Augustinian system which he had adopted, treated these questions as finally concluded. And how were they concluded? By the A.D. 1519. judgment of the church based upon a verbally inspired and infallible Bible. Luther did not indeed assert so strongly the verbal inspiration of the Bible, much less of the Vulgate version, as Dr. Eck and other Augustinian theologians had done; yet his standing-point obliged him practically to assume the truth of this doctrine, as it obliged his successors more and more strongly to assert it as the years rolled on. And so, whilst rejecting, even more thoroughly than Erasmus ever did, the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of Rome, yet it is curious to observe that, in doing so, Luther did not reject the notion of ecclesiastical authority in itself, but rather, amidst many inconsistencies, set up the authority of what he considered to be the true church against that of the church which he regarded as the false one. As a consistent Augustinian he was driven to assume, in replying to the Wittemberg prophets on the one hand and the scepticism of Erasmus on the other, that there is a true church somewhere, and that somewhere in the true church there is an authority capable of establishing theological hypotheses. He was not willing that the Scriptures should be left simply to the private judgment of each individual for himself. He even allowed himself to claim for the public ministers of his own church-' the 'leaders of the people and the preachers of the word'— authority not only for themselves but also for others, ' and for the salvation of others, to judge with the greatest certainty the spirit and dogmas of all men.'1 6 Ideo alterum est judicium externum, quo non modo pro nobis ipsis, sed et pro aliis et propter ' aliorum salutem, certissime judi CHAP. Not that Luther always consistently upheld this doctrine anymore than Erasmus consistently upheld its A.D. 1519. opposite. Luther was often to be found asserting and using the right of private judgment against the authority of Rome, as Erasmus was often found upholding the authority of the Catholic Church and her authorised councils against the rival authority of Luther's schismatic and unauthorised church. In times of transition, men are inconsistent; and regard must be had rather to the direction in which they are moving than the precise point to which at any particular moment they may have attained. And what I wish to impress upon the reader is this-that not only Luther, but all other Reformers, from Wickliffe down to the modern Evangelicals, who have adopted the Augustinian system and founded their reform upon it, have practically assumed as the basis of their theology, first, the plenary inspiration of each text contained in the Scriptures; and, secondly, the existence of an ecclesiastical authority of some kind capable of establishing theological hypotheses; so that, in this respect, Luther and other Augustinian reformers, instead of advancing beyond the Oxford Reformers, have lagged far behind, seeing that they have contentedly remained under a yoke from which the Oxford Reformers had been labouring for twenty years to set men free. The power of St. In saying this I am far from overlooking the fact, that Augustine. the Protestant Reformers, in reverting to a purer form of Augustinian doctrine than that held by the Schoolmen, did practically by it bring Christianity to bear upon camus et dogmata ad duces et præcones verbi &c.' -De Servo Arbitrio, Mar. Lutheri. Wittembergæ, 1526, p. 82. spiritus XVI. men with a power and a life which contrasted strangely CHAP. with the cold dead religion of the Thomists and Scotists. I am as far also from underrating the force and the fire A.D. 1519. of St. Augustine. What, indeed, must not that force and that fire have been to have made it possible for him to bind the conscience of Western Christendom for fourteen centuries by the chains of his dogmatic theology! And when it is considered, on the one hand, that the greatest of the Schoolmen were so loyal to St. Augustine, that some of their subtlest distinctions. were resorted to expressly to mitigate the harshness of the rigid results of his system, and thus were attempts, not to get from under its yoke, but to make it bearable;1 and, on the other hand, that the chief reactions against scholastic formalism-those of Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, the Portroyalists, the Puritans, the modern Evangelicals were Augustinian reactions; so far from under-estimating the power of the man whose influence was so diverse and so vast, it may well become an object of ever-increasing astonishment to the student of Ecclesiastical History. At the same time, these considerations must raise also our estimate of the need and the value of the firm stand taken 350 years ago by the Oxford Reformers against 1 See Mozley's Augustinian Doc-|ment.... The Augustinian schooltrine of Predestination. Chap. x. man [Aquinas] could not expressly Scholastic Doctrine of Predestination.'contradict this position, but what And see the particular instance he could not contradict he could there given on the subject of in-explain. Augustine had laid fants dying in original sin, p. 307. 'down that the punishment of such 'Being by nature reprobate, and 'children was the mildest of all 'not being included within the punishment in hell.'... Aquinas ' remedial decree of predestination, laid down the further hypothesis, 6 they were... [according to the pure 'that this punishment was not pain 'Augustinian doctrine]. . . subject ' of body or mind, but want of the 'to the sentence of eternal punish-Divine vision.' CHAP. this dogmatic power so long dominant in the realm of religious thought. It has been seen in every page A.D. 1519. of this history, that they had taken their standpoint, so to speak, behind that of St. Augustine; behind even the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom; behind those patristic hypotheses which grew up into the scholastic theology; behind that notion of Church authority by which these hypotheses obtained a fictitious verification; behind the theory of 'plenary inspiration,' without which the Scriptures could not have been converted, as they were, into a mass of raw material for the manufacture of any quantity of hypotheses-behind all these on the foundation of fact which underlies them all. The essential difference between the standpoints of the Protestant and Oxford Reformers Luther had been the first to perceive. And the correctness of this first impression of Luther's has been singularly confirmed by the history of the three-and-a-half centuries of Protestant ascendancy in Western Christendom. The Protestant movement, whilst accomplishing by one revolutionary blow many objects which the Oxford Reformers were striving and striving in vain to compass by constitutional means, has been so far antagonistic to their work in other directions as to throw it back-not to say to wipe it out of remembrance-so that in this nineteenth century those Christians who have desired, as they did, to rest their faith upon honest facts, and not upon dogmas-upon evidence, and not upon authorityinstead of taking up the work where the Oxford Reformers left it, have had to begin it again at the beginning, as Colet did at Oxford in 1496. They have had, like the Oxford Reformers, to combat at the outset the theory of CHAP. plenary inspiration,' and the tendency inherited along with it from St. Augustine, by both Schoolmen and Protestant Reformers, to build up a theology, as I have AD. 1519. said, upon unverified hypotheses, and to narrow the boundaries of Christian fellowship by the imposition of dogmatic creeds so manufactured. They have had to meet the same arguments and the same blind opposition; to bear the same taunts of heresy and unsoundness from ascendant orthodox schools; to be pointed at by their fellow-Christians as insidious enemies of the Christian faith, because they have striven to present it before the eyes of a scientific age, as what they think it really is not a system of unverified hypotheses, but a faith in facts which it would be unscientific even in a disciple of the positive philosophy to pass by unexplored. VIII. MORE'S DOMESTIC LIFE (1519). By the aid of a letter from Erasmus to Ulrich Hutten,1 written in July 1519, one more lingering look may be taken at the beautiful picture of domestic happiness presented by More's home. This history would be incomplete without it. forty The 'young More,' with whom Colet and Erasmus More had fallen in love twenty years ago, was now past years old. forty. The four motherless children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John, awhile ago nestling round their widowed father's knee, as the dark shadow of sorrow passed over the once bright home in Bucklersbury, were now from ten to thirteen years old. The good stepmother, Alice Middleton, is said to have ruled 1 1 Epist. ccccxlvii. 2 See note on the date, More's birth, Appendix C. K K |