cious persecutions, furthered the very thing he sought to hinder. Charles the Fifth, in levying armies to destroy the Reformation with fire and sword, only forced its promoters to draw together in closer alliances, forget their theological or personal feuds, and stand together for the common cause. That the Reformation had princes on its side, too, we very well know; the wise and steady Frederick, of Saxony, the impulsive, ready-handed Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, at a later time William the Silent of Orange; in the very court and family of Francis a princess, his sister Margaret, in due time Queen of Navarre, who loved the pure gospel, and, when she could, protected its preachers. But in the time of Grotius it could not perhaps be known, as it is now known, what a power there was back of all this, scarcely thought of at the time, yet which had more to do than all other influences combined in originating the Reformation and determining its character. This was neither more nor less than what we should now call a revival of spiritual religion. It was another instance of the fulfillment of that divine word: "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

Ante-Reformation

Christians.

The century and a half immediately preceding the Reformation, affords a scarcely less interesting subject of study, at the present point of view, than that of the Reformation itself. It was that in which the abuses and corruptions of the papacy may be said to have reached their culmination; that of the scandalous schism, in which for eighty years the world witnessed the strange spectacle of at first two, afterwards three Popes, all at the same time claiming pontifical dignity, each calling himself the sole vicegerent of God on earth, each in theory infallible, and each denouncing and excommunicating the other two. In order to sustain themselves and their adherents a revenue was of course necessary to each, and as they had divided what was called the patrimony of St. Peter amongst them, it is evident that extraordinary means must be used. Accordingly all the most outrageous expedients common with the Popes were resorted to; simony, the sale of

pardons and indulgences, bribery in all its forms, together with the customary oppressive exactions. Each papal court, one of which was located either at Rome or Bologna, another at Naples, and another at Avignon, in France, was the centre of intrigue, and of a corruption which spread into every part of the church, and made its effects felt to the remotest corner of Europe. Beginning about the middle of the fourteenth century, this schism lasted until nearly that of the fifteenth. It gave birth to that monster of iniquity John XXIII., who caused the arrest of Huss at the Council of Constance, and is to be held mainly chargeable with the guilt of his murder there; and it prepared the way also for the infamous Alexander VI.

Now, there was one power alive and active in the world at this time, which resisted and held in some degree of check this tendency toward universal demoralization. It was not a political power, for the kings and statesmen of Europe were controlled in their measures, always, by considerations of policy, and policy would often prompt either utter silence as to this increasing corruption amongst those who ought to have been examples of virtue, or else the taking advantage of those causes which led to it, with a view to some especial end. It was not learning, or culture, for men gifted with these were, save in marked and exceptional cases, aspiring to the high places of the church, and must often reach the coveted eminence by winking at the things they disapproved, or by becoming as bad as the rest. It was not even a sense of public danger, acting alone, for this did not see to the heart of the evil, or divine its true causes, or its remedies, but always imagined that by enforcing certain laws of the state or canons of the church, or by applying some principle as to correlative powers, such as that of the supremacy of general councils, the enormities complained of might be cured. The hope of the world, at that time, was in the fact that the grace of God had not wholly forsaken it, and the power which papal tyranny and corruption had most cause to dread, and which it did dread above all, was that of enlightened conviction of the truth, and the aroused Christian conscience.

tyrs.

It is only by a somewhat close observaThe Seed of the Mar- tion of the period now in question—the ante-Reformation period-that we can be prepared to appreciate the extent to which spiritual religion still remained a power, or the part it distinctively had in bringing about the Reformation itself. If we may take that passage in Revelation which speaks of "the Church in the wilderness as alluding to those who through successive centuries, in the midst of that vast and savage desert of superstition, impiety, oppression and suffering which we call the Dark Ages, reaching on nearly to the time of the Reformation, maintained their Christian independence, we find in the religious history of that period a striking fulfillment of the prophecy. As more becomes known of those sects, Paulicians, Waldenses, Cathari, Albigenses, Lollards, whose own records have so almost wholly perished, and whose history until late years was written only by their enemies-as more becomes known of them, it grows more clearly evident that in them, allowing for exceptional instances of Manichæan or other error, and extravagances of other kinds which were the fault of their age quite as much as of themselves-God preserved amidst the general apostasy an element of genuine primitive Christianity. And the influence of these sects was profoundly felt, in the interest of spiritual religion; surviving them, even in localities where they had been rooted out. It is a just remark of a recent writer' that "the historian who desires to trace the more remote consequences of important moral movements" cannot "fail to notice the singular fact that the soil watered by Albigensian blood" in France "at the beginning of the thirteenth century was precisely that in which the seed sown by the reformers, three hundred years later, sprang up most rapidly and bore the most abundant harvest." One can, we think, without much difficulty divine how, even after the Albigensian" heresy," as it was called, had perished in the deluge of blood and fire that rolled over Southern France, the spirit of it should long survive, preserved in traditions of that

1 Baird's History of the Rise of the Huguenots, vol. i., p. 62.

time when the Counts of Toulouse with their followers stood manfully for the truth; we can understand how the crumbling walls of a burnt castle, the fields of memorable battle, though transformed into fields of peaceful harvest, and family traditions, secretly cherishing the memory of heroic men and women who had died for their faith, would keep alive something, it may be much, of the memory and spirit of such an ancestry. Though the very seed of these doctrines should have perished, the soil would remain; and in this, as the writer just quoted says, the seed of the Reformation sprang and grew. So was granted the petition of the great poet in his noblest sonnet, where he prays that from the ashes of these "slaughtered saints"

66 May grow

An hundred-fold, who having learned thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

In the Roman Church.

But there were, even amongst those who remained in the Roman communion many who were without doubt true spiritual Christians. Their piety sometimes assumed the mystical form, and carried certain spiritual ideas to extremes; their methods for promoting spiritual religion were often mistaken, as when the society of "Brothers of the Common Lot" in Holland seemed to imagine that withdrawal from the world in a kind of monastic seclusion was essential to piety, or when a similar society in Rome about the beginning of the sixteenth century sought to promote personal godliness by visiting the churches more diligently, by praying more frequently at sacred spots, by celebrating mass more regularly, and in short by a closer attention to all the rules and rites of formal religion. But we must not forget that to those "Brothers of the Common Lot" belonged Thomas à Kempis, author of the "Imitation of Christ," which next to Pilgrim's Progress has done most of uninspired books to promote spiritual religion; while it is worthy of remark that the society in Rome, if their method was mistaken, still adopted as their fundamental principle that which was the inmost idea of the Reformation: "That the

amendment of the church must be built upon the amendment and religious renovation of the individual." Personal religion that was preeminently the Reformation idea; and there were many, even amongst those still in the Roman communion who clung to it, and who sought to realize it, even before the time of Luther and Calvin.

lards.

Notable amongst these were Wickliffe Wickliffe and the Lol- and the Lollards in England. There remains one touching testimony to the sincere piety of these greatly maligned sufferers for the name of Jesus, in the inscriptions cut in the elm-board lining of the Lollard's Prison at Lambeth palace in London. The lapse of five centuries has made these inscriptions difficult to decipher; yet they have been preserved in one of the old books in the library of the British Museum, and with the help of this may be made out. There is no breath of imprecation there, no indication either of faltering in their fidelity, or of anger toward those who had imprisoned them, and perhaps were soon to lead them out to a painful death. Their words in the quaint Old English, or quainter Latin, only record some Christian precept or aspiration, or declare how willingly they suffered."

This spirit, as we know, lived again in John Huss, and in his friend Jerome, and to the very time of the reformation still survived amidst the rude Bohemian mountains.

Perhaps in some respects the most pleasThe Society of Naples. ing example of ante-Reformation piety -though its date is nearly that of the Reformation itself—is that of the society at Naples, formed by a devout Spaniard, Juan Valdez, and to which belonged the most brilliant preacher of Italy at that time, Bernardino Ochino, with Peter Martyr, and the gifted Italian princess, Vittoria Colonna.

2 Whether this "Lollard's Tower" at Lambeth is the real Lollard's prison, or whether, as some have claimed, the "Lollard's Tower" was a part of the structure of old Saint Paul's, need not be debated here. The testimony for the Lambeth tower is quite sufficient to justify the above allusion; while the tenor of the inscriptions mentioned is certainly consistent with the view which makes the small room at the top one, at least, of the famous Lollard prisons.