047. NORTH AMERICA KEPT FOR ENGLAND

NORTH AMERICA KEPT FOR ENGLAND The halo of romance has been stripped from the brow of Columbus. He had amazing courage and daring, but he was little more than a bold buccaneer. Some sense of a divine mission indeed possessed him; he celebrated mass on setting out from Palos, and the first sight of the new world was greeted with a gloria in excelsis: he afterward declared that God had made him a messenger of the new heavens and the new earth. But he was a man of dreams and hallucinations, of chicanery and deceit; he deceived others, and he deceived himself. His religion was largely a cloak for his personal ambition; he was almost devoid of generosity or honor; he was so devoted to gain, that the Indians with whom he dealt held up a piece of gold and said: "Behold the Christian’s God"; and, in spite of earnest protests from Ferdinand and Isabella, he sent cargoes of these same Indians to be sold in Spain, and thus became the first slave-driver of the new world. It was well that a flight of birds induced him to change his course to the southwest and to make for the West Indies, for otherwise he would have landed in Virginia, and with his first voyage would have brought North America under the dominion of Spain and the Inquisition. The same Providence that turned Columbus southward against his will and so kept North America from Spain, only six years later turned Sebastian Cabot southward against his will and so kept North America for England. Under the patronage of Henry VII. Cabot set out for Labrador and Hudson’s Bay. But icebergs terrified his crew; he changed his course and followed the coast as far as Chesapeake Bay, and this exploration laid the foundation for the British claim to the possession of most of our present United States. The subsequent settlements of New England and Virginia by the English, and the long conflict with Spain and her rival settlements in South America which ended only with the destruction of the Armada, may be seen wrapped up in the germs planted by Cabot and Columbus. But these discoveries were also signs of a new spirit in Europe—a public spirit, a patriotic spirit, a spirit of breadth and enterprise, of inquiry and unrest, of revolt against the traditional tyrannies both of Church and State. The very centralization which the kings devised in their own interest had awakened a sense of nationality. Joan of Arc was not so much the cause as she was the expression of this new feeling of unity in France. The merely local and individual began to recognize its relation to the life of the whole. Kings used this new national consciousness for their purposes, but it was a spirit which they did not evoke, and which they could not permanently control. Macchiavelli’s "Prince," with its calm praise of royal perfidy, shows at any rate that a third estate was rising, of which the monarch must henceforth take account. The fifteenth century witnessed the first systematic substitution of diplomacy for force.

Down to this time the peoples of Europe had not been intelligent enough to influence foreign affairs, and their monarchs did this business for them. But when the Turks took Constantinople, in 1453, and the Eastern Empire fell, and scholars fled from the ancient haunts of learning, and their Greek books were brought into the debased and ignorant West, there resulted such a sudden and mighty outburst of human intelligence as the world had never seen before. The thoughts of men were preternaturally widened. Science, literature, and art began to awaken from the sleep of ages. Italy was at this time the great fountain of ideas, and in Italy the very extinction of her ancient liberties under the iron hand of the despots resulted in the turning of every energy into the new revival of learning. Printing had j ust been invented, and had made it impossible again to destroy the intellectual treasures of mankind. Whole generations set themselves to rediscover the classic writers, and to transfer their words from manuscript to the printed page. From the bed of the Tiber, and from the buried ruins of old Roman villas, were dug up such masterpieces as the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere; and Venus rose once more from the earth, as she was fabled of old to have risen from the sea.

Though the Renaissance began in Italy, it quickly extended throughout Europe. The presses of Florence and Venice were duplicated in Paris and Lyons and Basle. Learning and printing together penetrated even the thick darkness of England, where many a nobleman could not read, and where many a priest could not understand the Latin of his prayers. In 1471 William Caxton established his press under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and Erasmus, Colet, and More began the teaching of Greek in the University of Oxford. Well has it been said that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. Scholasticism, and the whole brood of papal assumptions, had thrown upon them the blazing light of a new knowledge and a new zeal for truth.

How needful this enlightenment was may be judged when we remember to what slavery of intellect and heart Rome had reduced the world. In perfect accord with Rome’s conception of arbitrary sovereignty, the scholastic philosophy of Duns Scotus and William of Occam had taught that truth and right are just what God’s will makes them: they have no foundation in the nature of things, or in the nature of God. God has made the radii of a circle to be equal, but he could just as easily have made them unequal; he has chosen that veracity and purity shall be virtues, but he could just as easily have made lying to be right and purity to be wrong. Since truth and right are not necessary but only arbitrary relations, no amount of thinking or reasoning can ever determine what is right or what is true, —this is one of God’s secrets, which only he can make known. He has told the secret only to the church. Only the church can dispense it to the world. This the priest will do for a consideration. The thoughtful naturally drew the inference that a merely arbitrary truth was hardly worth the purchasing, and a merely arbitrary right was hardly worth the doing. The world sank into a hopeless skepticism as to the very existence of truth, and into a desperate immorality which defied both right and God. The first effect of the Renaissance indeed was an amazing increase of human wickedness. The reading of the classic writers stimulated not only the intellect but also the passions of men. Many a form of heathen depravity, which had been buried in oblivion, arose once more to corrupt the world. The spirit of the age is expressed in the legend of Doctor Faustus, ready to sell his soul for knowledge, and when knowledge failed to satisfy, throwing his whole being into the pursuit of pleasure. Never in all the world was there more complete proof that mere knowledge will not make men moral. The wickedest of the popes were great patrons of learning and of art. Ferocity and sensuality walked hand in hand with letters. The young world, just risen from sleep, had unbounded capacity for enjoyment; everything seemed possible and permissible to its fresh energy. Church and creed restrained no longer,—they were either thrown aside or they led the race for mere physical beauty and delight. In short, paganism had come again, and the gods of power and pleasure were worshiped in the place of Christ.

How infinitely important it was, if the world was not to go down again into heathenism and destruction, that the Renaissance, the new birth of the human intellect, should be followed by the Reformation, the new birth of the human conscience! Rome had become the Sodom and Egypt of the book of Revelation,—a Sodom for impurity, and an Egypt for darkness and oppression. She gave no relief or help to the conscience-stricken or the dying. When the conscience-stricken sought for pardon, the conditions were simply physical penance and the giving of their treasures to the church. When the dying stretched out agonizing hands to grasp some sure support as they walked out into the great darkness, their ears were dinned by the droning of the priest, as he offered unintelligible prayers to the Virgin and to a whole sky-full of saints. How terrible a commentary upon the corruptions of a false Christianity is the vow of the Sultan Amurath! That Moslem monarch, believing that there was but one God, and that Mohammed was his prophet, swore a great oath that he would give himself no rest till he had destroyed the gods of gold, silver, brass, and wood, that were worshiped by the disciples of Christ. But there was another destruction preparing, at the hands of a stouter heart and a truer believer, the converted monk of Wittenberg. Twentyfive years after the discovery of the new world a movement was inaugurated which was to link civil and religious liberty together, and to transport both to the shores of America. The false Church and the despotic State must be shaken to their foundations in order that a better order which could not be shaken might remain. That mighty movement was the Reformation under Luther. We have seen the need of it. And now the hour had struck.

Down came the storm. In ruins fell The outworn world we knew.

It passed,—that elemental swell;

Again appeared the blue! The Reformation was, above all things else, a revival of religion. It never would have accomplished what it did, if it had not begun with the heart and purified the springs of action. But it did not end with the heart,— it clarified the intellect also. It took up into itself whatever was good in the Renaissance and purged it of the evil. It made havoc of the saints and the ceremonies, the penances and the priests, with which Rome had encumbered and obscured the way of salvation, and it brought man once more, after the old New Testament fashion, into personal dealings with his God and Saviour. Here was the death-blow to skepticism. Faith was the highest sort of knowledge. The vision of God which the believer enjoyed through the Holy Spirit was more immediate than ocular perception or logical demonstration. Faith, at the Reformation, laid the foundation of modern scientific certainty; it had God sure,—since God is truth and truth is God, other things may be sure also,—hence it proceeded to banish skepticism in philosophy and science. All our present convictions of the value of normally conducted investigation, all our faith in a rationally constituted universe, all our nineteenth-century harvests of knowledge and invention, are the fruits of spiritual seed planted by Luther at the Reformation.

It seems wonderful to us that Luther, after having revived the New Testament doctrine of faith, did not also revive the New Testament doctrine of the church. This was his error; this was the reason why his Reformation did not permanently endure in Germany. The multitude of the unregenerate which infant baptism brought into the church soon undid the work of religious revival, just as it had done once before in the time of the Emperor Constantine, and left Christianity a prey to formalism and skepticism. Luther undervalued polity, as compared with doctrine, and so he deprived doctrine of its divinely appointed guardian and defender. He did not trust enough in the self-governing powers of the body of true believers, and so he gave over to the State the government of the Church. Revolting at the fanaticisms of the uninstructed, and not knowing that the only remedy for the evils of liberty is liberty, he concluded that in the matter of church government the princes should lead and the people should follow. Did he not believe in the priesthood of individual believers? Ah, yes! but he also believed that, since the nation was Christian also, there should be a public judgment in matters of religion, and that this judgment should be expressed by the State. It was only the Roman principle in a modified form. Its adoption was a mistake so fatal that it vitiated the whole Reformation in Europe, and made absolutely necessary another movement on another continent for the establishment of a free Church in a free State.

Luther mixed up Church and State once more. But he had his misgivings. "Satan remains Satan," he said; "under the pope, Satan pushed the Church into the State; now he wishes to push the State into the Church." But all the Reformers, save a few insignificant Anabaptists, unwittingly helped on this same retrogression. It matters not where you look. There was no real freedom of conscience anywhere. The Church included the entire baptized population. The State was simply the Church exercising civil functions. The State, therefore, must stand for Christianity, and must root out all unchristian belief and practice. In theory there was toleration, but only in non-essentials; and the State usually determined that everything was essential which in any way affected its creed or its influence. Hence Calvin, who has been called "the constitutional lawyer of the Reformation," assented to the burning of Servetus, and Zwingli assented to the drowning of Mantz.

I have mentioned the Anabaptists, and have called them insignificant. This they were in numbers, but not in influence. Originating in the valleys of Switzerland, a natural home of civil freedom, and possibly tracing their spiritual descent from the Waldenses on the southern side of the Alps, they represent the real Reformation movement, from which both Luther and Zwingli for political reasons turned aside. Mantz, for whose drowning Zwingli was responsible, was an Anabaptist, and so were Sattler and Blaurock and Hetzer and Hiibmeier, some of whom had their tongues torn out, while others had their bodies lacerated with red-hot tongs, and all of them were burned at the stake. All these believed in complete separation of Church and State, while yet they enjoined obedience to the civil power in all things not contrary to conscience and the word of God. They were men of the highest learning, ability, and piety. Hiibmeier, before his conversion, had been Professor of Theology at the University of Ingolstadt. Most of them had been Zwingli’s lieutenants, until Zwingli’s desertion of scriptural principles compelled them to desert him. At Schleitheim, a little village near Schaffhausen, they issued, in 1527, the first published Confession in which Christian men claimed absolute religious freedom for themselves and granted absolute religious freedom to others. They were the first martyrs of soul-liberty in Europe; the first who dared proclaim even unto death the New Testament doctrine of a wholly spiritual church; the first who pushed to its logical consequences the principle that civil government has no authority over conscience. We glory in the fact that these reformers of the Reformers were Baptists.

God’s providence is nowhere more clearly seen than in the topography of the earth and in the physical preparations for human history. Christianity has run in channels marked out by road lines and by river lines, simply because these have been the lines of human traffic and intercourse. It was so at the Reformation. Calvinism originated at Geneva, in Switzerland. Whither should it first extend itself? Why, naturally down the river Rhine to the Low Countries and the sea. As Calvinism flowed downward with commerce and the waters of the Rhine to the Netherlands and so across to England, it was inevitable that the English Reformation should be tinged with Calvin’s spirit. When the Presbyterians, who best represented Calvin, were persecuted by the Episcopal government, they prayed for toleration. And well they might, for one of their ministers, Alexander Leighton by name, for publishing a book against the bishops,¹ was sentenced to deposition from the ministry, to public whipping, and to imprisonment for life, after being fined .£10,000, besides having his cheeks branded, his ears cut off, and his nostrils slit. This was in 1628, and the sufferer had been Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. But when the Presbyterians came into power, they still held that it was the right of the State to add its civil penalties to the censures of the Church. The Westminster Confession, at the end of that very chapter on Christian liberty in which is affirmed the Reformation principle of private judgment, proclaims that the magistrate, by his power, may proceed against men who merely publish opinions, provided they are contrary to the known principles of Christianity, or to the power of godliness, or even to the external peace and order of the church. John Milton himself had no notion of giving liberty to Papists; Richard Baxter called universal toleration "soul-murder," and "the way to men’s damnation "; and even Oliver Cromwell retained lay patronage and the compulsory payment of tithes, the injustice of which has become the more apparent as time has passed by.