“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.”
Bucer, De Regno Christi.
Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.”[1] His reference was to the new world revealed by learning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought.
The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the effect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from which new streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency. The sixteenth century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth—because it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an older social order. The practical implications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced.
The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.
For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. The general who marshaled the host and launched the attack was economic power.
Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with the climax of the great Discoveries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the conventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic significance. It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labor of Italian cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors.
The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a single economic system, has no space left for fresh expansion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemorial pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.
As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic in its external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal, relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the foreign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an economic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony with its depôt, the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried on under capitulations.
This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion. Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst.[2] It was not the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been accumulated. It was not great capitalists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity the basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and east to north and west. The records of German and English trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civilization,[3] and for a century after them English economic development was to be as closely wedded to its continental connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Discoveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient economic effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine.
The result was not the less sensational because it had been long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter.
It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensations, which were recorded in the letter-books[4] of business men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German cities which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which henceforward must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no longer local but international, and based, not merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors; a revolution in prices which shattered all customary relationships; the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power; the triumph of the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church—all were crowded into less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three-quarters of a century the whole framework of European civilization had been transformed.
Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could already, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun.
The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not discerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the water-logged Netherlands.[5] The justice of the criticism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long agony, in which the powerhouse of European enterprise was to be struck with paralysis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political and religious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting struggle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her own waste places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years, and which only in the twentieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of mere experiment over, and the new connections firmly established, she appeared to be in sight of an economic stability based on broader foundations than ever before.
Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of East and West. But it was not Portugal, with her tiny population, and her empire that was little more than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries an army on the march, and now staggering beneath the responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the material harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the political agents of minds more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace. Every period and society has some particular center, or institution, or social class, in which the characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be fixed and embodied. In the Europe of the early Renaissance the heart of the movement had been Italy. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The institution which best symbolized its eager economic energies was the international money-market and produce-exchange. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the international financier.
Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarnation in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the international idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe, Antwerp, “a home common to all nations,” was the most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a center of learning by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a country where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Dürer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found a spiritual home, where the energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of happiness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at Antwerp.
The economic preëminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the munitions of the Black Country round Liége, poured in an unceasing stream on to its quays.[6] But Antwerp was a European, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competitor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth century she had crushed her rival. The Hanse League maintained a depôt at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increasing numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepôt through which English cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap the wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged preëminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads which ran east and west met and ended in its harbors. The Portuguese Government made it in 1503 the depôt of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite of protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought finance in its train. The commercial companies and banking-houses of south Germany turned from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for financial operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.[7]
In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of society, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Professor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook of the medieval middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the sixteenth century, with its international ramifications, its independence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindication of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own career.[8] “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants at Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the cause of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade there.”[9] Swept into wealth on the crest of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all precedents, a policy of practical individualism, which would have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian monarchy, which were fought by their more conservative neighbors, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, welcoming the technical improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum cuiusque gentis ac linguae.
For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in the mere expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance the movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the impecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the growth of an international banking system mobilized immense resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of international currency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They formed together the departments of an international clearing-house, where bills could be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nationality changed hands.[10]
Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reëstablished them by political art.
The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it.”[11] The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including the financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared their position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace.
It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon. The centralized States which were rising in the age of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial situation. It sprang from the combination of modern administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of masses of professional infantry and artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspiration of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of printing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized industry. Government after Government, undeterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its neighbors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the taxpayer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property which should have been treated as capital. They parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their successors.
These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money-market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the financier was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, financing impartially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince. Compared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.
The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German banking-houses were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had invested in the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East Indies, financed an expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Imhofs were much the same. The Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous concessions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and commercial businesses in Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Brandenburg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds; provided the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client; and found the money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per cent. for the preceding sixteen years.[12]
Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercantilist thinkers resharpened an old economic weapon for the armory of princes. Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign exchanges.
The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an instrument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own conception of man’s spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had stretched old formulæ to cover the new forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic treatment of economic questions was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology.
Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that questions of economic conduct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to consult the theologians of the University as to the compatibility of speculative exchange business with the canon law.[13] When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the University of Bologna authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.[14]
Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry, and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a scale unknown before, the new economic civilization inevitably gave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the friends and the enemies of the Reformation identified it with social change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the protagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social revolution had been fermenting for half a century, it seemed at last to have come. The rise in prices, an enigma which baffled contemporaries till Bodin published his celebrated tract in 1569,[15] produced a storm of indignation against monopolists. Since the rising led by Hans Böheim in 1476, hardly a decade had passed without a peasants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and peasant, had become a battle-cry. From city after city municipal authorities, terrified by popular demands for the repression of the extortioner, consulted universities and divines as to the legitimacy of interest, and universities and divines gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending and prices.[16] Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on the same subject.[17] Bucer sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a Christian prince.[18] Bullinger produced a classical exposition of social ethics in the Decades which he dedicated to Edward VI.[19] Luther preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,[20] and said that it was time “to put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers.”[21] Zwingli and Œcolampadius devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief.[22] Above all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightful catastrophe, not only terrified Luther into his outburst: “Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer”;[23] it also helped to stamp on Lutheranism an almost servile reliance on the secular authorities. In England there was less violence, but hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel—to mention but the best-known names—all contributed to the debate.[24] Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the part of men of religion. If the world could be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise.
That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in England, is its conservatism. Where questions of social morality were involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to medieval authorities, and reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.
A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found acceptance in certain quarters has represented the Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to Oziander protesting against the embarrassment caused to reformers in England by the indulgence to moral laxity, in the matter alike of economic transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given by reformers in Germany.[25] By the seventeenth century the hints had become a theory and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the first theologians to defend extortion,[26] and it only remained for a pamphleteer to adapt the indictment to popular consumption, by writing bluntly that “it grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of heresy.”[27] That the revolt from Rome synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a period of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it had its seamy side. What is sometimes suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of religious and economic movements, but a logical connection between changes in economic organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad social practice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly teach a conscienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of their teaching. In the eighteenth century, which had as little love for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as for their political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our own day, the wheel seems almost to have come full circle. What was then a matter for congratulation is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by whom the Reformation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of unscrupulous commercialism, which had previously been held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the Church.
These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the grand religious struggles of the age have their significance. But the obiter dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants than on the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to partisans. If capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which establish themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predominantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic bankers who were its leading financiers.
Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and economic issues, it did so without design, and against the intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensational the innovations in economic practice which accompanied the expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the development of doctrine on the subject of economic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To think of the abdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to antedate a movement which was not finally accomplished for another century and a half, and which owed as much to changes in economic and political organization, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all shades of opinion still searched the Bible, the Fathers and the Corpus Juris Canonici for light on practical questions of social morality, and, as far as the first generation of reformers was concerned, there was no intention, among either Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good conscience, which were supposed to control economic transactions and social relations. If anything, indeed, their tendency was to interpret them with a more rigorous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, in particular, against the avarice which was thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the passion for regeneration and purification, which was one element in the Reformation, was directed against the corruptions of society as well as of the Church. Princes and nobles and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and fished eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive Christianity.
The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression in the writings of the German reformers. Like the return to nature in the eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society disillusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The prosperity of Augsburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central position, which they were to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepôt between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the near East. But the expansion of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of an acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Germany from a highway into a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise to a position of overwhelming preëminence of the new interests based on the control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally of the personal labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements.
Under the impact of these new forces, while the institutions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and operation were transformed. In the larger cities the gild organization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the capitalist, became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate his power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding morass of hopeless pauperism.[28] The peasantry suffered equally from the spread of a commercial civilization into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches of the towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and fines by their competition. But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found corvées redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest exactions.[29]
On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to economic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized themselves into companies, which handled at Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their own resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar movement took place on the narrower stage of European commerce in the generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany, and it was defended and attacked by arguments almost identical with those which are familiar today. The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in bulk, drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great pike swallows up a lot of little fishes,” and plundered the consumer, were the commonplaces of the social reformer.[30] The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger of interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by the companies. The problem was on several occasions brought before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who observed that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had already been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do not seem to have been more effective than modern legislation on the same subject.
The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such conditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth century, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.[31] In the age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants’ companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed merchants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.[32]
Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness.
It was partly that they were pièces de circonstance, thrown off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity. But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a conception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial or mischievous.
“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Paradise.”[33] It was this doctrine that all things have their price—future salvation as much as present felicity—which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in common with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolutionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and become a congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of Adam.
The children of the mind are like the children of the body. Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if their parents could foresee their future development, it would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would have been horrified, could he have anticipated the remoter deductions to be derived from his argument. Wamba said that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all, and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded by Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed would have more affinity with the thought of Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his teaching a plea for treating questions of economic conduct and social organization as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s revolt against authority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on its laxity and its corruption. His individualism was not the greed of the plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness of public authority an opportunity for personal gain. It was the ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers for a society in which order and fraternity will reign without “the tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute,” because they well up in all their native purity from the heart.
Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church-civilization, in which all departments of life, the State and society, education and science, law, commerce and industry, were to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.[34] That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on social issues. So far from accepting the view which was afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves for that plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those directed against Rome. The text of his admonitions is always, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a formal, legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not need to be organized by law, because it is the spontaneous expression of a habit of love. To restore is to destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder of revolution. It was the declaration of the peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised Messiah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées, and enclosures.[35]
The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of society more medieval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commercial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular protests against a commercial civilization which were everywhere in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naïveté, even while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.
For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for the anxious provision which accumulates for the future, Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk. Christians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow, take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther thought that the most admirable life was that of the peasant, for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commercial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.[36] The labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the community in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined to the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands no more than will compensate him for his labor and risk. The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are members. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome. For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders, mischievous alike in their practice and by their example, cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrimages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or compelled to labor, and each town must organize charity for the support of the honest poor.[37]
Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and subordination, though he knocked away the ecclesiastical rungs in the ladder. The combination of religious radicalism and economic conservatism is not uncommon, and in the traditional conception of society, as an organism of unequal classes with different rights and functions, the father of all later revolutions found an arsenal of arguments against change, which he launched with almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping monopolists. His vindication of the spiritual freedom of common men, and his outspoken abuse of the German princes, had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs groaning under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another age, was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and his own. As fully convinced as any medieval writer that serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by a political theory which exalted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis between the external order and the life of the spirit. The demand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood,”[38] horrified him, partly as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be confused with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation movement, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gospel by turning a spiritual message into a program of social reconstruction. “This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an external worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’”[39] After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated.
A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence. Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined; and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could be more striking than that between his social theory and the outlook of Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main institutions of a commercial civilization, and supplied a creed to the classes which were to dominate the future. The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw no room in a Christian society for those middle classes whom an English statesman once described as the natural representatives of the human race. International trade, banking and credit, capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic forces, which, next to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest solvent of the medieval world, seem to him to belong in their very essence to the kingdom of darkness which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law, only to reaffirm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it had been used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions at length, as in his Long Sermon on Usury in 1520, or his tract On Trade and Usury in 1524, his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists themselves had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical life.
In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional doctrines. “A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and conscience that thou mayest practice it without harm or injury to him.”[40] If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it. If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation. If he has to determine it himself, he must consider the income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his labor, and his risk, and must settle it accordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments.
On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the canonists. “The greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in interest.... The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.”[41] Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compensation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian burial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the characteristic developments of his generation—the luxury trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking beyond measure. “Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels and spices ... and drain the land and people of their money, should not be permitted.... Of combinations I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong.... Who is so stupid as not to see that combinations are mere outright monopolies, which even heathen civil laws—I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law—condemn as a plainly harmful thing in all the world?”[42]
So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed that Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, would have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite. It was one, not merely of indifference, but of repugnance. The prophet who scourged with whips the cupidity of the individual chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned a shattering dialectic on the corporate organization of the Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of human hopes are human institutions, there have been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost everything that men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived at a time when the contrast between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been intolerable, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to give it a concrete expression. He reiterates the content of medieval economic teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers of the later Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received a positive, if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but abhorrence. God speaks to the soul, not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social institutions built up by man, but solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and in the heart alone. Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of sense are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men, that it may enter into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the primeval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of contributing to sanctification. “It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty.... One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.”[43]
The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only good works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions—drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.