The
History of Protestantism |
Chapter 1 | . . . | SWITZERLAND – THE COUNTRY AND THE
PEOPLE. The Reformation dawns first in England – Wicliffe – Luther – His No – What it Implied – Uprising of Conscience – Who shall Rule, Power or Conscience? – Contemporaneous Appearance of the Reformers – Switzerland – Variety and Grandeur of its Scenery – Its History – Bravery and Patriotism of its People – A New Liberty approaches – Will the Swiss Welcome it? – Yes – An Asylum for the Reformation – Decline in Germany – Revival in Switzerland. |
Chapter 2 | . . . | CONDITION OF SWITZERLAND PRIOR TO THE
REFORMATION. Primitive and Mediaeval Christianity – The Latter Unlike the Former – Change in Church's Discipline – in her Clergy – in her Worship – State of Switzerland – Ignorance of the Bible – The Sacred Languages Unknown – Greek is Heresy – Decay of Schools – Decay of Theology – Distracted State of Society – All Things Conventionally Holy – Sale of Benefices – Swiss Livings held by Foreigners. |
Chapter 3 | . . . | CORRUPTION OF THE SWISS CHURCH. The Government of the Pope-How the Shepherd Fed his Sheep – Texts from Aquinas and Aristotle – Preachers and their Sermons – Council of Meudon and the Vicar – Canons of Neufchatel – Passion-plays – Excommunication employed against Debters – Invasion of the Magistrates' Jurisdiction – Lausanne – Beauty of its Site – Frightful Disorder of its Clergy – Geneva and other Swiss Towns – A Corrupt Church the greatest Scourge of the World – Cry for Reform – The Age turns away from the True Reform – A Cry that waxes Louder, and a Corruption that waxes Stronger. |
Chapter 4 | . . . | ZWINGLI'S BIRTH AND SCHOOL-DAYS. One Leader in Germany – Many in Switzerland – Valley of Tockenburg – Village of Wildhaus – Zwingli's Birth – His Parentage – Swiss Shepherds – Winter Evenings – Traditions of Swiss Valour – Zwingli Listens – Sacred Traditions – Effect of Scenery in moulding Zwingli's Character – Sent to School at Wesen – Outstrips his Teacher – Removed to Basle – Binzli – Zwingli goes to Bern – Lupllus – The Dominicans – Zwingli narrowly escapes being a Monk. |
Chapter 5 | . . . | ZWINGLI'S PROGRESS TOWARDS
EMANCIPATION. Zwingli returns Home – Goes to Vienna – His Studies and Associates – Returns to Wildhaus – Makes a Second Visit to Basle – His Love of Music – The Scholastic Philosophy – Leo Juda – Wolfgang Capito – Ecolampadius – Erasmus – Thomas Wittembach – Stars of the Dawn – Zwingli becomes Pastor of Olarus – Studies and Labors among his Parishioners – Swiss drawn to Fight in Italy – Zwingli's Visit to Italy – Its Lessons. |
Chapter 6 | . . . | ZWINGLI IN PRESENCE OF THE
BIBLE. Zwingli's profound Submission to Scripture – The Bible his First Authority – This a Wider Principle than Luther's – His Second Canon – The Spirit the Great Interpreter – His use of the Fathers – Light – The Swiss Reform presents a New Type of Protestantism – German Protestantism Dogmatic – Swiss Protestantism Normal – Duality in the False Religion of Christendom – Met by the Duality of Protestantism – Place of Reason and of Scripture. |
Chapter 7 | . . . | EINSIEDELN AND ZURICH. Visit to Erasmus – The Swiss Fight for the Pope – Zwingli Accompanies them – Marignano – Its Lessons – Zwlngle invited to Einsiedeln – Its Site – Its Administrator and Abbot – Its Image – Pilgrims – Annual Festival – Zwingli's Sermon – A Stronghold of Darkness converted into a Beacon of Light – Zwingli called to Zurich – The Town and Lake – Zwingli's First Appearance in its Pulpit – His Two Grand Principles – Effects of his Preaching – His Pulpit a Fountain of National Regeneration. |
Chapter 8 | . . . | THE PARDON-MONGER AND THE
PLAGUE. The Two Proclamations – Pardon for Money and Pardon of Grace – Contemporaneous – The Cordelier Samson sent to Switzerland – Crosses St. Gothard – Arrives in Uri – Visits Schwitz-Zug – Bern – A General Release from Purgatory – Baden – "Ecce Volant!" – Zurich – Samson Denied Admission – Returns to Rome – The Great Death – Ravages – Zwingli Stricken – At the Point of Death – Hymn – Restored – Design of the Visitation. |
Chapter 9 | . . . | EXTENSION OF THE REFORMATION TO BERN AND
OTHER SWISS TOWNS. A Solemn Meeting – Zwingli Preaches with greater Life – Human Merit and Gospel Virtue – The Gospel Annihilates the one, Nourishes the other – Power of Love – Zwingli's Hearers Increase – His Labors – Conversions – Extension of the Movement to other Swiss Towns – Basle – Lucerne – Oswald Myconius – Labors in Lucerne – Opposition – Is Thrust out – Bern – Establishment of the Reformation there. |
Chapter 10 | . . . | SPREAD OF PROTESTANTISH IN EASTERN
SWITZERLAND. St. Gall – The Burgomaster – Purgation of the Churches – Canton Glarus – Valley of the Tockenburg – Embraces Protestantism – Schwitz about to enter the Movement – Turns back – Appenzell – Six of its Eight Parishes embrace the Gospel – The Grisons – Coire – Becomes Reformed – Constance – Schaffhausen – The German Bible – Its Influence – The Five Forest Cantons – They Crouch down under the Old Yoke. |
Chapter 11 | . . . | THE QUESTION OF FORBIDDEN MEATS. The Foreign Enlistments – The Worship at Zurich as yet Unchanged – Zwingli makes a Beginning – Fasts and Forbidden Meats – Bishop of Constance Interferes – Zwingli's Defense – The Council of Two Hundred – The Council gives no Decision – Opposition organised against Zwingli – Constance, Lausanne, and the Diet against Zwingli – First Swiss Edict of Persecution – Diet Petitioned to Cancel it – The Reformed Band – Luther Silent – Zwingli Raises his Voice – The Swiss Printing-press. |
Chapter 12 | . . . | PUBLIC DISPUTATION AT ZURICH. Leo Juda and the Monk – Zwingli Demands a Public Disputation – Great Council Grants it – Six Hundred Members Assemble – Zwingli's Theses – President Roist – Deputies of the Bishop of Constance – Attempt to Stifle Discussion – Zwingli's Challenge – Silence – Faber rises – Antiquity – Zwingli's Reply – Hoffman's Appeal – Leo Juda – Doctor of Tubingen – Decree of Lords of Zurich – Altercation between Faber and Zwingli – End of Conference. |
Chapter 13 | . . . | DISSOLUTION OF CONVENTUAL AND MONASTIC
ESTABLISHMENTS. Zwingli's Treatise – An After-fight – Zwingli's Pulpit Lectures – Superstitious Usages and Payments Abolished – Gymnasium Founded – Convents Opened – Zwingli on Monastic Establishments – Dissolution of Monasteries – Public Begging Forbidden – Provision for the Poor. |
Chapter 14 | . . . | DISCUSSION ON IMAGES AND THE
MASS. Christ's Death – Zwingli's Fundamental Position – Iconoclasts – Hottinger – Zwingli on Image-worship – Conference of all Switzerland summoned – 900 Members Assemble – Preliminary Question – The Church – Discussion on Images – Books that Teach Nothing – The Mass Discussed – It is Overthrown – Joy of Zwingli – Relics Inferred. |
Chapter 15 | . . . | ESTABLISHMENT OF PROTESTANTISM IN
ZURICH. The Greater Reforms – Purification of the Churches – Threatening Message of the Forest Cantons – Zurich's Reply – Abduction of the Pastor of Burg – The Wirths – Their Condemnation and Execution – Zwingli Demands the Non-celebration of the Mass – Am-Gruet Opposes – Zwingli's Argument – Council's Edict – A Dream – The Passover – First Celebration of the Supper in Zurich – Its Happy Influence – Social and Moral Regulations – Two Annual Synods – Prosperity of Zurich. |
BOOK
EIGHTH
HISTORY OF PROTESTANTISM IN SWITZERLAND FROM A.D. 1516 TO ITS
ESTABLISHMENT AT ZURICH, 1525.
CHAPTER 1 Back to
Top
SWITZERLAND – THE COUNTRY
AND THE PEOPLE.
The Reformation dawns first in England – Wicliffe –
Luther – His No – What it Implied – Uprising of Conscience – Who shall Rule,
Power or Conscience? – Contemporaneous Appearance of the Reformers – Switzerland
– Variety and Grandeur of its Scenery – Its History – Bravery and Patriotism of
its People – A New Liberty approaches – Will the Swiss Welcome it? – Yes – An
Asylum for the Reformation – Decline in Germany – Revival in
Switzerland.
IN following the progress of the recovered Gospel
over Christendom in the morning of the sixteenth century, our steps now lead us
to Switzerland. In Enghmd first broke the dawn of that blessed day. Foremost in
that race of mighty men and saviours by whose instrumentality it pleased God to
deliver Christendom from the thraldom into which the centuries had seen it fall
to ignorance and superstition, stands Wicliffe. His appearance was the pledge
that after him would come others, endowed with equal, and it might be with
greater gifts, to carry forward the same great mission of emancipation. The
success which followed his preaching gave assurance that that Divine Influence
which had wrought so mightily in olden time, and chased the night of Paganism
from so many realms, overturning its altars, and laying in the dust the powerful
thrones that upheld it, would yet again be unloosed, and would display its
undying vitality and unimpaired strength in dispelling the second night which
had gathered over the world, and overturning the new altars which had been
erected upon the ruins of the Pagan ones.
But a considerable interval
divided Wicliffe from his great successors. The day seemed to tarry, the hopes
of those who looked for "redemption" were tried by a second delay. That Arm
which had "cut the bars" of the Pagan house of bondage seemed "shortened," so
that it could not unlock the gates of the yet more doleful prison of the Papacy.
Even in England and Bohemia, to which the Light was restricted, so far from
continuing to brighten and send forth its rays to illuminate the skies of other
countries, it seemed to be again fading away into night. No second Wicliffe had
risen up; the grandeur, the power, and the corruption of Rome had reached a
loftier height than ever–when suddenly a greater than Wicliffe stepped upon the
stage. Not greater in himself, for Wicliffe sent his glance deeper down, and
cast it wider around on the field of truth, than perhaps even Luther. It seemed
in Wicliffe as if one of the theological giants of the early days of the
Christian Church had suddenly appeared among the puny divines of the fourteenth
century, occupied with their little projects of the reformation of the Church
"in its head and members," and astonished them by throwing down amongst them his
plan of reformation according to the Word of God. But Luther was greater than
Wicliffe, in that borne up on his shield he seemed not only of loftier stature
than other men, but loftier than even the proto-Reformer. Wicliffe and the
Lollards had left behind them a world so far made ready for the Reformers of the
sixteenth century, and the efforts of Luther and his fellow-laborers therefore
told with sudden and prodigious effect. Now broke forth the day. In the course
of little more than three years, the half of Christendom had welcomed the
Gospel, and was beginning to be bathed in its splendor.
We have already
traced the progress of the Protestant light in Germany, from the year 1517 to
its first culmination in 1521 from the strokes of the monk's hammer on the door
of the castle-church at Wittemberg, in presence of the crowd of pilgrims
assembled on All Souls' Eve, to his No thundered forth in the Diet of Worms,
before the throne of the Emperor Charles V. That No sounded the knell of all
ancient slavery; it proclaimed unmistakably that the Spiritual had at last made
good its footing in presence of the Material; that conscience would no longer
bow down before empire; and that a power whose rights had long been proscribed
had at last burst its bonds, and would wrestle with principalities and thrones
for the scepter of the world. The opposing powers well knew that all this
terrible significance lay couched in Luther's one short sentence, "I cannot
retract." It was the voice of a new age, saying, I cannot repass the boundary
across which I have come. I am the heir of the future; the nations are my
heritage; I must fulfill my appointed task of leading them to liberty, and woe
to those who shall oppose me in the execution of my mission! Ye emperors, ye
kings, ye princes and judges of the earth, "be wise." If you co-operate with me,
your recompense will be thrones more stable, and realms more flourishing. But if
not – my work must be done nevertheless; but alas! for the opposers; nor throne,
nor realm, nor name shall be left them.
One thing has struck all who have
studied, with minds at once intelligent and reverent, the era of which we speak,
and that is the contemporaneous appearance of so many men of great character and
sublimest intellect at this epoch. No other age can show such a galaxy of
illustrious names. The nearest approach to it in history is perhaps the
well-known famous half-century in Greece. Before the appearance of Christ the
Greek intellect burst out all at once in dazzling splendor, and by its
achievements in all departments of human effort shed a glory over the age and
country. Most students of history have seen in this wondrous blossoming of the
Greek genius a preparation of the world, by the quickening of its mind and the
widening of its horizon, for the advent of Christianity. We find this phenomenon
repeated, but on a larger scale, in Christendom at the opening of the sixteenth
century.
One of the first to mark this was Ruchat, the eloquent historian
of the Swiss Reformation. "It came to pass," says he, "that God raised up, at
this time, in almost all the countries of Europe, Italy not excepted, a number
of learned, pious, and enlightened men, animated with a great zeal for the glory
of God and the good of the Church. These illustrious men arose all at once, as
if by one accord, against the prevailing errors, without however having
concerted together; and by their constancy and their firmness, accompanied by
the blessing from on high, they happily succeeded in different places in
rescuing the torch of the Gospel from under the bushel that had hidden its
light, and by means of it effected the reformation of the Church; and as God
gave, at least in part, this grace to different nations, such as the French,
English, and Germans, he granted the same to the Swiss nation: happy if they had
all profited by it."[1]
The country on the
threshold of which we now stand, and the eventful story of whose reformation we
are to trace, is in many respects a remarkable one. Nature has selected it as
the chosen field for the display of her wonders. Here beauty and terror,
softness and ruggedness, the most exquisite loveliness and stern, savage,
appalling sublimity lie folded up together, and blend into one panorama of
stupendous and dazzling magnificence. Here is the little flower gemming the
meadow, and yonder On the mountain's side is the tall, dark, silent fir-tree.
Here is the crystal rivulet, gladdening the vale through which it flows, and
yonder is the majestic lake, spread out amid the hushed mountains, reflecting
from its mirror-like bosom the rock that nods over its strand, and the white
peak which from afar looks down upon it out of mid-heaven. Here is the rifted
gorge across which savage rocks fling their black shadows, making it almost
night at noon-day; here, too, the glacier, like a great white ocean, hangs its
billows on the mountain's brow; and high above all, the crowning glory in this
scene of physical splendors, is some giant of the Alps, bearing on his head the
snows of a thousand winters, and waiting for the morning sun to enkindle them
with his light, and fill the firmament with their splendor.
The politics
of Switzerland are nearly as romantic as its landscape. They exhibit the same
blending of the homely and the heroic. Its people, simple, frugal, temperate,
and hardy, have yet the faculty of kindling into enthusiasm, and some of the
most chivalric feats that illustrate the annals of modern war have been enacted
on the soil of this land. Their mountains, which expose them to the fury of the
tempest, to the violence of the torrent, and the dangers of the avalanche, have
taught them self-denial, and schooled them into daring. Nor have their souls
remained unattempered by the grandeurs amid which they daily move, as witness,
on proper occasions, their devotion at the altar, and their heroism on the
battle-field. Passionately fond of their country, they have ever shown
themselves ready, at the call of patriotism, to rush to the battlefield, and
contend against the most tremendous odds. From tending their herds and flocks on
those breezy pasture-lands that skirt the eternal snows, the first summons has
brought them down into the plain to do battle for the freedom handed down to
them from their fathers. Peaceful shepherds have been suddenly transformed into
dauntless warriors, and the mail-clad phalanxes of the invader have gone down
before the impetuosity of their onset, his spearmen have reeled beneath the
battle axes and arrows of the mountaineers, and both Austria and France have
often had cause to repent having incautiously roused the Swiss lion from his
slumbers.
But now a new age had come, in which deeper feelings were to
stir the souls of the Swiss, and kindle them into a holier enthusiasm. A higher
liberty than that for which their fathers had shed their blood on the
battle-fields of the past was approaching their land. What reception will they
give it? Will the men who never declined the summons to arms, sit still when the
trumpet calls them to this nobler warfare? will the yoke on the conscience gall
them less than that which they felt to be so grievous though it pressed only on
the body? No! the Swiss will nobly respond to the call now to be addressed to
them. They were to see by the light of that early dawn that Austria had not been
their greatest oppressor: that Rome had succeeded in imposing upon them a yoke
more grievous by far than any the House of Hapsburg had put upon their fathers.
Had they fought and bled to rend the lighter yoke, and were they meekly to bear
the heavier? Its iron was entering the soul. No! they had been the bond-slaves
of a foreign priest too long. This hour should be the last of their vassalage.
And in no country did Protestantism find warriors more energetic, or combatants
more successful, than the champions that Switzerland sent forth.
Not only
were the gates of this grand territory to be thrown open to the Reformation, but
here in years to come Protestantism was to find its center and head-quarters.
When kings should be pressing it hard with their swords, and chasing it from the
more open countries of Europe, it would retreat within this mountain-guarded
land, and erecting its seat at the foot of its mighty bulwarks, it would
continue from this asylum to speak to Christendom. The day would come when the
light would wax dim in Germany, but the Reformation would retrim its lamp in
Switzerland, and cause it to burn with a new brightness, and shed all around a
purer splendor than ever was that of morning on its Alps. When the mighty voice
that was now marshalling the Protestant host in Germany, and leading it on to
victory, should cease to be heard; when Luther should descend into his grave,
leaving no one behind him able to grasp his scepter, or wield his sword; when
furious tempests should be warring around Protestantism in France, and heavy
clouds darkening the morning which had there opened so brightly; when Spain,
after a noble effort to break her fetters and escape into the light, should be
beaten down by the inquisitor and the despot, and compelled to return to her old
prison–there would stand up in Switzerland a great chief, who, pitching his
pavilion amid its mountains, and surveying from this center every part of the
field, would set in order the battle a second time, and direct its movements
till victory should crown the combatants.
Such is the interest of the
land we are now approaching. Here mighty champions are to contend, here wise and
learned doctors are to teach: but first let us briefly describe the condition in
which we find it–the horrible night that has so long covered those lovely
valleys and those majestic mountains, on which the first streaks of morning are
now beginning to be discernible.
CHAPTER 2
Back to
Top
CONDITION OF
SWITZERLAND PRIOR TO THE REFORMATION.
Primitive and Mediaeval
Christianity – The Latter Unlike the Former – Change in Church's Discipline – in
her Clergy – in her Worship – State of Switzerland – Ignorance of the Bible –
The Sacred Languages Unknown – Greek is Heresy – Decay of Schools – Decay of
Theology – Distracted State of Society – All Things Conventionally Holy – Sale
of Benefices – Swiss Livings held by Foreigners.
So changed was the Christianity of the Middle Ages
from the Christianity of the primitive times, that it could not have been known
to be the same Gospel. The crystal fountains amid the remote and solitary hills,
and the foul and turbid river formed by their waters after stagnating in
marshes, or receiving the pollution of the great cities past which they roll,
are not more unlike than were the pure and simple Gospel as it issued at the
beginning from its divine source, and the Gospel exhibited to the world after
the traditions and corruptions of men had been incorporated with it. The
government of the Church, so easy and sweet in the first age, had grown into a
veritable tyranny. The faithful pastors who fed the flock with knowledge and
truth, watching with care lest harm should come to the fold, had given place to
shepherds who slumbered at their post, or awoke up only to eat the fat and
clothe them with the wool. The simple and spiritual worship of the first age
had, by the fifth, been changed into a ceremonial, which Augustine complained
was "less tolerable than the yoke under which the Jews formerly groaned."[1] The Christian churches of
that day were but little distinguishable from the pagan temples of a former era;
and Jehovah was adored by the same ceremonies and rites by which the heathen had
expressed their reverence for their deities. In truth, the throne of the Eternal
was obscured by the crowd of divinities placed around it, and the one great
object of worship was forgotten in the distraction caused by the many
competitors–angels, saints, and images–for the homage due to him alone. It was
to no effect, one would think, to pull down the pagan temple and demolish the
altar of the heathen god, seeing they were to be replaced with fanes as truly
superstitious, and images as grossly idolatrous. So early as the fourth century,
St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, found in his diocese an altar which one of his
predecessors had set up in honor of a brigand, who was worshipped as a martyr.
[2]
The stream of
corruption, swollen to such dimensions so early as the fifth century, flowed
down with ever-augmenting volume to the fifteenth. Not a country in Christendom
which the deluge did not overflow. Switzerland was visited with the fetid stream
as well as other lands; and it will help us to estimate the mighty blessing
which the Reformation conferred on the world, to take a few examples of the
darkness in which this country was plunged before that epoch.
The
ignorance of the age extended to all classes and to every department of human
knowledge. The sciences and the learned languages were alike unknown; political
and theological knowledge were equally neglected. "To be able to read a little
Greek," says the celebrated Claude d'Espenes, speaking of that time, "was to
render one's self suspected of heresy; to possess a knowledge of Hebrew, was
almost to be a heretic outright.[3] The schools destined for
the instruction of youth contained nothing that was fitted to humanise, and sent
forth barbarians rather than scholars. It was a common saying in those days,
"The more skillful a grammarian, the worse a theologian." To be a sound divine
it was necessary to eschew letters; and verily the clerks of those days ran
little risk of spoiling their theology and lowering their reputation by the
contamination of learning. For more than four hundred years the theologians knew
the Bible only through the Latin version, commonly styled the Vulgate, being
absolutely ignorant of the original tongues.[4] Zwingli, the Reformer of
Zurich, drew upon himself the suspicions of certain priests as a heretic,
because he diligently compared the original Hebrew of the Old Testament with
this version. And Rodelf Am-Ruhel, otherwise Collinus, Professor of Greek at
Zurich, tells us that he was on one occasion in great danger from having in his
possession certain Greek books, a thing that was accounted an indubitable mark
of heresy. He was Canon of Munster, in Aargau, in the year 1523, when the
magistrates of Lucerne sent certain priests to visit his house. Discovering the
obnoxious volumes, and judging them to be Greek–from the character, we presume,
for no respectable cure would in those days have any nearer acquaintance with
the tongue of Demosthenes–" This," they exclaimed, "is Lutheranism! this is
heresy! Greek and heresy–it is the same thing!"[5]
A priest of the
Grisons, at a public disputation on religion, held at Ilanz about the year 1526,
loudly bewailed that ever the learned languages had entered Helvetia. "If," said
he, "Hebrew and Greek had never been heard of in Switzerland, what a happy
country! what a peaceful state! but now, alas! here they are, and see what a
torrent of errors and heresics have rushed in after them." [6] At that time there was
only one academy in all Switzerland, namely, at Basle; nor had it existed longer
than fifty years, having been founded by Pope Pius II. (AEneas Sylvius) in the
middle of the fifteenth century. There were numerous colleges of canons, it is
true, and convents of men, richly endowed, and meant in part to be nurseries of
scholars and theologians, but these establishments had now become nothing better
than retreats of epicurism, and nests of ignorance. In particular the Abbey of
St. Gall, formerly a renowned school of learning, to which the sons of princes
and great lords were sent to be taught, and which in the eighth, ninth, tenth,
and eleventh centuries, had sent forth many learned men, had by this time fallen
into inefficiency, and indeed into barbarism. John Schmidt, or Faber, vicar of
the Bishop-of Constance, and a noted polemic of the day, as well as a great
enemy of the Reformation and the Reformers, publicly avowed, in a dispute he had
with Zwingli, that he knew just a little Greek, but knew nothing whatever of
Hebrew.[7] It need not surprise us
that the common priests were so illiterate, when even the Popes themselves, the
princes of the Church, were hardly more learned. A Roman Catholic author has
candidly confessed that "there have been many Popes so ignorant that they knew
nothing at all of grammar."[8]
As regards
theology, the divines of those days aimed only at becoming adepts in the
scholastic philosophy. They knew but one book in the world, to them the sum of
all knowledge, the fountain-head of all truth, the "Sentences "of Peter Lombard.
While the Bible lay beside them unopened, the pages of Peter Lombard were
diligently studied. If they wished to alternate their reading they turned, not
to Scripture, but to the writings of Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. These authors
were their life-long study; to sit at the feet of Isaiah, or David, or John, to
seek the knowledge of salvation at the pure sources of truth, was never thought
of by them. Their great authority was Aristotle, not St. Paul. In Switzerland
there were doctors of divinity who had never read the Holy Scriptures; there
were priests and cures who had never seen a Bible all their days.[9] In the year 1527 the
magistrates of Bern wrote to Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon, the last Bishop of
Lausanne, saying that a conference was to be held in their city, on religion, at
which all points were to be decided by an appeal to Sacred Scripture, and
requesting him to come himself, or at least send some of his theologians, to
maintain their side of the question. Alas! the perplexity of the good bishop. "I
have no person," wrote he to the lords of Bern, "suttlciently versed in Holy
Scripture to assist at such a dispute." This recalls a yet more ancient fact of
a similar kind. In A.D. 680 the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus summoned a General
Council (the sixth) to be held in his capital in Barbary. The Pope of the day,
Agatho, wrote to Constantine, excusing the non-attendance of the Italian
bishops, on the score "that he could not find in all Italy a single ecclesiastic
sufficiently acquainted with the inspired Oracles to send to the Council.[10] But if this century had
few copies of the Word of Life, it had armies of monks; it had an astoundingly
long list of saints, to whose honor every day new shrines were erected; and it
had churches, to which the splendor of their architecture and the pomp of their
ceremonies gave an imposing magnificence, while the bull of Boniface V. took
care that they should not want frequentors, for in this century was passed the
infamous law which made the churches places of refuge for malefactors of every
description.
The few who studied the Scriptures were contemned as ignoble
souls who were content to plod along on the humblest road, and who lacked the
ambition to climb to the sublimer heights of knowledge. "Bachelor" was the
highest distinction to which they could attain, whereas the study of the
"Sentences" opened to others the path to the coveted honor of" Doctor of
Divinity." The priests had succeeded in making it be believed that the study of
the Bible was necessary neither for the defense of the Church, nor for the
salvation of her individual members, and that for both ends Tradition sufficed.
"In what peace and concord would men have lived," said the Vicar of Constance,
"if the Gospel had never been heard of in the world!"[11]
The great Teacher
has said that God must be worshipped "in spirit and in truth:" not in "spirit"
only, but in "truth," even that which God has revealed. Consequently when that
"truth" was hidden, worship became impossible. Worship after this was simply
masquerade. The priest stood up before the people to make certain magical signs
with his fingers, or to mutter unintelligible words between his teeth, or to
vociferate at the utmost pitch of his voice. Of a like character were the
religious acts enjoined on the people. Justice, mercy, humility, and the other
virtues of early times were of no value. All holiness lay in prostrating one's
self before an image, adoring a relic, purchasing an indulgence, performing a
pilgrimage, or paying one's tithes. This was the devotion, these were the graces
that lent their glory to the ages in which the Roman faith was in the ascendant.
The baron could not ride out till he had donned his coat of mail, lest he should
be assailed by his neighbor baron: the peasant tilled the earth, or herded his
oxen, with the collar of his master round his neck: the merchant could not pass
from fair to fair, but at the risk of being plundered: the robber and the
murderer waylaid the passenger who traveled without an escort, and the blood of
man was continually flowing in private quarrels, and on the battle-field; but
the times, doubtless, were eminently holy, for all around wherever one looked
one beheld the symbols of devotion–crosses, pardons, privileged shrines, images,
relics, aves, cowls, girdles, and palmer-staffs, and all the machinery which the
"religion" of the times had invented to make all things holy–earth, air, and
water – everything, in short, save the soul of man. Polydore Virgil, an Italian,
and a good Catholic, wishing to pay a compliment to the piety of those of whom
he was speaking, said, "they had more confidence in their images than in Jesus
Christ himself, whom the image represents."[12]
Within the "Church"
there was seen only a scramble for temporalities; such as might be seen in a
city abandoned to pillage, where each strives to appropriate the largest share
of the spoil. The ecclesiastical benefices were put up to auction, in effect,
and knocked down to the highest bidder. This was found to be the easiest way of
gathering the gold of Christendom, and pouring it into the great treasury at
Rome–that treasury into which, like another sea, flowed all the rivers of the
earth, and yet like the sea it never was full. Some of the Popes tried to reduce
the scandal, but the custom was too deeply rooted to yield to even their
authority. Martin V., in concert with the Council of Constance, enacted a
perpetual constitution, which declared all simoniacs, whether open or secret,
excommunicated. His successor Eugenius and the Council of Basle ratified this
constitution. It is a fact, nevertheless, that during the Pontificate of Pope
Martin the sale of benefices continued to flourish.[13] Finding they could not
suppress the practice, the Popes evidently thought that their next best course
was to profit by it. The rights of the chapters and patrons were abolished, and
bands of needy priests were seen crossing the Alps, with Papal briefs in their
hands, demanding admission into vacant benefices. From all parts of Switzerland
came loud complaints that the churches had been invaded by strangers. Of the
numerous body of canons attached to the cathedral church of Geneva, in 1527, one
only was a native, all the rest were foreigners.[14]
CHAPTER 3
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CORRUPTION OF THE
SWISS CHURCH.
The Government of the Pope-How the Shepherd Fed his
Sheep – Texts from Aquinas and Aristotle – Preachers and their Sermons – Council
of Meudon and the Vicar – Canons of Neufchatel – Passion-plays – Excommunication
employed against Debters – Invasion of the Magistrates' Jurisdiction – Lausanne
– Beauty of its Site – Frightful Disorder of its Clergy – Geneva and other Swiss
Towns – A Corrupt Church the greatest Scourge of the World – Cry for Reform –
The Age turns away from the True Reform – A Cry that waxes Louder, and a
Corruption that waxes Stronger.
OVER the Churches of Switzerland, as over those of
the rest of Europe, the Pope had established a tyranny. He built this usurpation
on such make-believes as the "holy chair," the "Vicar of Jesus Christ," and the
"infallibility" thence deduced. He regulated all things according to his
pleasure. He forbade the people to read the Scriptures. He every day made new
ordinances, to the destruction of the laws of God; and all priests, bishops not
excepted, he bound to obey him by an oath of peculiar stringency. The devices
were infinite–annats, reservations, tithes (double and treble), amulets,
dispensations, pardons, rosaries, relics–by which provision was made whereby the
humblest sheep, in the remotest corner of the vast fold of the Pope, might send
yearly to Rome a money acknowledgment of the allegiance he owed to that great
shepherd, whose seat was on the banks of the Tiber, but whose iron crook reached
to the extremities of Christendom.
But was that shepherd equally alive to
what he owed the flock? Was the instruction which he took care to provide them
with wholesome and abundant? Is it to the pastures of the Word that he conducted
them? The priests of those days had no Bible; how then could they communicate to
others what they had not learned themselves? If they entered a pulpit, it was to
rehearse a fable, to narrate a legend, or to repeat a stale jest; and they
deemed their oratory amply repaid, if their audience gaped at the one and
laughed at the other. If a text was announced, it was selected, not from
Scripture, but from Scotus, or Thomas Aquinas, or the Moral Philosophy of
Aristotle.[1] Could grapes grow on such
a tree, or sweet waters issue from such a fountain?
But, in truth, few
priests were so adventurous as to mount a pulpit, or attempt addressing a
congregation. The most part were dumb. They left the duty of story-telling, or
preaching, to the monks, and in particular to the Mendicants. "I must record,"
says the historian Ruchat, "a fact to the honor of the Council of Moudon. Not a
little displeased at seeing that the cure of the town was a dumb pastor, who
left his parishioners without instruction, the Council, in November, 1535,
ordered him to explain, at least to the common people, the Ten Commandments of
the Law of God, every Sabbath, after the celebration of the office of the mass."
[2] Whether the cure's
theological acquirements enabled him to fulfill the Council's injunction we do
not know. He might have pleaded, as a set-off to his own indolence, a yet more
scandalous neglect of duty to be witnessed not far off. At Neufchatel, so
pleasantly situated at the foot of the Jura Alps, with its lake reflecting on
its tranquil bosom the image of the vine-clad heights that environ it, was a
college of canons. These ecclesiastics lived in grand style, for the foundation
was rich, the air pleasant, and the wine good. But, says Ruchat, "it looked as
if they were paid to keep silence, for, though they were many, there was not one
of them all that could preach." [3]
In those
enlightened days, the ballad-singers and play-wrights supplemented the
deficiencies of the preachers. The Church held it dangerous to put into the
hands of the people the vernacular Gospel, lest they should read in their own
tongue of the wondrous birth at Bethlehem, and the not less wondrous death on
Calvary, with all that lay between. But the Passion, and other Biblical events,
were turned into comedies and dramas, and acted in public–with how much
edification to the spectators, one may guess! In the year 1531, the Council of
Moudon gave ten florins of Savoy to a company of tragedians, who played the
"Passion" on Palm Sunday, and the "Resurrection" on Easter Monday.[4] "If Luther had not come,"
said a German abbe, calling to mind this and similar occurrences–
"If
Luther had not come, the Pope by this time would have persuaded men to feed
themselves on dust."
A raging greed, like a burning thirst, tormented the
clergy, from their head downwards. Each several order became the scourge of the
one beneath it. The inferior clergy, pillaged by the superior, as the superior
by their Sovereign Priest at Rome, fleeced in their turn those under them.
"Having bought," says the historian of the Swiss Reformation, "the Church in
gross, they sold it in detail."[5] Money, money was the
mystic potency that set agoing and kept working the machine of Romanism. There
were churches to be dedicated, cemeteries to be consecrated, bells to be
baptised: all this must be paid for. There were infants to be christened,
marriages to be blessed, and the dead to be buried: nothing of all this could be
done without money. There were masses to be said for the repose of the soul;
there were victims to be rescued from the raging flames of purgatory: it was
vain to think of doing this without money. There was, moreover, the privilege of
sepulture in the floor of the church–above all, near the altar, where the dead
man mouldered in ground preeminently holy, and the prayers offered for him were
specially efficacious: that was worth a great sum, and a heavy price was charged
for it. There were those who wished to eat flesh in Lent, or in forbidden times,
and there were those who felt it burdensome to fast at any season: well, the
Church had arranged to meet the wishes of both, only, as was reasonable, such
accommodation must be paid for. All needed pardon: well, here it is–a plenary
pardon; the pardon of all one's sins up to the hour of one's death–but first the
price has to be paid down. Well, the price has been paid; the soul has taken its
departure, fortified with a plenary absolution; but this has to be rendered yet
more plenary by the payment of a supplemental sum–though why, we cannot well
say, for now we touch the borders of a subject which is shrouded in mystery, and
which no Romish theologian has attempted to make plain. In short, as said the
poet Mantuan,[6] the Church of Rome is an
"enormous market, stocked with all sorts of wares, and regulated by the same
laws which govern all the other markets of the world. The man who comes to it
with money may have everything; but, alas! for him who comes without money, he
can have nothing."
Every one knows how simple was the discipline of the
early Church, and how spiritual the ends to which it was directed. The pastors
of those days wielded it only to guard the doctrine of the Church from the
corruption of error, and her communion from the contamination of scandalous
persons.
For far different ends was the Church's discipline employed in
the fifteenth century in Switzerland, and other countries of Europe. One abuse
of it, very common, was to employ it for compelling payment of debts. The
creditor went to the bishop and took out an excommunication against his debtor.
To the poor debtor this was a much more formidable affair than any civil
process. The penalties reached the soul as well as the body, and extended beyond
the grave. The magistrate had often to interfere, and forbid a practice which
was not more an oppression of the citizen, than a manifest invasion of his own
jurisdiction. We find the Council of Moudon, 7th July, 1532, forbidding a
certain Antoine Jayet, chaplain and vicar of the church, to execute any such
interdiction against any layman of the town and parish of Moudon, and promising
to guarantee him against all consequences before his superiors. Nor was it long
till the Council had to make good their guarantee; for the same month, the vicar
having failed to execute one of these interdictions against a burgess of Moudon,
the Council deputed two of their number to defend him before the chapter at
Lausanne, which had summoned him before it to answer for his disobedience.[7] A frequent consequence was
that corpses remained unburied. If the husband died under excommunication for
debt, the wife could not consign his body to the grave, nor the son that of the
father. The excommunication must first be revoked.[8]
This prostitution
of ecclesiastical discipline was of very common occurrence, and inflicted a
grievance that was widely felt, not only at the epoch of the Reformation, but
all through the fifteenth century. It was one of the many devices by which the
Roman Church worked her way underneath the temporal power, and filched from it
its rightful jurisdiction.
Thrones, judgment-seats, in short, the whole
machinery of civil government that Church left standing, but she contrived to
place her own functionaries in these chairs of rule. She talked loftily of the
kingly dignity, she styled princes the "anointed of heaven;" but she deprived
their sceptres of all real power by the crosiers of her bishops. In the year
1480 we find the inhabitants of the Pays-de-Vaud complaining to Philibert, Duke
of Savoy, their liege lord, that his subjects who had the misfortune to be in
debt were made answerable, not in his courts, but to the officer of the Bishop
of Lausanne, by whom they were visited with the penalty of excommunication. The
duke did not take the matter so quietly as many others. He fulminated a decree,
dated "Chambeer, August 31st," against this usurpation of his jurisdiction on
the part of the bishop.[9]
It remains only
that we touch on what was the saddest part of the corruption of those melancholy
days, the libertinism of the clergy. Its frightful excess makes the full and
open exposure of the scandal impossible. Oftener than once did the Swiss cantons
complain that their spiritual guides led worse lives than the laymen, and that,
while they went about their church performances with an indevotion and coldness
that shocked the pious, they gave themselves up to profanity, drunkenness,
gluttony, and uncleanness.[10]
We shall let the
men who then lived, and who witnessed this corruption, and suffered from it,
describe it. In the year 1477, some time after the election of Benedict of
Montferrand to the Bishopric of Lausanne, the Bernese came to him on the 2nd of
August, to complain of their clergy, whose irregularities they were no longer
able to bear. "We see clearly," said they, "that the clergy of our land are
extremely debauched, and given up to impurity, and that they practice their
wickedness openly, without any feeling of shame. They keep their concubines,
they resort at night to houses of debauchery; and they do all this with so much
boldness, that it is plain they have neither honor nor conscience, and are not
restrained by the fear either of God or man. This afflicts us extremely. Our
ancestors have often made police regulations to arrest these disorders,
particularly when they saw that the ecclesiastical tribunals gave themselves no
care about the matter." A similar complaint was lodged, in the year 1500,
against the monks of the Priory of Grandson, by the lords of Bern and Friburg [11] But to what avail? Despite
these complaints and police regulations, the manners of the clergy remained
unreformed: the salt had lost its savor, and wherewith could it be salted? The
law of corruption is to become yet more corrupt.
So would it assuredly
have been in Switzerland–from its corruption, corruption only would have come in
endless and ever grosser developments–had not Protestantism come to sow with
beneficent hand, and quicken with heavenly breath, in the bosom of society, the
seeds from which was to spring a new life. Men needed not laws to amend the old,
but a power to create the new.
The examples we have given–and it is the
violence of the malady that illustrates the power of the physician–are
sufficiently deplorable; but sad as they are, they fade from view and pass from
memory in presence of this one enormity, which an ancient document has handed
down to us, and which we must glance at; for we shall only glance, not dwell, on
the revolting spectacle. It will give us some idea of the frightful moral gulf
in which Switzerland was sunk, and how inevitable would have been its ruin had
not the arm of the Reformation plucked it from the abyss.
On the northern
shore of Lake Leman stands the city of Lausanne. Its site is one of the grandest
in Switzerland. Crowned with its cathedral towers, the city looks down on the
noble lake, which sweeps along in a mighty crescent of blue, from where Geneva
on its mount of rock is dimly descried in the west, till it bathes the feet of
the two mighty Alps, the Dent du Midi and the Dent de Morcele, which like twin
pillars guard the entrance to the Rhone valley. Near it, on this side, the
country is one continuous vineyard, from amid which hamlets and towns sweetly
look out. Yonder, just dipping into the lake, is the donjon of Chillon,
recalling the story of Bonnevard, to whose captivity within its wails the genius
of Byron has given a wider than a merely Swiss fame. And beyond, on the other
side of the lake, is Savoy, a rolling country, clothed with noble forests and
rich pastures, and walled in on the far distance, on the southern horizon, by
the white peaks of the Alps. But what a blot in this fair scene was Lausanne! We
speak of the Lausanne of the sixteenth century. In the year 1533 the Lausannese
preferred a list of twenty-three charges against their canons and priests, and
another of seven articles against their bishop, Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon.
Ruchat has given the document in full, article by article, but parts of it will
not bear translation in these pages, so, giving those it concerns the benefit of
this difficulty, we take the liberty of presenting it in an abridged form.[12]
The canons and
priests, according to the statement of their parishioners, sometimes quarrelled
when saying their offices, and fought in the church. The citizens who came to
join in the cathedral service were, on occasion, treated by the canons to a
fight, and stabbed with poignards. Certain ecclesiastics had slain two of the
citizens in one day, but no reckoning had been held with them for the deed. The
canons, especially, were notorious for their profligacy. Masked and disguised as
soldiers, they sallied out into the streets at night, brandishing naked swords,
to the terror, and at times the effusion of the blood, of those they
encountered. They sometimes attacked the citizens in their own houses, and when
threatened with ecclesiastical inflictions, denied the bishop's power and his
right to pronounce excommunication upon them. Certain of them had been visited
with excommunication, but they went on saying mass as before. In short, the
clergy were just as bad as they could possibly be, and there was no crime of
which many of them had not at one time or another been guilty.
The
citizens further complained that, when the plague visited Lausanne,[13] many had been suffered to
die without confession and the Sacrament. The priests could hardly plead in
excuse an excess of work, seeing they found time to gamble in the taverns, where
they seasoned their talk with oaths, or cursed some unlucky throw of the dice.
They revealed confessions, were adroit at the framing of testaments, and made
false entries in their own favor. They were the governors of the hospital, and
their management had resulted in a great impoverishment of its
revenues.
Unhappily, Lausanne was not an exceptional case. It exhibits
the picture of what Geneva and Neufchatel and other towns of the Swiss
Confederacy in those days were, although, we are glad to be able to say, not in
so aggravated a degree. Geneva, to which, when touched by the Reformed light,
there was to open a future so different, lay plunged at this moment in
disorders, under its bishop, Pierre de la Baume, and stood next to Lausanne in
the notoriety it had achieved by the degeneracy of its manners. But it is
needless to particularize. All round that noble lake which, with its smiling
banks and its magnificent mountain boundaries–here the Jura, there the White
Alps–forms so grand a feature of Switzerland, were villages and towns, from
which went out a cry not unlike that which ascended from the Cities of the Plain
in early days.
This is but a partial lifting of the veil. Even conceding
that these are extreme cases, still, what a terrible conclusion do they force
upon us as regards the moral state of Christendom! And when we think that these
polluting streams flowed from the sanctuary, and the instrumentality ordained by
God for the purification of society had become the main means of corrupting it,
we are taught that, in some respects, the world has more to fear from the
admixture of Christianity with error than the Church has. It was the world that
first brought this corruption into the Church; but see what a terrible
retaliation the Church now takes upon the world!
One does not wonder that
there is heard on every side, at this era, an infinite number of voices, lay and
cleric, calling for the Reformation of the Church. Yet the majority of those
from whom these demands came were but groping in the dark. But God never leaves
himself without a witness. A century before this, he had put before the world,
in the ministry of Wicliffe, plain, clear, and demonstrated, the one only plan
of a true Reformation. Putting his finger upon the page of the New Testament,
Wicliffe said: Here it is; here is what you seek. You must forget the past
thousand years; you must look at what is written on this page; you will find in
this Book the Pattern of the Reformation of the Church; and not the Pattern
only, but the Power by which that Reformation can alone be realised.
But
the age would not look at it. Men said, Can any good thing come out of this
Book? The Bible did well enough as the teacher of the Christians of the first
century; but its maxims are no longer applicable, its models are antiquated. We
of the fifteenth century require something more profound, and more suited to the
times. They turned their eyes to Popes, to emperors, to councils. These, alas!
were hills from which no help could come. And so for another century the call
for Reformation went on, gathering strength with every passing year, as did also
the corruption. The two went on by equal stages, the cry waxing ever the louder
and the corruption growing ever the stronger, till at length it was seen that
there was no help in man. Then He who is mighty came down to
deliver.
CHAPTER 4
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ZWINGLI'S BIRTH AND
SCHOOL-DAYS.
One Leader in Germany – Many in Switzerland – Valley of
Tockenburg – Village of Wildhaus – Zwingli's Birth – His Parentage – Swiss
Shepherds – Winter Evenings – Traditions of Swiss Valour – Zwingli Listens –
Sacred Traditions – Effect of Scenery in moulding Zwingli's Character – Sent to
School at Wesen – Outstrips his Teacher – Removed to Basle – Binzli – Zwingli
goes to Bern – Lupllus – The Dominicans – Zwingli narrowly escapes being a
Monk.
THERE is an apt resemblance between the physical
attributes of the land in which we are now arrived, and the eventful story of
its religious awakening. Its great snow-clad hills are the first to catch the
light of morning, and to announce the rising of the sun. They are seen burning
like torches, while the mists and shadows still cover the plains and valleys at
their feet. So of the moral dawn of the Swiss. Three hundred years ago, the
cities of this land were among the first in Europe to kindle in the radiance of
the Reformed faith, and to announce the new morning which was returning to the
world. There suddenly burst upon the darkness a multitude of lights. In Germany
there was but one pre-eminent center, and one pre-eminently great leader. Luther
towered up like some majestic Alp. Alone over all that land was seen his
colossal figure. But in Switzerland one, and another, and a third stood up, and
like Alpine peaks, catching the first rays, they shed a bright and pure
effulgence not only upon their own cities and cantons, but over all
Christendom.
In the south-east of Switzerland is the long and narrow
valley of the Tockenburg. It is bounded by lofty mountains, which divide it on
the north from the canton of Appenzell, and on the south from the Grisons. On
the east it opens toward the Tyrolese Alps. Its high level does not permit the
grain to ripen or the vine to be cultivated in it, but its rich pastures were
the attraction of shepherds, and in process of time the village of Wildhaus grew
up around its ancient church. In this valley, in a cottage which is still to be
seen [1] standing about a mile from
the church, on a green meadow, its walls formed of the stems of trees, its roof
weighed down with stones to protect it from the mountain gusts, with a limpid
stream flowing before it, there lived three hundred years ago a man named
Huldric Zwingli, bailiff of the parish. He had eight sons, the third of whom was
born on New Year's day, 1584, seven weeks after the birth of Luther, and was
named Ulric.[2]
The man was greatly
respected by his neighbors for his upright character as well as for his office.
He was a shepherd, and his summers were passed on the mountains, in company with
his sons, who aided him in tending his flocks. When the green of spring
brightened the vales, the herds were brought forth and driven to pasture. Day by
day, as the verdure mounted higher on the mountain's side, the shepherds with
their flocks continued to ascend. Midsummer found them at their highest
elevation, their herds browsing on the skirts of the eternal snows, where the
melting ice and the vigorous sun of July nourished a luxuriant herbage. When the
lengthening nights and the fading pasturage told them that summer had begun to
decline, they descended by the same stages as they had mounted, arriving at
their dwellings in the valley about the time of the autumnal equinox. In
Switzerland so long as winter holds its reign on the mountain-tops, and darkens
the valleys with mists and tempests, no labor can be done out of doors,
especially in high-lying localities like the Tockenburg. Then the peasants
assemble by turns in each other's houses, lit at night by a blazing fire of
fir-wood or the gleam of candle. Gathering round the hearth, they beguile the
long evenings with songs and musical instruments, or stories of olden days. They
will tell of some adventurous exploit, when the shepherd climbed the precipice,
or braved the tempest, to rescue some member of the fold which had strayed from
its companions. Or they will narrate some yet braver deed done on the
battlefield where their fathers were wont to meet the spearmen of Austria, or
the steel-clad warriors of Gaul. Thus would they make the hours pass swiftly
by.
The house of the Amman of Wildhaus, Huldric Zwingli, was a frequent
resort of his neighbors in the winter evenings. Round his hearth would assemble
the elders of the village, and each brought his tale of chivalry borrowed from
ancient Swiss ballad or story, or mayhap handed down by tradition. While the
elders spoke, the young listened with coursing pulse and flashing eyes. They
told of the brave men their mountains had produced of old; of the feats of valor
which had been done upon their soil; and how their own valley of the Tockenburg
had sent forth heroes who had helped to roll back from their hills the hosts of
Charles the Bold. The battles of their fathers were fought over again in the
simple yet graphic narratives of the sons. The listeners saw these deeds enacted
before them. They beheld the fierce foreign phalanxes gathering round their
mountains. They saw their sires mustering in city and on mountain, they saw them
hurrying through narrow gorge, and shady pine-forest, and across their lakes, to
repel the invader; they heard the shock of the encounter, the clash of battle,
the shout of victory, and saw the confusion and terrors of the rout. Thus the
spirit of Swiss valor was kept alive; bold sire was succeeded by son as bold;
and the Alps, as they kindled their fires morning by morning, beheld one
generation of patriots and warriors rise up after another at their
feet.
In the circle of listeners round his father's hearth in the winter
evenings was the young Ulric Zwingli. He was thrilled by these tales of the
deeds of ancient valor, some of them done in the very valley where he heard them
rehearsed. His country's history, not in printed page, but in tragic action,
passed before him. He could see the forms of its heroes moving grandly along.
They had fought, and bled, centuries ago; their ashes had long since mingled
with the dust of the vale, or been borne away by the mountain torrent; but to
him they were still living. They never could die. If that soil which spring
brightened with its flowers, and autumn so richly covered with its fruits, was
free–if yonder snows, which kindled so grandly on the mountain's brow, owned no
foreigul lord, it was to these men that this was owing. This glorious land
inhabited by freemen was their eternal monument. Every object in it was to him
associated with their names, and recalled them to his memory. To be worthy of
his great ancestors, to write his name alongside theirs, and have his exploits
similarly handed down from father to son, became henceforward his highest
ambition. This brave, lofty, liberty-loving nature, which strengthened from year
to year, was a fit stock on which to graft the love of a yet higher liberty, and
the detestation of a yet baser tyranny than any which their fathers had repelled
with the scorn of freemen when they routed the phalanxes of the Hapsburg, or the
legionaries of France.
And betimes this liberty began to be disclosed to
him. His grandmother was a pious woman. She would call the young Ulric to her,
and making him sit beside her, would introduce him to heroes of a yet loftier
type, by reciting to him such portions of sacred history as she herself had
learned from the legends of the Church, and the lessons of the Breviary. She
would tell him, doubtless, of those grand patriarchal shepherds who fed their
flocks on the hills of Palestine of old, and how at times an August Being came
down and talked with them. She would tell him of those mighty men of valor from
the plough, the sheepfold, or the vineyard, who, when the warriors of Midian,
crossing the Jordan, darkened with their swarms the broad Esdraelon, or the
hordes of Philistia, from the plain by the sea-shore, climbed the hills of
Judah, drove back the invading hosts, and sent them with slaughter and terror to
their homes. She would take him to the cradle at Bethlehem, to the cross on
Calvary, to the garden on the morning of the third day, when the doors of the
sepulcher were seen to open, and a glorious form walked forth from the darkness
of the tomb. She would show him the first missionaries hurrying away with the
great news to the Gentile world, and would tell him how the idols of the nations
fell at the preaching of the Gospel. Thus day by day was the young Zwingli
trained for his great future task. Deep in his heart was laid the love of his
country, and next were implanted the rudiments of that faith which alone could
be the shield of his country's stable and lasting independence.
The grand
aspects of nature around him – the tempest's roar, the cataract's dash, the
mountain peaks–doubtless contributed their share to the forming of the future
Reformer. They helped to nurse that elevation of soul, that sublime awe of Him
who had "set fast the mountains," and that intrepidity of mind which
distinguished Zwingli in after-years. So thinks his biographer. "I have often
thought in my simplicity," says Oswald My-conius, [3] "that from these sublime
heights, which stretch up towards heaven, he has taken something heavenly and
sublime." "When the thunder rolls through the gorges of the mountains, and leaps
from crag to crag with crashing roar, then it is as if we heard anew the voice
of the Lord God proclaiming, 'I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou
perfect.' When in the dawn of morning the icy mountains glow in light divine, so
that a sea of fire seems to surround all their tops, it is as if 'the Lord God
of hosts treadeth upon the high places of the earth,' and as if the border of
his garment of light had transfigured the hills. It is then that with
reverential awe we feel as if the cry came to us also, 'Holy, holy, holy, is the
Lord God of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.' Here under the
magnificent impressions of a mountain world and its wonders, there awoke in the
breast of the young Zwingli the first awful sense of the grandeur and majesty of
God, which afterwards filled his whole soul, and armed him with intrepidity in
the great conflict with the powers of darkness. In the solitude of the
mountains, broken only by the bells of his pasturing flocks, the reflective boy
mused on the wisdom of God which reveals itself in all creatures. An echo of
this deep contemplation of nature, which occupied his harmless youth, we find in
a work which, in the ripeness of manhood, he composed on 'The Providence of
God.' [4] 'The earth,' says he, 'the
mother of all, shuts never ruthlessly her rich treasures within herself; she
heeds not the wounds made on her by spade and share. The dew, the rain, the
rivers moisten, restore, quicken within her that which had been brought to a
stand-still in growth by drought, and its after-thriving testifies wondrously of
the Divine power. The mountains, too, these awkward, rude, inert masses, that
give to the earth, as the bones to the flesh, solidity, form, and consistency,
that render impossible, or at least difficult, the passage from one place to
another, which, although heavier than the earth itself, are yet so far above it,
and never sink, do they not proclaim the imperishable might of Jehovah, and
speak forth the whole volume of his majesty?'"[5]
His father marked
with delight the amiable disposition, the truthful character, and the lively
genius of his son, and began to think that higher occupations awaited him than
tending focks on his native mountains. The new day of letters was breaking over
Europe. Some solitary rays had penetrated into the secluded valley of the
Tockenburg, and awakened aspirations in the bosom of its shepherds. The Bailiff
of Wildhaus, we may be sure, shared in the general impulse which was moving men
towards the new dawn.
His son Ulric was now in his eighth or ninth year.
It was necessary to provide him with better instruction than the valley of the
Tockenburg could supply. His uncle was Dean of Wesen, and his father resolved to
place him under his superintendence. Setting out one day on their way to Wesen,
the father and son climbed the green summits of the Ammon, and now from these
heights the young Ulric had his first view of the world lying around his native
valley of the Tockenburg. On the south rose the snowy crests of the Oberland. He
could ahnost look down into the valley of Glarus, which was to be his first
charge; more to the north were the wooded heights of Einsiedeln, and beyond them
the mountains which enclose the lovely waters of Zurich.
The Dean of
Wesen loved his brother's child as his own son. He sent him to the public school
of the place. The genius of the boy was quick, his capacity large, but the
stores of the teacher were slender. Soon he had communicated to his pupil all he
knew himself, and it became necessary to send Zwingli to another school. His
father and his uncle took counsel together, and selected that of
Basle.
Ulric now exchanged his grand mountains, with their white peaks,
for the carpet-like meadows, watered by the Rhine, and the gentle hills, with
their sprinkling of fir-trees, which encompass Basle. Basle was one of those
points on which the rising day was concentrating its rays, and whence they were
radiated over the countries around. It was the seat of a University. It had
numerous printing-presses, which were reproducing the master-pieces of the
classic age. It was beginning to be the resort of scholars; and when the young
student from the Tockenburg entered its gates and took up his residence within
it, he felt doubtless that he was breathing a new atmosphere.
The young
Zwingli was fortunate as regarded the master under whose care he was placed at
Basle. Gregory Binzli, the teacher in St. Theedore's School, was a man of mild
temper and warm heart, and in these respects very ulike the ordinary pedagogues
of the sixteenth century, who studied by a stiff demeanor, a severe countenance,
and the terrors of discipline to compel the obedience of their pupils, and
inspire them with the love of learning. In this case no spur was needed. The
pupil from the Tockenburg made rapid progress here as at Wesen. He shone
especially in the mimic debates which the youth of that day, in imitation of the
wordy tournaments of their elders, often engaged in, and laid the foundation of
that power in disputation which he afterwards wielded on a wider arena.[6]
Again the young
Zwingli, distancing his schoolmates, stood abreast of his teacher. It was clear
that another school must be found for the pupil of whom the question was not,
What is he able to learn but, Where shall we find one qualified to teach him.?[7]
The Bailiff of
Wildhaus and the Dean of Wesen once more took counsel touching the young
scholar, the precocity of whose genius had created for them this embarrassment.
The most distinguished school at that time in all Switzerland was that of Bern,
where Henry Woelflin, or Lupullus, taught, with great applause, the dead
languages. Thither it was resolved to send the boy. Bidding adieu for a time to
the banks of the Rhine, Zwingli re-crossed the Jura, and stood once more in
sight of those majestic snowy piles, which had been in a sort his companions
from his infancy. Morning and night he could gaze upon the pyramidal forms of
the Shrekhorn and the Eiger, on the tall peak of the Finster Aarhorn, on the
mighty Blumlis Alp, and overtopping them all, the Jungfrau, kindling into glory
at the sun's departure, and burning in light long after the rest had vanished in
darkness.
But it was the lessons of the school that engrossed him. His
teacher was accomplished beyond the measure of his day. He had traveled over
Italy and Greece, and had extended his tour as far as Syria and the Holy
Sepulchre. He had not merely feasted his eyes upon their scenery, he had
mastered the long-forgotten tongues of these celebrated countries. He had drunk
in the spirit of the Roman and Greek orators and poets, and the fervor of
ancient liberty and philosophy he communicated to his pupils along with the
literature in which they were contained. The genius of Zwingli expanded under so
sympathetic a master. Lupullus initiated him into the art of verse-making after
the ancient models. His poetic vein was developed, and his style now began to
assume that classic terseness and chastened glow which marked it in after-years.
Nor was his talent for music neglected.
But the very success of the young
scholar was like to have cut short his career, or fatally changed its direction.
With his faculties just opening into blossom, he was in danger of disappearing
in a convent. Luther at a not unsimilar stage of his career had buried himself
in the cell, and would never have been heard of more, had not a great storm
arisen in his soul and compelled him to leave it. If Zwingli shall bury himself
as Luther did, will he be rescued as Luther was? But how came he into this
danger?
In Bern, as everywhere else, the Dominicans and the Franciscans
were keen competitors, the one against the other, for public favor. Their claims
to patronage were mainly such as these–a showy church, a gaudy dress, an
attractive ceremonial; and if they could add to these a wonder-working image,
their triumph was almost secured. The Dominicans now thought that they saw a way
by which they would mortify their rivals the Franciscans. They had heard of the
scholar of Lupullus. He had a fine voice, he was quick-witted, and altogether
such a youth as would be a vast acquisition to their order. Could they only
enrol him in their ranks, it would do more than a fine altar-piece, or a new
ceremonial, to draw crowds to their chapel, and gifts to their treasury. They
invited him to take up his abode in their convent as a novitiate.[8]
Intelligence
reached the Amman of Wildhans of the snares which the Dominicans of Bern were
laying for his son. He had imagined a future for him in which, like his uncle
the dean, he would be seen discharging with dignity the offices of his Church;
but to wear a cowl, to become the mere decoy-duck of monks, to sink into a
pantomimic performer, was an idea that found no favor in the eyes of the
bailiff. He spoilt the scheme of the Dominicans, by sending his commands to his
son to return forthwith to his home in the Tockenburg. The Hand that led Luther
into the convent guided Zwingli past it.
CHAPTER 5
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ZWINGLI'S PROGRESS TOWARDS
EMANCIPATION.
Zwingli returns Home – Goes to Vienna – His Studies and
Associates – Returns to Wildhaus – Makes a Second Visit to Basle – His Love of
Music – The Scholastic Philosophy – Leo Juda – Wolfgang Capito – Ecolampadius –
Erasmus – Thomas Wittembach – Stars of the Dawn – Zwingli becomes Pastor of
Olarus – Studies and Labors among his Parishioners – Swiss drawn to Fight in
Italy – Zwingli's Visit to Italy – Its Lessons.
THE young Zwingli gave instant obedience to the
injunction that summoned him home; but he was no longer the same as when he
first left his father's house. He had not yet become a disciple of the Gospel,
but he had become a scholar. The solitudes of the Tockenburg had lost their
charm for him; neither could the society of its shepherds any longer content
him. He longed for more congenial fellowship.
Zwingli, by the advice of
his uncle, was next sent to Vienna, in Austria. He entered the high school of
that city, which had attained great celebrity under the Emperor Maximilian I.
Here he resumed those studies in the Roman classics which had been so suddenly
broken off in Bern, adding thereto a beginning in philosophy. He was not the
only Swiss youth now living in the capital and studying in the schools of the
ancient enemy of his country's independence. Joachim Vadian, the son of a rich
merchant of St. Gall; Henry Loreti, commonly known as Glarean, a peasant's son,
from Mollis; and a Suabian youth, John Heigerlin, the son of a blacksmith, and
hence called Faber, were at this time in Vienna, and were Zwingli's companions
in his studies and in his amusements. All three gave promise of future eminence;
and all three attained it; but no one of the three rendered anything like the
same service to the world, or achieved the same lasting fame, as the fourth, the
shepherd's son from the Tockenburg. After a sojourn of two years at Vienna,
Zwingli returned once more (1502) to his home at Wildhaus.
But his native
valley could not long retain him. The oftener he quaffed the cup of learning,
the more he thirsted to drink thereof. Being now in his eighteenth year, he
repaired a second time to Basle, in the hope of turning to use, in that city of
scholars, the knowledge he had acquired. He taught in the School of St.
Martin's, and studied at the University. Here he received the degree of Master
of Arts. This title he accepted more from deference to others than from any
value which he himself put upon it. At no period did he make use of it, being
wont to say, "One is our Master, even Christ."[1]
Frank and open and
joyous, he drew around him a large circle of friends, among whom was Capito, and
Leo Juda, who afterwards became his colleague. His intellectual powers were
daily expanding. But all was not toil with him; taking his lute or his horn, he
would regale himself and his companions with the airs of his native mountains;
or he would sally out along the banks of the Rhine, or climb the hills of the
Black Forest on the other side of that stream.
To diversify his labors,
Zwingli turned to the scholastic philosophy. Writing of him at this period,
Myconius says: "He studied philosophy here with more exactness than ever, and
pursued into all their refinements the idle, hair-splitting sophistries of the
schoolman, with no other intention than that, if ever he should come to close
quarters with him, he might know his enemy, and beat him with his own
weapons."[2] As one who quits a smiling
and fertile field, and crosses the boundary of a gloomy wilderness, where
nothing grows that is good for food or pleasant to the eye, so did Zwingli feel
when he entered this domain. The scholastic philosophy had received the
reverence of ages; the great intellects of the preceding centuries had extolled
it as the sum of all wisdom. Zwingli found in it only barrenness and confusion;
the further he penetrated into it the more waste it became. He turned away, and
came back with a keener relish to the study of the classics. There he breathed a
freer air, and there he found a wider horizon around him.
Between the
years 1512 and 1516 there chanced to settle in Switzerland a number of men of
great and varied gifts, all of whom became afterwards distinguished in the great
movement of Reform.
Let us rapidly recount their names. It was not of
chance surely that so many lights shone out all at once in the sky of the Swiss.
Leo Juda comes first: he was the son of a priest of Alsace. His diminutive
stature and sickly face hid a richly replenished intellect, and a bold and
intrepid spirit. The most loved of all the friends of Zwingli, he shared his two
master-passions, the love of truth and the love of music. When the hours of
labor were fulfilled, the two regaled themselves with song. Leo had a treble
voice, and struck the tymbal; to the trained skill and powerful voice of Ulric
all instruments and all parts came alike. Between them there was formed a
covenant of friendship that lasted till death. The hour soon came that parted
them, for Leo Juda was the senior of Zwingli, and quitted Basle to become priest
at St. Pilt in Alsace. But we shall see them re-united ere long, and fighting
side by side, with ripened powers, and weapons taken from the armoury of the
Divine Word, in the great battle of the Reformation.
Another of those
remarkable men who, from various countries, were now directing their steps to
Switzerland, was Wolfgang Capito. He was born at Haguenau in Germany in 1478,
and had taken his degree in the three faculties of theology, medicine, and law.
In 1512 he was invited to become cure of the cathedral church of Basle.
Accepting this charge he set to studying the Epistle to the Romans, in order to
expound it to his hearers, and while so engaged his own eyes opened to the
errors of the Roman Church. By the end of 1517 so matured had his views become
that he found he no longer could say mass, and forbore the practice.[3]
John Hausschein,
or, in its Greek form, Ecolampadius–both of which signify "light of the
house"–was born in 1482, at Weinsberg, in Franconia. His family, originally from
Basle, was wealthy. So rapid was his progress in the belles lettres, that at the
age of twelve he composed verses which were admired for their elegance and fire.
He went abroad to study jurisprudence at the Universities of Bologna and
Heidelberg. At the latter place he so recommended himself by his exemplary
conduct and his proficiency in study, that he was appointed preceptor to the son
of the Elector Palatine Philip. In 1514 he preached in his own country. His
performance elicited an applause from the learned, which he thought it little
merited, for he says of it that it was nothing else than a medley of
superstition. Feeling that his doctrine was not true, he resolved to study the
Greek and Hebrew languages, that he might be able to read the Scriptures in the
original. With this view he repaired to Stuttgart, to profit by the instructions
of the celebrated scholar Reuchlin, or Capnion. In the year following (1515)
Capito, who was bound to Ecolampadius in the ties of all intimate friendship,
had made Christopher of Uttenheim, Bishop of Basle, acquainted with his merits,
and that prelate addressed to him an invitation to become preacher in that
city,[4] where we shall afterwards
meet him.
About the same time the celebrated Erasmus came to Basle, drawn
thither by the fame of its printing-presses. He had translated, with simplicity
and elegance, the New Testament into Latin from the original Greek, and he
issued it from this city, accompanied with clear and judicious notes, and a
dedication to Pope Leo X. To Leo the dedication was appropriate as a member of a
house which had given many munificent patrons to letters, and no less
appropriate ought it to have been to him as head of the Church. The epistle
dedicatory is dated Basle, February 1st, 1516. Erasmus enjoyed the aid of
Ecolampadius in this labor, and the great scholar acknowledges, in his preface
to the paraphrase, with much laudation, his obligations to the theologian.[5]
We name yet another
in this galaxy of lights which was rising over the darkness of this land, and of
Christendom as well. Though we mentionhim last, he was the first to arrive.
Thomas Wittembach was a native of Bienne, in Switzerland. He studied at
Tubingen, and had delivered lectures in its high school. In 1505 he came to that
city on the banks of the Rhine, around which its scholars, and its printers
scarcely less, were shedding such a halo. It was at the feet of Wittembach that
Ulric Zwingli, on his second visit to Basle, found Leo Juda. The student from
the Tockenburg sat him down at the feet of the same teacher, and no small
influence was Wittembach destined to exert over him. Wittembach was a disciple
of Reuchlin, the famous Hebraist. Basle had already opened its gates to the
learning of Greece and Rome, but Wittembach brought thither a yet higher wisdom.
Skilled in the sacred tongues, he had drunk at the fountains of Divine knowledge
to which these tongues admitted him. There was an older doctrine, he affirmed,
than that which Thomas Aquinas had propounded to the men of the Middle Ages–an
older doctrine even than that which Aristotle had taught to the men of Greece.
The Church had wandered from that old doctrine, but the time was near when men
would come back to it. That doctrine in a single sentence was that "the death of
Christ is the only ransom for our souls."[6] When these words were
uttered, the first seed of a new life had been cast into the heart of
Zwingli.
To pause a moment: the names we have recited were the stars of
morning. Verily, to the eyes of men that for a thousand years had dwelt in
darkness, it was a pleasant thing to behold their light. With literal truth may
we apply the words of the great poet to them, and call their effulgence "holy:
the offspring of heaven first-born." Greater luminaries were about to come
forth, and fill with their splendor that firmanent where these early harbingers
of day were shedding their lovely and welcome rays. But never shall these first
pure lights be forgotten or blotted out. Many names, which war has invested with
a terrible splendor, and which now attract the universal gaze, grow gradually
dim, and at last will vanish altogether. But history will trim these "holy
lights" from century to century, and keep them burning throughout the ages; and
be the world's day ever so long and ever so bright, the stars that ushered in
its dawn will never cease to shine.
We have seen the seed dropped into
the heart of Zwingli; the door now opened by which he was ushered into the field
in which his great labors were to be performed. At this juncture the pastor of
Glarus died. The Pope appointed his equerry, Henri Goldli, to the vacant
office;[7] for the paltry post on the
other side of the Alps must be utilised. Had it been a groom for their horses,
the shepherds of Glarus would most thankfully have accepted the Pope's nominee;
but what they wanted was a teacher for themselves and their children, and having
heard of the repute of the son of the Bailiff of Wildhaus, their neighbor, they
sent back the equerry to his duties in the Pontifical stables, and invited Ulric
Zwingli to become their pastor. He accepted the invitation, was ordained at
Constance, and in 1506, being then in his twenty-second year, he arrived at
Glarus to begin his work. His parish embraced nearly a third of the
canton.
"He became a priest," says Myconius, "and devoted himself with
his whole soul to the search after Divine truth, for he was well aware how much
he must know to whom the flock of Christ is entrusted." As yet, however, he was
a more ardent student of the ancient classics than of the Holy Scriptures. He
read Demosthenes and Cicero, that he might acquire the art of oratory. He was
especially ambitious of wielding the mighty power of eloquence. He knew what it
had accomplished in the cities of Greece, that it had roused them to resist the
tyrant, and assert their liberties: might it not achieve effects as great, and
not less needed, in the valleys of Switzerland? Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and the
other great writers of Rome, he was perfectly familiar with. Seneca he called a
"holy man." The beautiful genius, the elevation of soul, and the love of country
which distinguished some of the great men of heathendom, he attributed to the
influence of the Holy Ghost. God, he affirmed, did not confine his influence
within the limits of Palestine, he covered therewith the world. "If the two
Catos," said he, "Scipio and Camillus, had not been truly religious, could they
have been so high-minded?"[8]
He founded a Latin
school in Glarus, and took the conduct of it into his own hands. He gathered
into it the youth of all the best families in his extensive parish, and so
gained them to the cause of letters and of noble aims. As soon as his pupils
were ripe, he sent them either to Vienna, in the University of which Vadian, the
friend of his youth, had risen to the rank of rector, or to Basle, where
Glarean, another of his friends, had opened a seminary for young men. A gross
licentiousness of manners, united with a fiery martial spirit, acquired in the
Burgundian and Suabian wars, had distinguished the inhabitants of Glarus before
his arrival amongst them. An unwonted refinement of manners now began to
characterise them, and many eyes were turned to that new light which had so
suddenly broken forth in this obscure valley amid the Alps.
There came a
pause in his classical studies and his pastoral work. The Pope of the day,
Julius II., was warring with the King of France, Louis XII., and the Swiss were
crossing the Alps to fight for "the Church." The men of Glarus, with their
cardinal-bishop, in casque and coat of mail, at their head, obeying a new
summons from the warlike Pontiff, marched in mass to encounter the French on the
plains of Italy. Their young priest, Ulric Zwingli, was compelled to accompany
them. Few of these men ever returned: those who did, brought back with them the
vices they had learned in Italy, to spread idleness, profligacy, and beggary
over their native land. Switzerland was descending into an abyss. Ulric's eyes
began to be opened to the cause which was entailing such manifold miseries upon
his country. He began to look more closely at the Papal system, and to think how
he could avert the ruin which, mainly through the intrigues of Rome, appeared to
impend over Swiss independence and Swiss morals. He resumed his studies. A
solitary ray of light had found its way in the manner we have already shown into
his mind. It had appeared sweeter than all the wisdom which he had acquired by
the laborious study of the ancients, whether the classic writers, whom he
enthusiastically admired, or the scholastic divines, whom he held but in small
esteem. On his return from the scenes of dissipation and carnage which had met
his gaze on the south of the Alps, he resumed the study of Greek, that he might
have free access to the Divine source whence he knew that solitary ray had
come.
This was a moment big with the fate of Zwingli, of his native
Switzerland, and in no inconsiderable degree of the Church of God. The young
priest of Glarus now placed himself in presence of the Word of God. If he shall
submit his understanding and open his heart to its influence, all will be well;
but if, offended by its doctrines, so humbling to the pride of the intellect,
and so distasteful to the unrenewed heart, he shall turn away, his condition
will be hopeless indeed. He has bowed before Aristotle: will he bow before a
Greater speaking in this Word?
CHAPTER 6
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ZWINGLI IN PRESENCE
OF THE BIBLE.
Zwingli's profound Submission to Scripture – The Bible
his First Authority – This a Wider Principle than Luther's – His Second Canon –
The Spirit the Great Interpreter – His use of the Fathers – Light – The Swiss
Reform presents a New Type of Protestantism – German Protestantism Dogmatic –
Swiss Protestantism Normal – Duality in the False Religion of Christendom – Met
by the Duality of Protestantism – Place of Reason and of
Scripture.
THE point in which Zwingli is greatest, and in which
he is second to none among the Reformers, is this, even his profound deference
to the Word of God. There had appeared no one since our own Wicliffe who had so
profoundly submitted himself to its teaching. When he came to the Bible, he came
to it as a Revelation from God, in the full consciousness of all that such an
admission implies, and prepared to follow it out to all its practical
consequences. He accepted the Bible as a first authority, an infallible rule, in
contradistinction to the Church or tradition, on the one hand, and to
subjectivism or spiritualism on the other. This was the great and distinguishing
principle of Zwingli, and of the Reformation which he founded–THE SOLE AND
INFALLIBLE AUTHORITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. It is a prior and deeper principle than
that of Luther. It is before it in logical sequence, and it is more
comprehensive in its range; for even Luther's article of a standing or a falling
Church, "justification by faith alone," must itself be tried by Zwingli's
principle, and must stand or fall according as it agrees therewith. Is the free
justification of sinners part of God's Revelation? That question we must first
decide, before admitting the doctrine itself. The sole infallible authority of
the Bible is therefore the first of all theological principles, being the basis
on which all the others stand.
This was Zwingli's first canon: what was
his second? Having adopted a Divine rule, he adopted also a Divine Interpreter.
He felt that it would be of but little use that God should speak if man were
authoritatively to interpret. He believed in the Bible's self-evidencing power,
that its true meaning was to be known by its own light. He used every help to
ascertain its sense fully and correctly: he studied the languages in which it
was originally given; he read the commentaries of learned and pious men; but he
did not admit that any man, or body of men, had a peculiar and exclusive power
of perceiving the sense of Scripture, and of authoritatively declaring it. The
Spirit who inspired it would, he asserted, reveal it to every earnest and
prayerful reader of it.
This was the starting-point of Ulric Zwingli.
"The Scriptures," said he, "come from God, not from man, and even that God who
enlightens will give thee to understand that the speech comes from God. The Word
of God. .. cannot fail; it is bright, it teaches itself, it discloses itself, it
illumines the soul with all salvation and grace, comforts it in God, humbles it,
so that it loses and even forfeits itself, and embraces God in itself." [1]
These effects of
the Bible, Zwingli had himself experienced in his own soul. He had been an
enthusiastic student of the wisdom of the ancients: he had pored over the pages
of the scholastic divines; but not till he came to the Holy Scriptures, did he
find a knowledge that could solve his doubts and stay his heart. "When seven or
eight years ago," we find him writing in 1522, "I began to give myself wholly up
to the Holy Scriptures, philosophy and theology (scholastic) would always keep
suggesting quarrels to me. At last I came to this, that I thought, 'Thou must
let all that lie, and learn the meaning of God purely out of his own simple
Word.' Then I began to ask God for his light, and the Scriptures began to be
much easier to me, although I am but lazy."[2]
Thus was Zwingli
taught of the Bible. The ancient doctors and Fathers of the Church he did not
despise, although he had not yet begun to study them. Of Luther he had not even
heard the name. Calvin was then a boy about to enter school. From neither
Wittemberg nor Geneva could it be said that the light shone upon the pastor of
Glarus, for these cities themselves were still covered with the night. The day
broke upon him direct from heaven. It shone in no sudden burst; it opened in a
gradual dawn; it continued from one studious year to another to grow. At last it
attained its noon; and then no one of the great minds of the sixteenth century
excelled the Reformer of Switzerland in the simplicity, harmony, and clearness
of his knowledge.[3]
In Ulric Zwingli
and the Swiss Reformation we are presented with a new type of Protestantism–a
type different from that which we have already seen at Wittemberg. The
Reformation was one in all the countries to which it extended; it was one in
what it accepted, as well as in what it rejected; but it had, as its dominating
and molding principle, one doctrine in Germany, another in Switzerland, and
hence it came to pass that its outward type or aspect was two-fold. We may say
it was dogmatic in the one country, normal in the other.
This duality was
rendered inevitable by the state of the world. In the Christendom of that day
there were two great currents of thought–there was the superstitious or
self-righteous current, and there was the scholastic or rationalistic current.
Thus the error which the Reformation sought to withstand wore a two-fold type,
though at bottom one, for the superstitious element is as really human as the
rationalistic. Both had been elaborated into a scheme by which man might save
himself. On the side of self-righteousness man was presented with a system of
meritorious services, penances, payments, and indulgences by which he might
atone for sin, and earn Paradise. On the scholastic side he was presented with a
system of rules and laws, by which he might discover all truth, become
spiritually illuminated, and make himself worthy of the Divine favor. These were
the two great streams into which the mighty flood of human corruption had parted
itself.
Luther began his Reformation in the way of declaring war against
the self-righteous principle: Zwingli, on the other hand, began his by throwing
down the gage of battle to the scholastic divinity.
Luther's hygemonic or
dominating principle was justification by faith alone, by which he overthrew the
monkish fabric of human merit. Zwingli's dominating principle was the sole
authority of the Word of God, by which he dethroned reason from the supremacy
which the schoolmen had assigned her, and brought back the understanding and the
conscience to Divine revelation. This appears to us the grand distinction
between the German and the Swiss Reformation. It is a distinction not in
substance or in nature, but in form, and grew out of the state of opinion in
Christendom at the time, and the circumstance that the prevailing superstition
took the monkish form mainly, though not exclusively, in the one half of Europe,
and the scholastic form in the other. The type impressed on each–on the German
and on the Swiss Reformation–at this initial stage, each has continued to wear
more or less all along.
Nor did Zwingli think that he was dishonoring
reason by assigning it its true place and office as respects revelation. If we
accept a revelation at all, reason says we must accept it wholly. To say that we
shall accept the Bible's help only where we do not need its guidance; that we
shall listen to its teachings in those things that we already know, or might
have known, had we been at pains to search them out; but that it must be silent
on all those mysteries which our reason has not and could not have revealed to
us, and which, now that they are revealed, reason cannot fully explain – to act
thus is to make reason despicable under pretense of honoring it. For surely it
is not reasonable to suppose that God would have made a special communication to
us, if he had had nothing to disclose save what we already knew, or might have
known by the exercise of the faculties he has given us. Reason bids us expect,
in a Divine revelation, announcements not indeed contradictory to reason, but
above reason; and if we reject the Bible because it contains such announcements,
or reject those portions of it in which these announcements are put forth, we
act irrationally. We put dishonor upon our reason. We make that a proof of the
Bible's falsehood which is one of the strongest proofs of its truth. The Bible
the first authority, was the fundamental principle of Zwingli's
Reformation.
CHAPTER 7
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EINSIEDELN AND
ZURICH.
Visit to Erasmus – The Swiss Fight for the Pope – Zwingli
Accompanies them – Marignano – Its Lessons – Zwlngle invited to Einsiedeln – Its
Site – Its Administrator and Abbot – Its Image – Pilgrims – Annual Festival –
Zwingli's Sermon – A Stronghold of Darkness converted into a Beacon of Light –
Zwingli called to Zurich – The Town and Lake – Zwingli's First Appearance in its
Pulpit – His Two Grand Principles – Effects of his Preaching – His Pulpit a
Fountain of National Regeneration.
Two journeys which Zwingli made at this time had a
marked effect upon him. The one was to Basle, where Erasmus was now living. His
visit to the prince of scholars gave him equal pleasure and profit. He returned
from Basle, his enthusiasm deepened in the study of the sacred tongues, and his
thirst whetted for a yet greater acquaintance with the knowledge which these
tongues contained.
The other journey was of another character, as well as
in another direction. Louis XlI. of France was now dead; Julius II. of Rome had
also gone to his account; but the war which these two potentates had waged with
each other remained as a legacy to their successors. Francis I. took up the
quarrel–rushed into Italy–and the Pope, Leo X., summoned the Swiss to fight for
the Church, now threatened by the French. Inflamed by the eloquence of their
warlike cardinal, Matthew Schinner, Bishop of Sion, even more than drawn by the
gold of Rome, the brave mountaineers hastened across the Alps to defend the
"Holy Father." The pastor of Glarus went with them to Italy, where one day he
might be seen haranguing the phalanxes of his countrymen, and allother day,
sword in hand, fighting side by side with them on the battle-field–a blending of
spiritual and military functions less repulsive to the ideas of that age than to
those of the present. But in vain the Swiss poured out their blood. The great
victory which the French achieved at Marignano inspired terror in the Vatican,
filled the valleys of the Swiss with widows and orphans, and won for the
youthful monarch of France a renown in arms which he was destined to lose, as
suddenly as he had gained it, on the fatal field of Pavia.
But if
Switzerland had cause long to remember the battle of Marignano, in which so many
of her sons had fallen, the calamity was converted at a future day into a
blessing to her. Ulric Zwingli had thoughts suggested to him during his visit to
Italy which bore fruit on his return. The virtues that flourished at Rome, he
perceived, were ambition and avarice, pride and luxury. These were not, he
thought, by any means so precious as to need to be nourished by the blood of the
Swiss. What a folly! what a crime to drag the flower of the youth of Switzerland
across the Alps, and slaughter them in a cause like this! He resolved to do his
utmost to stop this effusion of his countrymen's blood. He felt, more than ever,
how necessary was a Reformation, and he began more diligently than before to
instruct his parishioners in the doctrines of Holy Scripture.
He was thus
occupied, searching the Bible, and communicating what, from time to time, he
discovered in it to his parishioners, when he was invited (1516) to be preacher
in the Convent of Einsiedeln. Theobald, Baron of Gherolds-Eck, was administrator
of this abbey, and lord of the place. He was a lover of the sciences and of
learned men, and above all of those who to a knowledge of science joined piety.
From him came the call now addressed to the pastor of Glarus, drawn forth by the
report which the baron had received of the zeal and ability of Zwingli.[1] Its abbot was Conrad de
Rechenberg, a gentleman of rank, who discountenanced the superstitious usages of
his Church, and in his heart had no great affection for the mass, and in fact
had dropped the celebration of it. One day, as some visitors were urging him to
say mass, he replied, "If Jesus Christ is veritably in the Host, I am not worthy
to offer Him in sacrifice to the Father; and if He be not in the Host, I should
be more unhappy still, for I should make the people adore bread in place of
God."[2]
Ought he to leave
Glarus, and bury himself on a solitary mountain-top? This was the question
Zwingli put to himself. He might, he thought, as well go to his grave at once;
and yet, if he accepted the call, it was no tomb in which he would be shutting
himself up. It was a famed resort of pilgrims, in which he might hope to
prosecute with advantage the great work of enlightening his countrymen. He
therefore decided to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered for carrying
on his mission in a new and important field.
The Convent of Einsiedeln
was situated on a little hill between the Lakes of Zurich and Wallenstadt. Its
renown was inferior only to that of the far-famed shrine of Loretto. "It was the
most famous," says Gerdesius, "in all Switzerland and Upper Germany."[3] An inscription over the
portal announced that "Plenary Indulgences" were to be obtained within; and
moreover–and this was its chief attraction–it boasted an image of the Virgin
which had the alleged power of working miracles. Occasional parties of pilgrims
would visit Einsiedeln at all seasons, but when the great annual festival of its
"Consecration" came round, thousands would flock from all parts of Switzerland,
and from places still more remote, from France and Germany, to this famous
shrine. On these occasions the valley at the foot of the mountain became
populous as a city; and all day long files of pilgrims might be seen climbing
the mountain, carrying in the one hand tapers to burn in honor of "Our Lady of
Einsiedeln," and in the other money to buy the pardons which were sold at her
shrine. Zwingli was deeply moved by the sight. He stood up before that great
multitude–that congregation gathered from so many of the countries of
Christendom–and boldly proclaimed that they had come this long journey in vain;
that they were no nearer the God who hears prayer on this mountain-top than in
the valley; that they were on no holier ground in the precincts of the Chapel of
Einsiedeln than in their own closets; that they were spending "their money for
that which is not bread, and their labor for that which satisfieth not," and
that it was not a pilgrim's gown but a contrite heart which was pleasing to God.
Nor did Zwingli content himself with simply reproving the grovelling
superstition and profitless rites which the multitudes whom this great festival
had brought to Einsiedeln substituted for love to God and a holy life. He
preached to them the Gospel. He had pity on the many who came really seeking
rest to their souls. He spoke to them of Christ and Him crucified. He told them
that He was the one and only Savior; that His death had made a complete
satisfaction for the sins of men; that the efficacy of His sacrifice lasts
through all ages, and is available for all nations; and that there was no need
to climb this mountain to obtain forgiveness; that the Gospel offers to all,
through Christ, pardon without money and without price. This "good news" it was
worth coming from the ends of the earth to hear.[4] Yet there were those among
this crowd of pilgrims who were not able to receive it as "good news." They had
made a long journey, and it was not pleasant to be told at the end of it that
they might have spared their pains and remained at home. It seemed, moreover,
too cheap a pardon to be worth having. They would rather travel the old road to
Paradise by penances, and fasts, and alms-deeds, and the absolutions of the
Church, than trust their salvation to a security so doubtful. To these men
Zwingli's doctrine seemed like a blasphemy of theVirgin in her own
chapel.
But there were others to whom the preacher's words were as "cold
water" to one athirst. They had made trial of these self-righteous performances,
and found their utter inefficacy. Had they not kept fast and vigil till they
were worn to a skeleton? Had they not scourged themselves till the blood flowed?
But peace they had not found: the sting of an accusing conscience was not yet
plucked out. They were thus prepared to welcome the words of Zwingli. A Divine
influence seemed to accompany these words in the case of many. They disclosed,
it was felt, the only way by which they could ever hope to obtain eternal life,
and returning to their homes they published abroad the strange but welcome
tidings they had heard. Thus it came to pass that this, the chief stronghold of
darkness in all Switzerland, was suddenly converted into a center of the
Reformed light. "A trumpet had been blown," and a "standard lifted up" upon the
tops of the mountains.[5]
Zwingli continued
his course. The well-worn pilgrim-track began to be disused, the shrine to which
it led forsaken; and as the devotees diminished, so too did the revenues of the
priest of Einsiedeln. But so far from being grieved at the loss of his
livelihood, it rejoiced Zwingli to think that his work was prospering. The Papal
authorities offered him no obstruction, although they could hardly shut their
eyes to what was going on. Rome needed the swords of the cantons. She knew the
influence which Zwingli wielded over his countrymen, and she thought by securing
him to secure them; but her favors and flatteries, bestowed through the
Cardinal-Bishop of Sion, and the Papal legate, were totally unavailing to turn
him from his path. He continued to prosecute his ministry, during the three
years of his abode at this place, with a marked degree of success. By this
course of discipline Zwingli was being gradually prepared for beginning the
Reformation of Switzerland. The post of Preacher in the College of Canons which
Charlemagne had established at Zurich became vacant at this time, and on the
11th of December, 1518, Zwingli was elected, by a majority of votes, to the
office.
The "foundation" on which Zwingli was now admitted was limited to
eighteen members. According to the terms of Charlemagne's deed they were "to
serve God with praise and prayer, to furnish the Christians in hill and valley
with the means of public worship, and finally to preside over the Cathedral
school," which, after the name of the founder, was called the Charles' School.
The Great Minster, like most other ecclesiastical institutions, quickly
degenerated, and ceased to fulfill the object for which it had been instituted.
Its canons, spending their time in idleness and amusement, in falconry and
hunting the boar, appointed a leut-priest with a small salary, supplemented by
the prospect of ultimate advancement to a canon-ship, to perform the functions
of public worship. This was the post that Zwingli was chosen to fill. At the
time of his election the Great Minster had twenty-four canons and thirty-six
chaplains. Felix Hammerlin, the precentor of this foundation, had said of it in
the first half of the fifteenth century: "A blacksmith can, from a number of old
horseshoes, pick out one and make it useable; but I know no smith who, out of
all these canons, could make one good canon."[6] We may be sure that there
were some of a different spirit among the canons at the time of Zwingli's
election, otherwise the chaplain of Einsiedeln would never have been chosen as
Preacher in the Cathedral of Zurich.
Zurich is pleasantly situated on the
shores of the lake of that name. This is a noble expanse of water, enclosed
within banks which swell gently upwards, clothed here with vineyards, there with
pine-forests, from amid which hamlets and white villas gleam out and enliven the
scene, while in the far-off horizon the glaciers are seen blending with the
golden clouds. On the right the region is walled in by the craggy rampart of the
Albis Alp, but the mountains stand back from the shore, and by permitting the
light to fall freely upon the bosom of the lake, and on the ample sweep of its
lovely and fertile banks, give a freshness and airiness to the prospect as seen
from the city, which strikingly contrasts with the neighboring Lake of Zug,
where the placid waters and the slumbering shore seem perpetually wrapped in the
shadows of the great mountains.
Zurich was at that time the chief town of
the Swiss Confederation. Every word spoken here had thus double power. If at
Einsiedeln Zwingli had boldly rebuked superstition, and faithfully preached the
Gospel, he was not likely to show either less intrepidity or less eloquence now
that he stood at the center of Helvetia, and spoke to all its cantons. He
appeared in the pulpit of the Cathedral of Zurich for the first time on the 1st
of January, 1519. It was a singular coincidence, too, that this was his
thirty-fifth birthday. He was of middle size, with piercing eyes, sharp-cut
features, and clear ringing voice. The crowd was great, for his fame had
preceded him. It was not so much his reputed eloquence which drew this multitude
around him, including so many who had long ceased to attend service, as the
dubious renown, as it was then considered, of preaching a new Gospel. He
commenced his ministry by opening the New Testament, and reading the first
chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew,[7] and he continued his
expositions of this Gospel on successive Sabbaths, till he had arrived at the
end of the book. The life, miracles, teaching, and passion of Christ were ably
and earnestly laid before his hearers.
The two leading principles of his
preaching at Zurich, as at Glarus and Einsiedeln, were–the Word of God the one
infallible authority, and the death of Christ the one complete satisfaction.
Making these his rallying-points, his address took a wide range, as suited his
own genius, or as was demanded by the condition of his hearers, and the perils
and duties of his country. Beneath him, crowding every bench, sat all ranks and
conditions–states-men, burgomasters, canons, priests, scholars, merchants, and
artisans. As the calm face of ocean reflects the sky which is hung above it, so
did the rows of upturned faces respond to the varied emotions which proceeded
from the cathedral pulpit of Zurich. Did the preacher, as was his delight,
enlarge, in simple, clear, yet earnest words– words whose elegance charmed the
learned, as they instructed the illiterate [8] –on a "free salvation,"
the audience bent forward and drank in every syllable. Not all, however; for
there were those among Zwingli's hearers, and some even who had promoted his
election, who saw that if this doctrine were generally received it would turn
the world upside down. Popes must doff their tiara, and renowned doctors and
monarchs of the schools must lay down their scepter.
The intrepid
preacher would change his theme; and, while the fire of his eye and the
sternness of his tones discovered the indignation of his spirit, he would
reprove the pride and luxury which were corrupting the simplicity of ancient
manners, and impairing the rigor of ancient virtue.
When there was more
piety at the hearth, there was more valor in the field. On glancing abroad, and
pointing to the tyranny that flourished on the south of the Alps, he would
denounce in yet more scathing tones that hypocritical ambition which, for its
own aggrandisement, was rending their country in pieces, dragging away its sons
to water foreign lands with their blood, and digging a grave for its morality
and its independence. Their sires had broken the yoke of Austria, it remained
for them to break the yet viler yoke of the Popes. Nor were these appeals
without effect. Zwingli's patriotism, kindled at the altar, and burning with
holy and vehement flame, set on fire the souls of his countrymen. The knitted
brows and flashing eyes of his audience showed that his words were telling, and
that he had awakened something of the heroic spirit which the fathers of the men
he was addressing had displayed on the memorable fields of Mortgarten and
Sempach.
It was seen flint a fountain of new life had been opened at the
heart of Switzerland. Zwingli had become the regenerator of the nation. Week by
week a new and fresh impulse was being propagated from the cathedral, throughout
not Zurich only, but all the cantons; and the ancient simplicity and bravery of
the Swiss, fast perishing under the wiles of Rome and the corrupting touch of
French goht, were beginning again to flourish. "Glory be to God!" men were heard
saying to one another, as they retired from the cathedral where they had
listened to Zwingli, says Bullinger, in his Chronicle, "this man is a preacher
of the truth. He will be our Moses to lead us forth from this Egyptian
darkness."
CHAPTER 8
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THE PARDON-MONGER AND THE
PLAGUE.
The Two Proclamations – Pardon for Money and Pardon of Grace
– Contemporaneous – The Cordelier Samson sent to Switzerland – Crosses St.
Gothard – Arrives in Uri – Visits Schwitz-Zug – Bern – A General Release from
Purgatory – Baden – "Ecce Volant!" – Zurich – Samson Denied Admission – Returns
to Rome – The Great Death – Ravages – Zwingli Stricken – At the Point of Death –
Hymn – Restored – Design of the Visitation.
IT is instructive to mark that at the very moment
when Rome was preparing for opening a great market in Christendom for the pardon
of sin, so many preachers should be rising up, one in this country and another
in that, and, without concert or pre-arrangement, beginning to publish the old
Gospel that offers pardon without money. The same year, we may say, 1517, saw
the commencement of both movements. In that year Rome gathered together her
hawkers, stamped her indulgence tickets, fixed the price of sins, and enlarged
her coffers for the streams of gold about to flow into them. Woe to the nations!
the great sorceress was preparing new enchantments; and the fetters that bound
her victims were about to be made stronger.
But unknown to Rome, at that
very hour, numbers of earnest students, dispersed throughout Christendom, were
poring over the page of Scripture, and sending up an earnest cry to God for
light to enable them to understand its meaning. That prayer was heard. There
fell from on high a bright light upon the page over which they bent in
study.Their eyes were opened; they saw it all–the cross, the all-perfect and
everlasting sacrifice for sin–and in their joy, unable to keep silence, they ran
to tell the perishing tribes of the earth that there was "born unto them a
Savior who is Christ the Lord."
"Certain historians have remarked," says
Ruchat,[1] "that this year, 1517,
there fell out a prodigy at Rome that seemed to menace the 'Holy Chair' with
some great disaster. As the Pope was engaged in the election of thirty-one new
cardinals, all suddenly there arose a horrible tempest. There came the loud
peals of the thunder and the lightning's terrific flash. One bolt struck the
angel on the top of the Castle of St. Angelo, and threw it down; another,
entering a church, shivered the statue of the infant Jesus in the arms of his
mother; and a third tore the keys from the hands of the statue of St. Peter."
Without, however, laying stress upon this, a surer sign that this chair, before
which the nations had so long bowed, was about to be stripped of its influence,
and the keys wrested from the hands of its occupant, is seen in the rise of so
many evangelists, filled with knowledge and intrepidity, to publish that Gospel
of which it had been foretold that, like the lightning, it should shine from the
east even unto the west.
We have already seen how contemporaneous in
Germany were the two great preachings–forgiveness for money, and forgiveness
through grace. They were nearly as contemporaneous in Switzerland.
The
sale of indulgences in Germany was given to the Dominicans; in Switzerland this
traffic was committed to the Franciscans. The Pope commissioned Cardinal
Christopher, of Forli, general of the order, as superintendent-in-chief of the
distribution in twenty-five provinces; and the cardinal assigned Switzerland to
the Cordelier Bernardin Samson, guardian of the convent at Milan.[2] Samson had already served
in the trade under two Popes, and with great advantage to those who had employed
him. He had transported across the mountains, it was said, from Germany and
Switzerland, chests filled with gold and silver vessels, besides what he had
gathered in coin, amounting in eighteen years to no less a sum than eight
hundred thousand dollars.[3] Such were the antecedents
of the man who now crossed the Swiss frontier on the errand of vending the
Pope's pardons, and returning with the price to those who had sent him, as he
thought, but in reality to kindle a fire amid the Alps, which would extend to
Rome, and do greater injury to the "Holy Chair" than the lightning which had
grazed it, and passed on to consume the keys in the hands of the statue of St.
Peter.
"He discharged his mission in Helvetia with not less'impudence,"
says Gerdesius, "than Tetzel in Germany."[4] Forcing his way (1518)
through the snows of the St. Gothard, and descending along the stream of the
Reuss, he and his band arrived in the canton of Uri.[5] A few days sufficing to
fleece these simple mountaineers, the greedy troop passed on to Schwitz, there
to open the sale of their merchandise. Zwingli, who was then at Einsiedeln,
heard of the monk's arrival and mission, and set out to confront him. The result
was that Samson was obliged to decamp, and from Schwitz went on to Zug. On the
shores of this lake, over whose still waters the lofty Rossberg and the Righi
Culm hang a continual veil of shadows, and Rome a yet deeper veil of
superstition and credulity, Samson set up his stage, and displayed his wares.
The little towns on the lake sent forth their population in such crowds as
almost to obstruct the sale, and Samson had to entreat that a way might be
opened for those who had money, promising to consider afterwards the case of
those who had none. Having finished at Zug, he traveled over the Oberland,
gathering the hard cash of the peasants and giving them the Pope's pardons in
return. The man and his associates got fat on the business; for whereas when
they crossed the St. Gothard, lank, haggard, and in rags, they looked like
bandits, they were now in flesh, and daintily apparelled. Directing his course
to Bern, Samson had some difficulty in finding admission for himself and his
wares into that lordly city. A little negotiation with friends inside, however,
opened its gates. He proceeded to the cathedral church, which was hung with
banners on which the arms of the Pope were blazoned in union with those of the
cantons, and there he said mass with great pomp. A crowd of spectators and
purchasers filled the cathedral. His bulls of indulgences were in two forms, the
one on parchment and the other on paper. The first were meant for the rich, and
were charged a dollar. The others were for the poor, and were sold at two batzen
apiece. He had yet a third set, for which he charged a much higher sum. A
gentleman of Orbe, named Arnay, gave 500 dollars for one of these.[6] A Bernese captain, Jacob
von Stein, bartered the dapple-grey mare which he bestrode for one of Samsoh's
indulgences. It was warranted good for himself, his troop of 500 men, and all
the vassals on the Seigniory of Belp [7] and may therefore be
reckoned cheap, although the animal was a splendid one. We must not pass without
notice a very meritorious act of the monk in this neighborhood. The small town
of Aarberg, three leagues from Bern, had, some years before, been much damaged
by fire and floods. The good people of the place were taught to believe that
these calamities had befallen them for the sin they had committed in insulting a
nuncio of the Pope. The nuncio, to punish the affront he had received at their
hands, and which reflected on the Church whose servant he was, had
excommunicated them, and cursed them, and threatened to bury their village seven
fathoms deep in the earth. They had recourse to Samson to lift off a malediction
which had already brought so many woes upon them, and the last and most dreadful
of which yet awaited them. The lords of Bern used their mediation for the poor
people.
The good monk was compassionate. He granted, but of course not
without a sum of money, a plenary indulgence, which removed the excommunication
of the nuncio, and permitted the inhabitants to sleep in peace. Whether it is
owing to Samson's indulgence we shall not say, but the fact is undeniable that
the little town of Aarberg is above ground to this day.[8] At Bern, so pleased was
the monk with his success, that he signalized his departure with a marvellous
feat of generosity. The bells were tolling his leave-taking, when Samson caused
it to be proclaimed that he "delivered from the torments of purgatory and of
hell all the souls of the Benrose who are dead, whatever may have been the
manner or the place of their death."[9] What sums it would have
saved the good people of Bern, had he made that announcement on the first day of
his visit! At Bern, Lupullus, formerly the schoolmaster, now canon, and whom we
have already met with as one of Zwingli's teachers, was Samson's
interpreter.
"When the wolf and the fox prowl about together," said one
of the canons to De Wattville, the provost, "your safest plan, my gracious lord,
is to shut up your sheep and your geese." These remarks, as they broke no bones,
and did not spoil his market, Samson bore with exemplary good
nature.
From Bern, Samson went on to Baden. The Bishop of Constance, in
whose diocese Baden was situated, had forbidden his clergy to admit the
indulgence-monger into their pulpits, not because he disapproved his trade, but
because Samson had not asked his permission before entering his diocese, or had
his commission countersigned by him. The Cure of Baden, however, had not courage
to shut the door of his pulpit in the face of the Pope's
commissioner.
After a brisk trade of some days, the monk proposed to
signalise his deparure by an act of grace, similar to that with which he had
closed his performances in Bern. After mass, he formed a procession, and putting
himself at its head, he marched round the churchyard, himself and troop chanting
the office for the dead. Suddenly he stopped, looked fixedly up into the sky,
and after a minute's pause, he shouted out, "Ecce volant! "– " See how they
fly!" These were the souls escaping through the open gates of purgatory and
winging their way to Paradise. It struck a wag who was present that he would
give a practical commentary on the flight of the souls to heaven. He climbed to
the top of the steeple, taking with him a bag of feathers, which he proceeded to
empty into the air. As the feathers were descending like snow-flakes on Samson
and his company, the man exclaimed, "Ecce Volant! "–" See how they fly!" The
monk burst into a rage. To have the grace of holy Church so impiously travestied
was past endurance. Such horrible profanation of the wholesome institution of
indulgences, he declared, destowed nothing less than burning. But the citizens
pacified him by saying that the man's wits were at times disordered. Be this as
it may, it had turned the laugh against Samson, who departed from Baden somewhat
crestfallen.[10]
Samson continued
his journey, and gradually approached Zurich. At every step he dispensed his
pardons, and yet his stock was no nearer being exhausted than when he crossed
the Alps. On the way he was told that Zwingli was thundering against him from
the pulpit of the cathedral. He went forward, notwithstanding. He would soon put
the preacher to silence. As he came nearer, Zwingli waxed the bolder and the
plainer. "God only can forgive," said the preacher, with a solemnity that awed
his hearers; "none on earth can pardon sin. You may buy this man's papers, but
be assured you are not absolved. He who sells indulgences is a sorcerer, like
Simon Magus; a false prophet, like Balaam; an ambassador of the king of the
bottomless pit, for to those dismal portals rather than to the gates of Paradise
do indulgences lead."
Samson reached Zurich to find its gates closed, and
the customary cup of wine–a hint that he was not expected to enter–waiting
him.[11] Feigning to be charged
with a special message from the Pope to the Diet, he was admitted into the city.
At his audience it was found that he had forgotten his message, for the
sufficient reason that he had never received any. IIe was ignominiously sent
away without having sold so much as a single pardon in Zurich. Soon thereafter
he re-crossed the Alps, dragging over their steeps a wagonful of coin, the
fruits of his robbery, and returned to his masters in Italy.[12]
He was not long
gone when another visitant appeared in Switzerland, sent of God to purify and
invigorate the movement–to scatter the good seed on the soil which Zwingli had
ploughed and broken up. That visitant was the plague or "Great Death." It broke
out in the August of that same year, 1519. As it spread from valley to valley,
inflicting frightful ravages, men felt what a mockery were the pardons which
thousands, a few months before, had flocked to purchase. It reached Zurich, and
Zwingli, who had gone to the baths of Pfaffers to recruit his health, exhausted
by the labors of the summer, hastened back to his flock. He was hourly by the
bedside of the sick or the dying.[13] On every side of him fell
friends, acquaintances, stricken down by the destroyer. He himself had hitherto
escaped his shafts, but now he too was attacked. He lay at the point of death.
Utterly prostrate, all hope of life was taken away. It was at this moment that
he penned his little hymn, so simple, yet not a little dramatic, and breathing a
resignation so entire, and a faith so firm–
Thus he examined, at that awful moment, the foundations of his faith; he lifted his eyes to the cross; he knew whom he had believed; and being now more firmly persuaded than ever of the Gospel's truth, having put it to the last awful test, he returned from the gates of the grave to preach it with even more spirituality and fervor than before. Tidings of his death had been circulated in Basle, in Lucerne – in short, all the cities of the Confederation. Everywhere men heard with dismay that the great preacher of Switzerland had gone to his grave. Their joy was great in proportion when they learned that Zwingli still lived.[14] Both the Reformer and the country had been chastened, purified, and prepared, the one for his mighty task, and the other for the glorious transformation that awaited it.
CHAPTER 9 Back to Top
EXTENSION OF THE REFORMATION TO BERN
AND OTHER SWISS TOWNS.
A Solemn Meeting – Zwingli Preaches with
greater Life – Human Merit and Gospel Virtue – The Gospel Annihilates the one,
Nourishes the other – Power of Love – Zwingli's Hearers Increase – His Labors –
Conversions – Extension of the Movement to other Swiss Towns – Basle – Lucerne –
Oswald Myconius – Labors in Lucerne – Opposition – Is Thrust out – Bern –
Establishment of the Reformation there.
WHEN Zwingli and the citizens of Zurich again
assembled in their cathedral, it was a peculiarly solemn moment for both. They
were just emerging from the shadow of the "Great Death." The preacher had risen
from a sick-bed which had nearly passed into a death-bed, and the audience had
come from waiting beside the couches on which they had seen their relations and
friends breathe their last. The Reformed doctrine seemed to have acquired a new
value. In the awful gloom through which they had just passed, when other lights
had gone utterly out, the Gospel had shone only the brighter. Zwingli spoke as
he had never spoken before, and his audience listened as they had listened on no
former occasion.
Zwingli now opened a deeper vein in his ministry. He
touched less frequently upon the evils of foreign service. Not that he was less
the patriot, but being now more the pastor, he perceived that a renovated
Christianity was not only the most powerful renovator of his country's morals,
but the surest palladium of its political interests. The fall and the recovery
of man were his chief themes. "In Adam we are all dead," would he say–"sunk in
corruption and condemnation." This was a somewhat inauspicious commencement of a
Gospel of "good news," for which, after the terrors incident to the scenes which
the Zurichers had witnessed, so many of them thirsted. But Zwingli went on to
proclaim a release from prison–an opening of the sepulcher. But dead men do not
open their own tombs. Christ was their life. He had become so by His passion,
which was "an eternal sacrifice, and everlastingly effectual to heal."[1] To Him must they come.
"His sacrifice satisfies Divine justice for ever in behalf of alI who rely upon
it with firm and unshaken faith." Are men then to live in sin? Are they to cease
to cultivate holiness? No. Zwingli went on to show that, although this doctrine
annihilates human merit, it does not annihilate evangelical virtue: that,
although no man is saved for his holiness, no man will be saved without
holiness: that as God bestows his salvation freely, so we give our obedience
freely: on the one side there is life by grace, and on the other works by
love.
And then, going still deeper down, Zwingli would disclose that
principle which is at once the strongest and the sweetest in all the Gospel
system. What is that principle? Is it law? No. Law comes like a tyrant with a
rod to coerce the unwilling, and to smite the guilty. Man is both unwilling and
guilty. Law in his case, therefore, can but engender fear: and that fear darkens
his mind, enfeebles his will, and produces a cramped, cringing, slavish spirit,
which vitiates all he does. It is the Medusa-head that turns him into
stone.
What then is the principle? It is love. But how comes love to
spring up in the heart of a guilty and condemned man? It comes in this wise. The
Gospel turns man's eye upon the Savior. He sees Him enduring His passion in his
stead, bearing the bitter tree, to bestow upon him a free forgiveness, and life
everlasting. That look enkindles love. That love penetrates his whole being,
quickening, purifying, and elevating all his powers, filling the understanding
with light, the will with obedience, the conscience with peace, the heart with
joy, and making the life to abound in holy deeds, fruitful alike to God and man.
Such was the Gospel that was now preached in the Cathedral of Zurich.
The
Zurichers did not need any argument to convince them that this doctrine was
true. They read its truth in its own light. Its glory was not of earth, but of
the skies, where was the place of its birth. An unspeakable joy filled their
hearts when they saw the black night of monkery departing, with its cowls, its
beads, its scourges, its purgatorial fires, which had given much uneasiness to
the flesh, but brought no relief to the conscience; and the sweet light of the
Gospel opening so full of refreshing to their souls.
The cathedral,
although a spacious building, could not contain the crowds that flocked to it.
Zwingli labored with all his might to consolidate the movement. He admirably
combined prudence with his zeal. He practiced the outward forms of the Church in
the pale of which he still remained. He said mass: he abstained from flesh on
fast-days: but all the while he labcured indefatigably to diffuse a knowledge of
Divine truth, knowing that as the new growth developed, the old, with its rotten
timber, and seared and shrivelled leaves, would be cast off. As soon as men
should come to see that a free pardon was offered to them in the Bible, they
would no longer scourge themselves to merit one, or climb the mountain of
Einsiedeln with money in their hand to buy one. In short, Zwingli's first
object, which he ever kept clearly in view, was not the overthrow of the Papacy,
but the restoration of Christianity.
He commenced a week-day lecture for
the peasants who came to market on Friday. Beautifully consecutive and logical
was his Sunday course of instruction. Having opened to his flock the Gospel in
his expositions of St. Matthew, he passed on to the consideration of the Acts of
the Apostles, that he might show them how Christianity was diffused. He next
expounded the Epistles, that he might have an opportunity of inculcating the
Christian graces, and showing that the Gospel is not only a "doctrine," but also
a "life." He then took up the Epistles of St. Peter, that he might reconcile the
two apostles, and show the harmony that reigns in the New Testament on the two
great subjects of "Faith" and "Works;" and last of all he expounded the Epistle
to the Hebrews, showing the harmony that subsists between the two Dispensations,
that both have one substance, and that one substance is the Gospel– Salvation of
Grace– and that the difference lay only in the mode of revelation, which was by
type and symbol in the one case, by plain literal statements in the other. "Here
they were to learn," says Zwingli, "that Christ is our alone true High Priest.
That was the seed I sowed; Matthew, Luke, Paul, Peter have watered it, but God
caused it to thrive." And in a letter to Myconius, of December 31st, 1519, [2] he reports that "at Zurich
upwards of 2,000 souls had already been so strengthened and nourished by the
milk of the truth, that they could now bear stronger food, and anxiously longed
for it." Thus, step by step, did Zwingli lead his hearers onward from the first
principles to the higher mysteries of Divine revelation.
A movement like
this could not be confined within the walls of Zurich, any more than day can
break and valley and mountain-top not catch the radiance. The seeds of this
renovation were being cast by Zwingli into the air; the winds were wafting them
all over Switzerland, and at many points laborers were preparing a soil in which
they might take root and grow. It was in favor of the movement here that the
chief actors were not, as elsewhere, kings, ministers, and princes of the
Church, but the people. Let us look around and note the beginnings of this
movement, by which so many of the Helvetic cantons were, at no distant day, to
be emancipated from the tyranny of the Papal supremacy, and the superstitions of
the Papal faith.
We begin on the northern frontier. There was at that
time at Basle a brilliant cluster of men. Among the first, and by much the most
illustrious of them all, was Erasmus, whose edition of the New Testament (1516)
may be said to have opened a way for the Reformation. The labors of the
celebrated printer Frobenius were scarcely less powerful. He printed at Basle
the writings of Luther, and in a short time spread them in Italy, France, Spain,
and England.[3] Among the second class,
the more distinguished were Capito and Hedio. They were warm friends and
admirers of Zwingli, and they adopted in Basle the same measures for the
propagation of the Reformed faith which the latter was prosecuting with so much
success at Zurich. Capito began to expound daily to the citizens the Gospel
according to St. Matthew, and with results thus described in a letter of Hedio's
to Zwingli in 1520: "This most efficacious doctrine of Christ penetrates and
warms the heart."[4] The audiences increased.
The doctors and monks conspired against the preacher,[5] and raised
tumults.
The Cardinal–Archbishop of Mainz, desiring to possess so great a
scholar, invited Capito to Mainz,[6] On his departure, however,
the work did not cease. Hedio took it up, and beginning where Capito had
stopped, went on to expound the Gospel with a courageous eloquence, to which the
citizens listened, although the monks ceased not to warn them against believing
those who told them that the sum of all Christian doctrine was to be found in
the Gospel. Scotus, said they, was a greater doctor than St. Paul. So broke the
dawn of the Reformation in Basle. The number of its disciples in this seat of
learning rapidly increased. Still it had a long and sore fight before obtaining
the mastery. The aristocracy were powerful: the clergy were not less so: the
University threw its weight into the same scale. Here was a triple rampart,
which it cost the truth much effort to scale. Hedio, who succeeded Capito, was
himself succeeded by Ecolampadius, the greatest of the three. Ecolampadius
labored with zeal and waited in hope for six years. At last, in 1528, Basle, the
last of all the Helvetic cantons, decreed its acceptance of the Reformed
faith.[7]
At Lucerne,
Myconius endeavored to sow the good seed of the Gospel; but the soil was
unkindly, and the seed that sprang up soon withered. It was choked by the love
of arms and the power of superstition. Oswald Geishauser – for such was his name
till Erasmus hellenised it into Myconius–was one of the sweetest spirits and
most accomplished minds of that age. He was born at Lucerne (1488), and educated
at Basle, where he became Rector of St. Peter's School. In 1516 he left Basle,
and became Rector of the Cathedral School at Zurich. He was the first of those
who sought to dispel the ignorance of his native Switzerland by laboring, in his
vocation as schoolmaster, to introduce at once the knowledge of ancient letters
and the love of Holy Scripture. He had previously contracted a friendship with
Zwingli, and it was mainly through his efforts and counsel that the Preacher of
Einsiedeln was elected to fill the vacant office at Zurich. The two friends
worked lovingly together, but at length it was resolved that Myconius should
carry the light to his native city of Lucerne. The parting was sad, but Myconius
obeyed the call of duty and set out.
He hoped that his office as
head-master in the collegiate school of this city would afford him opportunities
of introducing a higher knowledge than that of Pagan literature among the
citizens around the Waldstatter Lake. He began his work very quietly. The
writings of Luther had preceded him, but the citizens of Lucerne, the strenuous
advocates at once of a foreign service and a foreign faith, abominated these
books as if they had proceeded from the pen of a demon. The expositions of
Myconius in the school awakened instant suspicion. "We must burn Luther and the
schoolmaster,"[8] said the citizens to one
another. Myconius went on, notwithstanding, not once mentioning Luther's name,
but quietly conveying to the youth around him a knowledge of the Gospel. The
whisperings soon grew into accusations.
At last they burst out in fierce
threats. "I live among ravenous wolves," we find him writing in December, 1520.
[9] He was summoned before the
council. "He is a Lutheran," said one accuser; "he is a seducer of youth," said
another. The council enjoined him not to read anything of Luther's to his
scholars–not even to mention his name–nay, not even to admit the thought of him
into his mind.[10] The lords of Lucerne set
no narrow limits to their jurisdiction. The gentle spirit of the schoolmaster
was ill-fitted to buffet the tempests that assailed him on every side. He had
offered the Gospel to the citizens of Lucerne, and although a few had accepted
it, and loved him for its sake, the great majority had thrust it from them.
There were other cities and cantons that, he knew, would gladly welcome the
truth which Lucerne had rejected. He resolved, therefore, to shake off the dust
from his feet as a witness against it, and depart. Before he had carried his
resolution into effect, the council furnished him with but too good evidence
that the course he had resolved upon was the path of duty. He was suddenly
stripped of his office, and banished from the canton. He quitted the ungrateful
city, where his cradle had been placed, and in 1522 he returned to Zwingli at
Zurich.[11] Lucerne failed to verify
the augury of its name, and the light that departed with its noblest son has
never since returned.
Bern knew to choose the better part which Lucerne
had rejected. Its citizens had won renown in arms: their city had never opened
its gates to an enemy, but in the morning of the sixteenth century it was
conquered by the Gospel, and the victory which truth won at Bern was the more
important that it opened a door for the diffusion of the Gospel throughout
Western Switzerland.
It was the powerful influence that proceeded from
Zurich which originated the Reformed movement in the warlike city of Bern.
Sebastian Meyer had "by little and little opened the gates of the Gospel" to the
Bernese.[12] But eminently the Reformer
of this city was Berthold Haller. He was born in Roteville,[13] Wurtemberg, and studied at
Pforzheim, where he was a fellow-student of Melanchthon. In 1520 he came to
Bern, and was made Canon and Preacher in the cathedral. He possessed in ample
measure all the requisites for influencing public assemblies. He had a noble
figure, a graceful manner, a mind richly endowed with the gifts of nature, and
yet more richly furnished with the acquisitions of learning. After the example
of Zwingli, he expounded from the pulpit the Gospel as contained in the
evangelists. But the Bernese partook not a little of the rough and stubborn
nature of the animal that figures in their cantonal shield. The clash of
halberds and swords had more attraction for their ears than the sound of the
Gospel. Haller's heart at times grew faint. He would pour into the bosom of
Zwingli all his fears and griefs. He should perish one day by the teeth of these
bears: so he wrote. "No," would Zwingli reply, in ringing words that made him
ashamed of his timidity, "you must tame these bear-cubs by the Gospel. You must
neither be ashamed nor afraid of them. For whosoever is ashamed of Christ before
men, of him will Christ be ashamed before His Father." Thus would Zwingli lift
up the hands that hung down, and set them working with fresh rigor. The
sweetness of the Gospel doctrine was stronger than the sternness of Bernese
nature. The bear-cubs were tamed. Reanimated by the letters of Zwingli, and the
arrival from Nuremberg of a Carthusian monk named Kolb,[14] with hoary head but a
youthful heart, fired with the love of the Gospel, and demanding, as his only
stipend, the liberty of preaching it, Hailer had his zeal and perseverance
rewarded by seeing in 1528 the city and powerful canton of Bern, the first after
Zurich of all the cantons of Helvetia, pass over to the side of Protestantism.[15]
The establishment
of the Protestant worship at Bern formed an epoch in the Swiss Reformation. That
event had been preceded by a conference which was numerously attended, and at
which the distinctive doctrines of the two faiths were publicly discussed by the
leading men of both sides.[16] The deputies had their
views cleared and their zeal stimulated by these discussions, and on their
return to their several cantons, they set themselves with fresh vigor to
complete, after the example of Bern, the work of reformation. For ten years
previously it had been in progress in most of them.
CHAPTER
10 Back to
Top
SPREAD OF PROTESTANTISH IN EASTERN
SWITZERLAND.
St. Gall – The Burgomaster – Purgation of the Churches –
Canton Glarus – Valley of the Tockenburg – Embraces Protestantism – Schwitz
about to enter the Movement – Turns back – Appenzell – Six of its Eight Parishes
embrace the Gospel – The Grisons – Coire – Becomes Reformed – Constance –
Schaffhausen – The German Bible – Its Influence – The Five Forest Cantons – They
Crouch down under the Old Yoke.
THE light radiating from Zurich is touching the
mountain-tops of Eastern Switzerland, and Protestantism is about to make great
progress in this part of the land. At this time Joachim Vadian, of a noble
family in the canton of St. Gall, returning from his studies in Vienna, put his
hand to the plough of the Reformation.[1] Although he filled the
office of burgomaster, he did not disdain to lecture to his townsmen on the Acts
of the Apostles, that he might exhibit to them the model of the primitive
Church–in simplicity and uncorruptedness, how different from the pattern of
their own day![2] A contemporary remarked,
"Here in St. Gall it is not only allowed to hear the Word of God, but the
magistrates themselves preach it."[3] Vadian kept up an
uninterrupted correspondence with Zwingli, whose eye continually watched the
progress of the work in all parts of the field, and whose pen was ever ready to
minister encouragement and direction to those engaged in it. A sudden and
violent outburst of Anabaptism endangered the cause in St. Gall, but the
fanaticism soon spent itself; and the preachers returning from a conference at
Baden with fresh courage, the reformation of the canton was completed. The
images were removed from the Church of St. Lawrence, and the robes, jewels, and
gold chains which adorned them sold to found alms-houses.[4] In 1528 we find Vadian
writing, "Our temples at St. Gall are purged from idols, and the glorious
foundations of the building of Christ are being more laid every day."[5]
In the canton of
Glarus the Reformed movement had been begun by Zwingli himself. On his removal
to Einsiedeln, three evangelists who had been trained under him came forward to
carry on the work. Their names were – Tschudi, who labored in the town of
Glarus; Brunner, in Mollis; and Schindler, in Schwanden. Zwingli had sown the
seed: these three gathered in the harvest.[6]
The rays of truth
penetrated into Zwingli's native valley of the Tockenburg. With intense interest
did he watch the issue of the struggle between the light and the darkness on a
spot to which he was bound by the associations of his youth, and by many ties of
blood and friendship.
Knowing that the villagers were about to meet to
decide whether they should embrace the new doctrine, or continue to worship as
their fathers had done, Zwingli addressed a letter to them in which he said, "I
praise and thank God, Who has called me to the preaching of His Gospel, that He
has led you, who are so dear to my heart, out of the Egyptian darkness of false
human doctrines, to the wondrous light of His Word;" and he goes on earnestly to
exhort them to add to their profession of the Gospel doctrine the practice of
every Gospel virtue, if they would have profit, and the Gospel praise. This
letter decided the victory of Protestantism in the Reformer's native valley. The
council and the community in the same summer, 1524, made known their will to the
clergy, "that the Word of God be preached with one accord." The Abbot of St.
Gall and the Bishop of Coire sought to prevent effect being given to these
instructions. They summoned three of the preachers–Melitus, Doering, and
Farer–before the chapter, and charged them with disobedience. The accused
answered in the spirit of St. Peter and St. John before the council, "Convince
us by the Word of God, and we will submit ourselves not only to the chapter, but
to the least of our brethren; but contrariwise we will submit to no one–no, not
even to the mightiest potentate." The two dignitaries declined to take up the
gage which the three pastors had thrown down. They retired, leaving the valley
of the Tockenburg in peaceful possession of the Gospel.[7]
In the ancient
canton of Schwitz, which lay nearer to Zurich than the places of which we have
just spoken, there were eyes that were turned in the direction of the light.
Some of its citizens addressed Zwingli by letter, desiring him to send men to
them who might teach them the new way. "They had begun to loathe," they said,
"the discolored stream of the Tiber, and to thirst for those waters whereof they
who had once tasted wished evermore to drink." Schwitz, however, did not intend
to take her stand by the side of her sister Zurich, in the bright array of
cantons that had now begun to march under the Reformed banner.
The
majority of her citizens, content to drink at the muddy stream from which some
had turned away, were not yet prepared to join in the request, "Give us of this
water, that we may go no more to Rome to draw." Their opportunity was let slip.
They spurned the advice of Zwingli not to sell their blood for gold, by sending
their sons to fight for the Pope, as he was now soliciting them to do. Schwitz
became one of the most hostile of all the Helvetic cantons to the Reformer and
his work.
But though the cloud still continued to rest on Schwitz, the
light shone on the cantons around and beyond it.
Appenzell opened its
mountain fastnesses for the entrance of the heralds of the Reformed faith.
Walter Klarer, a native of the canton, who had studied at Paris, and been
converted by the writings of Luther, began in 1522 to preach here with great
zeal. He found an efficient coadjutor in James Schurtanner, minister at Teufen.
We find Zwingli writing to the latter in 1524 as follows: "Be manly and firm,
dear James, and let not yourself be overcome, that you may be called Israel. We
must contend with the foe till the day dawn, and the powers of darkness hide
themselves in their own black night. .. It is to be hoped that, athough your
canton is the last in the order of the Confederacy,[8] ' it will not be the last
in the faith. For these people dwell not in the center of a fertile country,
where the dangers of selfishness and pleasure are greatest, but in a mountain
district where a pious simplicity can be better preserved, which guileless
simplicity, joined to an intelligent piety, affords the best and surest
abiding-place for faith." The audiences became too large for the churches to
contain.
'The Gospel needs neither pillared aisle nor fretted roof," said
they; "let us go to the meadow." They assembled in the open fields, and their
worship lost nothing of impressiveness, or sublimity, by the change. The echoes
of their mountains awoke responsive to the voice of the preacher proclaiming the
"good tidings," and the psalm with which their service was closed blended with
the sound of the torrents as they rolled down from the summits.[9] Out of the eight parishes
of the canton, six embraced the Reformation.
Following the course of the
Upper Rhine, the Protestant movement penetrated to Coire, which nestles at the
foot of the Splugen pass. The soil had been prepared here by the schoolmaster
Salandrinus, a friend of Zwingli. In 1523 the Diet met at Coire to take into
consideration the abuses in the Church, and to devise means for their removal.
Eighteen articles were drawn up and confirmed in the year following, of which we
give only the first as being the most important: "Each clergyman shall, for
himself, purely and fully preach the Word of God and the doctrine of Christ to
his people, and shall not mislead them by the doctrines of human invention.
Whoever will not or cannot fulfill this official duty shall be deprived of his
living, and draw no part of the same." In virtue of this decision, the Dean of
St. Martin's, after a humiliating confession of his inability to preach, was
obliged to give way to Zwingli's friend, John Dorfman, or Comander–a man of
great courage, and renowned for his scholarship–who now became the chief
instrument in the reform of the city and canton. Many of the priests were won to
the Gospel: those who remained on the side of Rome, with the bishop at their
head, attempted to organise an opposition to the movement. Their violence was so
great that the Protestant preacher, Comander, had to be accompanied to the
church by an armed guard, and defended, even in the sanctuary, from insult and
outrage. In the country districts, where more than forty Protestant evangelists,
"like fountains of living water, were refreshing hill and dale," the same
precautions had to be taken. Finding that the work was progressing nevertheless,
the bishop complained of the preachers to the Diet, as "heretics,
insurrectionists, sacrilegists, abusers of the holy Sacraments, and despisers of
the mass-sacrifice," and besought the aid of the civil power to put them down.
When Zwingli heard of the storm that was gathering, he wrote to the magistrates
of Coire with apostolic vigor, pointing to the sort of opposition that was being
offered to the Gospel and its preachers in their territories, and he charged
them, as they valued the light now beginning to illuminate their land, and
dreaded being plunged again into the old darkness, in which the Truth had been
held captive, and its semblance palmed upon them, to the cozening them of their
worldly goods, and, as he feared he had ground to add, of their souls'
salvation, that they should protect the heralds of the Gospel from insult and
violence.
Zwingli's earnest appeal produced a powerful effect in all the
councils and communities of the Grisons; and when the bishop, through the Abbot
of St. Luzi, presented his accusation against the Protestant preachers, in the
Diet which met at Coire on Christmas Day, 1525, craving that they should be
condemned without a hearing, that assembly answered with dignity, "The law which
demands that no one be condemned unheard, shall also be observed in this
instance." There followed a public disputation at Ilanz, and the conversion of
seven more mass-priests.[10] The issue was that the
canton was won. "Christ waxed strong everywhere in these mountains," writes
Salandrinus to Zwingli, "like the tender grass in spring."[11]
Nor did the reform
find here its limits. Napoleon had not yet cut a path across these
glacier-crowned mountains for his cannon to pass into Italy, but the Gospel,
without waiting for the picks and blasting agencies of the conqueror to open its
path, climbed these mighty steeps and took possession of the Grisons, the
ancient Rhaetia. The bishop fled to the Tyrol; religious liberty was proclaimed
in the territory; the Protestant faith took root, and here where are placed the
sources of those waters which, rushing down the mountains' sides, form rivers in
the valleys below, were opened fountains of living waters. From the crest of the
Alps, where it had now seated itself, the Gospel may be said to have looked down
upon Italy. Not yet, however, was that land to be given to it.[12]
It is interesting
to think that the light spread on the east as far as to Constance and its lake,
where a hundred years before John Huss had poured out his blood. After various
reverses the movement of reform was at last crowned, in the year 1528, by the
removal of the images and altars from the churches, and the abolition of all
ceremonies, including that of the mass itself.[13] All the districts that lie
along the banks of the Thur, of the Lake of Constance, and of the Upper Rhine,
embraced the Gospel. At Mammeren, which adjoins the spot where the Rhine issues
from the lake, the inhabitants flung their images into the water. The statue of
St. Blaise, on being thrown in, stood upright for a short while, and casting a
reproachful look at the ungrateful and impious men who had formerly worshipped
and were now attempting to drown it, swam across the lake to Cataborn on the
opposite shore. So does a monk named Lang, whom Hotfinger quotes, relate.[14]
After a protracted
struggle, Protestantism gained the victory over the Papacy in Schaffhausen. The
chief laborers there were Sebastian Heftmeister, Sebastian Hoffman, and Erasmus
Ritter. On the Reformed worship being set up there, after the model of Zurich in
1529, the inhabitants of Eastern Switzerland generally may be said to have
enjoyed the light of Protestant truth. The change that had passed over their
land was like that which spring brings with it, when the snows melt, and the
torrents gush forth, and the flowers appear, and all is fertility and verdure up
to the very margin of the glacier. Yet more welcome was this spiritual
spring-time, and a higher joy did it inspire. The winter–the winter of ascetic
severities, vain mummeries, profitless services, and burdensome rites–was past,
and the sweet light of a returning spring-time now shone upon the Swiss. From
the husks of superstition they turned to feed on the bread and water of
life.
Perhaps the most efficient instrument in this reform remains to be
mentioned. In every canton a little band of laborers arose at the moment when
they were needed. All of them were men of intrepidity and zeal, and most of them
were pre-eminent in piety and scholarship. In this distinguished phalanx,
Zwingli was the most distinguished; but in those around him there were worthy
companions in arms, well entitled to fight side by side with him. But the little
army was joined by another combatant, and that combatant was one common to all
the German-speaking cantons – the Word of God. Luther's German edition of the
New Testament appeared in 1522. Introduced into Switzerland, it became the
mightiest instrumentality for the furtherance of the movement. It came close to
the conscience and heart of the people. The pastor could not be always by their
side, but in the Bible they had an instructor who never left them. By night as
well as by day this voice spoke to them, cheering, inspiring, and upholding
them. Of the dissemination of the Holy Scriptures in the mother tongue, Zwingli
said, "Every peasant's cottage became a school, in which the highest art of all
was practiced, the reading of the Old and New Testament; for the right and true
Schoolmaster of His people is God, without Whom all languages and all arts are
but nets of deception and treachery. Every cow and goose herd became thereby
better instructed in the knowledge of salvation than the schoolmen."[15] From the Bible eminently
had Zwingli drawn his knowledge of truth. He felt how sweetly it works, yet how
powerfully it convinces; and he desired above all things that the people of
Switzerland should repair to the same fountains of knowledge. They did so, and
hence the solidity, as well as the rapidity, of the movement. There is no more
Herculean task than to change the opinions and customs of a nation, and the task
is ten times more Herculean when these opinions and customs are stamped with the
veneration of ages.
It was a work of this magnitude which was
accomplished in Switzerland in the short space of ten years. The truth entered,
and the heart was cleansed from the pollution of lust, the understanding was
liberated from the yoke of tradition and human doctrines, and the conscience was
relieved from the burden of monastic observances. The emancipation was complete
as well as speedy; the intellect, the heart, the conscience, all were renovated;
and a new era of political and industrial life was commenced that same hour in
the Reformed cantons.
Unhappily, the five Forest Cantons did not share in
this renovation. The territory of these cantons contains, as every traveler
knows, the grandest scenery in all Switzerland. It possesses the higher
distinction of having been the cradle of Swiss independence. But those who had
contended on many a bloody field to break the yoke of Austria, were content, in
the sixteenth century, to remain under the yoke of Rome. They even threatened to
bring back the Austrian arms, unless the Refrained cantons would promise to
retrace their steps, and return to the faith they had cast off. It is not easy
to explain why the heroes of the fourteenth century should have been so lacking
in courage in the sixteenth. Their physical courage had been nursed in the
presence of physical danger. They had to contend with the winter storms, with
the avalanches and the mountain torrents; this made them strong in limb and bold
in spirit. But the same causes which strengthen physical bravery sometimes
weaken moral courage. They were insensible to the yoke that pressed upon the
soul. If their personal liberty or their material interests were assailed, they
were ready to defend them with their blood; but the higher liberty they were
unable to appreciate. Their more secluded position shut them out from the means
of information accessible to the other cantons. But the main cause of the
difference lay in the foreign service to which these cantons were specially
addicted. That service had demoralised them. Husbanding their blood that they
might sell it for gold, they were deaf when liberty pleaded. Thus their grand
mountains became the asylum of the superstitions in which their fathers had
lived, and the bulwark of that, base vassalage which the other cantons had
thrown off.
CHAPTER
11 Back to
Top
THE QUESTION OF FORBIDDEN
MEATS.
The Foreign Enlistments – The Worship at Zurich as yet
Unchanged – Zwingli makes a Beginning – Fasts and Forbidden Meats – Bishop of
Constance Interferes – Zwingli's Defense – The Council of Two Hundred – The
Council gives no Decision – Opposition organised against Zwingli – Constance,
Lausanne, and the Diet against Zwingli – First Swiss Edict of Persecution – Diet
Petitioned to Cancel it – The Reformed Band – Luther Silent – Zwingli Raises his
Voice – The Swiss Printing-press.
OUR attention must again be directed to the center of
the movement at Zurich. In 1521 we find the work still progressing, although at
every step it provokes opposition and awakens conflict. The first trouble grew
out of the affair of foreign service. Charles V. and Francis I. were on the
point of coming to blows on the plains of Italy. On the outlook for allies, they
were making overtures to the Swiss. The men of Zurich promised their swords to
the emperor. The other cantons engaged theirs to the French. Zwingli, as a
patriot and a Christian minister, denounced a service in which Swiss would meet
Swiss, and brother shed the blood of brother in a quarrel which was not theirs.
To what purpose should he labor in Switzerland by the preaching of the Gospel to
break the yoke of the Pope, while his fellow-citizens were shedding their blood
in Italy to maintain it? Nevertheless, the solicitations of the
Cardinal-Archbishop of Sion, who had sent an agent into the canton to enlist
recruits for the emperor, to whom the Pope had now joined himself in alliance,
prevailed, and a body of 2,700 Zurichers marched out at the gates, bound on this
enterprise.[1] They won no laurels in the
campaign; the usual miseries–wounds and death, widows and orphans, vices and
demoralization formed its sequel, and many a year passed before another body of
Zurichers left their home on a similar errand. Zwingli betook himself more
earnestly to the preaching of the Word of God, persuaded that only this could
extinguish that love of gold which was entangling his countrymen with foreign
princes, and inspire them with a horror of these mercenary and fratricidal wars
into which this greed of sordid treasure was plunging them, to the ruin of their
country.
The next point to be attacked by the Reformer was the fast-days
of the Church. Hitherto no change had been made in the worship at Zurich. The
altar with its furniture still stood; mass was still said; the images still
occupied their niches; and the festivals were duly honored as they came round.
Zwingli was content, meanwhile, to sow the seed. He precipitated nothing, for he
saw that till the understanding was enlightened, and the heart renovated,
outward change would nought avail. But now, after four years' inculcation of the
truth, he judged that his flock was not unprepared to apply the principles he
had taught them. He made a beginning with the smaller matters. In expounding the
fourth chapter of the first Epistle to Timothy, Zwingli took occasion to
maintain that fasts appointed by the Church, in which certain meats were
forbidden to be eaten at certain times, had no foundation in the Bible.[2] Certain citizens of
Zurich, sober and worthy men for the most part, resolved to reduce Zwingli's
doctrine to practice. They ate flesh on forbidden days. The monks took alarm.
They saw that the whole question of ecclesiastical ordinances was at stake. If
men could eat forbidden meats without purchasing permission from the Church,
might not her commands be set at nought on other weightier points? What helped
to increase the irritation were the words of Zwingli, in his sermon, which had
given special umbrage to the war party:–"Many think that to eat flesh is
improper, nay, a sin, although God has nowhere forbidden it; but to sell human
flesh for slaughter and carnage, they hold to be no sin at all."[3]
It began to be
clear how Zwingli's doctrine would work; its consequences threatened to be very
alarming, indeed. The revenues of the clergy it would diminish, and it would
withdraw the halberds of the Swiss from the service of Rome and her allies. The
enemies of the Reformation, who up to this time had watched the movement at
Zurich in silence, but in no little uneasiness, began now to bestir themselves.
The Church's authority and their own pockets were invaded. Numerous foes arose
to oppose Zwingli.
The tumult on this weighty affair of "forbidden meats"
increased, and the Bishop of Constance, in whose diocese Zurich was situated,
sent his suffragan, Melchior Bottli, and two others, to arrange matters. The
suffragan-bishop appeared (April 9th, 1522) before the Great Council of Zurich.
He accused Zwingli, without mentioning him by name, of preaching novelties
subversive of the public peace; and said if he were allowed to teach men to
transgress the ordinances of the Church, a time would soon come when no law
would be obeyed, and a universal anarchy would overwhelm all things.[4] Zwingli met the charge of
sedition and disorder by pointing to Zurich, "in which he had now been four
years, preaching the Gospel of Jesus, and the doctrine of the apostles, with the
sweat of his brow, and which was more quiet and peaceful than any other town in
the Confederacy." "Is not then," he asked, "Christianity the best safeguard of
the general security? Although all ceremonies were abolished, would Christianity
therefore cease to exist? May not the people be led by another path than
ceremonies to the knowledge of the truth, namely, by the path which Christ and
His apostles pursued?" He concluded by asking that people should be at liberty
to fast all the days of the year, if so it pleased them, but that no one should
be compelled to fast by the threat of excommunication.[5] The suffragan had no other
reply than to warn the councillors not to separate themselves from a Church out
of which there was no salvation. To this the quick retort of Zwingli was, "that
this need not alarm them, seeing the Church consists of all those in every place
who believe upon the Lord Jesus–the Rock which St. Peter confessed;–it is out of
this Church," said he, "that there is no salvation." The immediate result of
this discussion – an augury of greater things to come–was the conversion of one
of the deputies of the bishop to the Reformed faith – John Vanner.[6]
The Council of Two
Hundred broke up without pronouncing any award as between the two parties. It
contented itself with craving the Pope, through the Bishop of Constance, to give
some solution of the controverted point, and with enjoining the faithful
meanwhile to abstain from eating flesh in Lent. In this conciliatory course,
Zwingli went thoroughly with the council. This was the first open combat between
the champions of the two faiths; it had been fought in presence of the supreme
council of the canton; the prestige of victory, all men felt, remained with the
Reformers, and the ground won was not only secured, but extended by a treatise
which Zwingli issued a few days thereafter on the free use of meats.[7]
Rome resolved to
return to the charge. She saw in Zurich a second Wittemberg, and she thought to
crush the revolt that was springing up there before it had gathered strength.
When Zwingli was told that a new assault was preparing against him, he replied,
"Let them come on; I fear them as the beetling cliff fears the waves that
thunder at its feet." It was arranged that Zwingli should be attacked from four
different quarters at once. The end of the Zurich movement, it was believed, was
near.
The first attacking galley was fitted out in the port of Zurich;
the other three sailed out of the episcopal harbour of Constance. One day, the
aged Canon Hoffman tabled in the chapter of Zurich a long accusatory writing
against the Reformer. This, which was the opening move of the projected
campaign, was easily met. A few words of defense from Zwingli, and the aged
canon was fain to flee before the storm which, at the instigation of others, he
had drawn upon himself. "I gave him," writes Zwingli to Myconius, "a shaking
such as an ox does, when with its horns it tosses a heap of straw up in the
air."
The second attack came from the Bishop of Constance. In a pastoral
letter which he issued to his clergy, he drew a frightful picture of the state
of Christendom. On the frontier stood the Turk; and in the heartof the land were
men, more dangerous than Turks, sowing "damnable heresies." The two, the Turk
and the heresies, were so mixed up in the bishop's address, that the people,
whoso minds the pastoral was intended to influence, could hardly avoid
concluding that the one was the cause of the other, and that if they should
imbibe the heresy, their certain doom was to fall by the scimitar of the
Turk.
The third attack was meant to support the second. It came from the
Bishop of Lausanne, and also took the shape of a pastoral letter to the clergy
of his diocese. It forbade all men, under pain of being denied the Sacrament in
their last hours, or refused Christian burial, to read the writings of Zwingli
or of Luther, or to speak a word in private or public, to the disparagement of
the "holy rites and customs of the Church." By these means, the Roman
ecclesiastics hoped utterly to discredit Zwingli with the people. They only
extended the reputation they meant to ruin. The pastoral was taken to pieces by
Zwingli in a tractate, entitled Archeteles (the beginning and the end), which
over flowed with hard argument and trenchant humor.[8] The stereotyped and vapid
phrases in which the bishops indulged, fell pointless compared with the
convincing reasonings of the Reformer, backed as these were by facts drawn from
the flagrant abuses of the Church, and the oppressions under which Switzerland
groaned, and which were too patent to be denied by any save those who had a hand
in their infliction, or were interested in their support.[9]
The first three
attacks having failed to destroy Zwingli, or arrest his work, the fourth was now
launched against him. It was the most formidable of the four. The Diet, the
supreme temporal power in the Swiss Confederacy, was then sitting at Badin. To
it the Bishop of Constance carried his complaint, importuning the court to
suppress by the secular arm the propagation of the new doctrines by Zwingli and
his fellow-laborers. The Diet was not likely to turn a deaf ear to the bishop's
solicitations. The majority of its members were pensioners of France and Italy,
the friends of the "foreign service" of which Zwingli was the declared and
uncompromising foe. They regarded the preacher of Zurich with no favorable eye.
Only the summer before (1522), the Diet, at its meeting in Lucerne, had put upon
its records an order "that priests whose sermons produced dissension and
disorder among the people should desist from such preaching." This was the first
persecuting edict which disgraced the statute-book of Helvetia.[10]
It had remained a
dead letter hitherto, but now the Diet resolved to put it in force, and made a
beginning by apprehending and imprisoning Urban Weiss, a Protestant pastor in
the neighborhood of Baden. The monks, who saw that the Diet had taken its side
in the quarrel between Rome and the Gospel, laid aside their timidity, and
assuming the aggressive, strove by clamor tand threats to excite the authorities
to persecution.
The Reformer of Zurich did not suffer himself to be
intimidated by the storm that was evidently brewing. He saw in it an intimation
of the Divine will that he should not only display the banner of truth more
openly than ever in the pulpit of Zurich, but that he should wave it in the
sight of the whole Confederacy. In the June following, he summoned a meeting of
the friends of the Gospel at Einsiedeln. This summons was numerously responded
to. Zwingli submitted two petitions to the assembly, to be signed by its
members, one addressed to the Diet, and the other to the Bishop of the diocese.
The petitions, which were in substance identical, prayed "that the preaching of
the Gospel might not be forbidden, and that it might be permitted to the priests
to marry." A summary of the Reformed faith accompanied these petitions, that the
members of the Diet might know what it was they were asked to protect,[11] and an appeal was made to
their patriotism, whether the diffusion of doctrines so wholesome, drawn from
their original fountains in the Sacred Scriptures, would not tend to abolish the
many evils under which their country confessedly groaned, and at once purify its
private morals, and reinvigorate and restore its public virtue.
These
petitions were received and no further cared for by those to whom they were
presented. Nevertheless, their influence was great with the lower orders of the
clergy, and the common people. The manifesto that accompanied them laid bare the
corruption which had taken place in the national religion, and the causes at
work in the deterioration of the national spirit, and became a banner round
which the, friends of Gospel truth, and the champions of the rights of
conscience, leagued themselves. Thus banded together, they were abler to
withstand their enemies. The cause grew and waxed strong by the efforts it made
to overcome the obstacles it encountered. Its enemies became its friends. The
storms that warred around the tree Zwingli had planted, instead of overturning
it, cleared away the mephitic vapors with which the air around it was laden, and
lent a greater luxuriance to its boughs. Its branches spread wider and yet wider
around, and its fibres going still deeper into the soil, it firmly rooted itself
in the land of the Swiss.
The friends of the Reformation in Germany were
greatly encouraged and emboldened by what was now taking place in Switzerland.
If Luther had suddenly and mysteriously vanished, Zwingli's voice had broken the
silence which had followed the disappearance of the former. If the movement
stood still for the time on the German plains, it was progressing on the
mountains of Switzerland. The hopes of the Protestants lived anew. The friends
of truth everywhere could not but mark the hand of God in raising up Zwingli
when Luther had been withdrawn, and saw in it an indication of the Divine
purpose, to advance the cause of Protestantism, although emperors and Diets were
"taking counsel together" against it. The persecuted in the surrounding
countries, turning their eyes to Switzerland, sought under the freer forms and
more tolerant spirit of its government that protection which they were denied
under their own. Thus from one day to another the friends of the movement
multiplied in Helvetia.
The printing-press was a powerful auxiliary to
the living agency at work in Switzerland. Zurich and Basle were the first of the
Swiss towns to possess this instrumentality. There had been, it is true, a
printing-press in Basle ever since the establishment of its University, in 1460,
by Pope Pius II.; but Zurich had no printing-press till 1519, when Christopher
Froschauer, from Bavaria, established one. Arrving in Zurich, Froschauer
purchased the right of citizenship, and made the city of his adoption famous by
the books he issued from his press. He became in this regard the right hand of
Zwingli, to whom he afforded all the facilities in his power for printing and
publishing his works. Froschauer thus did great service to the
movement.
The third city of Switzerland to possess a printing-press was
Geneva. A German named Koln, in 1523, printed there, in the Gothic character,
the Constitutions of the Synod of the Diocese of Lausanne, by order of the
bishop, Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon. The fourth city of the Swiss which could
boast a printing establishment was Neuchatel. There lived Pierre de Wingle,
commonly called Pirot Picard, who printed in 1535 the Bible in French,
translated by Robert Olivetan, the cousin of Calvin. This Bible formed a largo
folio, and was in the Gothic character.[12]
CHAPTER
12 Back to
Top
PUBLIC DISPUTATION AT
ZURICH.
Leo Juda and the Monk – Zwingli Demands a Public Disputation
– Great Council Grants it – Six Hundred Members Assemble – Zwingli's Theses –
President Roist – Deputies of the Bishop of Constance – Attempt to Stifle
Discussion – Zwingli's Challenge – Silence – Faber rises – Antiquity – Zwingli's
Reply – Hoffman's Appeal – Leo Juda – Doctor of Tubingen – Decree of Lords of
Zurich – Altercation between Faber and Zwingli – End of
Conference.
EARLY in the following year (1523) the movement at
Zurich advanced a step. An incident, in itself of small moment, furnished the
occasion. Leo Juda, the school-companion of Zwingli at Basle, had just come to
Zurich to assume the Curacy of St. Peter's. One day the new pastor entered a
chapel where an Augustine monk was maintaining with emphasis, in his sermon,
"that man could satisfy Divine justice himself." "Most worthy father," cried Leo
Juda, but in calm and friendly tones, "hear me a moment; and ye, good people,
give ear, while I speak as becomes a Christian." In a brief address he showed
them, out of the Scriptures, how far beyond man's power it was to save himself.
A disturbance broke out in the church, some taking the side of the monk, and
others that of the Curate of St. Peter's. The Little Council summoned both
parties before them. This led to fresh disturbances. Zwingli, who had been
desirous for some time to have the grounds of the Reformed faith publicly
discussed, hoping thereby to bear the banner of truth onwards, demanded of the
Great Council a public disputation. Not otherwise, he said, could the public
peace be maintained, or a wise rule laid down by which the preachers might guide
themselves. He offered, if it was proved that he was in error, not only to keep
silence for the future, but submit to punishment; and if, on the other hand, it
should be shown that his doctrine was in accordance with the Word of God, he
claimed for the public preaching of it protection from the public
authority.
Leave was given to hold a disputation, summonses were issued
by the council to the clergy far and near; and the 29th day of January, 1523,
was fixed on for the conference.[1]
It is necessary to
look a little closely at what Zwingli now did, and the grounds and reasons of
his procedure. The Reformer of Zurich held that the determination of religious
questions appertains to the Church, and that the Church is made up of all those
who profess Christianity according to the Scriptures. Why then did he submit
this matter–the question as to which is the true Gospel–to the Great Council of
Zurich, the supreme civil authority in the State?
Zwingli in doing so did
not renounce his theory, but in reconciling his practice with his theory, in the
present instance, it is necessary to take into account the following
considerations. It was not possible for the Reformer of Zurich in the
circumstances to realize his ideal; there was yet no Church organisation; and to
submit such a question at large to the general body of the professors of the
Reformed faith would have been, in their immature state of knowledge, to
risk–nay, to invite–divisions and strifes. Zwingli, therefore, chose in
preference the Council of Two Hundred as part of the Reformed body–as, in fact,
the ecclesiastical and political representative of the Church. The case
obviously was abnormal. Besides, in submitting this question to the council,
Zwingli expressly stipulated that all arguments should be drawn from the
Scriptures; that the council should decide according to the Word of God; and
that the Church, or ecclesiastical community, should be free to accept or reject
their decision, according as they might deem it to be founded on the Bible.[2]
Practically, and in
point of fact, this affair was a conference or disputation between the two great
religious parties in presence of the council–not that the council could add to
the truth of that which drew its authority from the Bible exclusively. It judged
of the truth or falsehood of the matter submitted to it, in order that it might
determine the course it became the council to pursue in the exercise of its own
functions as the rulers of the canton. It must hear and judge not for spiritual
but for legal effects. If the Gospel which Zwingli and his fellow-laborers are
publishing be true, the council will give the protection of law to the preaching
of it.
That this was the light in which Zwingli understood the matter is
plain, we think, from his own words. "The matter," says he, "stands thus. We,
the preachers of the Word of God in Zurich, on the one hand, give the Council of
Two Hundred plainly to understand, that we commit to them that which properly it
belongs to the whole Church to decide, only on the condition that in their
consultations and conclusion they hold themselves to the Word of God alone; and,
on the other hand, that they only act so far in the name of the Church, as the
Church tacitly and voluntarily adopts their conclusions and ordinances. [3] Zwingli discovers, in the
very dawn of the Reformation, wonderfully clear views on this subject; although
it is true that not till a subsequent period in the history of Protestantism was
the distinction between things spiritual and things secular, and,
correspondingly, between the authorities competent to decide upon the one and
upon the other, clearly and sharply drawn; and, especially, not till a
subsequent period were the principles that ought to regulate the exercise of the
civil power about religious matters–in other words, the principles of
toleration–discovered and proclaimed. It is in Switzerland, and at Zurich, that
we find the first enunciation of the liberal ideas of modern times.
The
lords of Zurich granted the conference craved by Zwingli, and published a formal
decree to that effect. They invited all the cures or pastors, and all
ecclesiastics of whatever degree, in all the towns of the canton. The Bishop of
Constance, in whose diocese Zurich was situated, was also respectfully asked to
be present, either in person or by deputy. The day fixed upon was the 29th of
January. The disputation was to be conducted in the German language, all
questions were to be determined by the Word of God, and it was added that after
the conference had pronounced on all the questions discussed in it, only what
was agreeable to Scripture was to be brought into the pulpit.[4]
That an
ecclesiastical Diet should convene in Zurich, antl that Rome should be summoned
before it to show cause why she should longer retain the supremacy she had
wielded for a thousand years, appeared to the men of those times a most
extraordinary and, indeed, portentous event. It made a great stir all over
Switzerland. "There was much wondering," says Bullinger in his Chronicle, "what
would come out of it." The city in which it was to be held prepared fittingly to
receive the many venerable and dignified visitors who had been invited. Warned
by the examples of Constance and Basle; Zurich made arrangements for maintaining
public decorum during the session of the conference. The public-houses were
ordered to be shut at an early hour; the students were warned that noise and
riot on the street would be punished; all persons of ill-fame were sent out of
the town, and two councillors, whose immoralities had subjected them to public
criticism, were forbidden, meanwhile, attendance in the council chamber. These
things betoken that already the purifying breath of the Gospel, more refreshing
than the cool breeze from the white Alps on lake and city in the heat of summer,
had begun to be felt in Zurich.
Zwingli's enemies called it "a Diet of
vagabonds," and loudly prophesied that all the beggars in Switzerland would
infallibly grace it with their presence. Had the magistrates of Zurich expected
guests of this sort, they would have prepared for their coming after a different
fashion.
Zwingli prepared for the conference which he had been the main
instrument of convoking, by composing an abridgment of doctrine, consisting of
sixty-seven articles, which he got printed, and offered to defend from the Word
of God. The first article struck at that dogma of Romanism which declares that
"Holy Scripture has no authority unless it be sanctioned by the Church." The
others were not less important, namely, that Jesus Christ is our only Teacher
and Mediator; that He alone is the Head of believers; that all who are united to
Him are members of His body, children of God, and Members of the Church; that it
is by power from their Head alone that Christians can do any good act; that from
Him, not from the Church or the clergy, comes the efficacy that sanctifies; that
Jesus Christ is the one sovereign and eternal Priest; that the mass is not a
sacrifice; that every kind of food may be made use of on all days; that monkery,
with all that appertains to it–frocks, tonsures, and badges–is to be rejected;
that Holy Scripture permits all men, without exception, to marry; that
ecclesiastics, as well as others, are bound to obey the magistrate; that
magistrates have received power from God to put malefactors [5] to death; that God alone
can pardon sin; that He gives pardon solely for the love of Christ; that the
pardon of sins for money is simony; and, in fine, that there is no purgatory
after death.[6]
By the publication
of these theses, Zwingli struck the first blow in the coming campaign, and
opened the discussions in the canton before the conference had opened them in
the Council Hall of Zurich.[7]
When the clay (29th
January, 1523) arrived, 600 persons assembled in the Town Hall. They met at tlhe
early hour of six. The conference included persons of rank, canons, priests,
scholars, strangers, and many citizens of Zurich. The Bishop of Constance, the
diocesan, was invited,[8] but appeared only by his
deputies, John Faber, Vicar-General, and James von Anwyl, knight, and Grand
Master of the Episcopal Court at Constance. Deputies of the Reformation appeared
only from Bern and Schaffhausen; so weak as yet was the cause in the Swiss
cantons.
The burgomaster, Marx Roist, presided. He was, says Christoffel,
"a hoary-headed warrior, who had fought with Zwingli at Marignano." He had a son
named Gaspar, a captain in the Pope's bodyguard, nevertheless he himself was a
staunch Reformer, and adhered faithfully to Zwingli, although Pope Adrian had
tried to gain him by letters full of praise.[9] In a vacant space in the
middle of the assembly sat Zwingli alone at a table. Bibles in the Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew languages lay open before him. All eyes were turned upon him. He was
there to defend the Gospel he had preached, which so many, now face to face with
him, had loudly denounced as heresy and sedition, and the cause of the, strifes
that were beginning to rend the cantons. His position was not unlike that of
Luther at Worms. The cause was the same, only the tribunal was less august, the
assemblage less brilliant, and the immediate risks less formidable. But the
faith that upheld the champion of Worms also animated the hero of Zurich. The
venerable president rose. He stated briefly why the conference had been
convoked, adding, "If any one has anything to say against the doctrine of
Zwingli, now is the time to speak."[10] All eyes were turned on
the bishop's representative, John Faber. Faber had formerly been a friend of
Zwingli, but having visited Rome and been flattered by the Pope, he was now
thoroughly devoted to the Papal interests, and had become one of Zwingli's
bitterest opponents.
Faber sat still, but James von Anwyl rose. He tried
to throw oil upon the waters, and to allay the storm raging, not indeed in the
council chamber– for there all was calm–but in Zurich. The deputies, he said,
were present not to engage in controversy, but to learn the unhappy divisions
that were rending the canton, and to employ their power in healing them. He
concluded by dropping a hint of a General Council, that was soon to meet, and
which would amicably arrange this whole matter.
Zwingli saw through a
device which threatened to rob him, of all the advantage that he hoped to gain
from the conference. "This was now," he said, "his fifth year in Zurich. He had
preached God's message to men as contained in His own Word;" and, submitting his
theses, he offered to make good before the assembly their agreement with the
Scriptures; and looking round upon all, said, "Go on then, in God's name. Here I
am to answer you."[11] Thus again challenged,
Faber, who wore a red hat, rose, but only to attempt to stifle discussion, by
holding out the near prospect of a General Council. "It would meet at Nuremberg
within a year's time."[12]
"And why not,"
instantly retorted the Reformer, "at Erfurt or Wittemberg?" Zwingli entered
fully into the grounds of his doctrine, and closed by expressing his convictions
that a General Council they would not soon see, and that the one now convened
was as good as any the Pope was likely to give them. Had they not in this
conference, doctors, theologians, jurisconsults, and wise men, just as able to
read the Word of God in the original Hebrew and Greek, and as well qualified to
determine all questions by this, the alone infallible rule, as any Council they
were ever likely to see in Christendom? [13]
A long pause
followed Zwingli's address. He stood unaccused in the midst of those who had so
loudly blamed and condemned him out of doors.
Again he challenged his
opponents: he challenged them a second time, he challenged them a third time. No
one spoke. At length Faber rose–not to take up the gauntlet which Zwingli had
thrown down, but to tell how he had discomfited in argument the pastor of
Fislisbach, whom, as we have already said, the Diet at Baden had imprisoned; and
to express his amazement at the pass to which things had come, when the ancient
usages which had lasted for twelve centuries were forsaken, and it was calmly
concluded "that Christendom had been in error fourteen hundred
years!"
The Reformer quickly replied that error was not less error
because the belief of it had lasted fourteen hundred years, and that in the
worship of God antiquity of usage was nothing, unless ground or warrant for it
could be found in the Sacred Scriptures.[14]
He denied that the
false dogmas and the idolatrous practices which he was combating came from the
first ages, or were known to the early Christians. They were the growth of times
less enlightened and men less holy. Successive Councils and doctors, in
comparatively modern times, had rooted up the good and planted the evil in its
room. The prohibition of marriage to priests he instanced as a case in point.[15]
Master Hoffman, of
Schaffhausen, then rose. He had been branded, he said, as a heretic at Lausanne,
and chased from that city for no other offense than having preached, agreeably
to the Word of God, against the invocation of the saints. Therefore he must
adjure the Vicar-General, Faber, in the name of God, to show him those passages
in the Bible in which such invocation is permitted and enjoined. To this solemn
appeal Faber remained silent.
Leo Juda next came forward. He had but
recently come to Zurich, he said, as a laborer with Zwingli in the work of the
Gospel. He was not able to see that the worship of the Church of Rome had any
foundation in Scripture. He could not recommend to his people any other
intercessor than the one Mediator, even Christ Jesus, nor could he bid them
repose on any other expiation of their sins than His death and passion on the
cross. If this belief of his was false, he implored Faber to show him from the
Word of God a better way.
This second appeal brought Faber to his feet.
But, so far as proof or authority from the Bible was concerned, he might as well
have remained silent. Not deigning even a glance at the Canon of Inspiration, he
went straight to the armoury of the Roman Church. He pleaded first of all the
unanimous comment of the Fathers, and secondly the Litany and canon of the mass,
which assures us that we ought to invoke the mother of God and all the saints.
Coming at last to the Bible, but only to misinterpret it, he said that the
Virgin herself had authorised this worship, inasmuch as she had foretold that it
would be rendered to her in all coming time: "From henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed."[16] And not less had her
cousin Elizabeth sanctioned it when she gave expression to her surprise and
humility in these words: "Whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord
should come to me?"[17] These proofs he thought
ought to suffice, and if they were not to be held as establishing his point,
nothing remained for him but to hold his peace.[18]
The Vicar-General
found a supporter in Martin Blantsch, Doctor of Tubingen. He was one of those
allies who are more formidable to the cause they espouse than to that which they
combat. "It was a prodigious rashness," said Dr. Blantsch, "to censure or
condemn usages established by Councils which had assembled by the inspiration of
the Holy Ghost. The decisions of the first four General Councils ought to
receive the same reverence as the Gospel itself: so did the canon law enjoin
(Distinction XV.); for the Church, met in Council by the Holy Spirit, cannot
err. To oppose its decrees was to oppose God. 'He that heareth you heareth me,
and he that despiseth you despiseth me.' [19]
It was not
difficult for Zwingli to reply to arguments like these. They presented a pompous
array of Councils, canons, and ages; but this procession of authorities, so
grandly marshalled, lacked one thing–an apostle or evangelist to head it.
Lacking this, what was it? Not a chain of living witnesses, but a procession of
lay figures. Seeing this discomfiture of the Papal party, Sebastien Hoffman, the
pastor of Schaffhausen, and Sebastien Meyer, of Bern, rose and exhorted the
Zurichers to go bravely forward in the path on which they had entered, and to
permit neither thebulls of the Popes nor the edicts of the Emperor to turn them
from it. This closed the morning's proceedings.
After dinner the
conference re-assembled to hear the decree of the lords of Zurich. The edict was
read. It enjoined, in brief, that all preachers both in the city and throughout
the canton, laying aside the traditions of men, should teach from the pulpit
only what they were able to prove from the Word of God [20] "But," interposed a
country cure, "what is to be done in the case of those priests who are not able
to buy those books called the New Testament? " So much for his fitness to
instruct his hearers in the doctrines of a book which he had never seen. "No
priest," replied Zwingli, "is so poor as to be unable to buy a New Testament, if
he seriously wishes to possess one; or, if he be really unable, he will find
some pious citizen willing to lend him the money." [21]
The business was at
an end, and the assembly was about to separate. Zwingli could not refrain giving
thanks to God that now his native land was about to enjoy the free preaching of
the pure Gospel. But the Vicar-General, as much terrified as Zwingli was
gladdened by the prospect, was heard to mutter that had he seen the theses of
the pastor of Zurich a little sooner, he would have dealt them a complete
refutation, and shown from Scripture the authority of oral traditions, and the
necessity of a living judge on earth to decide controversies. Zwingli begged him
to do so even yet.
"No, not here," said Faber; "come to Constance." "With
all my heart," replied Zwingli; but he added in a quiet tone, and the
Vicar-General could hardly be insensible to the reproach his words implied, "You
must give me a safe-conduct, and show me the same good faith at Constance which
you have experienced at Zurich; and further, I give you warning that I will
accept no other judge than Holy Scripture." "Holy Scripture!" retorted Faber,
somewhat angrily; "there are many things against Christ which Scripture does not
forbid: for example, where in Scripture do we read that a man may not take his
own or his sister's daughter to wife?" "Nor," replied Zwingli, "does it stand in
Scripture that a cardinal should have thirty livings. Degrees of relationship
further removed than the one you have just specified are forbidden, therefore we
conclude that nearer degrees are so." He ended by expressing his surprise that
the Vicar-General should have come so long a way to deliver such sterile
speeches.
Faber, on his part, taunted the Reformer with always harping on
the same string, namely, Scripture, adding, "Men might live in peace and concord
and holiness, even if there were no Gospel." The Vicar-General, by this last
remark, had crowned his own discomfiture. The audience could no longer restrain
their indignation. They started to their feet and left the assembly-hall. So
ended the conference.[22]
CHAPTER
13 Back to
Top
DISSOLUTION OF CONVENTUAL AND
MONASTIC ESTABLISHMENTS.
Zwingli's Treatise – An After-fight –
Zwingli's Pulpit Lectures – Superstitious Usages and Payments Abolished –
Gymnasium Founded – Convents Opened – Zwingli on Monastic Establishments –
Dissolution of Monasteries – Public Begging Forbidden – Provision for the
Poor.
VICTORY had been gained, but Zwingli was of opinion
that he had won it somewhat too easily. He would have preferred the assertion of
the truth by a sharp debate to the dumb opposition of the priests. He set to
work, however, and in a few months produced a treatise on the established
ordinances and ceremonies, in which he showed how utterly foundation was lacking
for them in the Word of God. The luminous argument and the "sharp wit" of the
volume procured for it an instant and wide circulation.
Men read it, and
asked why these usages should be longer continued. The public mind was now ripe
for the changes in the worship which Zwingli had hitherto abstained from making.
This is a dangerous point in all such movements. Not a few Reformations have
been wrecked on this rock. The Reformer of Zurich was able, partly by aid of the
council, partly by the knowledge he had sown among the people, to steer his
vessel safely past it. He managed to restrain the popular enthusiasm within its
legitimate channel, and he made that a cleansing stream which otherwise would
have become a devastating torrent.
Faber took care that the indignation
his extraordinary arguments had awakened in the Zurichers should not cool down.
Like the Parthian, he shot his arrows in his flight. No sooner was the
Vicar-General back in Constance, than he published a report of the conference,
in which he avenged his defeat by the most odious and calumnious attacks on
Zwingli and the men of Zurich. This libel was answered by certain of the youth
of Zurich, in a book entitled the Hawk-pluckings. It was "a sharp polemic, full
of biting wit." It had an immense sale, and Faber gained as little in this
after-fight as he had done in the main battle.[1]
The Reformer did
not for a moment pause or lose sight of his grand object, which was to restore
the Gospel to its rightful place in the sanctuary, and in the hearts of the
people. He had ended his exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew. He proceeded
next to the consideration of the Acts of the Apostles, that he might be able to
show his hearers the primitive model of the Church, and how the Gospel was
spread in the first ages. Then he went on to the 1st Epistle to Timothy, that he
might unfold the rules by which all Christians ought to frame their lives. He
turned next to the Epistle to the Galatians, that he might reach those who, like
some in St. Paul's days, had still a weakness for the old leaven; then to the
two Epistles of St. Peter, that he might show his audience that St. Peter's
authority did not rise above that of St. Paul, who, on St. Peter's confession,
had fed the flock equally with himself. Last of all he expounded the Epistle to
the Hebrews, that he might fix the eyes of his congregation on a more glorious
priesthood than that of the Jews of old, or that of Rome in modern times–on that
of the great Monarch and Priest of His Church, who by His one sole sacrifice had
sanctified for ever them that believe.
Thus did he place the building
which he was laboring to rear on the foundations of the prophets and apostles,
Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone. And now it seemed to him that
the time for practical reformation had arrived.[2]
This work began at
the cathedral, the institution with which he himself was connected. The original
letter of grant front Charlemagne limited the number of canons upon this
foundation to thirteen. There were now more than fifty canons and chaplains upon
it. These had forgotten their vow, at entry, framed in accordance with the
founder's wish, "to serve God with praise and prayer" and "to supply public
worship to the inhabitants of hill and valley." Zwingli was the only worker on
this numerous staff; almost all the rest lived in downright idleness, which was
apt on occasion to degenerate into something worse. The citizens grumbled at the
heavy rents and numerous dues which they paid to men whose services were so
inappreciable. Feeling the justice of these complaints, Zwingli devised a plan
of reform, which the council passed into a law, the canons themselves
concurring. The more irritating of the taxes for the ecclesiastical estate were
abolished. No one was any longer to be compelled to pay for baptism, for extreme
unction, for burial, for burial-candles, for grave-stones, or for the tolling of
the great bell of the minster.[3] The canons and chaplains
who died off were not to be replaced; only a competent number were to be
retained, and these were to serve as ministers of parishes. The amount of
benefices set free by the decease of canons was to be devoted to the better
payment of the teachers in the Gymnasium of Zurich, and the founding of an
institution of a higher order for the training of pastors, and the instruction
of youth generally in classical learning.
In place of the choir-service,
mumbled drowsily over by the canons, came the "prophesying" or exposition of
Scripture (1525), which began at eight every morning, and was attended by all
the city clergy, the canons, the chaplains, and scholars.[4] Of the new school
mentioned above, Oswald Myconius remarks that "had Zwingli survived, it would
not have found its equal anywhere." As it was, this school was a plant that bore
rich fruit after Zwingli was in his grave. Of this the best proof is the glory
that was shed on Zurich by the numbers of her sons who became illustrious in
Church and State, in literature and science.
Reform was next applied to
the conventual and monastic establishments. They fell almost without a blow. As
melts the ice on the summit of the Alps when spring sets in, so did the monastic
asceticism of Zurich give way before the warm breath of evangelism. Zwingli had
shown from the pulpit that these institutions were at war alike with the laws of
nature, the affections of the heart, and the precepts of Scripture. From the
interior of some of these places, cries were heard for deliverance from the
conventual vow. The council of Zurich, 17th June, 1523, granted their wish, by
giving permission to the nuns to return to society. There was no compulsion; the
convent door was open; the inmates might go or they might remain. Many quitted
the cloister, but others preferred to end their days where they had spent their
lives.[5]
Zwingli next set
about preparing for the dissolution of the monastic houses. He began by
diffusing rational ideas on the subject in the public mind. "It has been
argued," said he, "that a priest must in some way distinguish himself from other
men. He must have a bald pate, or a cowl, or a frock, or wooden shoes, or go
bare-foot. No," said Zwingli, "he who distinguishes himself from others by such
badges but raises against himself the charge of hypocrisy. I will tell you
Christ's way: it is to excel in humility and a useful life. With that ornament
we shall need no outward badge; the very children will know us, nay, the devil
himself will know us to be none of his. When we lose our true worth and dignity,
then we garnish ourselveas with shorn crowns, frocks, and knotted cords; and men
admire our clothes, as the children stare at the gold-bespangled mule of the
Pope. I will tell you a labor more fruitful both to one's self and to others
than singing matins, aves, and vespers: namely, to study the Word of God, and
not to cease till its light shine into the hearts of men."
"To snore
behind the walls of a cloister," he continued, "is not to worship God. But to
visit widows and orphans, that is to say, the destitute in their affliction, and
to keep one's self unspotted from the world, that is to worship God. The world
in this place (James 1:27) does not mean hill and valley, field and forest,
water, lakes, towns and villages, but the lusts of the world, as avarice, pride,
uncleanness, intemperance. These vices are more commonly to be met with within
the walls of a convent than in the world abroad. I speak not of envy and hatred
which have their habitation among this crew, and yet these are all greater sins
than those they would escape by fleeing to a cloister... Therefore let the monks
lay aside all their badges, their cowls, and their regulations, and let them put
themselves on a level with the rest of Christendom, and unite themselves to it,
if they would truly obey the Word of God."[6]
In accordance with
these rational and Gospel principles, came a resolution passed by the council in
December, 1524, to reform the monasteries.
It was feared that the monks
would offer resistance to the dissolution of their orders, but the council laid
their plans so wisely, that before the fathers knew that their establishments
were in danger the blow had been struck. On a Saturday afternoon the members of
council, accompanied by delegates from the various guilds, the three city
ministers, and followed by the town militia, presented themselves in the
Augustine monastery. They summoned the inmates into their presence, and
announced to them the resolution of the council dissolving their order. Taken
unawares, and awed by the armed men who accompanied the council, the monks at
once yielded. So quietly fell the death-blow on the monkish establishments of
Zurich.[7]
"The younger friars
who showed talent and inclination," says Christoffel, "were made to study: the
others had to learn a trade.
The strangers were furnished with the
necessary travelling money to go to their homes, or to re-enter a cloister in
their own country; the frail and aged had a competent settlement made upon them,
with the condition attached that they were regularly to attend the Reformed
service, and give offense to none either by their doctrines or lives. The wealth
of the monasteries was for the most part applied to the relief of the poor or
the sick, since forsooth the cloisters called themselves the asylums of the
poor; and only a small part was reserved for the churches and the
schools."
"Every kind of door and street beggary was forbidden," adds
Christoffel, "by an order issued in 1525, while at the same time a competent
support was given to the home and stranger poor. Thus, for example, the poor
scholars were not allowed any longer to beg their living by singing beneath the
windows, as was customary before the Reformation. Instead of this a certain
number of them (sixteen from the canton Zurich, four strangers) received daily
soup and bread, and two shillings weekly. Stranger beggars and pilgrims were
allowed only to pass through the town, and nowhere to beg."[8]
In short, the
entire amount realised by the dissolution of the monastic orders was devoted to
the relief of the poor, the ministry of the sick, and the advancement of
education. The council did not feel at liberty to devote these funds to any
merely secular object.
"We shall so act with cloister property," said
they, "that we can neither be reproached before God nor the world. We might not
have the sin upon our consciences of applying the wealth of one single cloister
to fill the coffers of the State."[9]
The abrogation of
the law of celibacy fittingly followed the abolition of the monastic vow. This
was essential to the restoration of the ministerial office to its apostolic
dignity and purity. Many of the Reformed pastors took advantage of the change in
the law, among others Leo Juda, Zwingli's friend. Zwingli himself had contracted
in 1522 a private marriage, according to the custom of the times, with Anna
Reinhard, widow of John Meyer von Knonau, a lady of great beauty and of noble
character. On the 2nd of April, 1524, he publicly celebrated his marriage in the
minster church. Zwingli had made no secret whatever of his private espousals,
which were well known to both friend and foe, but the public acknowledgment of
them was hailed by the former as marking the completion of another stage in the
Swiss Reformation.[10]
Thus step by step
the movement advanced. Its path was a peaceful one. That changes so great in a
country where the government was so liberal, and the expression of public
opinion so unrestrained, should have been accomplished without popular tumults,
is truly marvellous. This must be ascribed mainly to the enlightened maxims that
guided the procedure of the Reformer. When Zwingli wished to do away with any
oppressive or superstitious obdervance; he sifted and exposed the false dogma on
which it was founded, knowing that when he had overthrown it in the popular
belief, it would soon fall in the popular practice. When public sentiment was
ripe, the people would go to the legislative chamber, and would there find the
magistrates prepared to put into the form of law what was already the judgment
and wish of the community; and thus the law, never outrunning public opinion
would be willingly obeyed. In this way Zwingli had already accomplished a host
of reforms. He had opened the door of the convents; he had suppressed the
monastic orders; he had restored hundreds of idle men to useful industry; he had
set free thousands of pounds for the erection of hospitals and the education of
youth; and he had closed a fountain of pollution, only the more defiling because
it issued from the sanctuary, and restored purity to the altar, in the repeal of
the law of clerical celibacy. But the Reformation did not stop here. More
arduous achievement awaited it.
CHAPTER
14 Back to
Top
DISCUSSION ON IMAGES AND THE
MASS.
Christ's Death – Zwingli's Fundamental Position – Iconoclasts –
Hottinger – Zwingli on Image-worship – Conference of all Switzerland summoned –
900 Members Assemble – Preliminary Question – The Church – Discussion on Images
– Books that Teach Nothing – The Mass Discussed – It is Overthrown – Joy of
Zwingli – Relics Inferred.
THE images were still retained in the churches, and
mass still formed part of the public worship. Zwingli now began to prepare the
public mind for a reform in both particulars–to lead men from the idol to the
one true God; from the mass which the Church had invented to the Supper which
Christ had instituted. The Reformer began by laying down this doctrine in his
teaching, and afterwards more formally in eighteen propositions or conclusions
which he published – "that Christ, Who offered Himself once for all upon the
cross, is a sufficient and everlasting Sacrifice for the sins of all who believe
upon Him; and that, therefore, the mass is not a sacrifice, but the memorial of
Christ's once offering upon the cross, and the visible seal of our redemption
through Him."[1] This great truth received
in the public mind, he knew that the mass must fall.
But all men had not
the patience of Zwingli. A young priest, Louis Hetzer, of fiery zeal and
impetuous temper, published a small treatise on images, which led to an
ebullition of popular feeling. Outside the city gates, at Stadelhofen, stood a
crucifix, richly ornamented, and with a frequent crowd of devotees before it. It
gave annoyance to not a few of the citizens, and among others to a shoemaker,
named Nicholas Hottinger, "a worthy man," says Bullinger, "and well versed in
his Bible." One day as Hottinger stood surveying the image, its owner happened
to come up, and Hottinger demanded of him "when he meant to take that thing
away?" "Nobody bids you worship it, Nicholas," was the reply. "But don't you
know," said Hottinger, "that the Word of God forbids images?" "If," replied the
owner, "you feel yourself empowered to remove it, do so." Hottinger took this
for consent, and one morning afterwards, the shoemaker, coming to the spot with
a party of his fellow-citizens, dug a trench round the crucifix, when it fell
with a crash.[2] A violent outcry was
raised by the adherents of the old faith against these iconoclasts. "Down with
these men!" they shouted; "they are church-robbers, and deserving of
death."
The commotion was increased by an occurrence that soon thereafter
happened. Lawrence Meyer, Vicar of St. Peter's, remarked one day to a
fellow-vicar, that when he thought of the people at the church-door, pale with
hunger, and shivering from want of clothes, he had a great mind to knock down
the idols on the altars, and take their silken robes and costly jewels, and
therewith buy food and raiment for the poor. On Lady-day, before three o'clock
in the morning, the plates, rolls, images, and other symbols had all disappeared
from St. Peter's Church. Suspicion, of course, fell upon the vicar. The very
thing which he had confessed having a strong desire to do, had been done; and
yet it may have been another and not the vicar who did it, and as the deed could
not be traced to him, nothing more came of it so far as Meyer was concerned.[3]
Still the incident
was followed by important consequences. Zwingli had shrunk from the discussion
of the question of worshipping by images, but now he felt the necessity of
declaring his sentiments. He displayed in this, as in every reform which he
instituted, great breadth of view, and singular moderation in action. As
regarded images in churches, he jocularly remarked that they did not hurt
himself, for his short-sightedness prevented him seeing them. He was no enemy to
pictures and statues, if used for purposes purely aesthetic. The power of
bodying forth beautiful forms, or lofty ideas, in marble or on canvas, was one
of the good gifts of God. He did not, therefore, condemn the glass paintings in
the church windows, and similar ornaments in sacred buildings, which were as
little likely to mislead the people as the cock on the church steeple, or the
statue of Charles the Great at the minster. And even with regard to images which
were superstitiously used, he did not approve their unauthorised and irregular
destruction. Let the abuse be exposed and sifted, and it would fall of itself.
"The child is not let down from the cradle," said he, "till a rest has been
presented to it to aid it in walking." When the knowledge of the one true God
has entered the heart., the man will no longer be able to wornhip by an
image.
"On the other hand," said he, "all images must be removed which
serve the purposes of a superstitious veneration, because such veneration is
idolatry. First of all, where are the images placed? Why, on the altar, before
the eyes of the worshippers. Will the Romanists permit a man to stand on the
altar when mass is being celebrated? Not they. Images, then, are higher than
men, and yet they have been cut out of a willow-tree by the hands of men. But
further, the worshippers bow to them, and bare the head before them. Is not that
the very act which God has forbidden? 'Thou shalt not bow down unto them.'
Consider if this be not open idolatry."
"Further," argued Zwingli, "we
burn costly incense before them, as did the heathen to their idols. Here we
commit a two-fold sin. If we say that thus we honor the saints, it was thus that
the heathen honored their idols. If we say that it is God we honor, it is a form
of worship which no apostle or evangelist ever offered to Him."
"Like the
heathen, do we not call those images by the names of those they represent? We
name one piece of carved wood the Mother of God, another St. Nicholas, a third
Holy Hildegarde, and so on. Have we not heard of men breaking into prisons and
slaying those who had taken away their images, and when asked why they did so,
they replied, 'Oh, they have burned or stolen our blessed Lord God and the
saints'? Whom do they call our Lord God? The idol."
"Do we not give to
these idols what we ought to give to the poor? We form them of massive gold or
silver, or we overlay them with some precious metal. We hang rich clothing upon
them, we adorn them with chains and precious jewels. We give to the bedizened
image what we ought to give to the poor, who are the living images of
God."
"But, say the Papists," continued Zwingli, "images are the books of
the simple. Tell me, where has God commanded us to learn out of such a book? How
comes it that we have all had the cross so many years before us, and yet have
not learned salvation in Christ, or true faith in God? Place a child before an
image of the Savior and give it no instruction. Will it learn from the image
that Christ suffered for us? It is said, 'Nay, but it must be taught also by the
Word.' Then the admission is made that it must be instructed not by the image,
but by the Word."
"It is next insisted the images incite to devotion. But
where has God taught us that we should do Him such honor through idols, and by
the performance of certain gestures before them? God everywhere rejects such
worship. Therefore, while the Gospel is preached, and men are instructed in the
pure doctrine, the idols ought to be removed that men may not fall back into the
same errors, for as storks return to their old nests, so do men to their old
errors, if the way to them be not barred."[4]
To calm the public
excitement, which was daily growing stronger, the magistrates of Zurich resolved
to institute another disputation in October of that same year, 1523. [5]
The two points
which were to be discussed were Images and the Mass. It was meant that this
convocation should be even more numerous than the former. The Bishops of
Constance, Coire, and Basle were invited. The governments of the twelve cantons
were asked to send each a deputy.[6]
When the day
arrived, the 26th of October, not fewer than 900 persons met in the Council
Hall. None of the bishops were present. Of the cantons only two, Schaffhausen
and St. Gall, sent deputies. Nevertheless, this assembly of 900 included 350
priests.[7] At a table in the middle
sat Zwingli and Leo Juda, with the Bible in the original tongues open before
them. They were appointed to defend the theses, which all were at liberty to
impugn.
There was a preliminary question, Zwingli felt, which met them on
the threshold: namely, what authority or right had a conference like this to
determine points of faith and worship? This had been the exclusive prerogative
of Popes and Councils for ages. If the Popes and Councils were right, then the
assembly now met was an anarchical one: if the assembly was right, then Popes
and Councils had been guilty of usurpation by monopolising a power which
belonged to more than themselves. This led Zwingli to develop his theory of the
Church; whence came she? what were her powers, and of whom was she
composed?
The doctrine now propounded for the first time by Zwingli, and
which has come since to be the doctrine held on this head by a great part of
Reformed Christendom, was, in brief, that the Church is created by the Word of
God; that her one and only Head is Christ; that the fountain of her laws, and
the charter of her rights, is the Bible; and that she is composed of all those
throughout the world who profess the Gospel.
This theory carried in it a
great ecclesiastical revolution. It struck a blow at the root of the Papal
supremacy. It laid in the dust the towering fabric of the Roman hierarchy. The
community at Zurich, professing their faith in the Lord Jesus and their
obedience to His Word, Zwingli held to be the Church–the Church of Zurich–and he
maintained that it had a right to order all things conformable to the Bible.
Thus did he withdraw the flock over which he presided from the jurisdiction of
Rome, and recover for them the rights and liberties in which the Scriptures had
vested the primitive believers, but of which the Papal See had despoiled them.[8]
The discussion on
images was now opened. The thesis which the Reformer undertook to maintain, and
for which he had prepared the public mind of Zurich by the teaching stated
above, was "that the use of images in worship is forbidden in the Holy
Scriptures, and therefore ought to be done away with." This battle was an easy
one, and Zwingli left it almost entirely in the hands of Leo Juda. The latter
established the proposition in a clear and succinct manner by proofs from the
Bible. At this stage the combat was like to have come to an end for want of
combatants. The opposite party were most unwilling to descend into the arena.
One and then another was called on by name, but all hung back. The images were
in an evil case; they could not speak for themselves, and their advocates seemed
as dumb as they.[9] At length one ventured to
hint that "one should not take the staff out of the hand of the weak Christian,
on which he leans, or one should give him another, else he falls to the ground."
"Had useless parsons and bishops," replied Zwingli, "zealously preached the Word
of God, as has been inculcated upon them, it were not come to this, that the
poor ignorant people, unacquainted with the Word, must learn Christ only through
paintings on the wall or wooden figures." The debate, if such it could be
called, and the daylight were ending together. The president, Hoffmeister of
Schaffhausen, rose. "The Almighty and Everlasting God be praised," said he,
"that He hath vouchsafed us the victory." Then turning to the councillors of
Zurich, he exhorted them to remove the images from the churches, and declared
the sitting at an end. "Child's play," said Zwingli, "this has been; now comes a
weightier and more important matter." [10]
That matter was the
mass. Truly was it styled "weightier." For more than three centuries it had held
its place in the veneration of the people, and had been the very soul of their
worship. Like a skillful and wary general, Zwingli had advanced his attacking
lines nearer and nearer that gigantic fortress against which he was waging
successful battle. He had assailed first the outworks; now he was to strike a
blow at the inner citadel. Should it fall, he would regard the conquest as
complete, and the whole of the contested territory as virtually in his
hands.
On the 27th of October the discussion on the mass was opened. We
have previously given Zwingli's fundamental proposition, which was to this
effect, that Christ's death on the cross is an all-sufficient and everlasting
sacrifice, and that therefore the Eucharist is not a sacrifice, but a
memorial.
"He considered the Supper to be a remembrance instituted by
Christ, at which He will be present, and whereby He, by means of His word of
promise and outward signs, will make the blessing of His death, whose inward
power is eternal, to be actually effective in the Christian for the
strengthening and assurance of faith."[11] This cut the ground from
beneath "transubstantiation" and the "adoration of the Host." Zwingli led the
debate. He expressed his joy at the decision of the conference the day before on
the subject of images, and went on to expound and defend his views on the yet
graver matter which it was now called to consider. "If the mass is no
sacrifice," said Stienli of Schaffhausen, "then have all our fathers walked in
error and been damned!" "If our fathers have erred," replied Zwingli, "what
then? Is not their salvation in the hands of God, like that of all men who have
erred and sinned? Who authorises us to anticipate the judgment of God? The
authors of these abuses will, without doubt, be punished by God; but who is
damned, and who is not, is the prerogative of God alone to decide. Let us not
interfere with the judgments of God. It is sufficiently clear to us that they
have erred."[12] When he had finished, Dr.
Vadian, who was president for the day, demanded if there was any one present
prepared to impugn from Scripture the doctrine which had been maintained in
their hearing. He was answered only with silence. He put the question a second
time. The greater number expressed their agreement with Zwingli. The Abbots of
Kappel and Stein "replied nothing." The Provost of the Chapter of Zurich quoted
in defense of the mass a passage from the apocryphal Epistle of St. Clement and
St. James. Brennwald, Provost of Embrach, avowed himself of Zwingli's
sentiments.
The Canons of Zurich were divided in opinion. The chaplains
of the city, on being asked whether they could prove from Scripture that the
masswas a sacrifice, replied that they could not. The heads of the Franciscans,
Dominicans, and Angustines of Zurich said that they had nothing to oppose to the
theses of Zwingli.[13] A few of the country
priests offered objections, but of so frivolous a kind that it was felt they did
not merit the brief refutation they received. Thus was the mass
overthrown.
This unanimity deeply touched the hearts of all. Zwingli
attempted to express his joy, but sobs choked his utterance. Many in that
assembly wept with him. The grey-headed warrior Hoffmeister, turning to the
council, said, "Ye, my lords of Zurich, ought to take up the Word of God boldly;
God the Almighty will prosper you therein." These simple words of the veteran
soldier, whose voice had so often been heard rising high above the storm of
battle, made a deep impression upon the assembly.[14]
No sooner had
Zwingli won this victory than he found that he must defend it from the violence
of those who would have thrown it away. He might have obtained from the council
an order for the instant removal of the images, and the instant suppression of
the mass, but with his characteristic caution he feared precipitation. He
suggested that both should be suffered to continue a short while longer, that
time might be given him more fully to prepare the public mind for the change.
Meanwhile, the council ordered that the images should be "covered and veiled,"
and that the Supper should be dispensed in bread and wine to those who wished it
in that form. It was also enacted that public processions of religious bodies
should be discontinued, that the Host should not be carried through the streets
and highways, and that the relics and bones of saints should be decently
buried.[15]
CHAPTER
15 Back to
Top
ESTABLISHMENT OF PROTESTANTISM IN
ZURICH.
The Greater Reforms – Purification of the Churches –
Threatening Message of the Forest Cantons – Zurich's Reply – Abduction of the
Pastor of Burg – The Wirths – Their Condemnation and Execution – Zwingli Demands
the Non-celebration of the Mass – Am-Gruet Opposes – Zwingli's Argument –
Council's Edict – A Dream – The Passover – First Celebration of the Supper in
Zurich – Its Happy Influence – Social and Moral Regulations – Two Annual Synods
– Prosperity of Zurich.
AT last the hour arrived to carry out the greater
reforms. On the 20th of June, 1524, a procession composed of twelve councillors,
the three city pastors, the city architect, smiths, lock-smiths, joiners, and
masons might have been seen traversing the streets of Zurich, and visiting its
several churches. On entering, they locked the door from the inside, took down
the crosses, removed the images, defaced the frescoes, and re-stained the
walls.
"The reformed," says Bullinger, "were glad, accounting this
proceeding an act of worship done to the true God." But the superstitious, the
same chronicler tells us, witnessed the act with tears, deeming it a fearful
impiety. "Some of these people," says Christoffel, "hoped that the images would
of their own accord return to their vacant places, and astound the iconoclasts
by this proof of their miraculous power."[1] As the images, instead of
remounting to their niches, lay broken and shivered, they lost credit with their
votaries, and so many were cured of their superstition.
The affair passed
off without the least disturbance. In all the country churches under the
jurisdiction of Zurich, the images were removed with the same order and quiet as
in the capital. The wood was burned, and the costly ornaments and rich robes
that adorned the idols were sold, and the proceeds devoted to the support of the
poor, "those images of Christ."[2]
The act was not
without significance; nay, rather, rightly considered, it was among the more
important reformations that had been hitherto brought to pass in the canton. It
denoted the emancipation of the people from the bonds of a degrading
superstitiom. Men and women breathed the "ampler ether and the diviner air" of
the Reformed doctrine, which condemned, in unmistakable language, the use of
graven images for any purpose whatever. The voice of Scripture was plain on the
subject, and the Protestants of Zurich now that the scales had fallen from their
eyes–saw that they were to worship God, and Him only, in spirit and in truth, in
obedience to the commandments of the Almighty, and in accordance with the
teaching of Jesus Christ.
Again there came a pause. The movement rested a
little while at the point it had reached. The interval was filled up with
portentous events. The Diet of the Swiss Confederation, which met that year at
Zug, sent a deputation to Zurich to say that they were resolved to crush the new
doctrine by force of arms, and that they would hold all who should persist in
these innovations answerable with their goods, their liberties, and their lives.
Zurich bravely replied that in the matter of religion they must follow the Word
of God alone.[3] When this answer was
carried back to the Diet the members trembled with rage. The fanaticism of the
cantons of Lucerne, Schwitz, Uri, Unterwalden, Friburg, and Zug was rising from
one day to another, and soon blood would be spilt.
One night Jean Oexlin,
the pastor of Burg, near Stein on the Rhine, was dragged from his bed and
carried away to prison. The signal-gun was fired, the alarm-bells were rung in
the valley, and the parishioners rose in mass to rescue their beloved pastor.[4] Some miscreants mixed in
the crowd, rioting ensued, and the Carthusian convent of Ittingen was burned to
the ground.
Among those who had been attracted by the noise of the
tumult, and who had followed the crowd which sought to rescue the pastor of
Burg, carried away by the officers of a bailiff whose jurisdiction did not
extend to the village in which he lived, were an old man named Wirth,
Deputy-Bailiff of Stammheim, and his two sons, Adrian and John, preachers of the
Gospel, and distinguished by the zeal and courage with which they had prosecuted
that good work. They had for some time been objects of dislike for their
Reformed sentiments. Apprehended by the orders of the Diet, they were charged
with the outrage which they had striven to the utmost of their power to prevent.
Their real offense was adherence to the Reformed faith. They were taken to
Baden, put to the torture, and condemned to death by the Diet. The younger son
was spared, but the father and the elder son, along with Burkhard Ruetimann,
Deputy-Bailiff of Nussbaumen, were ordered for execution.
While on their
way to the place where they were to die, the Cure of Baden addressed them,
bidding them fall on their knees before the image in front of a chapel they were
at the moment passing. "Why should I pray to wood and stone?" said the younger
Wirth; "my God is the living God, to Him only will I pray. Be you yourself
converted to Him, for you have not worn the grey frock longer than I did; and
you too must die." It so happened that the priest died within the year.[5] Turning to his father, the
younger Wirth said, "My dear father, from this moment you shall no longer be my
father, and I shall no longer be your son; but we shall be brothers in Jesus
Christ, for the love of Whom we are now to lay down our lives. We shall today go
to Him who is our Father, and the Father of all believers, and with Him we shall
enjoy an everlasting life." Being come to the place of execution, they mounted
the scaffold with firm step, and bidding each other farewell till they should
again meet in the eternal mansions, they bared their necks, and the executioner
struck. The spectators could not refrain from shedding floods of tears when they
saw their heads rolling on the scaffold.[6]
Zwingli was
saddened but not intimidated by these events. He saw in them no reason why he
should stop, but on the contrary a strong reason why he should advance in the
movement of Reformation. Rome shall pay dear for the blood she has spilt; so
Zwingli resolves; he will abolish the mass, and complete the Reformation of
Zurich.
On the 11th of April, 1525, the three pastors of Zurich appeared
before the Council of Two Hundred, and demanded that the Senate should enact
that at the approaching Easter festival the celebration of the Lord's Supper
should take place according to its original institution.[7] The Under-Secretary of
State, Am-Gruet, started up to do battle in behalf of the threatened Sacrament.
"'This is my body,'" said he, quoting the words of Christ, which he insisted
were a plain and manifest assertion that the bread was the real body of Christ.
Zwingli replied that Scripture must be interpreted by Scripture, and reminded
him of numerous passages where is has the force of signifies, and among others
he quoted the following:–
"The seed is the Word," "The field is the
world," "I am the Vine," "The Rock was Christ."[8]
The secretary
objected that these passages were taken from parables and proved nothing. "No,"
it was replied, "the phrases occur after the parable has ended, and the
figurative language been put aside." Am-Gruet stood alone. The council were
already convinced; they ordered that the mass should cease, and that on the
following day, Maundy Thursday, the Lord's Supper should be celebrated after the
apostolic institution.[9]
The scene in which
Zwingli had been so intensely occupied during the day, presented itself to him
when asleep. He thought that he was again in the Council Chamber disputing with
Am-Gruet. The secretary was urging his objection, and Zwingli was unable to
repel it. Suddenly, a figure stood before him and said, "O, slow of heart to
understand, why don't you reply to him by quoting Exodus 12:11–'Ye shall eat it
[the lamb] in haste: it is the Lord's Passover'?[10] Roused from sleep by the
appearance of the figure, he leaped out of bed, turned up the passage in the
Septuagint, and found there the same word ejsti (is) used with regard to the institution of the Passover
which is employed in reference to the institution of the Supper. All are agreed
that the lamb was simply the symbol and memorial of the Passover: why should the
bread be more in the Supper? The two are but one and the same ordinance under
different forms. The following day Zwingli preached from the passage in Exodus,
arguing that that exegesis must be at fault which finds two opposite meanings in
the same; word, used, as it here is, in the same form of expression, and
recording the institution of the same ordinance. If the lamb was simply a symbol
in the Passover, the bread can be nothing more in the Supper; but if the bread
in the Supper was Christ, the lamb in the Passover was Jehovah. So did Zwingli
argue in his sermon, to the conviction of many of his hearers.
In giving
an account of the occurrence afterwards, Zwingli playfully remarked that he
could not tell whether the figure was white or black.[11] His opponents, however,
had no difficulty in determining that the figure was black, and that Zwingli
received his doctrine from the devil.
On the Thursday of Easter-week the
Sacrament of the Supper was for the first time dispensed in Zurich according to
the Protestant form. The altar was replaced by a table covered with a white
cloth, on which were set wooden plates with unleavened bread, and wooden goblets
filled with wine. The pyxes were disused, for, said they, Christ commanded "the
elements" not to be enclosed but distributed. The altars, mostly of marble, were
converted into pulpits, from which the Gospel was preached. The service began
with a sermon; after sermon, the pastor and deacons took their place behind the
table; the words of institution (1 Corinthians 11:20- 29) were read; prayers
were offered, a hymn was sung in responses, a short address was delivered; the
bread and wine were then carried round, and the communicants partook of them
kneeling on their footstools[12]
"This celebration
of the Lord's Supper," says Christoffel, "was accompanied with blessed results.
An altogether new love to God and the brethren sprang up, and the words of
Christ received spirit and life. The different orders of the Roman Church
unceasingly quarrelled with each other; the brotherly love of the first
centuries of Christianity returned to the Church with the Gospel. Enemies
renounced old deep-rooted hatred, and embraced in an ecstacy of love and a sense
of common brotherhood, by the partaking in common of the hallowed bread. 'Peace
has her habitation in our town,' wrote Zwingli to Ecolampadius; 'no quarrel, no
hypocrisy, no envy, no strife. Whence can such union come but from the Lord, and
our doctrine, which fills us with the fruits of peace and piety?'"[13]
This ecclesiastical
Reformation brought a social one in its wake. Protestantism was a breath of
healing–a stream of cleansing in all countries to which it came. By planting a
renovating principle in the individual heart, Zwingli had planted a principle of
renovation at the heart of the community; but he took care to nourish and
conserve that principle by outward arrangements. Mainly through his influence
with the Great Council, aided by the moral influence the Gospel exercised over
its members, a set of regulations and laws was framed, calculated to repress
immorality and promote virtue in the canton. The Sunday and marriage, those twin
pillars of Christian morality, Zwingli restored to their original dignity. Rome
had made the Sunday simply a Church festival: Zwingli replaced it on its first
basis–the Divine enactment; work was forbidden upon it, although allowed,
specially in harvest-time, in certain great exigencies of which the whole
Christian community were to judge.
Marriage, which Rome had desecrated by
her doctrine of "holy celibacy," and by making it a Sacrament, in order, it was
pretended, to cleanse it, Zwingli revindicated by placing it upon its original
institution as an ordinance of God, and in itself holy and good. All questions
touching marriage he made subject to a small special tribunal. The confessional
was abolished. "Disclose your malady," said the Reformer, "to the Physician who
alone can heal it." Most of the holy-days were abrogated. All, of whatever rank,
were to attend church, at least once, on Sunday. Gambling, profane swearing, and
all excess in eating and drinking were prohibited under penalties. To support
this arrangement the small inns were suppressed, and drink was not allowed to be
sold after nine o'clock in the evening. Grosser immoralities and sins were
visited with excommunication, which was pronounced by a board of moral control,
composed of the marriage-judges, the magistrates of the district, and the
pastors–a commingling of civil and ecclesiastical authority not wholly in
harmony with the theoretic views of the Reformer, but he deemed that the
peculiar relations of the Church to the State made this arrangement necessary
and justifiable for the time.
Above all he was anxious to guard the
morals of the pastors, as a means of preserving untarnished the grandeur and
unimpaired the power of the Word preached, knowing that it is in the Church
usually that the leprosy of national declension first breaks out. An act of
council, passed in 1528, appointed two synodal assemblies to be held each
year–one in spring, the other in autumn. All the pastors were to convene, each
with one or two members of his congregation. On the part of the council the
synod was attended by the burgomaster, six councillors, and the town clerk. The
court mainly occupied itself with inquiries into the lives, the doctrine, and
the occupations of the individual pastors, with the state of morals in their
several parishes.[14]
Thus a vigorous
discipline was exercised over all classes, lay and cleric. This regime would
never have been submitted to, had not the Gospel as a great spiritual pioneer
gone before. Its beneficent results were speedily apparent. "Under its
protecting and sheltering influence," says Christoffel, "there grew up and
flourished those manly and hardy virtues which so richly adorned the Church of
the Reformation at its commencement." An era of prosperity and renown now opened
on Zurich. Order and quiet were established, the youth were instructed, letters
were cultivated, arts and industry flourished, and the population, knit together
in the bends of a holy faith, dwelt in peace and love. They were exempt from the
terrible scourge which so frequently desolated the Popish cantons around
them.
Zwingli had withdrawn them from the "foreign service," so
demoralising to their patriotism and their morality, and while the other cantons
were shedding their blood on foreign fields, the inhabitants of the canton of
Zurich were prosecuting the labors of peace, enriching their territory with
their activity and skill, and making its capital, Zurich, one of the lights of
Christendom.
Book 9 Index
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME FIRST
BOOK EIGHTH
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 1
[1] Histoire de la Reformation, de la Suisse. Par Abraham Ruchat, Ministre du Saint Evangile et Professeur en Belles Lettres dans l’Academie du Lausanne. Vol 1, p. 70. Lausanne, 1835.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 2
[1] Augustin., Epist. 119., Ad Januarium.
[2] Sulp. Severus, Vit. Martini, cap. 11; apud Ruchat, 1:17.
[3] Commentar., in 1 Epist. Timot., cap. 3.
[4] Melchior Canus, Loc. Com., p. 59.
[5] Hottinger, tom. 3, p. 125; apud Ruchat.
[6] Ibid., tom. 3, pp. 285, 286.
[7] Zwing., Oper., tom. 2, p. 613.
[8] Alphons. de Castro adv. Haeres, lib. 1, cap. 4; apud Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 21.
[9] Hottinger, apud Ruchat, tom. l, p. 22.
[10] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 22. Mosheim, cent. 7, pt. 2, chap. 5.
[11] Zwing, Oper., tom. 2, p.622
[12] De Invent rer., lib. 6: 13: “Imaginibus magis fidunt, quam Christo ipsi;” apud Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 24.
[13] The sale of benefices was as ordinary an affair, says Ruchat (tom. 1, p. 26), “que celle des cochons au march3 –as that of swine in a market.
[14] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 26.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 3
[1] Ruchat, tom. 1 p. 27.
[2] Arch. de Moud. Registr.; apud Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 27.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 29.
[6] "Venilia Romae Templa, Sacerdotes, Altaria, Sacra, Coronae, Ignis, Thura, Preces, Coelum est venale, Deusque." (At Rome are on sale, temples, priests, altars, mitres, crowns, fire [or, excommunications], incense, prayers, heaven, and God himself.)
[7] Arch. de Moud. Registr.; apud Ruchat, i. 30.
[8] Arch. de Moud. Registr.; apud Ruchat, i. 30.
[9] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 31.
[10] “L’impiete, l’ivrognerie, la gourmandise et l’impurete, etaient parmi eux a leur comble; ils le portaient plus loin que les laiques.” (Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 32.)
[11] Arch. de Bern. et MS. amp., p. 18; apud Ruchat, 1, 33.
[12] “Taken,” says Ruchat, “from an original paper, which has been communicated to me by M. Olivier, chtatelain of La Sarraz.”
[13] Two or three years before the occurrence of this plague, a pestilence had raged in Lausanne and its environs. (Ruchat.)
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 4
[1] Christoffel, Zwingli, or Rise of the Reformation in Switzerland, p. 1; Clark’s ed., Edin., 1858. D’Aubigne, bk. 8, chap. 1.
[2] Pallavicino asserts that he was obscurely born–“nato bassamente” (tom. 1, lib. 1, cap. 19). His family was ancient and highly respected (Gerdesius, p. 101)–“Issu d’une honnete et ancienne famille,” says Ruchat (tom. 1, p. 71).
[3] Oswald Myconius, Vit. Zwing. Not to be confounded with Myconius the friend and biographer of Luther.
[4] De Providentia Dei.
[5] Christoffel, p. 3.
[6] Osw. Mycon., Vit. Zwing.
[7] Christoffel, p. 5.
[8] Bullinger, Chron.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 5
[1] Christoffel, p. 8.
[2] Osw. Mycon., Vit. Zwing.
[3] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 67.
[4] Hottinger, 16. Ruchat, tom. 1, pp. 76, 77.
[5] Hottinger, 16, 17. Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 77.
[6] “Jesum Christum nobis a Patre justitiam et satisfactionem pro peccatis mundi factum est” (Jesus Christ is made by the Father our righteousness and the satisfaction for the sins of the world).– Gerdesius, tom. 1, pp. 100-102.
[7] Christoffel, p. 9.
[8] Zwing. Epp., p. 9.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 6
[1] Zwingli Opp., ed. Schuler et Schulthess, 1, 81; apud Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., vol. 1, p. 287.
[2] Ibid., 1, 79; apud Dorner, vol 1, p. 287.
[3] Zwingli’s own words, as given in his Works, tom. 1, p. 37, are–“ Caepi ego evangelium praedicare anno salutis decimo sexto supra millesimum et quingentesimum, eo silicet tempore, cum Lutheri nomen in nostris regionibus ne auditurn quidem adhuc erat” (I began to preach the Gospel in the year of grace 1516, at that time namely when even the name of Luther had not been heard in our country). Wolfgang’s words are, as given in Capito’s letter to Bullinger–“Nam antequam Lutherus in lucem emerserat, Zwinglius et ego inter nos communicavimus de Pontifice dejiciendo, etiam dum ille vitam degeret in Eremitorio” (For before Luther had appeared in public, Zwingli and I had conversed together regarding the overthrow of the Pope, even when he lived in the Hermitage).–Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 193.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 7
[1] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 74.
[2] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 75.
[3] Hist. Ren. Evang., 1, 104.
[4] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 94.
[5] Christoffel, pp. 28, 29.
[6] Christoffel, p. 111.
[7] Ruchat. tom. 1, p. 105.
[8] Osw. Mycon., Vit. Zwing.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 8
[1] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 90.
[2] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 92.
[3] Ibid
[4] Hist. Ren. Evang. tom. 1, pp. 106, 122.
[5] Pallavicino, tom. 1, lib. 1, cap. 19, p. 80.
[6] Some of Samson’s indulgences were preserved in the archives of the towns, and in the libraries of private families, down to Ruchat’s time, the middle of last century. The indulgence bought by Arnay for 500 dollars Ruchat had seen, signed by Samson himself. Two batzen, for which the paper indulgences were sold, are about three-halfpence.
[7] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 96
[8] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 97.
[9] Ibid., pp. 97, 98. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 124.
[10] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 106.
[11] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 126.
[12] Pallavicino, tom. 1, p. 80.
[13] Bullinger, p. 87.
[14] Zwing. Epp., p. 91.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 9
[1] Zwing. Opp., 1, 206; apud D’Aubigne, 2, 351.
[2] Christoffel, pp. 40, 42.
[3] RuchaL. tom. 1, p. 108.
[4] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 229.
[5] Scultet. p. 67.
[6] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 229.
[7] Gerdesius, tom. 2, sec. 106, 120, 121.
[8] Letter to Zwingli, 1520–Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 231.
[9] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 232.
[10] “Ne Lutherum discipulis legerem; ne nominarem, imo ne in mentem eum admitterem.” (Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 232.)
[11] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 233. D’Aubigne, vol. 2, p. 400.
[12] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 237.
[13] Ibid., tom. 2, p. 236–Effigies.
[14] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 322
[15] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 238. Christoffel, pp. 186-192. D’Aubigne, vol. 2, p. 359; vol. 3, pp. 259-261.
[16] See summary of Disputation in Gerdesius, tom 2, sec. 118.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 10
[1] Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 239.
[2] Ibid., p. 246.
[3] Christoffel, p. 180.
[4] D’Aubigne,vol. 3, p. 320
[5] Gerdesius, tom 2, p. 367, foot-note
[6] Christoffel, pp. 173, 174.
[7] Gerdesius, tom 2, pp. 368,394. Christoffel, pp. 175,178.
[8] Appenzell joined the Swiss league in 1513, and was the last in order of the so-called old cantons.
[9] Christoffel, pp. 179–181.
[10] Ruchat, tom. 1, pp. 228-230. Christoffel, pp. 183, 185.
[11] Scultet., Annal., Dec. 1, p. 290; apud Gerdesius, tom. 2, pp. 292 and 304, 306· Christoffel, pp. 182-185.
[12] Gerdesius, tom. 2, pp. 292, 293.
[13] Hottinger, helve., pp. 380–384. Sleidan, lib. 5, apud Gerdesius, tom. 2, p. 363.
[14] D’Aubigne, vol. 5, p. 306.
[15] Christoffel, p. 173.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 11
[1] Christoffel, pp. 51, 52.
[2] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 133.
[3] Christoffel, p. 58.
[4] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 134.
[5] Ruchat, tom. 1, pp. 134,135.
[6] Christoffel, pp. 58-62.
[7] Gerdesius, tom 1, p. 270. Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 135.
[8] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 138. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 273.
[9] Christoffel, pp. 66, 67.
[10] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 140.
[11] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 141. Gerdesius, tom. 1, pp. 270-277.
[12] Ruchat, tom. 1, pp. 150, 151.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 12
[1] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 279. Christoffel, pp. 95, 96.
[2] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 160.
[3] Christoffel, p. 96.
[4] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 160.
[5] This article would appear to be directed against the teaching of the Anabaptists, who began to appear about the year 1522.
[6] Ruchat, tom 1, p. 161.
[7] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 279. Christoffel, p. 99.
[8] Hotting, 106, 107. Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 160.
[9] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 161.
[10] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 279.
[11] Christoffel, p. 102.
[12] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 162.
[13] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 163.
[14] Christoffel, pp. 105, 106.
[15] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 164.
[16] Luke 1:48.
[17] Ibid. 1:43.
[18] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 105.
[19] Luke 10:16.
[20] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 167. Sleidan, bk. 3, p. 57. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 279: “Ut traditionibus hominum omissis, Evangelium pure doceatur e Veteris et Novi Testamenti libris” (That, laying aside the traditions of man, the pure Gospel may be taught from the books of the Old and New Testament).
[21] Zwing. Op., 621, 622; apud Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 167.
[22] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 168. Christoffel, pp. 107, 108. D’Aubigne, vol. 3, pp. 226, 227.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 13
[1] Christoffel, p. 109.
[2] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 169.
[3] Ibid., tom. 1, p. 181.
[4] Christoffel, pp. 101-113.
[5] Christoffel, p. 115.
[6] Christoffel, pp. 118, 119.
[7] Ibid., p. 119.
[8] Christoffel, pp. 119, 120.
[9] Ibid., p. 120, foot-note.
[10] See D’Aubigne, 8, 13, foot-note, and Christoffel, pp. 122,123, on the time and manner of Zwingli’s marriage.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 14
[1] Zwing. Op., tom. 1, fol. 35. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 280.
[2] Christoffel, p. 126. Hottinger was afterwards martyred at Lucerne. But this, and other events outside the canton of Zurich, will come more fully under our notice when we advance to the second stage of the Swiss Reformation–that, namely, from the establishment of the Protestant faith at Zurich, 1525, to the battle of Kappel, 1531.
[3] Christoffel, p. 126.
[4] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 183. Christoffel, pp. 126-130. So did Zwingli, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, reason on the question of the worshipping of God by images. He was followed in the same line of argument by the French and English divines who rose later in the same century. And at this day the Protestant controversialist can make use of but the same weapons that Zwingli employed.
[5] Sleidan, bk. iv., p. 66.
[6] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 290.
[7] Ruchat, tom. 1, pp. 182,183.
[8] Christoffel, p. 132.
[9] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 291. Christoffel, p. 133.
[10] Christoffel, pp. 132-135.
[11] Dorner, Hist. Prof. Theol., vol. 1, p. 309.
[12] Christoffel, p. 137.
[13] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 184.
[14] Gerdesius, tom. 1, pp. 291, 292. Christoffel, pp. 137-139.
[15] Ibid., tom. 1, pp. 292, 293. Christoffel, pp. 142, 143.They boasted having in the cathedral the bodies of St. Felix and St. Regulus, martyrs of the Theban legion. When their coffins were opened they were found to contain some bones mixed with pieces of charcoal and brick. The bones were committed to the earth. “Nevertheless,” says Ruchat, “the Papists in latter times have given out that the bodies of the martyrs were carried to Ursern, in the canton of Uri, since the Reformation, and they were exhibited there on the 11th April, 1688.” (Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 193.)
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK EIGHTH- CHAPTER 15
[1] Christoffel, p. 143. See also foot-note.
[2] Sleidan, bk. 4, p. 73. Zwing. Op., tom. 1, fol. 261. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 294, also p. 305. Christoffel, pp. 143, 144.
[3] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 217.
[4] , ibid p. 218.
[5] Ibid., p. 221.
[6] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 221. Sleidan, bk. 4, p. 77. Christoffel, pp. 214-221.
[7] Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 318.
[8] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 245.
[9] Sleidan, bk. 4, p. 82. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 321. Christoffel. p. 146.
[10] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 246. Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 322.
[11] “Ater an albus, nihil memini, somnium enim narro.” (Gerdesius, tom. 1, p. 322.)
[12] Ruchat, tom. 1, p. 247. Christoffel, p. 149.
[13] Christoffel, pp. 147,148.
[14] Christoffel, pp. 151,165.