Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and ReformationLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 2: Renaissance and Reformation
Lord, John
History
Nor can I describe the counter reformation, the great reaction
which succeeded to the violence of the revolution. The English
reformation was not consummated until constitutional liberty was
heralded by the reign of William and Mary, when the nation became
almost unanimously Protestant, with perfect toleration of religions
opinions, although the fervor of the Puritans had passed away
forever, leaving a residuum of deep-seated popular antipathy to all
the institutions of Romanism and all the ideas of the Middle Ages.
The English reformation began with princes, and ended with the
agitations of the people. The German reformation began with the
people, and ended in the wars of princes. But both movements were
sublime, since they showed the force of religious ideas. Civil
liberty is only one of the sequences which exalt the character and
dignity of man amid the seductions and impediments of a gilded
material life.
AUTHORITIES.
Todd's Life of Cranmer; Strype's Life of Cranmer; Wood's Annals of
the Oxford University; Burnet's English Reformation; Doctor
Lingard's History of England; Macaulay's Essays; Fuller's Church
History; Gilpin's Life of Cranmer; Original Letters to Cromwell;
Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; Butler's Book of the
Roman Catholic Church; Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical biography;
Turner's Henry VIII.; Froude's History of England; Fox's Life of
Latimer; Turner's Reign of Mary.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA.
A.D. 1491-1556
RISE AND INFLUENCE OF THE JESUITS.
Next to the Protestant Reformation itself, the most memorable moral
movement in the history of modern times was the counter-reformation
in the Roman Catholic Church, finally effected, in no slight
degree, by the Jesuits. But it has not the grandeur or historical
significance of the great insurrection of human intelligence which
was headed by Luther. It was a revival of the pietism of the
Middle Ages, with an external reform of manners. It was not
revolutionary; it did not cast off the authority of the popes, nor
disband the monasteries, nor reform religious worship: it rather
tended to strengthen the power of the popes, to revive monastic
life, and to perpetuate the forms of worship which the Middle Ages
had established. No doubt a new religions life was kindled, and
many of the flagrant abuses of the papal empire were redressed, and
the lives of the clergy made more decent, in accordance with the
revival of intelligence. Nor did it disdain literature or art, or
any form of modern civilization, but sought to combine progress
with old ideas; it was an effort to adapt the Roman theocracy to
changing circumstances, and was marked by expediency rather than
right, by zeal rather than a profound philosophy.
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