BOOK I

THE REFORMATION AND THE CHURCHES

The modern world came into being with the Reformation, which revolutionized the social and political as well as the religious life of the West. In place of one Church, centered at Rome, there arose a number of churches, separate and self-governed, though owning a common allegiance to Jesus Christ. This movement towards freedom was most marked among the northern nations of Europe and the new nations that sprang from them. In some ways the cleavage was a great calamity, but it served to bring out the richness and many-sidedness of the Christian teaching.

CHAPTER I

MARTIN LUTHER AND THE LUTHERAN

CHURCHES

Martin Luther, the leader of the Reformation, must always rank among the world's heroes. No story is more wonderful than that of the peasant boy who lived to challenge the pope and the emperor, and to turn the whole course of history. His immediate work was the founding of the Lutheran Church, itself a splendid achievement. But beyond that the fearless, truth-loving spirit of Luther has given to modern progress an impulse of which no one can yet

guess the ultimate effect.

HE story of the modern Church begins with the Protestant Reformation, and the Protestant Reformation had its beginning in the work of Martin Luther. In the history of the Church he is the human link that connects a new world of Christian life and thought with the wholly different world that lies immediately behind it. He links these worlds together because he lived in both of them at once. He has been called the best-known character in history; certainly more books have been written about him than about any other man. The material for the writing of these books is enormous. He was a voluminous writer, and everything he wrote, after 1517, was live material for the printers of his day. He was a preacher and a university professor, and his sermons and lectures have been preserved. He conducted an enormous correspondence and people who received letters from him treasured them for future reference; his published letters fill eighteen volumes. He was a hero to his intimate friends, and the conversations that went on at his hospitable table were written down by listeners and circulated for posterity to read. With it all, he was a man of most amazing frankness. Reticence was a quality that was altogether alien to his nature. In everything he wrote and

everything he said he expressed himself without reserve on every subject that came into his mind. The result is that his whole life became an open book for everyone to read. From the time when he first became a public character down to the day of his death, we can account for almost every day that he spent, and know where he went, whom he saw, whom he talked to, what he talked about upon that day.

And yet, with all this information at our disposal, the opinions that men hold of him go very far apart. If divided judgment is a tribute paid to greatness, then this man was very great. There are some who think of him as a prophet sent from God; there are others who are just as sure that he was an emissary of Satan; but whether it is the one opinion or the other that men hold, depends upon the view they take of the meaning and the worth of modern Christianity. Among those who hold that he was a prophet there are some who believe that his ideas of religion and of the Christian life were truly derived from the pure sources of the Christian faith and must therefore be permanently valid; there are others who see in him merely the originator of a new search into the meaning of the Gospel, a liberator rather than a founder, a great rebel rather than a great constructive genius. For everything he did and for everything he said he is both blamed and praised; but upon one point those who blame him and those who praise him are agreedhe is an epoch-marking figure, a man whose influence ran into all the fields of human interest that his age knew, religious and political, economic and social.

On the thirty-first of October, 1517, Luther posted on the bulletin-board of the University of Wittenberg a set of ninetyfive theses on "the power and efficacy of indulgences". It was merely an accidental circumstance that the bulletin-board should have been the door of the Elector of Saxony's castlechurch. The theses were intended to be the subject of academic discussion. Luther proposed a "disputation", of the kind familiar to the medieval university, upon a subject that was at that time a live issue in many places, including Germany. But the discussion was not the whole purpose of the theses, for at