long as religious men must reveal their "expe- | unbroken. We cannot know about any seemriences," and self-defamation revels in its pre-ingly indifferent practice of the Church of sent impunity, there is no help for it, but in Rome that is not a development of the apostowithholding the applause to which even lowli- lic 005, and it is to no purpose to say that we ness itself aspires for the candour with which can find no proof of it in the writings of the it is combined, and the acuteness by which it first six centuries-they must find a disproof is embellished. if they would do any thing."-"I think people It is not by these nice self-observers that the are injudicious who talk against the Roman creeds of hoar antiquity, and the habits of cen- Catholics for worshipping saints and honourturies are to be shaken; nor is such high em- ing the Virgin and images, &c. These things prize reserved for ascetics who can pause to may, perhaps, be idolatrous; I cannot make enumerate the slices of bread and butter from up my mind about it."-"P. called us the which they have abstained. When Whitfield Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved would mortify his body, he set about it like a a double ignorance, as we are Catholics withman. The paroxysm was short, indeed, but out the popery, and Church of England men terrible. While it lasted his diseased imagi- without the protestantism."-"The more I nation brought soul and body into deadly con- think over that view of yours about regarding flict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and our present communion service, &c., as a judgwell-nigh destroying the peccant carcass. Not ment on the Church, and taking it as the so the fastidious and refined "witness to the crumbs from the apostle's table, the more I views" of the restorers of the Catholic Church. am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as The strife between his spiritual and animal tending to check the intrusion of irreverent nature is recorded in his journal in such terms thoughts, without in any way interfering with as these:-" Looked with greediness to see if one's just indignation."-"Your trumpery printhere was goose on the table for dinner."-ciple about Scripture being the sole rule of "Meant to have kept a fast, and did abstain from dinner, but at tea ate buttered toast.""Tasted nothing to-day till tea-time, and then only one cup and dry bread."-"I have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last."-"I made rather a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast in W.'s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip."

Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zuingle, Cranmer, and Latimer, may still rest in their honoured graves. "Take courage, brother Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon be put out," is a prophecy which will not be defeated by the successors of those who heard it, so long as their confessors shall be vacant to record, and their doctors to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast.

Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account of "the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient," and in which they record their "own general concurrence." Of these weighty truths take the following examples:

"You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain, that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church, which has preserved its traditionary practices

faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word) is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.”— "Really I hate the Reformation and the reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the rationalist spirit they set afloat is the udonporrns of the Revelation." Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact, that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?"-"[ wish you could get to know something of S. and W. (Southey and Wordsworth) and unprotestantize and un-Miltonize them."-" How is it we are so much in advance of our generation ?"

Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from "the secret place of thunders," have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it proclaimed from the rising to the setting sun! In what does the modern creed of Oxford differ from the ancient faith of Rome? Hurried along by the abhorred current of advancing knowledge and social improvement, they have indeed renounced papal dominion, and denied papal infallibility, and rejected the grosser superstitions which Rome herself at once despises and promotes. But a prostrate submission to human authority (though veiled under words of vague and mysterious import)—the repose of the wearied or indolent mind on external observances-an escape from the arduous exercise of man's highest faculties in the worship of his Maker-the usurped dominion of the imaginative and sensitive over the intellectual powers-these are the common characteristics of both systems.

The Reformation restored to the Christian world its only authentic canon, and its one Supreme Head. It proclaimed the Scriptures as the rule of life; and the Divine Redeemer as the supreme and central object to whom every eye must turn, and on whom every hope must rest. It cast down not only the idols erected for the adoration of the vulgar, but the

United States, and, in loathing against the tobacconized republic, becomes an absolutist. A "double first-class" theologian overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns Catholic. But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair; nor will Exeter hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of opposite materials, and are cast in very different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which it may be associated.

idolatrous abstractions to which the worship | There is nothing to dread from such hostility of more cultivated minds was rendered. Pene- and such enemies. A fine lady visits the trating the design, and seizing the spirit of the gospels, the reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man's compound nature had each its appropriate office; the one directed to the Redeemer in his palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in his hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful but penitent race the parental character of the Omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude's oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers and meditations "the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour." They are exhorted not to doubt that there was a real though silent "allusion to Christ" under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told that "this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes." It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude's departure from the habits of his fellow Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the "popular writers of the day," would bury in silence the name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may "awe and fear" become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an "awe" which "shrinks to utter" the name of Him who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the name which is ineffable;-a "fear" which can make mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all-is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple, though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow Christians. It tinges his letters, his journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer's life, and the benefits of his passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round whom as its centre the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is run, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the Protestant churches has been erected.

Mr. Froude was the victim of these associations. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his political or religious antagonists. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an administration more than suspected of liberalism. The "Witness to Catholic Views," "in whose sentiments as a whole," his editors concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his feelings:-"I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side." Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the editors enjoin the reader not to "confound the author's view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings_towards any he should exactly meet;" and Professor Tholuck is summoned from Germany to explain how the "originators of error" may lawfully be the objects of a good man's hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred, and connexions, Mr. Froude's feelings towards the "abstract negro" would have satisfied the learned professor in his most indignant mood. "I am ashamed," he says, "I cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers."-"Every one I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole AntiSlavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head."-"The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward, stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton's cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with every body, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley." Mr. Froude, or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that his profession gave him not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is "hated" with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction "I sincerely hope the march of mind in France may yet prove a bloody one.” "The election of the

D

wretched B. for, and that base fellow, H. | book than the preceding quotations might ap for, in spite of the exposure," &c. Again, pear to promise. If given as specimens of the editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. It should be observed," they say, "as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are."

his power, they would do gross injustice to a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and a devout Christian. But as illustrations of the temper and opinions of those who now sit in Wycliffe's seat, they are neither unfair nor unimportant. And they may also convince all whom it concerns, that hitherto, at least, Oxford has not given birth to a new race of giants, by whom the evangelical founders and missionaries of the Church of England will be expelled from their ancient dominion, or the Protestant world excluded from the light of day and the free breath of heaven.

Milton, however, is the especial object of Mr. Froude's virtuous abhorrence. He is "a detestable author." Mr. Froude rejoices to learn something of the puritans, because, as he says, "It gives me a better right to hate Milton, and accounts for many of the things Whenever the time shall be ripe for writing which most disgusted me in his (not in my the ecclesiastical history of the last and the sense of the word) poetry."-"A lady told me present age, a curious chapter may be devoted yesterday that you wrote the article of Sacred to the rise and progress of the Evangelical Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to body in England from the days of Whitfield to what I thought your standard of aversion to our own. It will convey many important lesMilton." Mr. Froude and his editors must be sons. It will manifest the irresistible power delivered over to the secular arm under the of the doctrines of the Reformation when prowrit De Heretico Comburando for their wilful claimed with honesty and zeal, even though obstinacy in rejecting the infallible sentence its teachers be unskilled in those studies which of the fathers and œcumenical counsels of the are essential to a complete and comprehenchurch poetical, on this article of faith. There sive theology. It will show that infirmities is no room for mercy. They did not belong which, not without some reason, offend the to the audience, meet but few, to whom the im- more cultivated, and disgust the more fastimortal addressed himself to that little com- dious members of the Catholic Church amongst pany to which alone it is reserved to estimate us, are but as the small dust in the balance, the powers of such a mind, and reverently to when weighed against the mighty energy of notice its defects. They were of that multi-those cardinal truths in the defence of which tude who have to make their choice between Wycliffe and Luther, Knox and Calvin, Ridley repeating the established creed and holding and Latimer, lived and laboured, and died. their peace. Why are free-thinkers in litera- It may also prove that recondite learning, deep ture to be endured more than in religion? | piety and the purest virtue may be all comThe guilt of liberalism has clearly been contracted by this rash judgment; and Professor Tholuck being the witness, it exposes the criminals and the whole society of Oriel, nay, the entire University itself, to the diffusive indignation of all who cling to the Catholic faith in poetry.

There are much better things in Mr. Froude's

bined in bosoms which are yet contracted by narrow and unsuspected prejudices. But, above all, it may teach mutual charity; admonishing men to listen with kindness and selfdistrust even to each other's extravagant claims to an exclusive knowledge of the Divine will, and the exclusive possession of the Divine favour.

D'AUBIGNÉ'S HISTORY OF THE GREAT
REFORMATION.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1839.]

ENGLISH literature is singularly defective in To fill this void in our libraries, is an enter whatever relates to the Reformation in Ger- prise which might stimulate the zeal, and many and Switzerland, and to the lives of the establish the reputation of the ripest student great men by whom it was accomplished. A native of this island who would know any thing to the purpose, of Reuchlin or Hutten, or Luther or Melancthon, of Zuingle, Bucer or Ecolampadius, of Calvin or Farel, must betake himself to other languages than his own.

*History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, in Germany, Switzerland, &c. By J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE, President of the Theological School of Geneva, 8vo. Vol. I. London, 1838.

of Ecclesiastical History amongst us. In no other field could he discover more ample resources for narratives of dramatic interest; for the delineation of characters contrasted in every thing except their common design; for exploring the influence of philosophy, arts, and manners, on the fortunes of mankind; and for reverently tracing the footsteps of Divine Providence, moving among the ways and works of men, imparting dignity to events otherwise

unimportant, and a deep significance to occur- guage of reproach and insult, but, harder still, rences in any other view as trivial as a border described as a buffoon. It is, perhaps, well raid, or the palaver of an African village. for the dignity of the stern reformer that the Take, for example, the life of Ulric de Hut- taunt was unknown to the object of it; for, ten, a noble, a warrior, and a rake; a theolo- great as he was, Hutten would not have spared gian withal, and a reformer; and at the same him; and as the quiver of few satirists has time the author, or one of the authors, of a been stored with keener or more envenomed satire to be classed amongst the most effective shafts, so, few illustrious men have exposed which the world has ever seen. Had the to such an assailant a greater number of vulrecreative powers of Walter Scott been exer- nerable points. But of these, or of his other cised on Hutten's story, how familiar would private habits, little is generally recorded. all Christendom have been with the stern History having claimed Luther for her own, Baron of Franconia, and Ulric, his petulant biography has yielded to the pretensions of boy; with the fat Abbot of Foulde driving the her more stately sister; and the domestic and fiery youth by penances and homilies to range interior life of the antagonist of Leo and of a literary vagabond on the face of the earth; Charles yet remains to be written. The matewith the burgomaster of Frankfort, avenging rials are abundant, and of the highest interest;by a still more formidable punishment the a collection of letters scarcely less voluminous pasquinade which had insulted his civic dig- than those of Voltaire; the Colloquia Mensalia, nity. How vivid would be the image of Hut-in some parts of more doubtful authenticity, ten at the siege of Pavia, soothing despair yet, on the whole, a genuine record of his conitself by writing his own epitaph; giving com-versation; his theological writings, a mine of bat to five Frenchmen for the glory of Maximilian; and receiving from the delighted emperor the frugal reward of a poetic crown. Then would have succeeded the court and princely patronage of "the Pope of Mentz," and the camp and the castle of the Lord of Sickengen, until the chequered scene closed with Ulric's death-bed employment of producing a satire on his stupid physician. All things were welcome to Hutten; arms and love, theology and debauchery, a disputation with the Thomists, a controversy with Erasmus, or a war to the knife with the dunces of his age. His claim to have written the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum, has, indeed, been disputed, though with little apparent reason. It is at least clear that he asserted his own title, and that no other candidate for that equivocal honour united in himself the wit and learning, the audacity and licentiousness, which successively adorn and disfigure that extraordinary collection. Neither is it quite just to exclude the satirist from the list of those who lent a material aid to the Reformation. It is not, certainly, by the heartiest or the most contemptuous laugh that dynasties, whether civil or religious, are subverted; but it would be unfair to deny altogether to Hutten the praise of having contributed by his merciless banter to the successes of wiser and better men than himself. To set on edge the teeth of the Ciceronians by the Latinity of the correspondents of the profound Ortuinus, was but a pleasant jest; but it was something more to confer an immorality of ridicule on the erudite doctors who seriously apprehended, from the study of Greek and Hebrew, the revival at once of the worship of Minerva, and of the rite of circumcision. It was in strict satirical justice, that characters were assigned to these sages in a farce as broad as was ever drawn by Aristophanes or Moliere; and which was destitute neither of their riotous mirth, nor even of some of that deep wisdom which it was their pleasure to exhibit beneath that mask.

Much as Luther, himself, asper, incolumi gravitate jocum tentavit, he received with little relish these sallies of his facetious ally; whom he not only censured for employing the lan

egotisms of the richest ore; and the works of Melancthon, Seckendorf, Cochlæus, Erasmus, and many others, who flourished in an age when, amongst learned men, to write and to live were almost convertible terms. The volume whose title-page we have.transcribed, is, in fact, an unfinished life of Luther, closing with his appeal from the pope to a general council. We have selected it as the most elaborate, from a long catalogue of works on the Reformation, recently published on the continent, by the present inheritors of the principles and passions which first agitated Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century. By far the most amusing of the series is the collection of Lutheriana by M. Michelet, which we are bound to notice with especial gratitude, as affording a greater number of valuable references than all other books of the same kind put together. It was drawn up as a relaxation from those severer studies on which M. Michelet's historical fame depends. But the pastime of some men is worth far more than the labours of the rest; and this compilation has every merit but that of an appropriate title; for an auto-biography it assuredly is not, in any of the senses, accurate or popular, of that much abused word. Insulated in our habits and pursuits, not less than in our geographical position, it is but tardily that, within the entrenchment of our four seas, we sympathize with the intellectual movements of the nations which dwell beyond them. Many, however, are the motives, of at least equal force in these islands as in the old and new continents of the Christian world, for diverting the eye from the present to the past, from those who would now reform, to those who first reformed, the churches of Europe. Or, if graver reasons could not be found, it is beyond all dispute that the professors of Wittemburg, three hundred years ago, formed a group as much more entertaining than those of Oxford at present, as the contest with Dr. Eck exceeded in interest the squabble with Dr. Hampden.

The old Adam in Martin Luther (a favourite subject of his discourse) was a very formida ble personage; lodged in a bodily frame of

ment."

This indiscreet, if not criminal marriage, searcely admitted a more serious defence. Yet Luther was not a man to do any thing which he was not prepared to justify. He had inculcated on others the advantages of the conjugal state, and was bound to enforce his precepts by his example. The war of the peasants had brought reproach on the principles of the Reformation; and it was incumbent on him to sustain the minds of his followers, and to bear his testimony to evangelical truth by deeds as well as words. Therefore, it was fit that he should marry a nun. Such is the logic of inclination, and such the presumption of uninterrupted success. "Dr. Ortuinas" himself never lent his venerable sanction to a stranger sophistry, than that which could thus discover in one great scandal an apology for another far more justly offensive.

surpassing vigour, solicited by vehement appe- | bics, the learned Eccius himself chiming into tites, and alive to all the passions by which the loud chorus with an elaborate epithalaman is armed for offensive or defensive war- mium. The bridegroom met the tempest, with fare with his fellows. In accordance with a the spirit of another Benedict, by a countergeneral law, that temperament was sustained blast of invective and sarcasms, which, afterby nerves which shrunk neither from the wards collected under the head of "the Lion endurance nor the infliction of necessary pain; and the Ass," perpetuated the memory of this and by a courage which rose at the approach redoubtable controversy. "My enemies," he of difficulty, and exulted in the presence of exclaimed, "triumphed. They shouted, Io, Io! danger. A rarer prodigality of nature com-I was resolved to show that, old and feeble as bined with these endowments an inflexible I am, I am not going to sound a retreat. I reliance on the conclusions of his own under-trust I shall do still more to spoil their merristanding, and on the energy of his own will. He came forth on the theatre of life another Samson Agonistes "with plain heroic magnitude of mind, and celestial vigour armed;" ready to wage an unequalled combat with the haughtiest of the giants of Gath; or to shake down, though it were on his own head, the columns of the proudest of her temples. Viewed in his belligerent aspect, he might have seemed a being cut off from the common brotherhood of mankind, and bearing from on high a commission to bring to pass the remote ends of Divine benevolence, by means appalling to human guilt and to human weakness. But he was reclaimed into the bosom of the great family of man, by bonds fashioned in strength and number proportioned to the vigour of the propensities they were intended to control. There brooded over him a constitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sadness, but more often giving birth to dreams so wild, that, if vivified by the imagination of Dante, they might have passed into visions as awful and majestic as those of the Inferno. As these mists rolled away, bright gleams of sunshine took their place, and that robust mind yielded itself to social enjoyments, with the hearty relish, the broad humour, and the glorious profusion of sense and nonsense, which betoken the relaxations of those who are for the moment abdicating the mastery, to become the companions of ordinary man. Luther had other and yet more potent spells with which to exorcise the demons who haunted him. He had ascertained and taught that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than light itself; for music, while it chases away the evil suggestions, effectually baffles the wiles of the tempter. His lute, and hand, and voice, accompanying his own solemn melodies, were therefore raised to repel the more vehement aggressions of the enemy of mankind; whose feebler assaults he encountered by studying the politics of a rookery, by assigning to each beautiful creation of his flowerbeds an appropriate sylph or genius, by the company of his Catherine de Bora, and the sports of their saucy John and playful Magdalene.

The name of Catherine has long enjoyed a wide but doubtful celebrity. She was a lady of noble birth, and was still young when she renounced the ancient faith, her convent, and her vows, to become the wife of Martin Luther. From this portentous union of a monk and nun, the "obscure men" confidently predicted the birth of Antichrist; while the wits and scholars greeted their nuptials with a thick hail-storm of epigrams, hymns, and dithyram

Catherine was a very pretty women, if Hol bein's portrait may be believed; although even her personal charms have been rudely im. pugned by her husband's enemies, in grave disquisitions devoted to that momentous question. Better still, she was a faithful and affectionate wife. But there is a no less famous Catherine to whom she bore a strong family resemblance. She brought from her nunnery an anxious mind, a shrewish temper, and great volubility of speech. Luther's arts were not those of Petruchio. With him reverence for woman was at once a natural instinct and a point of doctrine. He observed, that when the first woman was brought to the first man to receive her name, he called her not wife, but mother-" Eve, the mother of all living”—a word, he says, "more eloquent than ever fell from the lips of Demosthenes." So, like a wise and kind-hearted man, when his Cathe rine prattled, he smiled; when she frowned, he playfully stole away her anger, and chided her anxieties with the gentlest soothing. A happier or a more peaceful home was not to be found in the land of domestic tenderness. Yet, the confession must be made, that, from the first to the last, this love-tale is nothing less than a case of læsa majestas against the sovereignty of romance. Luther and his bride did not meet on either side with the raptures of a first affection. He had long before sighed for the fair Ave Shonfelden, and she had not concealed her attachment for a certain Jerome Baungartner. Ave had bestowed herself in marriage on a physician of Prussia; and before Luther's irrevocable vows were pledged, Jerome received from his great rival an intimation that he still possessed the heart, and, with common activity, might even vet secure