Reformation

Doctrine.

Here the clergy had once been supreme, and would probably have had little difficulty in maintaining their authority if they had kept unquestionable moral superiority. Few people are really interested in pushing theological enquiries very far, and, so long as men's conduct corresponds to their doctrine, the vast majority of mankind are willing to accept this at least as a work ing theory, and are under no temptation to question the specula tive basis of practices which they approve. So long as there was no deep gulf between what the clergy actually were and what the people had a right to expect of them, free-thought was mainly limited to a few philosophers here and there, to a few weavers at their loom or cobblers at their bench, and to that dead weight of indifference, of resistance against idealism of any kind, which than loo orthodox witnesses are cited on pp 379-419 of G. G. Coulton's Five Centuries of Religion, Vol. II.

has prevailed in every generation among the masses who need to concentrate so much of their thoughts and their labour upon the elementary problems of daily bread. We have abundant proof that the majority of the mediaeval population were not actively religious; but for a long time the enthusiastic churchman had generally nothing worse to struggle with than inertia and com placent ignorance. About the year A.D. 1000, there came a revival comparable almost to that which we call the Renaissance. With this revival we also find signs of free-thought and religious fric tion; an ice-bound world was now thawing; therefore it moved less regularly and under less strict control than might have been desired. Many features of the then existing dogmatic scheme had been created less by profound philosophy than by popular feeling or by comparatively unreflecting impulses. All men, for instance, had gradually grown to assume that we must take that text "many are called, but few are chosen," in its most baldly literal sense. Even in the 13th century, and in a philosopher so remarkable for balance and moderation as St. Thomas Aquinas, we find that the "few" who shall be saved are directly contrasted with the "very many" who shall go to hell. His contemporary, the Fran ciscan Berthold of Regensburg, whom Roger Bacon singles out as the greatest preacher of the day, actually commits himself in one passage to a rough numerical calculation; only about one in oo,000 shall be saved ; and few mediaeval theologians put it more favourably than one in i,000.

Moreover, they exerted all their imagination and their rhetoric to impress upon their hearers the terrible significance of this separation between the sheep and the goats. All was to depend

upon the last moment of life ; and, even there, it must depend mainly upon the faith in which the sinner died. Berthold asks his hearers to imagine themselves writhing white-hot within a white-hot universe until the day of judgment, when the pains will be greatly increased. Let them imagine this continuing for as many years as all the hairs that have grown upon all the beasts in this world since the creation ; and, even then, the sinner will be only at the beginning of his torments. Yet Berthold was one of the kindliest of men ; if he defended the current dogma with this ferociously implacable logic, it was because he had inherited it as part of the deposit of faith, and because he now found him self faced by an opposition which no student of the Reformation can afford to ignore.

Heresy.—The first half of the 12th century had witnessed the rise of several powerful heretical sects, which even the eloquence and influence of men like St. Bernard could not extinguish, though the leaders could be taken and slain. All these sects were more or less antisacerdotal; and more than one held among its chief tenets that the personal unworthiness of the priest impairs or destroys the value of the sacrament which he administers, a doctrine to which some colour had been lent by the very methods taken to combat clerical concubinage by the great pope Gregory VII. (d. Io85).

Towards the end of the century, these popular and compara tively unlearned revolts were succeeded by others of very different intellectual weight. The Waldensians [1'75] took their stand upon the Bible; this they read in the vernacular, and committed to memory with a diligence which, as even their persecutors com plained, ought to have shamed the orthodox out of their ignorance. About the same time, the complete works of Aristotle began to filter into the University of Paris through translations from the Arabic, and, a little later, through more accurate versions made by orthodox scholars. The Bible led the Waldensians to deny any essential distinction between clergy and laity; but they long persisted in regarding themselves as orthodox Catholics. The new Aristotle, and especially his Arabic translators and com mentators, led a certain number of Paris teachers to adopt the teaching of Averroes (q.v.), and thus to deny such fundamental doctrines as the personality of God, the creation, and the im mortality of the soul.