REFORMATION. The religious rev olution of the 16th century, known as the Reformation, is the greatest event in the history of civilization since Paganism gave place to Christianity as the faith of the leading nations of the world. It marks the supreme importance of this revolution that the age which preceded and the age which followed it belong to two different phases of the human spirit. With the Reformation begins what is distinctively known as Modern Europe, while the epoch that preceded it bears the equally distinctive designation of the Middle Ages. In the articles on Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII., Calvin, Knox, and others details will be found regard ing the aims and methods of the revolu tion in the various countries where it de clared itself. Here, therefore, it will be sufficient to indicate briefly the general causes which produced it, the special course and character it took among the different peoples, and its chief results for the human spirit at large.
The central fact of the Reformation was the detachment from papal Christi anity of the nations distinguished by the general name of Protestant. By this severance an order of things came to an end under which Christian Europe had been content to exist from the close of the 8th century. From the year 800, when, by a mutual understanding of their respective functions, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III., western Europe had come to regard the papacy as the essential condition of individual and corporate life, as a prime necessity in human affairs. Thus conceived, the power of the Church underlay all human relations. It was the consecration of the Church that con stituted the family; the Church defined the relations of rulers and their subjects, and the Church was the final court of appeal on the ultimate questions of human life and destiny. In the nature of things such a power could never be realized as it was ideally conceived. Yet during the 11th and 12th centuries, the period when the power of the Popes was most adequate to their claims, they un doubtedly went far to make the idea a reality. But the energies of the human
spirit were bound sooner or later issue in developments with which medm val conceptions were fundamentally irreconcilable. But in the 13th century along every line of man's activity, there were protests, conscious and uncon scious, against the system typified in the Roman Church.
The most remarkable of these protests was the order of ideas associated with the name of Joachim of Flora in Calabria (died 1202). Under the name of the "Eternal Gospel" (used for the first time in 1254) these ideas ran a course which for a time seriously threatened the exist ence of the mediwval Church. The new teaching struck at the very root of the papal system, for its essence was that the hour had come when a new dispensation, that of the Holy Spirit, should supersede the provisional Gospel delivered by Christ. During the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th century the influence of these ideas is traceable in every country of Christen dom, and it was only the unflinching action of the Church that postponed its disintegration for over three centuries. Numerous sects which either sprang from or were quickened by this move ment speak clearly to the revolutionary fever that had seized on men's spirits and was impelling them to other ideals than the traditions of Rome. Mainly the offspring of the third order of St. Francis, these sects swarmed throughout every Christian country under the names of Beguins, Bekhards, Fratricelli, Flagel lants, Lollards, Apostolic Brethren, etc., and everywhere spread discontent with the existing Church. Even John Knox (in answer to a letter by James Tyrie, a Scottish Jesuit) claims Joachim of Flora as an ally in the work which it was the labor of his own life to achieve—the change of the papacy, and the promotion of what he deemed a pure Gospel.