The triumph of the Protestant move ment in Scotland is likewise a fact of the first importance in European history. In Scotland from the very beginning of Luther's revolt, we find the presence of the same elements which elsewhere led to revolution. As in other countries, the Scotch clergy had lost the respect of the country. As early as 1525 Lutheran books were so widely read that an act of Parliament was passed forbidding their importation. The very efforts of the Church to stamp out the new heresy, as in the burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1528, and of George Wishart in 1546, served only to hasten the turn of affairs which it had dreaded. Jealousy of the wealth and political influence of the clergy disposed the nobility to throw in their lot with the party of revolution. When in 1559 Knox returned from his long sojourn abroad, his unflinching zeal and personal force supplied the momen tum that was needed to complete a rev olution already in full course; and in the following year Protestantism was for mally established as the religion of the country. The consequences of this rev olution extended far beyond Scotland. Had Mary on her return in 1561 found Scotland united in the Catholic faith, she would have commanded the destinies of England. Elizabeth could never have effected a religious settlement, and. with England paralyzed, Protestantism could not have held its own against the imited forces of Catholicism.
Thus, by the middle of the 16th cen tury, it seemed as if the revolution must sweep all before it, and the papal system be as completely effaced by Protestantism as paganism had been effaced by Chris tianity. At the beginning of the revolt the authorities of the ancient Church did not fully realize that the forces ar rayed against them menaced their very existence. When the true extent of the danger was realized the Church dis played all the resources of an institution whose roots were in the very heart of Christendom, and which, alike by its traditions and by its special adapta tions to the wants of the human spirit. appealed to the deepest instincts of a large section of all the peoples of west ern Europe. The Society of Jesus. founded in 1540, supplied an army of enthusiasts, whose policy and devotion saved Rome from dissolution. By the de crees of the Council of Trent (1545 1563), inspired by the spirit and aims of the Jesuits, the Church reaffirmed its traditional teaching, conceding nothing either to renaissance or reform; and a succession of Popes during the later half of the 16th century carried out with the zeal worthy of the better ages of the papacy the policy marked out for them by the Jesuits. Through the disunion of the Protestants and the strenuous efforts of the papacy, the middle of the 16th century saw the tide of revolution checked; and in certain countries, more especially in Germany, the Jesuits even gained ground which had been lost. By
the close of the same century Europe was portioned between the two religions almost by the same dividing lines as exist at the present day.
It has been said that the central fact of the religious revolution of the 16th century was the severance of the Prot estant nations from the Roman see; but the great schism inevi',ably led to issues of which the Protestant reformers never dreamed, and which they would have de nounced in as unqualified terms as any theologian of the medieval Church. The reform of religion preached by Luther or Calvin implied no real change in the modes of thought that distinguished medievalism. Their theology was but another form of scholasticism, their at titude to the classical tradition or to any departure from their own conception of the scheme of things was precisely that of the Schoolmen trained on the De cretals and Aristotle. For an infallible Church they substituted the Bible as the unerring expression of God's re lation to man; the interpretation of the Bible they left to the individual con sciousness. This freedom was of neces sity only nominal. since the members of any Protestant Church were members only on condition of their accepting the Church's interpretation of the contents of the Bible, and since each different Church deemed itself the special deposi tary of the only true conception of the perfect will of God. Nevertheless, it was from this attitude of the Protestant reformers to the Bible that the develop ments of modern thought sprang. A re former like John Knox would have stamped out every form of thought hos tile to his own synthesis of things divine and human; but it was not in the power of the Protestant system to do what had been so effectually done by the Church of the Middle Ages. In the mediaeval con ception Church and State made one organism; what menaced the life of the one menaced the life of the other. Hence the State was at the Church's bidding whenever its arm was needed to deal with any suggestion of heresy. But having no great central head, such an organic union was impossible for any Protestant Church, and religious error could not be regarded as a crime against the existing government. So complete was the revolution wrought by this changed relation of Church and State that toleration of different creeds, and not an iron uniformity, was in time seen to be the indispensable condition of civil society. But in this lies the fundamen tal distinction between medimvalism and the modern spirit. Mediievalism rested on the belief that society was threatened if any of its members questioned the body of truth of which the Church was the custodian; it is the distinctive prin ciple of the modern spirit that truth shall be followed wherever facts are be lieved to lead.