2. The Chief Products of the Controversial Period.— The first serious contribution of the Protestant camp was 'The Lives of the Popes of Rome) by Robert Barnes (1495-1540), an Anglican Lutheran who had fled to. Germany for protection. Composed under Luther's di rect supervision, it endeavored to prove the popes responsible for all the disasters of the Middle Ages and praised the virtues of their secular opponents. At last, the methods of Orosius had been turned against the' Church itself. Much more important were the vol uminous 'Magdeburg Centuries,) a composite work planned and edited by Matthias Vlacich (1520-75), better known by his latinized name of Flacius. He was aided by a number of prominent Protestant scholars, such as Altman, Copus, Wigand and Judex. The history of the Church and of Christian doctrine was reviewed by centuries down to 1300 in the effort to prove direct historicity in the Lutheran position and to show that the Catholic doctrines and organ ization had been an exotic and unholy growth away from the purity of Apostolic Christianity. While the authors displayed considerable critical ability in dissecting the papal doctrine and dogmas, they exhibited an equal gullibility in accepting preposterous tales to bolster up their side of the controversy. Its significance lies chiefly in the fact that it founded Church his tory in its modern phase. Another Protestant polemic appeared about this time in England and met with great popular success. This was 'The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs,) by the Englishman, John Foxe (1516 87). Beginning with Wycliffe, it traced the record of Protestant martyrs in such a manner as especially to represent the struggle as one between the purity and the perversion of Chris tianity— between Christ and the Anti-Christ. Protestantism found its Scottish champion in John Knox (1505-72), who wrote his 'History of the Reformation in Scotland) to prove the particular solicitude of the Devil for the wek fare of the Catholic cause. In spite of its obvious bias, however, Knox's work was greatly superior to that of the Centurions and Foxe. From the standpoint of literary quality, his history was a. work of genius, Misplaying a marvelous precision and sureness in the selec tion and presentation of the significant and striking details?) Nor did he fail to condemn in the most vigorous terms those who adopted Calvinism as a means of gaining selfish ma terial ends or resorted to violence in the name of religion in order to revenge political or personal grievances. A work which can scarcely be regarded as a part of the campaign of theological polemic that is being described, but which calls for some brief notice on ac count of its great interest and significance for the history of the Reformation, is the °Com mentaries on the Political and Religious Condi tions in the Reign of Emperor Charles V° by Johannes Philippi (1506-66), more generally known by his latinized name of Sleidanus. The great importance of his work is that it was the first political analysis of the Reforma tion movement and the Protestant revolt. He was the official constitutional apologist of the Lutheran states of northern Germany, and his task, not unlike that of Jefferson, was to justify at the bar of public opinion the entire legality pf the secession of the Protestant princes from the Empire. He, therefore, approached the his tory of the movement from a political and con stitutional rather than a theological point of view. While he limited himself wholly to authentic documents, his work was the product of an advocate; though not a polemic, it was a lawyer's brief carefully selecting and mar shalling the evidence to be presented. As might be expected from such circumstances, his exhibited great power in the organization and concentration of material, an admirable lucidity of expression and a dignified tone, designed to make an appeal to the learned public of Europe. While it contained none of Ranke's religious fervor and in no way anticipated the social studies of Janssen, his work was of the greatest significance as a direct foreshadowing of the now generally ac cepted thesis of Professor Robinson that the Protestant revolt was far more a political than a religious movement —that it looked more toward the political adjustments of the Peace of, Augsburg and the Treaty of Westphalia than to the triumph of the theology of °justification by faith') He anticipated this interpretation, not only through the general mode of his ap proach to the problem, but also by specific com ments upon the underlying political causes of the revolt.
The Catholic counter-blast was initiated by the monumental 'Annales ecclesiastici' of Car dinal Caesar Baronius (1538-1607), the director of the Vatican library. By the use of an enor mous mass of evidence he tried to prove the New Testament origin of Catholic Christianity and to show its logical development from Scrip tural foundations. While he was more critical in his use of sources than the authors of the 'Centuries' and introduced more unpublished documents, the work was purely a polemic and marked no advance in historical method. In one way it was decidedly a retrogression. As the most authoritative critic of the historiography of this period' has clearly shown, Baronius was mainly responsible for the introduction into his torical controversy of the method of shuffling, quibbling and evasion, which has particularly characterized the Jesuit controversialists. He endeavored to avoid meeting dangerous issues by trying to confuse and obscure the vital ques tion through turning the discussion into secon dary and irrelevant channels. The crudities and errors in the work of Baronius were re vealed in the searching criticism of the great humanist scholar, Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), to whom Baronius' weaknesses due to his in ability to handle Greek were readily apparent. He devoted the last years of his life to a refu tation of Baronius in his 'Exercitationes in Baronium.) The (Annales) were later continued with much greater scholarship by Odoricus Raynaldus (1595-1671), a learned Italian ec clesiastic. The second great Catholic cham pion was the French bishop, Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704). In his 'History of the Differences among the Protestant Churches' he endeavored to convince the Protestants of the error of their ways by showing them that there could be no logical end to sectarian divisions once the crucial initial break had been made with ecclesiastical authority. Bossuet's im portance lies in the fact that he alone of the controversialists, Protestant or Catholic, was able to get beneath personalities and events and to view the conflict in its deepest philosophical aspects as a struggle between liberty and au thority, in which the victory of liberty meant to him indifference, atheism and religious anarchy. In his 'Discourse on Universal History' he ap peared as the Orosius of the Counter-Reforma tion. Though incomparably more able and philosophic than the 'Seven Books against the Pagans,' it was less critical and less historical than the 'Enneades' of Sabellicus. "His 'Dis course,' " says Fueter, °was not an historical work. It was merely a sermon in which the biblical text was supplanted by historical sub ject-matter carefully edited and prepared in the interest of the Church.'" It was the last serious attempt at an interpretation of universal his tory in terms of the old theology. After Vol taire had published his 'Essai sur les Mceurs) in the middle of the next century, no one dared to risk his reputation by a revival of the doc trines of Orosius and Bossuet.
The above-mentioned works of controversy are only the more notable ones selected from the great volume of lesser contributions to the historical literature of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but they sufficiently illus trate the general tendencies in method and in terpretation. It has not entirely ceased at the present day as one can readily perceive by a comparison of the works of Ranke and Schaff with those of Dellinger and Janssen. While humanists and religious controversialists were writing, a new Europe was being shaped by the effects of the commercial revolution, out of which was to come modern civilization and with it the birth of scientific historiography.