BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION. The Ref ormation is dated from the year 1517, when Mar tin Luther (q.v.) challenged the Papal authority in his famous ninety-five theses, but its true meaning is to be found by referring to great cur rents of thought and action that through the Mid dle Ages had been modifying society. Since the establishment of the new Western Empire by Charles the Great in SOO there had been an almost continual contest between the emperors, the temporal heads of Christendom. and the popes, the spiritual heads, over the limits of their re spective authorities. The theory of the spiritual and the temporal powers. upon which Christian Europe was constituted, proved not to be a work able one, and every conflict between pope and emperor over the limits of temporal and spir itual jurisdiction sowed the seeds of future dis cord. The exercise of control by Otho I. (q.v.), the Investiture quarrel (see I N VESTITURE ) , the losing battle of the Hohenstaufen emperors, all tended in this direction; and although the Church triumphed, it did so at the cost of rents in its own armor which made the Reformation possible.
The rise of the spirit of nationality and its resentment of Papal control in ecclesiastical af fairs as shown in the contests between some of the French kings and the popes, and in the re volt against Roman influence of which \Vic• lif was the most notable exponent in England, worked to the same end. Wielif's religious teach ings, with their bearing upon the great political questions that were coming to the front in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were carried from Oxford to Prague, where John Huss (q.v.) took them up and made Bohemia almost a Prot estant country before Protestantism was known. Huss was condemned and executed at Constance in 1415, but the work he had done in Bo hemia made that country prepared ground for the Reformation seed. Luther's principles were anticipated by \Viclif and Huss, but in their day conditions were not ripe for the great revolution. The universities were often potent factors in the spread of ideas which graditally sapped the foundation of traditional beliefs, and led to the questioning of the authority upon which the old beliefs rested. The migration of
dents from one university to another spread the doctrines of rationalistic teachers far beyond their own lecture rooms. Thus were the ideas and the writings of Wielif carried to Prague.
(See UNIVERSITY.) When Dante (q.v.) headed the great revival of learning and letters, which, starting in Italy, spread over Europe, a new and more permanent shape was given to the growing eontroversy as to the relations of Church and State. Dante in the Dr Mo»archin and Marsi lius of Padua (q.v.), a partisan of the etnper ors, in the Driensor Paris, attempted to find new bases for the relations of Church and State in Christendom; and the latter espe cially advanced political theories that were distinctly modern in their nature. The Re naissance (q.v.), by opening new fields of thought, gathered in all these currents and gave them new power. Devoted Catholics, like Dante and later Savonarola, demanded reform within the Church, reform in head and members,' as the University of Paris reformers put it. Skepticism became rife; while a few into who could not be skeptics, and would not accept a religious system of which the popes of the fifteenth century were the representatives, sought for another basis of faith. Many sects in different countries, the offspring of abortive attempts at a return to simpler primitive Christianity, or of mystical or heretical teaching, had also prepared the minds of the masses of the people, less accessible to the more intellectual currents of the age, for a new movement. Such were the Apostolic Brethren, Beghards, Regains, Cathari, Flagellants, Frati cern. and the Lollards. The earlier sects of the Albigenses (q.v.) and the Waldenses (q.v.) or Vaudois were also in a way a part of these ear lier movements that formed the motley advance guard of the Reformation, but they lacked the intellectual strength and the political and social power that were necessary to make an abiding impression on feudal Europe.