ARTICLE VIII. —NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

PROFESSOR FISHER'S HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. * This work, we are informed in the preface, grew out of a course of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in the spring of 1871; but, it might be added, in its preparation and its design and whole scope, it was by no means confined to a course of lectures of a more or less temporary character. For many previous years the author had devoted himself to researches in the wide field of Church history, and he had pursued these studies with an earnest enthusiasm, and in a spirit of profound scholarship, that lend authority to his opinions. This is not a book of rhetorical essays upon a period of vivid interest, but it is the fruit of long years of patient investigation. It is weighty with solid learning and thought. It is both a text-book in the sharpness and lucidness of its analysis, and a work for private reading in the interest, and glow, and unity, of its treatment of a grand theme. It has almost an epic movement. The figures come out upon its shifting scenes in the clear light of truth, not grandiosely magnified but simply great, and the action is rapid, ever evolving something new though with the consistency of an inward principle of spiritual unity. There is at the same time an artistic completeness bringing the whole into a condensed and comprehensive plan, which is cleanly finished to the satisfaction of the most critical mind, and a philosophical method that grasps the deeper causative law of action and manifests a true historic insight. The long historical preparation of the Reformation, the slowly broadening and deepening adumbration of the drawing on of that great event, the rise of the papal hierarchy and its decline through the centralization of nations, or the springing up of a national idea adverse to the exclusive dominion of the ecclesiastical idea, connected as it was with the birth of vernacular literatures and the freeing of the popular intelligence, and the many different influences that swell the main cur

*The Reformation. By GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Yale College. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1872.

rent of reform, are sketched with masterly skill. Interests of state and political events begin to give a directive course and power to the Protestant movement. Though mainly spiritual, it is a great and general agitation and setting in motion of the deeper currents of life, moral, intellectual, social. There are ebb and flow, action and reaction. There is progress through antagonism as well as harmony. But the revolution goes on, fitfully and irregularly, however, without principle and definite aim, a kind of unrest and agitation of reason within the papal church, until Luther arose to give it purpose, concentration, expression.

It is wonderful how Luther stands out as the central figure of the Reformation, let it be looked at from any point of view philosophically or practically, in its preparative stages or its finished results, from its Germanic center or its European and world-wide circumference.

Though evidently his hero, Dr. Fisher treats Luther with marked judicial calmness and self-restraint from exaggeration. But while the character of Erasmus, the representative of Humanism, "the typical latitudinarian," is sketched with the keenest analysis, and the positive work which Erasmus did—sometimes ignored-is sharply brought out, evidently with much enjoyability of the richness of the theme; yet we feel that our author's strength is put into the portraiture of Luther, and, in a compact form, we know of no more vigorous and at the same time carefully drawn description in the English language of the great Teutonic hero of the Reformation-the Achilles of this Iliad-and his divine anger.

Luther's faults are not overlooked. His rough edges are not smoothed off. His coarseness of language, his intolerance in the Eucharistic controversy, his passionate temper, especially near the close of life, are not hid; but his thorough sincerity going to the core of his great soul, the unselfish nature of his convictions, his deathless constancy to the master-principle of his life-loyalty to God's Word and faith in the Invisible-his artless love of nature, his noble reason and quick intelligence, his dauntless and lightning-like action when the interests of truth were at stake, his hearty sympathy with the people, his prodigious labors as a writer, preacher, and theologian-these are painted with broad and rapid strokes.

The marvellous similarities and the equally extraordinary dif ferences in the lives and character of Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin, as influenced by their social and national as well as individual and

temperamental peculiarities, set before us in the light of fresh facts and ample learning, give a new charm to this old story. Calvin was the moral complement of Luther. Luther spoke to the many, Calvin wrote for the few. He built up a spiritual aristocracy and philosophy that has ruled the religious world ever since, as he ruled Geneva. He gathered up and transmitted the influences of the Reformation in dogmatic formulas which, while they have with mighty power preserved, have also in some sense crystallized the spirit and life of this great revival of Christianity, so that (whether our author will agree with us in the remark we cannot say) there is another and deeper reformation needed to set flowing again the divine current, to finish what was then begun, and to bring the world to a more living faith in the Son of God.

On the Calvin and Servetus question, we could refer the student to no more judicious treatment of the case in its length and breadth; and we would be willing to rest the judgment of an impartial future upon a statement so carefully weighed, which shrinks not from telling the truth, and the whole truth, and enters into no special pleading, but in whose very simplicity and plain dealing there is presented the best and in fact only apology. Perhaps it were better so to leave it.

The reasons why Calvinism, in one sense a despotic system, has eminently promoted civil liberty, are summed up into three: 1. That it drew a boundary line between Church and State. 2. The republican character of its Church organization. 3. The sense of the exaltation of the Almighty Ruler in its theology, dwarfing earthly potentates. These, combined with an intense spirituality and consciousness that this life is but an infinitesimal part of existence, raise its followers above the fear of human rule, and make stubborn independent subjects. Calvin himself, true reformer that he was though he loved power, did not foresee the vast political results of his system. But his was "the radical type of Protestantism; it broke abruptly and absolutely with the past ;" it introduced new ideas into the polity of government as well as the Church, and in France, Holland, Scotland, and England, wrought political as well as religious freedom, and in this hemisphere created a new world of popular government founded on the principles of justice and righteousness.

The peculiarity of the Reformation in England is stated by Dr. Fisher to lie

"not in the separation of a political community—in this case a powerful nationfrom the papal see; for the same thing took place generally when the Reforma

tion prevailed; but it lies in the fact that it involved immediately so little departure from the dogmatic system of the medieval church. At the outset, the creed, and to a great extent the polity and ritual of the Church in England, remained intact. Thus in the growth of the English Reformation, there were two factors, the one, in a sense political; the other doctrinal, or religious. The two agencies might coalesce or might clash with one another. They could not fail to act upon one another with great effect. They moved upon different lines; yet there were certain principal ends, which, from the beginning, they had in common."

For this reason the leaders of the English Reformation on the spiritual side did not play the prominent part which was taken by the reformers in Scotland and on the Continent. Henry VIII. and other statesmen actually cast into the shade the true religious teachers of the people, and the pure stream of reformation was disturbed by the force of govermental authority, of State policy. Puritanism, having its earliest source in the convictions and views of Calvinistic theologians in the bosom of the Anglican Church, such as Parker, Jewel, Grindal, Hooper, and in the partial sympathies of some of the first intellects of the Elizabethan age, of Bacon himself, was the salvation of spiritual reformation in England.

In regard to Scotland, Mr. Fisher observes: "Perhaps there was no country where the Church stood in greater need of reformation than Scotland." The sowing of the seed in the hard but deep soil of the Scottish mind, the origin, early struggles. and persecutions of the Kirk of Scotland, the career of Knox, his contests with Queen Mary and the Royalists, the story of Mary, though freshly familiar to us in the picturesque pages of Froude, do not lose their interest as viewed from the more exclusively theological and religious point of view.

We cannot follow the cause of the Reformation in Italy and Spain, and the counter-reformation in the Roman Catholic Church, the rise of the Jesuit order, the Council of Trent, and other great events in the religious history of the 17th century. The reader is impressed with the immense field of thought and fact swept over, the spiritual systems, the philosophies, the literatures, the ethical and political ideas that have risen and died, and that in many instances are still living and operative, molding our thought and our destiny at this moment. Who that carefully studies this vast congeries of correlated forces representing the period of the Reformation, stretching in all directions and through all the interests and organisms that represent human life, and mind, and society, and taking hold of the future life, can flippantly say that "Protestantism is a failure."

In the summing up of the influences and results of the Reformation, the work of Dr. Fisher, is, we think, most admirable. These chapters form valuable original contributions to the already rich literature of the subject, and are characterized by the scholarly clearness, penetration, and thoroughness of the author's style, especially in the subtle discrimination of the differentia of faith between the Protestant and Roman Catholic theologies. We cannot refrain from quoting a passage:

"The Roman Catholic theory of justification may be so stated as to seem to approximate closely to that of the Protestants; but on close examination, the two doctrines are seen to be discordant with one another. In the formula which defines the condition of salvation to be faith formed by love-fides formata caritatea separation between faith and love is conceived of, in which the latter becomes the adjunct of the former; and inasmuch as love is the injunction of the law, a door is open for a theory of works and human merit, and for all the discomforts of that legal and introspective piety from which the evangelical doctrine furnished the means of escape. Faith, in the Protestant view, is necessarily the source of good works, which flow from it as a stream from a fountain, which grow from it as fruit from a tree. The tendency of the Catholic system is to conjoin works with faith and thus to resolve good works into a form of legal obedience. Moreover, justification does not begin, as in the Protestant theology, with the forgiveness of sins; but the first element of justification is the infusion of inward personal righteousness, and pardon follows. Justification is gradual. By this incipient excellence of character, the Christian is made capable of meriting grace; and however this doctrne may be qualified and guarded by founding all merit ultimately on the merits of Christ, from which the sanctification of the disciple flows, the legal characteristic cleaves to the doctrine. But the wide difference of the Catholic conception from the Protestant becomes evident when it is remembered that, according to the former, for all the sins committed after baptism, the offender owes and must render satisfaction-a satisfaction that derives its efficacy, to be sure, from that made by Christ, but yet is not the less indispensable and real. And how is justification imparted? How does it begin? It is communicated through baptism, and hence generally in infancy. It is justification by baptism rather than by faith; and for all sins subsequently committed, penances are due; satisfaction must be offered by the transgressor himself."

We do not suppose that in the philosophy of the Christian faith, in the theory of the Church, in the theory of society and of Christian life, our author would hold that Protestantism any more than Roman Catholicism has as yet arrived at the highest Scriptural or Christ-like ideal of prefection; but Protestantism has made great advances upon Roman Catholicism, and it is a free system; it admits of change and improvement; it is the right of individual liberty, and therefore of progress in religious things; t upholds no past error or falsehood even of its own; its watch