HISTORY OF PROTESTANTISM IN SWITZERLAND FROM A.D. 1516 TO ITS ESTABLISHMENT AT ZURICH, 1525.

CHAPTER 1.

SWITZERLAND — THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE.

The Reformation dawns first in England — Wicliffe — Luther — His No — What it Implied — Uprising of Conscience — Who shall Rule, Power or Conscience? — Contemporaneous Appearance of the Reformers — Switzerland — Variety and Grandeur of its Scenery — Its History — Bravery and Patriotism of its People — A New Liberty approaches — Will the Swiss Welcome it? — Yes — An Asylum for the Reformation — Decline in Germany — Revival in Switzerland.

PICTURE: View of Westminster Abbey from the Mall, St. James’s Park PICTURE: View in Lucerne IN following the progress of the recovered Gospel over Christendom in the morning of the sixteenth century, our steps now lead us to Switzerland. In Enghmd first broke the dawn of that blessed day. Foremost in that race of mighty men and saviours by whose instrumentality it pleased God to deliver Christendom from the thraldom into which the centuries had seen it fall to ignorance and superstition, stands Wicliffe. His appearance was the pledge that after him would come others, endowed with equal, and it might be with greater gifts, to carry forward the same great mission of emancipation. The success which followed his preaching gave assurance that that Divine Influence which had wrought so mightily in olden time, and chased the night of Paganism from so many realms, overturning its altars, and laying in the dust the powerful thrones that upheld it, would yet again be unloosed, and would display its undying vitality and unimpaired strength in dispelling the second night which had gathered over the world, and overturning the new altars which had been erected upon the ruins of the Pagan ones.

But a considerable interval divided Wicliffe from his great successors. The day seemed to tarry, the hopes of those who looked for “redemption” were tried by a second delay. That Arm which had “cut the bars” of the Pagan house of bondage seemed “shortened,” so that it could not unlock the gates of the yet more doleful prison of the Papacy. Even in England and Bohemia, to which the Light was restricted, so far from continuing to brighten and send forth its rays to illuminate the skies of other countries, it seemed to be again fading away into night. No second Wicliffe had risen up; the grandeur, the power, and the corruption of Rome had reached a loftier height than ever—when suddenly a greater than Wicliffe stepped upon the stage. Not greater in himself, for Wicliffe sent his glance deeper down, and cast it wider around on the field of truth, than perhaps even Luther. It seemed in Wicliffe as if one of the theological giants of the early days of the Christian Church had suddenly appeared among the puny divines of the fourteenth century, occupied with their little projects of the reformation of the Church “in its head and members,” and astonished them by throwing down amongst them his plan of reformation according to the Word of God. But Luther was greater than Wicliffe, in that borne up on his shield he seemed not only of loftier stature than other men, but loftier than even the proto-Reformer. Wicliffe and the Lollards had left behind them a world so far made ready for the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and the efforts of Luther and his fellow-laborers therefore told with sudden and prodigious effect. Now broke forth the day. In the course of little more than three years, the half of Christendom had welcomed the Gospel, and was beginning to be bathed in its splendor.

We have already traced the progress of the Protestant light in Germany, from the year 1517 to its first culmination in 1521 from the strokes of the monk’s hammer on the door of the castle-church at Wittemberg, in presence of the crowd of pilgrims assembled on All Souls’ Eve, to his No thundered forth in the Diet of Worms, before the throne of the Emperor Charles V. That No sounded the knell of all ancient slavery; it proclaimed unmistakably that the Spiritual had at last made good its footing in presence of the Material; that conscience would no longer bow down before empire; and that a power whose rights had long been proscribed had at last burst its bonds, and would wrestle with principalities and thrones for the scepter of the world. The opposing powers well knew that all this terrible significance lay couched in Luther’s one short sentence, “I cannot retract.” It was the voice of a new age, saying, I cannot repass the boundary across which I have come. I am the heir of the future; the nations are my heritage; I must fulfill my appointed task of leading them to liberty, and woe to those who shall oppose me in the execution of my mission! Ye emperors, ye kings, ye princes and judges of the earth, “be wise.” If you co-operate with me, your recompense will be thrones more stable, and realms more flourishing. But if not — my work must be done nevertheless; but alas! for the opposers; nor throne, nor realm, nor name shall be left them.

One thing has struck all who have studied, with minds at once intelligent and reverent, the era of which we speak, and that is the contemporaneous appearance of so many men of great character and sublimest intellect at this epoch. No other age can show such a galaxy of illustrious names. The nearest approach to it in history is perhaps the well-known famous halfcentury in Greece. Before the appearance of Christ the Greek intellect burst out all at once in dazzling splendor, and by its achievements in all departments of human effort shed a glory over the age and country. Most students of history have seen in this wondrous blossoming of the Greek genius a preparation of the world, by the quickening of its mind and the widening of its horizon, for the advent of Christianity. We find this phenomenon repeated, but on a larger scale, in Christendom at the opening of the sixteenth century.

One of the first to mark this was Ruchat, the eloquent historian of the Swiss Reformation. “It came to pass,” says he, “that God raised up, at this time, in almost all the countries of Europe, Italy not excepted, a number of learned, pious, and enlightened men, animated with a great zeal for the glory of God and the good of the Church. These illustrious men arose all at once, as if by one accord, against the prevailing errors, without however having concerted together; and by their constancy and their firmness, accompanied by the blessing from on high, they happily succeeded in different places in rescuing the torch of the Gospel from under the bushel that had hidden its light, and by means of it effected the reformation of the Church; and as God gave, at least in part, this grace to different nations, such as the French, English, and Germans, he granted the same to the Swiss nation: happy if they had all profited by it.” The country on the threshold of which we now stand, and the eventful story of whose reformation we are to trace, is in many respects a remarkable one. Nature has selected it as the chosen field for the display of her wonders. Here beauty and terror, softness and ruggedness, the most exquisite loveliness and stern, savage, appalling sublimity lie folded up together, and blend into one panorama of stupendous and dazzling magnificence. Here is the little flower gemming the meadow, and yonder On the mountain’s side is the tall, dark, silent fir-tree. Here is the crystal rivulet, gladdening the vale through which it flows, and yonder is the majestic lake, spread out amid the hushed mountains, reflecting from its mirror-like bosom the rock that nods over its strand, and the white peak which from afar looks down upon it out of mid-heaven. Here is the rifted gorge across which savage rocks fling their black shadows, making it almost night at noon-day; here, too, the glacier, like a great white ocean, hangs its billows on the mountain’s brow; and high above all, the crowning glory in this scene of physical splendors, is some giant of the Alps, bearing on his head the snows of a thousand winters, and waiting for the morning sun to enkindle them with his light, and fill the firmament with their splendor.

The politics of Switzerland are nearly as romantic as its landscape. They exhibit the same blending of the homely and the heroic. Its people, simple, frugal, temperate, and hardy, have yet the faculty of kindling into enthusiasm, and some of the most chivalric feats that illustrate the annals of modern war have been enacted on the soil of this land. Their mountains, which expose them to the fury of the tempest, to the violence of the torrent, and the dangers of the avalanche, have taught them self-denial, and schooled them into daring. Nor have their souls remained unattempered by the grandeurs amid which they daily move, as witness, on proper occasions, their devotion at the altar, and their heroism on the battle-field.

Passionately fond of their country, they have ever shown themselves ready, at the call of patriotism, to rush to the battlefield, and contend against the most tremendous odds. From tending their herds and flocks on those breezy pasture-lands that skirt the eternal snows, the first summons has brought them down into the plain to do battle for the freedom handed down to them from their fathers. Peaceful shepherds have been suddenly transformed into dauntless warriors, and the mail-clad phalanxes of the invader have gone down before the impetuosity of their onset, his spearmen have reeled beneath the battle axes and arrows of the mountaineers, and both Austria and France have often had cause to repent having incautiously roused the Swiss lion from his slumbers.

But now a new age had come, in which deeper feelings were to stir the souls of the Swiss, and kindle them into a holier enthusiasm. A higher liberty than that for which their fathers had shed their blood on the battlefields of the past was approaching their land. What reception will they give it? Will the men who never declined the summons to arms, sit still when the trumpet calls them to this nobler warfare? will the yoke on the conscience gall them less than that which they felt to be so grievous though it pressed only on the body? No! the Swiss will nobly respond to the call now to be addressed to them. They were to see by the light of that early dawn that Austria had not been their greatest oppressor: that Rome had succeeded in imposing upon them a yoke more grievous by far than any the House of Hapsburg had put upon their fathers. Had they fought and bled to rend the lighter yoke, and were they meekly to bear the heavier? Its iron was entering the soul. No! they had been the bond-slaves of a foreign priest too long. This hour should be the last of their vassalage. And in no country did Protestantism find warriors more energetic, or combatants more successful, than the champions that Switzerland sent forth.

Not only were the gates of this grand territory to be thrown open to the Reformation, but here in years to come Protestantism was to find its center and head-quarters. When kings should be pressing it hard with their swords, and chasing it from the more open countries of Europe, it would retreat within this mountain-guarded land, and erecting its seat at the foot of its mighty bulwarks, it would continue from this asylum to speak to Christendom. The day would come when the light would wax dim in Germany, but the Reformation would retrim its lamp in Switzerland, and cause it to burn with a new brightness, and shed all around a purer splendor than ever was that of morning on its Alps. When the mighty voice that was now marshalling the Protestant host in Germany, and leading it on to victory, should cease to be heard; when Luther should descend into his grave, leaving no one behind him able to grasp his scepter, or wield his sword; when furious tempests should be warring around Protestantism in France, and heavy clouds darkening the morning which had there opened so brightly; when Spain, after a noble effort to break her fetters and escape into the light, should be beaten down by the inquisitor and the despot, and compelled to return to her old prison—there would stand up in Switzerland a great chief, who, pitching his pavilion amid its mountains, and surveying from this center every part of the field, would set in order the battle a second time, and direct its movements till victory should crown the combatants.

Such is the interest of the land we are now approaching. Here mighty champions are to contend, here wise and learned doctors are to teach: but first let us briefly describe the condition in which we find it—the horrible night that has so long covered those lovely valleys and those majestic mountains, on which the first streaks of morning are now beginning to be discernible.

CHAPTER - CONDITION OF SWITZERLAND PRIOR TO THE REFORMATION.

Primitive and Mediaeval Christianity — The Latter Unlike the Former — Change in Church’s Discipline — in her Clergy — in her Worship — State of Switzerland — Ignorance of the Bible — The Sacred Languages Unknown — Greek is Heresy — Decay of Schools — Decay of Theology — Distracted State of Society — All Things Conventionally Holy — Sale of Benefices — Swiss Livings held by Foreigners.

PICTURE: View in Lausanne PICTURE: Ulric Zwingle So changed was the Christianity of the Middle Ages from the Christianity of the primitive times, that it could not have been known to be the same Gospel. The crystal fountains amid the remote and solitary hills, and the foul and turbid river formed by their waters after stagnating in marshes, or receiving the pollution of the great cities past which they roll, are not more unlike than were the pure and simple Gospel as it issued at the beginning from its divine source, and the Gospel exhibited to the world after the traditions and corruptions of men had been incorporated with it. The government of the Church, so easy and sweet in the first age, had grown into a veritable tyranny. The faithful pastors who fed the flock with knowledge and truth, watching with care lest harm should come to the fold, had given place to shepherds who slumbered at their post, or awoke up only to eat the fat and clothe them with the wool. The simple and spiritual worship of the first age had, by the fifth, been changed into a ceremonial, which Augustine complained was “less tolerable than the yoke under which the Jews formerly groaned.” 1 The Christian churches of that day were but little distinguishable from the pagan temples of a former era; and Jehovah was adored by the same ceremonies and rites by which the heathen had expressed their reverence for their deities. In truth, the throne of the Eternal was obscured by the crowd of divinities placed around it, and the one great object of worship was forgotten in the distraction caused by the many competitors—angels, saints, and images—for the homage due to him alone. It was to no effect, one would think, to pull down the pagan temple and demolish the altar of the heathen god, seeing they were to be replaced with fanes as truly superstitious, and images as grossly idolatrous. So early as the fourth century, St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, found in his diocese an altar which one of his predecessors had set up in honor of a brigand, who was worshipped as a martyr. The stream of corruption, swollen to such dimensions so early as the fifth century, flowed down with ever-augmenting volume to the fifteenth. Not a country in Christendom which the deluge did not overflow. Switzerland was visited with the fetid stream as well as other lands; and it will help us to estimate the mighty blessing which the Reformation conferred on the world, to take a few examples of the darkness in which this country was plunged before that epoch.

The ignorance of the age extended to all classes and to every department of human knowledge. The sciences and the learned languages were alike unknown; political and theological knowledge were equally neglected. “To be able to read a little Greek,” says the celebrated Claude d’Espenes, speaking of that time, “was to render one’s self suspected of heresy; to possess a knowledge of Hebrew, was almost to be a heretic outright. 3 The schools destined for the instruction of youth contained nothing that was fitted to humanise, and sent forth barbarians rather than scholars. It was a common saying in those days, “The more skillful a grammarian, the worse a theologian.” To be a sound divine it was necessary to eschew letters; and verily the clerks of those days ran little risk of spoiling their theology and lowering their reputation by the contamination of learning. For more than four hundred years the theologians knew the Bible only through the Latin version, commonly styled the Vulgate, being absolutely ignorant of the original tongues. 4 Zwingle, the Reformer of Zurich, drew upon himself the suspicions of certain priests as a heretic, because he diligently compared the original Hebrew of the Old Testament with this version. And Rodelf Am-Ruhel, otherwise Collinus, Professor of Greek at Zurich, tells us that he was on one occasion in great danger from having in his possession certain Greek books, a thing that was accounted an indubitable mark of heresy. He was Canon of Munster, in Aargau, in the year 1523, when the magistrates of Lucerne sent certain priests to visit his house. Discovering the obnoxious volumes, and judging them to be Greek—from the character, we presume, for no respectable cure would in those days have any nearer acquaintance with the tongue of Demosthenes—“ This,” they exclaimed, “is Lutheranism! this is heresy! Greek and heresy—it is the same thing!” A priest of the Grisons, at a public disputation on religion, held at Ilanz about the year 1526, loudly bewailed that ever the learned languages had entered Helvetia. “If,” said he, “Hebrew and Greek had never been heard of in Switzerland, what a happy country! what a peaceful state! but now, alas! here they are, and see what a torrent of errors and heresics have rushed in after them.” 6 At that time there was only one academy in all Switzerland, namely, at Basle; nor had it existed longer than fifty years, having been founded by Pope Pius II. (AEneas Sylvius) in the middle of the fifteenth century. There were numerous colleges of canons, it is true, and convents of men, richly endowed, and meant in part to be nurseries of scholars and theologians, but these establishments had now become nothing better than retreats of epicurism, and nests of ignorance. In particular the Abbey of St. Gall, formerly a renowned school of learning, to which the sons of princes and great lords were sent to be taught, and which in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, had sent forth many learned men, had by this time fallen into inefficiency, and indeed into barbarism. John Schmidt, or Faber, vicar of the Bishop-of Constance, and a noted polemic of the day, as well as a great enemy of the Reformation and the Reformers, publicly avowed, in a dispute he had with Zwingle, that he knew just a little Greek, but knew nothing whatever of Hebrew. 7 It need not surprise us that the common priests were so illiterate, when even the Popes themselves, the princes of the Church, were hardly more learned. A Roman Catholic author has candidly confessed that “there have been many Popes so ignorant that they knew nothing at all of grammar.” As regards theology, the divines of those days aimed only at becoming adepts in the scholastic philosophy. They knew but one book in the world, to them the sum of all knowledge, the fountain-head of all truth, the “Sentences “of Peter Lombard. While the Bible lay beside them unopened, the pages of Peter Lombard were diligently studied. If they wished to alternate their reading they turned, not to Scripture, but to the writings of Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. These authors were their life-long study; to sit at the feet of Isaiah, or David, or John, to seek the knowledge of salvation at the pure sources of truth, was never thought of by them. Their great authority was Aristotle, not St. Paul. In Switzerland there were doctors of divinity who had never read the Holy Scriptures; there were priests and cures who had never seen a Bible all their days. 9 In the year 1527 the magistrates of Bern wrote to Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon, the last Bishop of Lausanne, saying that a conference was to be held in their city, on religion, at which all points were to be decided by an appeal to Sacred Scripture, and requesting him to come himself, or at least send some of his theologians, to maintain their side of the question. Alas! the perplexity of the good bishop. “I have no person,” wrote he to the lords of Bern, “suttlciently versed in Holy Scripture to assist at such a dispute.” This recalls a yet more ancient fact of a similar kind. In A.D. 680 the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus summoned a General Council (the sixth) to be held in his capital in Barbary. The Pope of the day, Agatho, wrote to Constantine, excusing the non-attendance of the Italian bishops, on the score “that he could not find in all Italy a single ecclesiastic sufficiently acquainted with the inspired Oracles to send to the Council. 10 But if this century had few copies of the Word of Life, it had armies of monks; it had an astoundingly long list of saints, to whose honor every day new shrines were erected; and it had churches, to which the splendor of their architecture and the pomp of their ceremonies gave an imposing magnificence, while the bull of Boniface V. took care that they should not want frequentors, for in this century was passed the infamous law which made the churches places of refuge for malefactors of every description.

The few who studied the Scriptures were contemned as ignoble souls who were content to plod along on the humblest road, and who lacked the ambition to climb to the sublimer heights of knowledge. “Bachelor” was the highest distinction to which they could attain, whereas the study of the “Sentences” opened to others the path to the coveted honor of” Doctor of Divinity.” The priests had succeeded in making it be believed that the study of the Bible was necessary neither for the defense of the Church, nor for the salvation of her individual members, and that for both ends Tradition sufficed. “In what peace and concord would men have lived,” said the Vicar of Constance, “if the Gospel had never been heard of in the world!” The great Teacher has said that God must be worshipped “in spirit and in truth:” not in “spirit” only, but in “truth,” even that which God has revealed. Consequently when that “truth” was hidden, worship became impossible. Worship after this was simply masquerade. The priest stood up before the people to make certain magical signs with his fingers, or to mutter unintelligible words between his teeth, or to vociferate at the utmost pitch of his voice. Of a like character were the religious acts enjoined on the people. Justice, mercy, humility, and the other virtues of early times were of no value. All holiness lay in prostrating one’s self before an image, adoring a relic, purchasing an indulgence, performing a pilgrimage, or paying one’s tithes. This was the devotion, these were the graces that lent their glory to the ages in which the Roman faith was in the ascendant. The baron could not ride out till he had donned his coat of mail, lest he should be assailed by his neighbor baron: the peasant tilled the earth, or herded his oxen, with the collar of his master round his neck: the merchant could not pass from fair to fair, but at the risk of being plundered: the robber and the murderer waylaid the passenger who traveled without an escort, and the blood of man was continually flowing in private quarrels, and on the battle-field; but the times, doubtless, were eminently holy, for all around wherever one looked one beheld the symbols of devotion—crosses, pardons, privileged shrines, images, relics, aves, cowls, girdles, and palmer-staffs, and all the machinery which the “religion” of the times had invented to make all things holy—earth, air, and water — everything, in short, save the soul of man. Polydore Virgil, an Italian, and a good Catholic, wishing to pay a compliment to the piety of those of whom he was speaking, said, “they had more confidence in their images than in Jesus Christ himself, whom the image represents.” Within the “Church” there was seen only a scramble for temporalities; such as might be seen in a city abandoned to pillage, where each strives to appropriate the largest share of the spoil. The ecclesiastical benefices were put up to auction, in effect, and knocked down to the highest bidder. This was found to be the easiest way of gathering the gold of Christendom, and pouring it into the great treasury at Rome—that treasury into which, like another sea, flowed all the rivers of the earth, and yet like the sea it never was full. Some of the Popes tried to reduce the scandal, but the custom was too deeply rooted to yield to even their authority. Martin V., in concert with the Council of Constance, enacted a perpetual constitution, which declared all simoniacs, whether open or secret, excommunicated. His successor Eugenius and the Council of Basle ratified this constitution. It is a fact, nevertheless, that during the Pontificate of Pope Martin the sale of benefices continued to flourish. 13 Finding they could not suppress the practice, the Popes evidently thought that their next best course was to profit by it. The rights of the chapters and patrons were abolished, and bands of needy priests were seen crossing the Alps, with Papal briefs in their hands, demanding admission into vacant benefices. From all parts of Switzerland came loud complaints that the churches had been invaded by strangers. Of the numerous body of canons attached to the cathedral church of Geneva, in 1527, one only was a native, all the rest were foreigners. 14

CHAPTER - CORRUPTION OF THE SWISS CHURCH.

The Government of the Pope-How the Shepherd Fed his Sheep — Texts from Aquinas and Aristotle — Preachers and their Sermons — Council of Meudon and the Vicar — Canons of Neufchatel — Passion-plays — Excommunication employed against Debters — Invasion of the Magistrates’ Jurisdiction — Lausanne — Beauty of its Site — Frightful Disorder of its Clergy — Geneva and other Swiss Towns — A Corrupt Church the greatest Scourge of the World — Cry for Reform — The Age turns away from the True Reform — A Cry that waxes Louder, and a Corruption that waxes Stronger.

PICTURE: Swiss Peasant Family OVER the Churches of Switzerland, as over those of the rest of Europe, the Pope had established a tyranny. He built this usurpation on such make-believes as the “holy chair,” the “Vicar of Jesus Christ,” and the “infallibility” thence deduced. He regulated all things according to his pleasure. He forbade the people to read the Scriptures. He every day made new ordinances, to the destruction of the laws of God; and all priests, bishops not excepted, he bound to obey him by an oath of peculiar stringency. The devices were infinite—annats, reservations, tithes (double and treble), amulets, dispensations, pardons, rosaries, relics—by which provision was made whereby the humblest sheep, in the remotest corner of the vast fold of the Pope, might send yearly to Rome a money acknowledgment of the allegiance he owed to that great shepherd, whose seat was on the banks of the Tiber, but whose iron crook reached to the extremities of Christendom.

But was that shepherd equally alive to what he owed the flock? Was the instruction which he took care to provide them with wholesome and abundant? Is it to the pastures of the Word that he conducted them? The priests of those days had no Bible; how then could they communicate to others what they had not learned themselves? If they entered a pulpit, it was to rehearse a fable, to narrate a legend, or to repeat a stale jest; and they deemed their oratory amply repaid, if their audience gaped at the one and laughed at the other. If a text was announced, it was selected, not from Scripture, but from Scotus, or Thomas Aquinas, or the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle. 1 Could grapes grow on such a tree, or sweet waters issue from such a fountain?

But, in truth, few priests were so adventurous as to mount a pulpit, or attempt addressing a congregation. The most part were dumb. They left the duty of story-telling, or preaching, to the monks, and in particular to the Mendicants. “I must record,” says the historian Ruchat, “a fact to the honor of the Council of Moudon. Not a little displeased at seeing that the cure of the town was a dumb pastor, who left his parishioners without instruction, the Council, in November, 1535, ordered him to explain, at least to the common people, the Ten Commandments of the Law of God, every Sabbath, after the celebration of the office of the mass.” 2 Whether the cure’s theological acquirements enabled him to fulfill the Council’s injunction we do not know. He might have pleaded, as a set-off to his own indolence, a yet more scandalous neglect of duty to be witnessed not far off. At Neufchatel, so pleasantly situated at the foot of the Jura Alps, with its lake reflecting on its tranquil bosom the image of the vine-clad heights that environ it, was a college of canons. These ecclesiastics lived in grand style, for the foundation was rich, the air pleasant, and the wine good. But, says Ruchat, “it looked as if they were paid to keep silence, for, though they were many, there was not one of them all that could preach.” In those enlightened days, the ballad-singers and play-wrights supplemented the deficiencies of the preachers. The Church held it dangerous to put into the hands of the people the vernacular Gospel, lest they should read in their own tongue of the wondrous birth at Bethlehem, and the not less wondrous death on Calvary, with all that lay between. But the Passion, and other Biblical events, were turned into comedies and dramas, and acted in public—with how much edification to the spectators, one may guess! In the year 1531, the Council of Moudon gave ten florins of Savoy to a company of tragedians, who played the “Passion” on Palm Sunday, and the “Resurrection” on Easter Monday. 4 “If Luther had not come,” said a German abbe, calling to mind this and similar occurrences— “If Luther had not come, the Pope by this time would have persuaded men to feed themselves on dust.”

A raging greed, like a burning thirst, tormented the clergy, from their head downwards. Each several order became the scourge of the one beneath it.

The inferior clergy, pillaged by the superior, as the superior by their Sovereign Priest at Rome, fleeced in their turn those under them. “Having bought,” says the historian of the Swiss Reformation, “the Church in gross, they sold it in detail.” 5 Money, money was the mystic potency that set agoing and kept working the machine of Romanism. There were churches to be dedicated, cemeteries to be consecrated, bells to be baptised: all this must be paid for. There were infants to be christened, marriages to be blessed, and the dead to be buried: nothing of all this could be done without money. There were masses to be said for the repose of the soul; there were victims to be rescued from the raging flames of purgatory: it was vain to think of doing this without money. There was, moreover, the privilege of sepulture in the floor of the church—above all, near the altar, where the dead man mouldered in ground preeminently holy, and the prayers offered for him were specially efficacious: that was worth a great sum, and a heavy price was charged for it. There were those who wished to eat flesh in Lent, or in forbidden times, and there were those who felt it burdensome to fast at any season: well, the Church had arranged to meet the wishes of both, only, as was reasonable, such accommodation must be paid for. All needed pardon: well, here it is—a plenary pardon; the pardon of all one’s sins up to the hour of one’s death—but first the price has to be paid down. Well, the price has been paid; the soul has taken its departure, fortified with a plenary absolution; but this has to be rendered yet more plenary by the payment of a supplemental sum—though why, we cannot well say, for now we touch the borders of a subject which is shrouded in mystery, and which no Romish theologian has attempted to make plain. In short, as said the poet Mantuan, 6 the Church of Rome is an “enormous market, stocked with all sorts of wares, and regulated by the same laws which govern all the other markets of the world. The man who comes to it with money may have everything; but, alas! for him who comes without money, he can have nothing.”

Every one knows how simple was the discipline of the early Church, and how spiritual the ends to which it was directed. The pastors of those days wielded it only to guard the doctrine of the Church from the corruption of error, and her communion from the contamination of scandalous persons.

For far different ends was the Church’s discipline employed in the fifteenth century in Switzerland, and other countries of Europe. One abuse of it, very common, was to employ it for compelling payment of debts.

The creditor went to the bishop and took out an excommunication against his debtor. To the poor debtor this was a much more formidable affair than any civil process. The penalties reached the soul as well as the body, and extended beyond the grave. The magistrate had often to interfere, and forbid a practice which was not more an oppression of the citizen, than a manifest invasion of his own jurisdiction. We find the Council of Moudon, 7th July, 1532, forbidding a certain Antoine Jayet, chaplain and vicar of the church, to execute any such interdiction against any layman of the town and parish of Moudon, and promising to guarantee him against all consequences before his superiors. Nor was it long till the Council had to make good their guarantee; for the same month, the vicar having failed to execute one of these interdictions against a burgess of Moudon, the Council deputed two of their number to defend him before the chapter at Lausanne, which had summoned him before it to answer for his disobedience. 7 A frequent consequence was that corpses remained unburied. If the husband died under excommunication for debt, the wife could not consign his body to the grave, nor the son that of the father. The excommunication must first be revoked. This prostitution of ecclesiastical discipline was of very common occurrence, and inflicted a grievance that was widely felt, not only at the epoch of the Reformation, but all through the fifteenth century. It was one of the many devices by which the Roman Church worked her way underneath the temporal power, and filched from it its rightful jurisdiction.

Thrones, judgment-seats, in short, the whole machinery of civil government that Church left standing, but she contrived to place her own functionaries in these chairs of rule. She talked loftily of the kingly dignity, she styled princes the “anointed of heaven;” but she deprived their sceptres of all real power by the crosiers of her bishops. In the year we find the inhabitants of the Pays-de-Vaud complaining to Philibert, Duke of Savoy, their liege lord, that his subjects who had the misfortune to be in debt were made answerable, not in his courts, but to the officer of the Bishop of Lausanne, by whom they were visited with the penalty of excommunication. The duke did not take the matter so quietly as many others. He fulminated a decree, dated “Chambeer, August 31st,” against this usurpation of his jurisdiction on the part of the bishop. It remains only that we touch on what was the saddest part of the corruption of those melancholy days, the libertinism of the clergy. Its frightful excess makes the full and open exposure of the scandal impossible. Oftener than once did the Swiss cantons complain that their spiritual guides led worse lives than the laymen, and that, while they went about their church performances with an indevotion and coldness that shocked the pious, they gave themselves up to profanity, drunkenness, gluttony, and uncleanness. We shall let the men who then lived, and who witnessed this corruption, and suffered from it, describe it. In the year 1477, some time after the election of Benedict of Montferrand to the Bishopric of Lausanne, the Bernese came to him on the 2nd of August, to complain of their clergy, whose irregularities they were no longer able to bear. “We see clearly,” said they, “that the clergy of our land are extremely debauched, and given up to impurity, and that they practice their wickedness openly, without any feeling of shame. They keep their concubines, they resort at night to houses of debauchery; and they do all this with so much boldness, that it is plain they have neither honor nor conscience, and are not restrained by the fear either of God or man. This afflicts us extremely. Our ancestors have often made police regulations to arrest these disorders, particularly when they saw that the ecclesiastical tribunals gave themselves no care about the matter.” A similar complaint was lodged, in the year 1500, against the monks of the Priory of Grandson, by the lords of Bern and Friburg 11 But to what avail? Despite these complaints and police regulations, the manners of the clergy remained unreformed: the salt had lost its savor, and wherewith could it be salted? The law of corruption is to become yet more corrupt.

So would it assuredly have been in Switzerland—from its corruption, corruption only would have come in endless and ever grosser developments—had not Protestantism come to sow with beneficent hand, and quicken with heavenly breath, in the bosom of society, the seeds from which was to spring a new life. Men needed not laws to amend the old, but a power to create the new.

The examples we have given—and it is the violence of the malady that illustrates the power of the physician—are sufficiently deplorable; but sad as they are, they fade from view and pass from memory in presence of this one enormity, which an ancient document has handed down to us, and which we must glance at; for we shall only glance, not dwell, on the revolting spectacle. It will give us some idea of the frightful moral gulf in which Switzerland was sunk, and how inevitable would have been its ruin had not the arm of the Reformation plucked it from the abyss.

On the northern shore of Lake Leman stands the city of Lausanne. Its site is one of the grandest in Switzerland. Crowned with its cathedral towers, the city looks down on the noble lake, which sweeps along in a mighty crescent of blue, from where Geneva on its mount of rock is dimly descried in the west, till it bathes the feet of the two mighty Alps, the Dent du Midi and the Dent de Morcele, which like twin pillars guard the entrance to the Rhone valley. Near it, on this side, the country is one continuous vineyard, from amid which hamlets and towns sweetly look out. Yonder, just dipping into the lake, is the donjon of Chillon, recalling the story of Bonnevard, to whose captivity within its wails the genius of Byron has given a wider than a merely Swiss fame. And beyond, on the other side of the lake, is Savoy, a rolling country, clothed with noble forests and rich pastures, and walled in on the far distance, on the southern horizon, by the white peaks of the Alps. But what a blot in this fair scene was Lausanne!

We speak of the Lausanne of the sixteenth century. In the year 1533 the Lausannese preferred a list of twenty-three charges against their canons and priests, and another of seven articles against their bishop, Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon. Ruchat has given the document in full, article by article, but parts of it will not bear translation in these pages, so, giving those it concerns the benefit of this difficulty, we take the liberty of presenting it in an abridged form. The canons and priests, according to the statement of their parishioners, sometimes quarrelled when saying their offices, and fought in the church.

The citizens who came to join in the cathedral service were, on occasion, treated by the canons to a fight, and stabbed with poignards. Certain ecclesiastics had slain two of the citizens in one day, but no reckoning had been held with them for the deed. The canons, especially, were notorious for their profligacy. Masked and disguised as soldiers, they sallied out into the streets at night, brandishing naked swords, to the terror, and at times the effusion of the blood, of those they encountered. They sometimes attacked the citizens in their own houses, and when threatened with ecclesiastical inflictions, denied the bishop’s power and his right to pronounce excommunication upon them. Certain of them had been visited with excommunication, but they went on saying mass as before. In short, the clergy were just as bad as they could possibly be, and there was no crime of which many of them had not at one time or another been guilty.

The citizens further complained that, when the plague visited Lausanne, many had been suffered to die without confession and the Sacrament. The priests could hardly plead in excuse an excess of work, seeing they found time to gamble in the taverns, where they seasoned their talk with oaths, or cursed some unlucky throw of the dice. They revealed confessions, were adroit at the framing of testaments, and made false entries in their own favor. They were the governors of the hospital, and their management had resulted in a great impoverishment of its revenues.

Unhappily, Lausanne was not an exceptional case. It exhibits the picture of what Geneva and Neufchatel and other towns of the Swiss Confederacy in those days were, although, we are glad to be able to say, not in so aggravated a degree. Geneva, to which, when touched by the Reformed light, there was to open a future so different, lay plunged at this moment in disorders, under its bishop, Pierre de la Baume, and stood next to Lausanne in the notoriety it had achieved by the degeneracy of its manners. But it is needless to particularize. All round that noble lake which, with its smiling banks and its magnificent mountain boundaries—here the Jura, there the White Alps—forms so grand a feature of Switzerland, were villages and towns, from which went out a cry not unlike that which ascended from the Cities of the Plain in early days.

This is but a partial lifting of the veil. Even conceding that these are extreme cases, still, what a terrible conclusion do they force upon us as regards the moral state of Christendom! And when we think that these polluting streams flowed from the sanctuary, and the instrumentality ordained by God for the purification of society had become the main means of corrupting it, we are taught that, in some respects, the world has more to fear from the admixture of Christianity with error than the Church has. It was the world that first brought this corruption into the Church; but see what a terrible retaliation the Church now takes upon the world!

One does not wonder that there is heard on every side, at this era, an infinite number of voices, lay and cleric, calling for the Reformation of the Church. Yet the majority of those from whom these demands came were but groping in the dark. But God never leaves himself without a witness. A century before this, he had put before the world, in the ministry of Wicliffe, plain, clear, and demonstrated, the one only plan of a true Reformation. Putting his finger upon the page of the New Testament, Wicliffe said: Here it is; here is what you seek. You must forget the past thousand years; you must look at what is written on this page; you will find in this Book the Pattern of the Reformation of the Church; and not the Pattern only, but the Power by which that Reformation can alone be realised.

But the age would not look at it. Men said, Can any good thing come out of this Book? The Bible did well enough as the teacher of the Christians of the first century; but its maxims are no longer applicable, its models are antiquated. We of the fifteenth century require something more profound, and more suited to the times. They turned their eyes to Popes, to emperors, to councils. These, alas! were hills from which no help could come. And so for another century the call for Reformation went on, gathering strength with every passing year, as did also the corruption. The two went on by equal stages, the cry waxing ever the louder and the corruption growing ever the stronger, till at length it was seen that there was no help in man. Then He who is mighty came down to deliver.

CHAPTER - ZWINGLE’S BIRTH AND SCHOOL-DAYS.

One Leader in Germany — Many in Switzerland — Valley of Tockenburg — Village of Wildhaus — Zwingle’s Birth — His Parentage — Swiss Shepherds — Winter Evenings — Traditions of Swiss Valour — Zwingle Listens — Sacred Traditions — Effect of Scenery in moulding Zwingle’s Character — Sent to School at Wesen — Outstrips his Teacher — Removed to Basle — Binzli — Zwingle goes to Bern — Lupllus — The Dominicans — Zwingle narrowly escapes being a Monk.

PICTURE: View in Zurich THERE is an apt resemblance between the physical attributes of the land in which we are now arrived, and the eventful story of its religious awakening. Its great snow-clad hills are the first to catch the light of morning, and to announce the rising of the sun. They are seen burning like torches, while the mists and shadows still cover the plains and valleys at their feet. So of the moral dawn of the Swiss. Three hundred years ago, the cities of this land were among the first in Europe to kindle in the radiance of the Reformed faith, and to announce the new morning which was returning to the world. There suddenly burst upon the darkness a multitude of lights. In Germany there was but one pre-eminent center, and one pre-eminently great leader. Luther towered up like some majestic Alp.

Alone over all that land was seen his colossal figure. But in Switzerland one, and another, and a third stood up, and like Alpine peaks, catching the first rays, they shed a bright and pure effulgence not only upon their own cities and cantons, but over all Christendom.

In the south-east of Switzerland is the long and narrow valley of the Tockenburg. It is bounded by lofty mountains, which divide it on the north from the canton of Appenzell, and on the south from the Grisons.

On the east it opens toward the Tyrolese Alps. Its high level does not permit the grain to ripen or the vine to be cultivated in it, but its rich pastures were the attraction of shepherds, and in process of time the village of Wildhaus grew up around its ancient church. In this valley, in a cottage which is still to be seen 1 standing about a mile from the church, on a green meadow, its walls formed of the stems of trees, its roof weighed down with stones to protect it from the mountain gusts, with a limpid stream flowing before it, there lived three hundred years ago a man named Huldric Zwingle, bailiff of the parish. He had eight sons, the third of whom was born on New Year’s day, 1584, seven weeks after the birth of Luther, and was named Ulric. The man was greatly respected by his neighbors for his upright character as well as for his office. He was a shepherd, and his summers were passed on the mountains, in company with his sons, who aided him in tending his flocks. When the green of spring brightened the vales, the herds were brought forth and driven to pasture. Day by day, as the verdure mounted higher on the mountain’s side, the shepherds with their flocks continued to ascend. Midsummer found them at their highest elevation, their herds browsing on the skirts of the eternal snows, where the melting ice and the vigorous sun of July nourished a luxuriant herbage. When the lengthening nights and the fading pasturage told them that summer had begun to decline, they descended by the same stages as they had mounted, arriving at their dwellings in the valley about the time of the autumnal equinox. In Switzerland so long as winter holds its reign on the mountain-tops, and darkens the valleys with mists and tempests, no labor can be done out of doors, especially in high-lying localities like the Tockenburg. Then the peasants assemble by turns in each other’s houses, lit at night by a blazing fire of fir-wood or the gleam of candle. Gathering round the hearth, they beguile the long evenings with songs and musical instruments, or stories of olden days. They will tell of some adventurous exploit, when the shepherd climbed the precipice, or braved the tempest, to rescue some member of the fold which had strayed from its companions. Or they will narrate some yet braver deed done on the battlefield where their fathers were wont to meet the spearmen of Austria, or the steel-clad warriors of Gaul. Thus would they make the hours pass swiftly by.

The house of the Amman of Wildhaus, Huldric Zwingle, was a frequent resort of his neighbors in the winter evenings. Round his hearth would assemble the elders of the village, and each brought his tale of chivalry borrowed from ancient Swiss ballad or story, or mayhap handed down by tradition. While the elders spoke, the young listened with coursing pulse and flashing eyes. They told of the brave men their mountains had produced of old; of the feats of valor which had been done upon their soil; and how their own valley of the Tockenburg had sent forth heroes who had helped to roll back from their hills the hosts of Charles the Bold. The battles of their fathers were fought over again in the simple yet graphic narratives of the sons. The listeners saw these deeds enacted before them.

They beheld the fierce foreign phalanxes gathering round their mountains.

They saw their sires mustering in city and on mountain, they saw them hurrying through narrow gorge, and shady pine-forest, and across their lakes, to repel the invader; they heard the shock of the encounter, the clash of battle, the shout of victory, and saw the confusion and terrors of the rout. Thus the spirit of Swiss valor was kept alive; bold sire was succeeded by son as bold; and the Alps, as they kindled their fires morning by morning, beheld one generation of patriots and warriors rise up after another at their feet.

In the circle of listeners round his father’s hearth in the winter evenings was the young Ulric Zwingle. He was thrilled by these tales of the deeds of ancient valor, some of them done in the very valley where he heard them rehearsed. His country’s history, not in printed page, but in tragic action, passed before him. He could see the forms of its heroes moving grandly along. They had fought, and bled, centuries ago; their ashes had long since mingled with the dust of the vale, or been borne away by the mountain torrent; but to him they were still living. They never could die. If that soil which spring brightened with its flowers, and autumn so richly covered with its fruits, was free—if yonder snows, which kindled so grandly on the mountain’s brow, owned no foreigul lord, it was to these men that this was owing. This glorious land inhabited by freemen was their eternal monument. Every object in it was to him associated with their names, and recalled them to his memory. To be worthy of his great ancestors, to write his name alongside theirs, and have his exploits similarly handed down from father to son, became henceforward his highest ambition. This brave, lofty, liberty-loving nature, which strengthened from year to year, was a fit stock on which to graft the love of a yet higher liberty, and the detestation of a yet baser tyranny than any which their fathers had repelled with the scorn of freemen when they routed the phalanxes of the Hapsburg, or the legionaries of France.

And betimes this liberty began to be disclosed to him. His grandmother was a pious woman. She would call the young Ulric to her, and making him sit beside her, would introduce him to heroes of a yet loftier type, by reciting to him such portions of sacred history as she herself had learned from the legends of the Church, and the lessons of the Breviary. She would tell him, doubtless, of those grand patriarchal shepherds who fed their flocks on the hills of Palestine of old, and how at times an August Being came down and talked with them. She would tell him of those mighty men of valor from the plough, the sheepfold, or the vineyard, who, when the warriors of Midian, crossing the Jordan, darkened with their swarms the broad Esdraelon, or the hordes of Philistia, from the plain by the sea-shore, climbed the hills of Judah, drove back the invading hosts, and sent them with slaughter and terror to their homes. She would take him to the cradle at Bethlehem, to the cross on Calvary, to the garden on the morning of the third day, when the doors of the sepulcher were seen to open, and a glorious form walked forth from the darkness of the tomb. She would show him the first missionaries hurrying away with the great news to the Gentile world, and would tell him how the idols of the nations fell at the preaching of the Gospel. Thus day by day was the young Zwingle trained for his great future task. Deep in his heart was laid the love of his country, and next were implanted the rudiments of that faith which alone could be the shield of his country’s stable and lasting independence.

The grand aspects of nature around him — the tempest’s roar, the cataract’s dash, the mountain peaks—doubtless contributed their share to the forming of the future Reformer. They helped to nurse that elevation of soul, that sublime awe of Him who had “set fast the mountains,” and that intrepidity of mind which distinguished Zwingle in after-years. So thinks his biographer. “I have often thought in my simplicity,” says Oswald Myconius, 3 “that from these sublime heights, which stretch up towards heaven, he has taken something heavenly and sublime.” “When the thunder rolls through the gorges of the mountains, and leaps from crag to crag with crashing roar, then it is as if we heard anew the voice of the Lord God proclaiming, ‘I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.’ When in the dawn of morning the icy mountains glow in light divine, so that a sea of fire seems to surround all their tops, it is as if ‘the Lord God of hosts treadeth upon the high places of the earth,’ and as if the border of his garment of light had transfigured the hills. It is then that with reverential awe we feel as if the cry came to us also, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ Here under the magnificent impressions of a mountain world and its wonders, there awoke in the breast of the young Zwingle the first awful sense of the grandeur and majesty of God, which afterwards filled his whole soul, and armed him with intrepidity in the great conflict with the powers of darkness. In the solitude of the mountains, broken only by the bells of his pasturing flocks, the reflective boy mused on the wisdom of God which reveals itself in all creatures. An echo of this deep contemplation of nature, which occupied his harmless youth, we find in a work which, in the ripeness of manhood, he composed on ‘The Providence of God.’ 4 ‘The earth,’ says he, ‘the mother of all, shuts never ruthlessly her rich treasures within herself; she heeds not the wounds made on her by spade and share. The dew, the rain, the rivers moisten, restore, quicken within her that which had been brought to a stand-still in growth by drought, and its after-thriving testifies wondrously of the Divine power. The mountains, too, these awkward, rude, inert masses, that give to the earth, as the bones to the flesh, solidity, form, and consistency, that render impossible, or at least difficult, the passage from one place to another, which, although heavier than the earth itself, are yet so far above it, and never sink, do they not proclaim the imperishable might of Jehovah, and speak forth the whole volume of his majesty?’” His father marked with delight the amiable disposition, the truthful character, and the lively genius of his son, and began to think that higher occupations awaited him than tending focks on his native mountains. The new day of letters was breaking over Europe. Some solitary rays had penetrated into the secluded valley of the Tockenburg, and awakened aspirations in the bosom of its shepherds. The Bailiff of Wildhaus, we may be sure, shared in the general impulse which was moving men towards the new dawn.

His son Ulric was now in his eighth or ninth year. It was necessary to provide him with better instruction than the valley of the Tockenburg could supply. His uncle was Dean of Wesen, and his father resolved to place him under his superintendence. Setting out one day on their way to Wesen, the father and son climbed the green summits of the Ammon, and now from these heights the young Ulric had his first view of the world lying around his native valley of the Tockenburg. On the south rose the snowy crests of the Oberland. He could ahnost look down into the valley of Glarus, which was to be his first charge; more to the north were the wooded heights of Einsiedeln, and beyond them the mountains which enclose the lovely waters of Zurich.

The Dean of Wesen loved his brother’s child as his own son. He sent him to the public school of the place. The genius of the boy was quick, his capacity large, but the stores of the teacher were slender. Soon he had communicated to his pupil all he knew himself, and it became necessary to send Zwingle to another school. His father and his uncle took counsel together, and selected that of Basle.

Ulric now exchanged his grand mountains, with their white peaks, for the carpet-like meadows, watered by the Rhine, and the gentle hills, with their sprinkling of fir-trees, which encompass Basle. Basle was one of those points on which the rising day was concentrating its rays, and whence they were radiated over the countries around. It was the seat of a University. It had numerous printing-presses, which were reproducing the master-pieces of the classic age. It was beginning to be the resort of scholars; and when the young student from the Tockenburg entered its gates and took up his residence within it, he felt doubtless that he was breathing a new atmosphere.

The young Zwingle was fortunate as regarded the master under whose care he was placed at Basle. Gregory Binzli, the teacher in St. Theedore’s School, was a man of mild temper and warm heart, and in these respects very ulike the ordinary pedagogues of the sixteenth century, who studied by a stiff demeanor, a severe countenance, and the terrors of discipline to compel the obedience of their pupils, and inspire them with the love of learning. In this case no spur was needed. The pupil from the Tockenburg made rapid progress here as at Wesen. He shone especially in the mimic debates which the youth of that day, in imitation of the wordy tournaments of their elders, often engaged in, and laid the foundation of that power in disputation which he afterwards wielded on a wider arena. Again the young Zwingle, distancing his schoolmates, stood abreast of his teacher. It was clear that another school must be found for the pupil of whom the question was not, What is he able to learn but, Where shall we find one qualified to teach him.? The Bailiff of Wildhaus and the Dean of Wesen once more took counsel touching the young scholar, the precocity of whose genius had created for them this embarrassment. The most distinguished school at that time in all Switzerland was that of Bern, where Henry Woelflin, or Lupullus, taught, with great applause, the dead languages. Thither it was resolved to send the boy. Bidding adieu for a time to the banks of the Rhine, Zwingle recrossed the Jura, and stood once more in sight of those majestic snowy piles, which had been in a sort his companions from his infancy. Morning and night he could gaze upon the pyramidal forms of the Shrekhorn and the Eiger, on the tall peak of the Finster Aarhorn, on the mighty Blumlis Alp, and overtopping them all, the Jungfrau, kindling into glory at the sun’s departure, and burning in light long after the rest had vanished in darkness.

But it was the lessons of the school that engrossed him. His teacher was accomplished beyond the measure of his day. He had traveled over Italy and Greece, and had extended his tour as far as Syria and the Holy Sepulchre. He had not merely feasted his eyes upon their scenery, he had mastered the long-forgotten tongues of these celebrated countries. He had drunk in the spirit of the Roman and Greek orators and poets, and the fervor of ancient liberty