of clerical marriage. He lent a willing hand to the divorces and re-marriages of his royal master.
And yet with all his weakness of character, and time-serving policy, Cranmer must have been an
eminently devout man if he translated and reproduced (as he certainly edited) the Anglican liturgy,
which has stood the test of many generations to this day.^613
John Knox, the Luther of Scotland, had the courage, as a widower of fifty-eight (March,
1563–64), to marry a Scotch lass of sixteen, Margaret Stuart, of royal name and blood, to the great
indignation of Queen Mary, who "stormed wonderfully" at his audacity. The papists got up the
story that he gained her affection by sorcery, and aimed to secure for his heirs, with the aid of the
Devil, the throne of Scotland. His wife bore him three daughters, and two years after his death
(1572) contracted a second marriage with Andrew Ker, a widower.^614
The most unfortunate matrimonial incident in the Reformation is the consent of Luther,
Melanchthon, and Bucer to the disgraceful bigamy of Landgrave Philip of Hesse. It is a blot on
their character, and admits of no justification. When the secret came out (1540), Melanchthon was
so over-whelmed with the reproaches of conscience and a sense of shame that he fell dangerously
ill at Weimar, till Luther, who was made of sterner stuff, and found comfort in his doctrine of
justification by faith alone, prayed him out of the jaws of death.
In forming a just estimate of this subject, we must not only look backward to the long ages
of clerical celibacy with all its dangers and evils, but also forward to the innumerable clerical homes
which were made possible by the Reformation. They can bear the test of the closest examination.
Clerical celibacy and monastic vows deprived the church of the services of many men who
might have become shining stars. On the other hand, it has been calculated by Justus Möser in
1750, that within two centuries after the Reformation from ten to fifteen millions of human beings
in all lands owe their existence to the abolition of clerical celibacy.^615 More important than this
numerical increase is the fact that an unusual proportion of eminent scholars and useful men in
church and state were descended from clerical families.^616
There is a poetic as well as religious charm in the home of a Protestant country pastor who
moves among his flock as a father, friend, and comforter, and enforces his teaching of domestic
virtues and affections by his example, speaking louder than words. The beauty of this relation has
often been the theme of secular poets. Everybody knows Oliver Goldsmith’s "Vicar of Wakefield,"
which describes with charming simplicity and harmless humor the trials and patience, the domestic,
social, and professional virtues of a country pastor, and begins with the characteristic sentence: "I
was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married, and brought up a large family, did more
(^613) Strype’s Memorials of Cranmer (Bk. I., chs. 1, 4, 19; Bk. III., chs. 8 and 38); Hook’s Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (vols.
VI. and VII.); Hardwick’s History of the Reformation, ed. W. Stubbs (1873), p. 179; and art. Cranmer in Leslie Stephen’s "Dictionary of
National Biogr.," vol. XIII.
(^614) Dr. M’Crie’s Life of John Knox, Philad. ed., pp. 269 and 477 (Append. Note HHH); and Dav. Laing’s Preface to the 6th vol. of his
ed. of Works of John Knox, pp. LXV. sqq.
(^615) Ranke states this fact.
(^616) Among distinguished sons of clergymen may be named Linné, the botanist; Berzelius, the chemist; Pufendorf, the lawyer; Schelling,
the philosopher; Buxtorff, the Orientalist; Euler, the mathematician; Agassiz, the scientist; Edward and Ottfried Müller, the classical
philologists; John von Müller, Spittler, Heeren, Mommsen, Bancroft, among historians; Henry Clay, Senator Evarts, and two Presidents
of the United States, Arthur and Cleveland, among statesmen; Charles Wesley, Gellert, Wieland, Lessing, the brothers Schlegel, Jean
Paul, Emanuel Geibel, Emerson (also the female writers Meta Heusser, Elizabeth Prentiss, Mrs. Stowe), among poets; John Wesley,
Monod, Krummacher, Spurgeon, H. W. Beecher, R. S. Storrs, among preachers; Jonathan Edwards, Schleiermacher, Hengstenberg,
Nitzsch, Julius Müller, Dorner, Dean Stanley, among divines; Swedenborg, the seer; with a large number of prominent and useful
clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, in all Protestant countries.