church of his day with the kingdom of God on earth, and furnished the program of mediaeval
Catholicism, though he has little to say about the papacy, and protested, in the Pelagian controversy,
against the position of one Pope, while he accepted the decision of another. All three were fighters,
but against different foes and with different weapons. Augustin contended for the catholic church
against heretical sects, and for authority against false freedom; Luther and Calvin fought for
evangelical dissent from the overwhelming power of Rome, and for rational freedom against
tyrannical authority. Luther was the fiercest and roughest fighter of the three; but he alone had the
Teutonic gift of humor which is always associated with a kindly nature, and extracts the sting out
of his irony and sarcasm. His bark was far worse than his bite. He advised to drown the Pope and
his cardinals in the Tiber; and yet he would have helped to save their lives after the destruction of
their office. He wrote a letter of comfort to Tetzel on his death-bed, and protested against the burning
of heretics.
Luther and Calvin learned much from Augustin, and esteemed him higher than any human
teacher since the Apostles; but they had a different mission, and assumed a polemic attitude towards
the traditional church. Augustin struggled from the Manichaean heresy into catholic orthodoxy,
from the freedom of error into the authority of truth; the Reformers came out of the corruptions
and tyranny of the papacy into the freedom of the gospel. Augustin put the church above the Word,
and established the principle of catholic tradition; the Reformers put the Word above the church,
and secured a progressive understanding of the Scriptures by the right of free investigation.
Luther and Calvin are confined in their influence to Protestantism, and can never be
appreciated by the Roman Church; yet, by the law of re-action, they forced the papacy into a moral
reform, which enabled it to recover its strength, and to enter upon a new career of conquest.
Romanism has far more vitality and strength in Protestant than in papal countries, and owes a great
debt of gratitude to the Reformation.
Of the two Reformers, Luther is the more original, forcible, genial, and popular; Calvin,
the more theological, logical, and systematic, besides being an organizer and disciplinarian. Luther
controls the Protestant churches of Germany and Scandinavia; Calvin’s genius shaped the confessions
and constitutions of the Reformed churches in Switzerland, France, Holland, and Great Britain; he
had a marked influence upon the development of civil liberty, and is still the chief molder of
theological opinion in the Presbyterian and Congregational churches of Scotland and North America.
Luther inspires by his genius, and attracts by his personality; Calvin commands admiration by his
intellect and the force of moral self-government, which is the secret of true freedom in church and
state.
Great and enduring are the merits of the three; but neither Augustin, nor Luther, nor Calvin
has spoken the last word in Christendom. The best is yet to come.
NOTES.
Remarkable Judgments on Luther.
Luther, like other great men, has been the subject of extravagant praise and equally
extravagant censure.
We select a few impartial and weighty testimonies from four distinguished writers of very
different character and position,—an Anglican divine, two secular poets, and a Catholic historian.
I. Archdeacon Charles Julius Hare (1795–1855) has written the best work in the English
language in vindication of Luther. It appeared first as a note of 222 pages in the second volume of
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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