rather than historical. It converted Gibbon to Romanism, but left him at last a skeptic, like
Bayle, who was, also, first a Protestant, then a Romanist for a short season.
Kaspar Riffel: Kirchengesch. Der Neusten Zeit. Mainz, 1844–47, 3 vols.
Martin John Spalding (since 1864 Archbishop of Baltimore, d. 1872): History of the Protest.
Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and in England, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands,
France., and Northern Europe. Louisville, 1860; 8th ed., revised and enlarged. Baltimore, 1875,
2 vols. No Index. Against Merle D’Aubigné. The Archbishop charges D’Aubigné (as he calls
him) with being a "bitter partisan, wholly unreliable as an historian," and says of his work that
it is "little better than a romance," as he "omits more than half the facts, and either perverts or
draws on his imagination for the remainder." His own impartiality and reliableness as an historian
may be estimated from the following judgments of the Reformers: "Luther, while under the
influence of the Catholic Church, was probably a moderately good man; he was certainly a very
bad one after he left its communion "(I. 72)."Heu! quantum mutatus ab illo!" (77). "His violence
often drove him to the very verge of insanity .... He occasionally inflicted on Melanchthon
personal chastisement" (87). Spalding quotes from Audin, his chief authority (being apparently
quite ignorant of German): "Luther was possessed not by one, but by a whole troop of devils"
(89). Zwingli (or Zuingle, as he calls him) he charges with "downright paganism" (I. 175), and
makes fun of his marriage and the marriages of the other Reformers, especially Bucer, who
"became the husband of no less than three ladies in succession: and one of them had been
already married three times—all too, by a singular run of good luck, in the reformation line"
(176). And this is all that we learn of the Reformer of Strassburg. For Calvin the author seems
to draw chiefly on the calumnies of Audin, as Audin drew on those of Bolsec. He describes
him as "all head and no heart;" "he crushed the liberties of the people in the name of liberty;"
"he combined the cruelty of Danton and Robespierre with the eloquence of Murat and Mirabeau,
though he was much cooler, and therefore more successful than any one of them all; he was a
very Nero." Spalding gives credit to Bolsec’s absurd stories of the monstrous crimes and horrible
death of Calvin, so fully contradicted by his whole life and writings and the testimonies of his
nearest friends, as Beza, Knox, etc. (I. 375, 384, 386, 388, 391). And such a work by a prelate
of high character and position seems to be the principal source from which American Roman
Catholics draw their information of the Reformation and of Protestantism!
The historico-polemical works of Döllinger and Janssen belong to the history of
the German Reformation and will be noticed in the next section.
BOOK 1.
THE GERMAN REFORMATION TILL THE DIET OF
AUGSBURG, a.d. 1530.
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CHAPTER II.
LUTHER’S TRAINING FOR THE REFORMATION, A.D. L483–1517.
§ 15. Literature of the German Reformation.
Sources.
I. Protestant Sources:
(1) The Works of the Reformers, especially Luther and Melanchthon. See § § 17, 32. The reformatory
writings of Luther, from 1517–1524, are in vol. XV. of Walch’s ed., those from 1525–1537 in