The Age of the Reformation Part 43

[Sidenote: The proletariat]

In Germany the features of the modern struggle between owners and workers are plainest. In mining, especially, there developed a real proletariat, a cla.s.s of laborers seeking employment wherever it was best paid and combining and striking for higher wages. To combat them were formed pools of employers to keep down wages and to blacklist agitators. Typical of these was the agreement made by Duke George of {555} Saxony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, [Sidenote: 1520] not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking work, and not to hire any troublesome agitator once dismissed by any operator.

It is extraordinary how rapidly many features of the modern proletariat developed. Take, for example, the housing problem. As this became acute some employers built model tenements for their workers. Others started stores at which they could buy food and clothing, and even paid them in part in goods instead of in money. Labor tended to become fluid, moving from one town to another and from one industry to another according to demand. Such a thing had been not unknown in the previous centuries; it was strongly opposed by law in the sixteenth. The new risks run by workers were brought out when, for the first time in history, a great mining accident took place in 1515, a flood by which eighty-eight miners were drowned. Women began to be employed in factories and were cruelly exploited. Most sickening of all, children were forced, as they still are in some places, to wear out their little lives in grinding toil. The lace-making industry in Belgium, for example, fell entirely into the hands of children. Far from protesting against this outrage, the law actually sanctioned it by the provision that no girl over twelve be allowed to make lace, lest the supply of maidservants be diminished.

[Sidenote: Strikes]

Strikes there were and rebellions of all sorts, every one of them beaten back by the forces of the government and of the capitalists combined. The kings of commerce were then, more than now, a timorous and violent race, for then they were conscious of being usurpers. When they saw a Munzer or a Kett--the mad Hamlets of the people--mop and mow and stage their deeds before the world, they became frantic with terror and could do nought but take subtle counsel to {556} kill these heirs, or pretenders, to their realms. The great rebellions are all that history now pays much attention to, but in reality the warfare on the poor was ceaseless, a chronic disease of the body politic. Louis XI spared nothing, disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, expulsion, wholesale execution, to beat down the lean and hungry conspirators against the public order, whose raucous cries of misery he detested. With somewhat gentler, because stronger, hand, his successors followed in his footsteps. But when needed the troops were there to support the rich. The great strike of printers at Lyons is one example of several in France. In the German mines there were occasional strikes, sternly suppressed by the princes acting in agreement.

[Sidenote: Degradation of the poor]

There can be no doubt that the economic developments of the sixteenth century worked tremendous hards.h.i.+p to the poor. It was noted everywhere that whereas wine and meat were common articles in 1500, they had become luxuries by 1600. Some scholars have even argued from this a diminution of the wealth of Europe during the century. This, however, was not the case. The aggregate of capital, if we may judge from many other indications, notably increased throughout the century.

But it became more and more concentrated in a few hands.

The chief natural cause of the depression of the working cla.s.s was the rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by subst.i.tuting foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products.

The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hards.h.i.+p to the peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive terms of service and dues.

Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched, destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there then much pity for the poor. The charity and wors.h.i.+p for "apostolic poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness, so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who do not feel it, arisen. The rich and n.o.ble, absorbed in debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race--"the ox without horns"

they called him--to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved.

"Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and "the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the a.s.s will have blows and the people _will_ be ruled by force."

There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent callousness. "I praise thee, thou n.o.ble peasant," wrote an obscure German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt, not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their wrongs. _The Utopia_ will always remain one of the world's n.o.blest books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social problem.

[Sidenote: Pauperism]

This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the decla.s.se journeyman of the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of st.u.r.dy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was coined in England about 1550 to name the new cla.s.s. _The Book of Vagabonds_, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Hutlin of Pfortzheim, describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of their population in vagabondage.

In the face of this appalling situation the medieval method of charity completely broke down. In fact, with its many begging friars, with its injunction of alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to G.o.d, and with its respect for voluntary poverty, the church rather aggravated than palliated the evil of mendicancy. The state had to step in to relieve the church.

[Sidenote: State poor-relief, 1506]

This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe edict was issued and repeatedly re-enacted against tramps ordering them to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and to be further punished with stocks. An enterprising group of humanists and lawyers demanded that the government should take over the duty of poor-relief from the church.

Accordingly at Lille a "common chest" was started, the first civil charitable bureau in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1512] At Bruges a cloister was secularized and turned into a school for eight hundred poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of charity was started at Antwerp. [Sidenote: 1521]

Under these circ.u.mstances the humanist Lewis Vives wrote his famous tract on the relief of the poor, [Sidenote: January, 1526] in the form of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In this well thought out treatise he advocated the law that no one should eat who did not work, and urged that all able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to artisans--a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to {560} draft men into their workshops! Cases of people unable to work should also be taken up, and they should be cared for by application of religious endowments by the government. Vives' claim to recognition lies even more in his spirit than in his definite program. For almost the first time in history he plainly said that poverty was a disgrace as well as a danger to the state and should be, not palliated, but extirpated.

While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city of Ypres [Sidenote: 1525] (tragic name!) had already sought his advice and acted upon it, as well as upon the example of earlier reforms in German cities, in promulgating an ordinance. The city government combined all religious and philanthropic endowments into one fund and appointed a committee to administer it, and to collect further gifts. These citizens were to visit the poor in their dwellings, to apply what relief was necessary, to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures and to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging and idleness.

All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.

Though there were sporadic examples of munic.i.p.al poor-relief in Germany prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his _Address to the German n.o.bility_ Luther had recommended that each city should take care of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per cent. A severe law against begging was pa.s.sed. Augsburg and Nuremberg followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote: 1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one joined the procession.

For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development, whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract.

Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published _A Plea for the Right of the Poor to Beg_. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk, Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his _Sacred Economy of caring for the Poor_, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the direction of charity.

[Sidenote: 1531]

But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but informed by the modern spirit, grew up.

In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere.

The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all needs. After munic.i.p.al relief of various sorts had been tried, and after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing need, the first compulsory Poor Rates were laid. Three or four years later came an act for setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These measures failed of the success that met the continental method. Even compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some {562} authorities have a.s.serted that by giving the poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote: 1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of the commercialism that made money but did not make men.

{563}

CHAPTER XII

MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT

Were we reading the biography of a wayward genius, we should find the significance of the book neither in the account of his quarrels and of his sins nor in the calculation of his financial difficulties and successes, but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty and wisdom of the world. Something the same is true about the history of a race or of a period; the political and economic events are but the outward framework; the intellectual achievement is both the most attractive and the most repaying object of our study. In this respect the sixteenth century was one of the most brilliant; it produced works of science that outstripped all its predecessors; it poured forth masterpieces of art and literature that are all but matchless.

SECTION 1. BIBLICAL AND CLa.s.sICAL SCHOLARs.h.i.+P

[Sidenote: Position of Bible in 16th century]

It is naturally impossible to give a full account of all the products of sixteenth century genius. In so vast a panorama only the mountain peaks can be pointed out. One of these peaks is a.s.suredly the Bible.

Never before nor since has that book been so popular; never has its study absorbed so large a part of the energies of men. It is true that the elucidation of the text was not proportional to the amount of labor spent on it. For the most part it was approached not in a scientific but in a dogmatic spirit. Men did not read it historically and critically but to find their own dogmas in it. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for both the textual and the higher criticism.

{564} [Sidenote: The Greek Text]

The Greek text of the New Testament was first published by Erasmus in March, 1516. Revised, but not always improved, editions were brought out by him in 1519, 1522 and 1527. For the first edition he had before him ten ma.n.u.scripts, all of them minuscules, the oldest of which, though he believed it might have come from the apostolic age, is a.s.signed by modern criticism to the twelfth century. In the course of printing, some bad errors were introduced, and the last six verses of the Apocalypse, wanting in all the ma.n.u.scripts, were supplied by an extremely faulty translation from the Latin. The results were such as might have been antic.i.p.ated. Though the text has been vastly purified by modern critics, the edition of Erasmus was of great service and was thoroughly honest. He noted that the last verses of Mark were doubtful and that the pa.s.sage on the adulteress (John vii, 53 to viii, 11) was lacking in the best authorities, and he omitted the text on the three heavenly witnesses (I John v, 7) as wanting in all his ma.n.u.scripts.

For this omission he was violently attacked. To support his position he asked his friend Bombasius to consult the Codex Vatica.n.u.s, and dared to a.s.sert that were a single ma.n.u.script found with the verse in Greek, he would include it in subsequent editions. Though there were at the time no codices with the verse in question--which was a Latin forgery of the fourth century, possibly due to Priscillian--one was promptly manufactured. Though Erasmus suspected the truth, that the verse had been interpolated from the Latin text, he added it in his third edition "that no occasion for calumny be given." This one sample must serve to show how Erasmus's work was received. For every deviation from the Vulgate, whether in the Greek text or in the new Latin translation with which he accompanied it, he was ferociously a.s.sailed. His {565} own anecdote of the old priest who, having the misprint "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in his missal, refused to correct the error when it was pointed out, is perfectly typical of the position of his critics. New truth must ever struggle hard against old prejudice.

While Erasmus was working, a much more ambitious scheme for publis.h.i.+ng the Scriptures was maturing under the direction of Cardinal Ximenez at Alcala or, as the town was called in Latin, Complutum. The Complutensian Polyglot, as it was thence named, was published in six volumes, four devoted to the Old Testament, one to the New Testament, and one to a Hebrew lexicon and grammar. The New Testament volume has the earliest date, 1514, but was withheld from the public for several years after this. The ma.n.u.scripts from which the Greek texts were taken are unknown, but they were better than those used by Erasmus.

The later editors of the Greek text in the sixteenth century, Robert Estienne (Stepha.n.u.s) and Theodore Beza, did little to castigate it, although one of the codices used by Beza, and now known by his name, is of great value.

[Sidenote: Hebrew text]

The Hebrew Ma.s.soretic text of the Old Testament was printed by Gerson Ben Mosheh at Brescia in 1494, and far more elaborately in the first four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglot. With the Hebrew text the Spanish editors offered the Septuagint Greek, the Syriac, and the Vulgate, the Hebrew, Syriac and Greek having Latin translations. The ma.n.u.scripts for the Hebrew were procured from Rome. A critical revision was undertaken by Sebastian Munster and published with a new Latin version at Basle 1534-5. Later recensions do not call for special notice here. An incomplete text of the Syriac New Testament was published at Antwerp in 1569.

[Sidenote: Latin versions]

The numerous new Latin translations made during {566} this period testify to the general discontent with the Vulgate. Not only humanists like Valla, Lefevre and Erasmus, but perfectly orthodox theologians like Pope Nicholas V, Cajetan and Sadoletus, saw that the common version could be much improved. In the new Latin translation by Erasmus many of the errors of the Vulgate were corrected. Thus, in Matthew iii, 2, he offers "resipiscite" or "ad mentem redite" instead of "poenitentiam agite." This, as well as his subst.i.tution of "sermo"

for "verb.u.m" in John i, 1, was fiercely a.s.sailed. Indeed, when it was seen what use was made by the Protestants of the new Greek texts and of the new Latin versions, of which there were many, a strong reaction followed in favor of the traditional text. Even by the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot the Vulgate was regarded with such favor that, being printed between the Hebrew and Greek, it was compared by them to Christ crucified between the two thieves. [Sidenote: 1530] The Sorbonne condemned as "Lutheran" the a.s.sertion that the Bible could not be properly understood or expounded without knowledge of the original languages. [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] In the decree of Trent the Vulgate was declared to be the authentic form of the Scriptures. The preface to the English Catholic version printed at Rheims [Sidenote: 1582] defends the thesis, now generally held by Catholics, that the Latin text is superior in accuracy to the Greek, having been corrected by Jerome, preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1592] In order to have this text in its utmost purity an official edition was issued.

[Sidenote: Biblical scholars.h.i.+p]

Modern critics, having far surpa.s.sed the results achieved by their predecessors, are inclined to underestimate their debts to these pioneers in the field. The manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries, concordances, special lexicons, all that make an introduction to biblical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or {567} were supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The professors at Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, were unable to find a map of Palestine. The first Hebrew concordance was printed, with many errors, at Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 1546, at Basle. To find a parallel pa.s.sage or ill.u.s.trative material or ancient comment on a given text, the critic then had to search through dusty tomes and ma.n.u.scripts, instead of finding them acc.u.mulated for him in ready reference books. That all this has been done is the work of ten generations of scholars, among whom the pioneers of the Renaissance should not lack their due meed of honor. The early critics were hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical (or didactic).

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to a more fruitful method. It is true that his main object was a moral one, the overthrow of superst.i.tion and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or chiefly, to explain away as fables stories that would seem silly or obscene as history. In the New Testament he sought the man Jesus and not the deified Christ.

He preferred the New Testament, with its "simple, plain and gentle truth, without savor of superst.i.tion or cruelty" to the Old Testament.

He discriminated nicely even among the books of the New Testament, considering the chief ones the gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles (except Hebrews), I Peter and I John. He hinted that many did not consider the Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in thought but not in style; he believed Hebrews to have {568} been written by Clement of Rome; and he called James lacking in apostolic dignity.