; but he was
deficient in constructive capacity. The local governments, which were
effective, had defended the Reformation and assured its success
against the hostility of the central government, which was
intermittent and inoperative, and as they afforded the necessary
protection, they assumed the uncontested control. Lutheranism is
governed not by the spiritual, but by the temporal power, in agreement
with the high conception of the State which Luther derived from the
long conflict of the Middle Ages. It is the most conservative form of
religion, and less liable than any other to collision with the civil
authority on which it rests. By its lack of independence and
flexibility it was unfitted to succeed where governments were hostile,
or to make its way by voluntary effort through the world. Moreover,
Luther's vigorous personality has so much in it of the character of
his nation, that they are attracted even by his defects--a thing which
you can hardly expect to occur elsewhere. Therefore it was in other
forms, and under other names, that the Protestant religion spread over
Europe. They differed from the original less in their theology, which
Luther had completed, than in questions of Church government, which he
abandoned to others.

Apart from the sects, which are of the first importance, but whose
story belongs to the Puritan Revolution and to the following century,
two other systems arose at the time, one in Switzerland, the other in
England. The general result of what happened when the Reformation,
ceasing to be national, became European, was that it prevailed in the
north, that it miscarried in the south, that it divided and agitated
the centre. Switzerland was divided, the towns becoming Protestant on
the Zwinglian type, the country people remaining Catholic, especially
in the central cantons. The chief towns, Berne and Bale, imitated the
example of Zurich, where Zwingli committed the government of the
Church to the authorities that governed the State, differing from the
Lutherans in this, that Zwinglianism was republican and revolutionary.
In Germany, where the organisation was defective, there was little
discipline or control. In Switzerland there was a more perfect order,
at the price of subjection to the secular authority. Those were the
rocks ahead; that was the condition of the Protestant churches, when a
man arose amongst them with a genius for organisation, a strong sense
of social discipline