for the first time appeared as the vehicle for
popular literature; the art of the bard gave place to the art of the
typographer, and the art of the preacher saw confronting it a
formidable rival in that of the pamphleteer. Similarly in the French
Revolution, modern journalism, till then unimportant and sporadic,
received its first great development, and began seriously to displace
alike the preacher, the pamphlet, and the broadside. The flood of
theological disquisitions, satires, dialogues, sermons, which now
poured from every press in Germany, overflowed into all classes of
society. These writings are so characteristic of the time that it is
worth while devoting a few pages to their consideration, the more
especially because it will afford us the opportunity for considering
other changes in that spirit of the age, partly diseased growths of
decaying mediaevalism and partly the beginnings of the modern critical
spirit, which also find expression in the literature of the
Reformation period.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] _Saemmtliche Werke_, vol. xxxiii. pp. 322-4.

[6] Quoted in Janssen, _Ein Zweites Wort an meine Kritiker_ 1883, p. 94.

[7] _Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes_, vol. ii. p. 115.

[8] Quoted in Janssen, bk. ii. 162.

CHAPTER II

POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME

In accordance with the conventional view the Reichstag at Worms was a
landmark in the history of the Reformation. This is, however, only
true as regards the political side of the movement. The popular
feeling was really quite continuous, at least from 1517 to 1525. With
the latter year and the collapse of the peasant revolt a change is
noticeable. In 1525 the Reformation, as a great upstirring of the
popular mind of Central Europe, in contradistinction to its character
as an academic and purely political movement, reached high-water mark,
and may almost be said to have exhausted itself. Until the latter year
it was purely a revolutionary movement, attracting to itself all the
disruptive elements of its time. Later, the reactionary possibilities
within it declared themselves. The emancipation from the thraldom of
the Catholic hierarchy and its Papal head, it was soon found, meant
not emancipation from the arbitrary tyranny of the new political and
centralizing authorities then springing up, but, on the contrary,
rather their consecration. The ultimate outcome, in fact, of the whole
business was, as we shall see later on, the inculcation of the
no