a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar
with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly
compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were
found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he
failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his
protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the
Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their
sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter
Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and
secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole
cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced,
prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of
Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His _History of the
Variations of the Protestant Churches_, written without that odious
defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of
confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn
the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions.
Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth,
but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors.
Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on
Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration
the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion
without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and
atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in
civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the
admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of
the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged,
as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original
sin and his latitudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed was written on the
Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men
of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their
environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the
most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians
neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward