is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently
desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political
entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and
Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of
their own church; one may also find in Doellinger a parallel to him.
Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his
explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history
as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been
advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was
caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian
and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant anticipation of the modern economic school of historical
thought is found in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, who suggested that the
causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social.
When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and noble into the
hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed
the ancient balance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling
feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more
dangerous enemy.

SECTION 2. THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE. (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge
the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in
historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had
been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or
a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw
deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was
false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met
the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and
to point out instructive analogies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and
were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After
comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe
adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas
the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed.
The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their
secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican
because o