grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian
would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and
capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther
and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his
obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty
fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession
of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes
of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors
of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of
images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least
unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism."
Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to
acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This
led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to
indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating
Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress
of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected
a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the
people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back,
and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of
boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with
selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he
wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing
in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression
on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet,
to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he
changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his
conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people
hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the
courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked
change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the
earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had
been concerned chiefly to