e but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without
regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the
most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own
opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an
historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little
biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no
polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the
times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the
Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to
generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"--coined in 1770
and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution."
The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and
moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and
service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722}
rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized
the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the
ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely
autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and
existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the
development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective.
Would he have thought so after 1919?

[Sidenote: Buckle]

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry
Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the
universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as
interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of
unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a
constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and
of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle
argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable,
and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with
his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any
period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that
age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate
enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the
earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though
diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the
cause of the religious change. Buckle ma