e thinks,
was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly
the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned classes
and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat.
From the learned uproar of Denifle's school emerges the explanation
of the revolt as the "great sewer" which carried off from the
church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's far finer
psychology--characteristically Jesuit--tries to cast on Luther the origin
of the present destructive subjectivism. Grisar's proof that "the modern
infidel theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated way on the
Luther of the first period, is suggestive.

[Sidenote: Acton]

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's favorite topics, I cannot
find on that subject any new or fruitful thought at all in proportion to
his vast learning. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the old
Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it was merely the product
of the wickedness and vagaries of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost
equally blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the English Bishop
Creighton too easy in his judgment of the popes, adding, "My dogma is not
the special wickedness of my own spiritual superiors, but the general
wickedness of men in authority--of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and
Cranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart and Henry VIII, of Philip II and
Elizabeth, of Cromwell and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bossuet
and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the turn of the 15th and 16th
centuries, believing that the fundamental characteristic of the period is
the belief in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that "Luther at
Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," but he
confesses himself baffled by the problem, which is, to his mind, why
Luther did not return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up
{742} all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, then or
later, dropped predestination, and admitted the necessity of good works,
the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of
tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Acton,
the one bar to his return to the church was his belief that the pope was
Antichrist.

It is notable that none of the free minds starting from Catholicism have
been attracted to the Protestant camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul
and Protestantism were coming