te: Nationalism and Teutonism] The
revolt from Rome was in the interests of the state church, and also of
Germanic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at the hands of the
Northern peoples is strikingly like the break-up of the Roman Empire
under pressure from their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman
church practically coincided with the boundaries of the Empire. The
apparent exception of England proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman
civilization was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth and
following centuries.

That the Reformation strengthened the state was inevitable, for there
was no practical alternative to putting the final authority in
spiritual matters, after the pope had been ejected, into the hands of
the civil government. Congregationalism was tried and failed as
tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation was really
responsible for the new despotism and the divine right of kings, is
clear from a comparison with {748} the Greek church and the Turkish
Empire. In both, the same forces which produced the state churches of
Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, a bigoted Sunnite,
after putting down the Shi'ite heresy, induced the last caliph of the
Abbasid dynasty to surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet;
thereafter he and his successors were caliphs as well as sultans. In
Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, in 1547, head of the national
church.

[Sidenote: Capitalism]

Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic revolution in that
its ethics are, far more than those of Catholicism, oriented by a
reference to this world. The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude,
mortification of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under the sun
of a new prosperity. In its light men began to realize the ethical
value of this life, of marriage, of children, of daily labor and of
success and prosperity. It was just in this work that Protestantism
came to see its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. The man
at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God
better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.

Moreover, the accentuation of the virtues of thrift and industry, which
made capitalism and Calvinism allies, but reflected the standards
natural to the bourgeois class. It was by the might of the merchants
and their money that the Reformation triumphed; conversely they
benefited both by the spoils of th