writers have pointed out the relation between commerce and scepticism in the Middle Ages, and, among others, Thorold Rogers has a passage in his History of Agriculture and Prices so interesting that it should be read entire:—
"The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the theologians of the age complain, was at once the cause and the effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident that all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only excepted, and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected during the Middle Ages of theological nonconformity. Before the campaigns of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the thirteenth century, Provence was the garden and workshop of Europe. The sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were the burghers of the Low Countries. . . . In England the strength of the Lollard party was, from the days of Wiklif to the days of Cranmer, in Norfolk [the principal manufacturing county]; and I have no doubt that . . . the presence of students from this district must have told on the theological bias of Cambridge University, which came out markedly at the epoch of the Reformation. . . .
"English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism, sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty. They who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks, the worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and shallow artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure to inculcate parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily cutting themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith, they were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to spare for monk or priest. . . ." (1)
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain return. Yet the mediæval cult was based upon the miracle, and many of the payments due for the supernatural services of the ecclesiastics were obligatory; beside, gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain on savings, and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of propitiation.
In an age as unscientific as the sixteenth century, the conviction of the immutability of natural laws was not strong enough to admit of the abrogation of religious formulas. The monied class, therefore, proceeded step by step, and its first experiment was to suppress all fees to middle-men, whether priests or saints, by becoming their own intercessors with the Deity.
As Dr. Witherspoon has observed, "fear of wrath
from the avenger of blood" made men "fly to the
city of refuge";(2) but, as the tradesman replaced the
enthusiast, a dogma was evolved by which mental
anguish, which cost nothing, was substituted for the
offering which was effective in proportion to its money
value. This dogma was "Justification by Faith," the
corner-stone of Protestantism.
Far from requiring an outlay from the elect, "Justification by Faith" discouraged it. The act consisted in "a deep humiliation of mind, confession of guilt and wretchedness . . . and acceptance of pardon and peace through Christ Jesus, which they have neither contributed to the procuring, nor can contribute to the continuance of, by their own merit." (3)
Yet the substitution of a mental condition for a
money payment, led to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of certain clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the sacred tradition which had not only sustained relic worship, but which had made the Church the channel of communication between Christians and the invisible world.
That ancient channel once closed, Protestants had
to open another, and this led to the deification of the
Bible, which, before the Reformation, had been supposed to derive its authority from that divine illumination which had enabled the priesthood to infallibly declare the canon of the sacred books. Calvin saw the weak spot in the position of the reformers, and faced it boldly. He maintained the Scripture to be "self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason," and that it should obtain "the same complete credit and authority with believers . . . as if they heard the very words pronounced by God himself." (4)
