But the struggle of the German rulers with popedom was not ended at Canossa. Henry himself renewed it a few years later with far better results to his side. The spirit of protestantism was ever alive in some form in Germany, and, as we have said, was prophetic of him who should rise in the fifteenth century and dare to protest against the claim of spiritual supremacy by the autocrat of Rome. From that time till now it has been a by-phrase with German princes in their conflicts with the church that they “will not go to Canossa.”
At this time superstition and dense ignorance were widespread. Stories of magic were constantly told and believed, and the miracles with which the church offset them were hardly less absurd. Other terrors were added. Public justice was administered so imperfectly that private and arbitrary violence took its place; while the tribunals which formerly sat in the open sunlight before the people now covered themselves with night and secrecy. “The Holy Feme” sprang up in Westphalia. Originally a public tribunal of the city, such as is found in Brunswick, and in other places, it afterward spread far and wide, but in a changed form. Its members held their sessions in secret and by night. Unknown messengers of the tribunal summoned the accused. Disguised judges, volunteer officers, from among “the knowing ones,” gave judgment, often in wild, desolate places, and often in some ancient seat of justice, as at the Linden-tree at Dortmund. The sentence was executed, even if the criminal had not appeared or had made his escape. The dagger, with the mark of the Feme, found in the dead body, told how surely the avenging arm had struck in the darkness. It was a fearful time, when justice, like crime, must walk in disguise.
The habits of thought which made possible such beliefs and actions as these were part of the same movement to which the corruption of church doctrine and government must also be referred. The perverted Roman Christianity from which the Reformation was a revolt was not the Christianity of Charlemagne, nor even that of Hildebrand. Hasty readers sometimes imagine that the church, for many centuries before the Reformation, had firmly held the doctrines which Luther rejected. But, in fact, most of them were recent innovations. Peter the Lombard, Bishop of Paris in the twelfth century, was the first theologian to enumerate “the Seven Sacraments,” and Eugene IV., in 1431, was the first of the popes to proclaim them. The doctrine of transubstantiation was first embodied in the church confession by the Lateran Council of November, 1215, the same which first required auricular confession of all the laity. It was more than a century later before the celibacy of the clergy and the denial of the sacramental cup to all but priests became established law, and the idea that the pope is the vicar of Christ upon earth, and the bearer of divine honors, was accepted. All these corruptions of the earlier faith were the results of ambition in the hierarchy, and of gross and sensual modes of thought in the people; and the same causes led to the rapid development, in the fifteenth century especially, of the worship of the Virgin Mary, who was honored with ceremonies and prayers from which Christians of earlier ages would have shrunk as blasphemous. Nor can the church of the beginning of the sixteenth century be understood by studying the confession adopted by the Council of Trent a generation or more afterward. The teachings and practices which called forth Luther’s protest were far too gross, when once explained, to bear the examination of sincere friends of Romanism; who, without knowing it themselves, were greatly influenced, even in their formal statements of belief, by the controversies of the Reformation. The value of that great event to the world can not be comprehended without a knowledge of what it has done for the Catholic church within its own boundaries.[A]