Untitled - 24grammata.com

OF THE REFORMATION. 249our inquiriesshould spread.It could not escape the proposers of the question that its chief interest lay in this verypointthat on this very account it must needs be a proposition, the answer to which would bring a special ray ofhope to the age in which we live. The distant results ofevery great revolution have deceived the expectations of theactors ;and there is perhaps no higher gratification to thehistorian than to follow out the wonderful perplexities of thethread of events on which the fortunes of our kind depend.Submitting to itsguidance he wanders on as in a labyrinth,which, amidst rocks and precipices, often opens to his view alandscape of surpassing beauty and; wrappedin wonder hecatches amid the storm of ages the voice of Him who tellsu us, that His ways are not our ways !"Liftup your eyes then, ye whom in your turn Fate has appointed to be the witnesses, the actors, the victims, of a Revolution ! Ye who have lost a father, a brother, a friend, alas !perhaps your all On the funeral !pilesof the Inquisition, onthe battle-fields of Miihlberg, of Nordlingen and Liitzen,innocent blood flowed as freelyas our own age has seen itflow ! and yet the clouds at length dispersed, and the day-starshone down upon a peaceful and a better world. The horizon clears up now faster than then, and perhaps we ourselvesmay yet witness those better times which it was in that casethe lot only of later generations to enjoy.Although the original tendency of the Reformation wasvery far from political,the intimate connexion which inthose days subsisted between Church and State rendered itunavoidable, that, as its influence widened, such a tendencyshould rapidly be acquired.It is true that at the commencement of the sixteenth century those relations were no longerin their fiill force, which during the preceding period had knitthe whole of Western Europe as it were into one empire,composed of a number of princes whom the pope eitherheld or claimed to hold, as vassals to the spiritual supremacyof his office. The temporal authority which had been established by Gregory the Seventh was already broken down ?not only by the disobedience and boldness of many of thesespiritual sons of the Church, but, and that perhapsin a stillgreater degree,, by the errors of the Romaii see Itself; A.