In Switzerland from 1516 to 1525 - James Aitken Wylie

saw that the ecclesiastical tribunals gave
themselves no care about the matter." A similar
complaint was lodged, in the year 1500, against the
monks of the Priory of Grandson, by the lords of
Bern and Friburg. But to what avail? Despite these
complaints and police regulations, the manners of
the clergy remained unreformed: the salt had lost
its savor, and wherewith could it be salted? The
law of corruption is to become yet more corrupt.
So would it assuredly have been in
Switzerland–from its corruption, corruption only
would have come in endless and ever grosser
developments–had not Protestantism come to sow
with beneficent hand, and quicken with heavenly
breath, in the bosom of society, the seeds from
which was to spring a new life. Men needed not
laws to amend the old, but a power to create the
new.
The examples we have given–and it is the
violence of the malady that illustrates the power of
the physician–are sufficiently deplorable; but sad
as they are, they fade from view and pass from
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