When
the Church became corrupt, men ought to have drawn a distinction, and
kept their religion in spite of all. But this is more easily said than
done. It is not every people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to
tolerate a lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward
expression. But history does not record a heavier responsibility than
that which rests upon the decaying Church. She set up as absolute
truth, and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had
distorted to serve her own aggrandizement. Safe in the sense of her
inviolability, she abandoned herself to the most scandalous profligacy,
and, in order to maintain herself in this state, she levelled mortal
blows against the conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove
multitudes of the noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged,
into the arms of unbelief and despair.
Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually so
great, react more energetically against the hierarchy; why did she not
accomplish a reformation like that which occurred in Germany, and
accomplish it at an earlier date?
A plausible answer has been Italian mind, we are told, never of the
hierarchy, while the origin given to this question. The went further
than the denial and the vigor of the German Reformation was due to its
positive religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of
justification by faith and of the inefficacy of good works.
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