The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief support in Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity, the Church.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.
It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means of the Papacy, and its instruments.105 Nevertheless, in the earlier religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the Huguenots, failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against it.Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their details, their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be demonstrated.The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our eyes, since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it, never all of them together.