The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth | Page 3

gloom and hidden darkness of faith; they strangle reason ... and thereby
offer to God the all-acceptablest sacrifice and service that can ever be
brought to Him."

However, whatever may have been the personal desires and tendencies
of those associated with its earlier manifestations, the forces of which
the Reformation was the outcome were not to be controlled by them.
The spirit of which they were the product was not to be controlled by
any fetters they could forge. The Reformation emancipated the intellect
of Europe from the yoke of tradition and blind obedience to authority;
it let loose the illuming flood of thought which had been accumulating
behind the more rigid barriers of the Church, and swept away as things
of straw the feebler barriers the early Reformers would have erected to
confine the thoughts of future generations. The futility of all such
efforts we can gauge, they could not. Blind obedience to authority, in
matters spiritual and temporal, had been the watchword and animating
principle of the power against which they had rebelled; liberty and
reason were the watchwords and animating principles of the movement
of which they, owing to their rebellion, had temporarily become the
recognised leaders. The right of private judgement, in other words, the
supremacy of reason as sole judge and arbiter of all matters, spiritual as
well as secular, was the essential element of the movement of which the
Reformation was the outcome; how, then, could they, the children of
this movement, hope to change its course?
When considering the forces and circumstances that made the
Reformation possible, when so many equally earnest previous attempts
in the same direction had failed, we should not lose sight of the
favourable political situation. Under cover of its religious authority, by
means of its unrivalled organisation, as well as by its temporal control
of large areas of the richest and most fertile land in Europe, the Church
of Rome annually drained into Italy a large part of the surplus wealth of
every country that recognised its spiritual authority. Such countries
were impoverished to support not only the resident but an absentee
priesthood, and to enable the Princes of the Church to maintain a more
than princely state at Rome. This was a standing grievance even in the
eyes of many sincerely devout Churchmen, and one which was prone to
make statesmen and politicians look with a favourable eye on any
movement which promised to lessen or to abolish it. Germany in this
respect had special reasons for discontent; as has been well said, "It
was the milch cow of the Papacy, which at once despised and drained it

dry." And, as everybody knows, it was in Germany that the standard of
revolt against the authority of Rome was first successfully raised. The
political constitution of that country was also peculiarly favourable to
the protection of the Reformation and of the persons of the early
Reformers. Although owing a nominal allegiance to the Emperor, or
rather to the will of the Diet which met annually under the presidency
of the Emperor, the head of each of the little States into which
Germany was divided claimed to be independent lord of the territory
over which he ruled. Hence, when the Ernestine line of Saxon princes
took the Reformation and the early Reformers under their protection,
there was no power ready and willing to compel them to relinquish
their design. The democratic independence of the Free Cities also made
them fitting strongholds of the new teachings.
Students of history would do well never to lose sight of the fact that
every religion which attempts to bind or to guide the reason, to direct
the lives and to determine the conscience of mankind, necessarily has
an ethical as well as a theological, a social as well as an individual side.
It concerns itself, not only with the relation of the individual to God or
the gods, but also with the relations and duties of man to man. Hence
the close relation and inter-relation of religion and politics. Politics is
the art or act of regulating the social relations of mankind, of
determining social or civic rights and duties. It is neither more nor less
than the practical application of accepted abstract ethical, or religious,
principles in the domain of social life. Hence we cannot be surprised
that almost every wide-spread religious revival, every renewed
application of reason to religion, which almost necessarily gives
prominence to its ethical or social side, has been followed by an
uprising of the masses against what they had come to regard as the
irreligious tyranny and oppression of the ruling privileged classes. The
teachings of Wyclif in England, in the fourteenth century, were
followed by the insurrection associated with the name of Wat Tyler; the
teachings of Luther