ABSTRACT
PURE theology occupies a smaller space in Cranmer’s life than in that of other great Reformers, such as Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin; he founded no church and gave his name to no doctrinal system. His work was rather to reform a church, and he laboured under conditions unlike those which determined the thoughts and actions of his contemporaries in Europe. No one will dispute the vast importance of the religious issues which agitated civilisation in the sixteenth century, but it is impossible to understand the history of that epoch if it is treated from an exclusively theological point of view. Religious forces are potent indeed, but it is doubtful whether religion has fashioned nationality so much as nationality has moulded religion. If religion had been the one supreme test, it would have divided Europe into Catholic and Protestant parties, and not into Catholic and Protestant nations. Religion, in fact, was not so dominant in the sixteenth as it had been in the twelfth century, and the age was really one of secularisation. There was no Crusade, nor in any single instance was there an effective coalition 225of Catholic or of Protestant powers for any object whatever; and when wars of religion did come in the seventeenth century, it was France a Catholic power, which caused the Protestant victory. Political conditions exercised incalculable influence over the results of the religious movement; Protestantism broke in vain against the national temper of Spain, and it was national feeling in Germany which gave effect to Luther’s protest. Political conditions, too, differentiated the Reformation in England from that in Germany and in Switzerland. Zwinglianism and Calvinism are republican because the Swiss cantons were republics; Lutheranism became a territorial religion because territorialism was the effective political principle then existent in Germany. The Church in England became the Church of England because a strong national monarchy grasped the sceptre which was slipping from the hands of the Papal hierarchy.
