History of English Literature, Volume 2

The Christian Renaissance

“I would have my reader fully understand,” says Luther in the preface to his complete works, “that I have been a monk and a bigoted Papist, so intoxicated, or rather so swallowed up in papistical doctrines, that I was quite ready, if I had been able, to kill or procure the death of those who should have rejected obedience to the Pope by so much as a syllable. I was not all cold or all ice in the Pope’s defence, like Eckius and his like, who veritably seemed to me to constitute themselves his defenders rather for their belly’s sake than because they looked at the matter seriously. More, to this day they seem to mock at him, like Epicureans. I for my part proceeded frankly, like a man who has horribly feared the day of judgment, and who yet hoped to be saved with a shaking of all his bones.” Again, when he saw Rome for the first time, he prostrated himself, saying, “I salute thee, holy Rome... bathed in the blood of so many martyrs.” Imagine, if you may, the effect which the shameless paganism of the Italian Renaissance had upon such a mind, so loyal, so Christian. The beauty of art, the charm of a refined and sensuous, existence, had taken no hold upon him; he judged morals, and he judged them with his conscience only. He regarded this southern civilization with the eyes of a man of the north, and understood its vices only, like Ascham, who said he had seen in Venice “more libertie to sinne in IX dayes than ever I heard tell of in our noble Citie of London in IX yeare.” Like Arnold and Channing in the present day, like all the men of Germanic race and education, he was horrified at this voluptuous life, now reckless and now licentious, but always void of moral principles, given up to passion, enlivened by irony, caring only for the present, destitute of belief in the infinite, with no other worship than that of visible beauty, no other object than the search after pleasure, no other religion than the terrors of imagination and the idolatry of the eyes.