necessary implication of our every moral experience, even the simplest? If, indeed, it were so that our truest life moved on within a charmed circle, to which even He was external, doubtless He would remain a grand Peradventure always, at the most a "Moral" Probability, which growth in goodness made less unsure. But this is to overdo the independence our Freedom gives us entirely. He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Of all certainties He is the first and surest.

One tends to criticise a book of this sort rather than praise it. It is more respectful to do so. But it would be wrong not to bear testimony to its speculative power and singular literary grace throughout. Professor Seth has at one stride gained a high place for himself among the ethical teachers of his generation.

ALEX. MARTIN.

Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte von Dr Wilhem Möller. Bearbeitet von Dr Gustav Kawerau. Dritter Band. Reformation

und Gegen-reformation. Freiburg, i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr. Edinburgh and London: Williams & Norgate, 1894. 8vo, xvi. pp. 440. Price, M.10.

THE third volume of Dr Möller's Church History will hardly sustain the reputation won by the first two for completeness and impartiality. It can scarcely be said to be Dr Möller's work. The materials he left dealt with sections of the subject and the arrangement, and in a great measure the materials used come to us from the editor, Dr Kawerau. The editor had to help him Dr Möller's lectures on Church History, but these were not so thoroughly down to date, nor was the arrangement altogether suitable for the purpose of a continuation of the Church History. Dr Kawerau had to collect a good deal of the material, and was forced by the incompleteness of what was left him to make independent use of the researches of later years. He has diligently and laboriously read the local histories bearing upon his subject, and omitted few of the recent contributions of modern scholarship, but yet the book is not quite what we might have expected from Dr Möller himself. This third volume, entitled the Reformation and Counter-reformation, includes the history of the Western Church from 1517 down to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It may be said to describe the first and second generations of the Reformation. The material is arranged under seven sections, of which the first and the seventh are almost entirely from the pen of the editor. The arrangement is lucid, and is as follows:—(1) The German Reformation down to 1555, i.e., to the Religious Peace

of Augsburg and the establishment of the principle of cujus regio, ejus religio for Germany; (2) the reformation beyond Germany, with a short sketch of the work of Calvin; (3) the Roman Catholic reaction; (4) the division of the Reformation Church into Evangelical and Reformed; (5) the conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-reformation; (6) the internal organisation in worship and doctrine of the Evangelical and Reformed Churches; and (7) the non-Catholic groups which came out of the Reformation upheaval. The German perspective of the whole is seen from the fact that while 148 pp. are required to describe the work of Luther in Germany, 50 pp. suffice to narrate the progress of the Reformation elsewhere. The main fault of the book is the abnormally large share of attention which it gives, in common with most German Church histories, to Germany and its religious affairs. Within the limits prescribed by this arrangement the book is, upon the whole, accurate, up to date, fair-minded, and clear. The author deserves credit for stating so clearly that the Roman Catholic reaction dates from the Peasants' War, but he fails to see that the strength of that reaction depended as much on the faint-hearted temporising of Luther as on the awakened instincts of conservatism. His account of the much-maligned Anabaptists is much more fair than what is given in older Church Histories, but he has not got much beyond the views of Albert Ritschl in his History of Pietism, and entirely fails to make use of the new material which has come to light since the publication of that important work. The author seems to regard the Anabaptist movement as one which came from the Reformation, brands it as fanaticism, misses its distinctive principles, and seems to have no idea of its real roots in the end of the 15th century. T. M. LINDSAY.

Die Publizistik im zeitalter Gregor's VII.

Von D. Carl Mirbt, Professor der Theologie in Marburg. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1894. Edinburgh and London: Williams & Norgate. 8vo, pp. xx. 629. Price, M.16.

THE three most important eras in the Middle Ages are the times of Gregory VII., Innocent III., and John XXII.—the beginning, the flood-tide, and the decline of the papacy as the great political power in Europe. Of the three perhaps the first is the most interesting, and its central figure is undoubtedly the greatest.

From 870-950 anarchy had almost dissolved both papacy and empire. The great feudal vassals had despoiled the head of the holy Roman empire of power and prestige. The fall of the imperial power in Italy had deprived the popes of their protector. The

times were full of wild confusion, and Saracens, Slavs, and Normans were plundering and conquering without let or hindrance. The temporal power was the first to rally; a strong elective monarchy emerged in Germany. It was inheritor of the ideas of Charles the Great, and therefore naturally strove to reform and revive the рарасу. A religious revival came to help the reforming emperors, and found its centre in the great monastery of Clugny. great emperor Henry III. purged the papacy, and under a line of German popes the aim of the spiritual head of Western Christendom was to bring back the clergy to purer and more spiritual lives, and identify the papacy with the highest spiritual life in Europe.

The

But the papacy could not be content with reforms urged on from the outside the noblest churchmen of the times saw that if the reform was to be lasting, it must come from the inside. No churchman felt the call for reform more than the Italian monk, Hildebrand. He had been brought into personal contact with the great emperor Henry III., and had imbibed from him many of his aspirations. He had shared in the new religious spirit both at Clugny and at Rome. He believed in the need of a powerful papal monarchy to purify the Church, and he shared the gorgeous dream recounted by St Augustine in the De Civitate Dei. He was a Roman, and the state-craft of old Rome had been bequeathed to him. He was a statesman with clear judgment and fertility of invention; above all, he knew how to wait. He carried through the change in the mode of election to the papacy which ended the possibility of its being fought for as a prize by turbulent Roman barons; he maintained the German ascendancy in Rome till the Roman factions were quelled. He made an alliance with the Normans of South Italy, which gave him a force of fighting men. Then elected to the papacy as Gregory VII., he began to carry out the magnificent schemes of reform he had so long planned.

Gregory's greater dream of a united Christendom, when the Church would be no longer divided into East and West, when all Christians would own the supremacy of Rome, need not concern us here. He found work enough to do in reforming the Church of the West, and his idea of reformation was based on the thought of the absolute independence of the Church from the temporal power, the introduction of a more spiritual life among the clergy, and the banishment of all secularity from among ecclesiastical rulers.

The second and third thoughts found for him practical expression in his enforcement of the celibacy of the clergy, and in his denunciation of the practice of simony; while the first thought, which included the other too, took shape in his violent opposition to that lay investiture by ring and pastoral staff, which made

bishops not only ecclesiastical rulers but feudal barons, subject to king or emperor.

What shape his struggle might have taken had the great emperor Henry III. lived is matter for interesting, if fruitless, speculation. Henry had died, leaving a child to succeed him, who grew up to be the heedless, headstrong, profligate Henry IV. A struggle between pope and emperor was the inevitable consequence, and the strong opponents which the rigorous policy of Gregory evoked were confronted by the still stronger opponents of the misgovernment of the emperor. The struggle outlived both Gregory and Henry, and in the end resulted in a compromise, which brought more credit to the papacy than to the empire, and it produced a large number of writers, who advocated or denounced the pretensions of the papacy. Gregory, in particular, gathered round him a band of distinguished Canonists, to whose labours we owe the form which Canon Law assumed during the Middle Ages, and whose ideas practically prevailed until they were fiercely attacked by Marsilius of Padua, John of Jandun, Peter Dubois, and William of Occam, in the beginning of the fourteenth century. The ideas of the group of Canonists who defended the schemes of Gregory were adopted by the famous school of Bologna, which, in the middle of the twelfth century, issued the famous Decretum of Gratian, which, although it embodied all the forgeries made in the interests of the papacy, was everywhere accepted as the code of Canon Law.

Professor Mirbt has endeavoured to collect and analyse the writings of the advocates and of the opponents of the proposals of Gregory VII., and his book may be regarded as a thorough analysis of these writings. It is in every way more complete than Riezler's, who, in 1874, attempted to do the same service for the conflict between the Temporal and Spiritual Powers, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, in his Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur zeit Ludwig des Baiers. The book is an indispensable guide to the student of earlier mediæval history. The book itself is divided into eight sections, discussing-(1) The principal writings, their authors, and place and time of composition; (2) quarrel between Gregory and Henry, and the measures taken by the pope against the emperor; (3) clerical celibacy and simony; (4) the relation of married priests to the sacraments; (5) the Investiture controversy; (6) the relation between State and Church; (7) the personal life of Gregory III.; and (8) the general character of the literature dealing with these subjects.

The writings dealt with, at least the larger number of them, are to be found in the Monumenta Germanica, and date from 1031 to 1112. The author classifies them under the following periods :(1) From 1031 to 1073, i.e., those prior to the election of Gregory

to the pontificate; (2) from 1073 to 1085, i.e., those written during Gregory's pontificate; (3) from 1085 to 1112, i.e., those written between the death of Gregory and the pontificate of Urban II., whose successor, Calixtus II., negociated the compromise called the Concordat of Worms. Almost one hundred treatises, all dealing with questions of Canon Law, have been gone over, and carefully analysed.

Dr Mirbt discusses very carefully the facts of the two excommunications launched by Gregory against Henry IV., and the various questions raised by these excommunications-the legal right of the pope to excommunicate the emperor, the guilt of the emperor, and the legality of his deposition.

The two methods adopted by Gregory to purify and to render more spiritual the bishops and clergy were the enforcement of sacerdotal celibacy, and the denunciation of simony. In discussing the former the author begins by describing the condition of the morality of the clergy in various parts of Europe, going over the same ground as that covered in Lea's Sacerdotal Celibacy. He shows that the thought of priestly celibacy had long attracted the people of Western Europe as an ideal to be aimed after; that Gregory differed from his predecessors only in the sternness in which he carried out their resolutions; that whilst the clergy in many parts of the country rose in revolt, the laity, for the most part, took the side of the pope; and that, in the end, the imperialists themselves had to declare themselves in favour of priestly celibacy. When Gregory declared that the sacraments administered by married priests were invalid, he did not go beyond what had been already decreed by Nicholas II.; he differed from his predecessors in the rigour by which he compelled his decree to be carried out. This decree of Gregory, and the measures he took to enforce it, produced a great deal of controversy, and the writings of both parties are carefully analysed.

Gregory's action in the matter of Lay-Investiture naturally provoked great controversy. The Lay-Investiture may be described briefly as follows:---Investiture was a feudal ceremony, according to which the vassal placed his hands between the hands of his feudal lord, swore to be his man (baron, i.e., baro'-vir), and was then ceremonially placed in possession of feudal properties and rights. The emperor and king claimed the right of investing bishops as well as barons, and did so on the ground that bishops held feudal rights over lands within their domains, and were barons as well as bishops, owing service to the temporal power as well as to the spiritual. But there was involved a whole variety of ecclesiastical and other questions, such as the rights of the laity represented by the layhead of the community, rights of patrons over benefices, &c.; and