.

The spirit of religious persecution, which inflamed the Roman Church
to punish all dissenters from the doctrine and abuses she promulgated,
can never be questioned. The Waldenses and Albigenses had suffered, in
darker times, almost incredible hardships and miseries--had been
almost annihilated by the dreadful crusade which was carried on
against them, so that two hundred thousand had perished for supposed
heresy. But reference is not now made to this wholesale massacre, but
to those instances of individual persecution which showed the extreme
jealousy and hatred of Rome of all new opinions. John Huss and Jerome
of Prague were publicly burned for attempting to reform the church,
and even Savonarola, who did not deny the authority of the popes, was
condemned to the flames for denouncing the vices of his age, rather
than the evils of the church.

[Sidenote: Necessity for Reform.]

These multiplied evils, which checked the spirit of improvement,
called loudly for reform. Councils were assembled for the purpose; but
councils supported, rather than diminished, the evils of which even
princes complained. The reform was not destined to come from
dignitaries in the church or state; not from bishops, nor
philosophers, nor kings, but from an obscure teacher of divinity in a
German university, whom the genius of a reviving and awakened age had
summoned into the field of revolutionary warfare. It was reserved for
Martin Luther to commence the first successful rebellion against the
despotism of Rome, and to give the greatest impulse to freedom of
thought, and a general spirit of reform, which ten centuries had seen.

The most prominent event in modern times is unquestionably the
Protestant Reformation, and it was by far the most momentous in its
results. It gave rise, directly or indirectly, to the great wars of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as to those rival
sects which agitated the theological world. It is connected with the
enterprises of great monarchs, with the struggle of the Huguenots and
Puritans, with the diffusion of knowledge, and with the progress of
civil and religious liberty in Europe. An event, therefore, of such
interest and magnitude, may well be adopted as a starting point in
modern history, and will, accordingly, be the first subject of
especial notice. History is ever most impressive and philosophical
when great changes and revolutions are traced to the agency of great
spiritual ideas.