t much better off in popular
favour, whilst the upper members of the hierarchy were naturally
regarded as the chief blood-suckers of the German people in the
interests of Rome. The vast revenues which both directly in the shape
of _pallium_ (the price of "investiture"), _annates_ (first year's
revenues of appointments), _Peter's-pence_, and recently of
_indulgences_--the latter the by no means most onerous exaction, since
it was voluntary--all these things, taken together with what was
indirectly obtained from Germany, through the expenditure of German
ecclesiastics on their visits to Rome and by the crowd of parasitics,
nominal holders of German benefices merely, but real recipients of
German substance, who danced attendance at the Vatican--obviously
constituted an enormous drain on the resources of the country from all
the lay classes alike, of which wealth the papal chair could be
plainly seen to be the receptacle.

If we add to these causes of discontent the vastness in number of the
regular clergy, the "friars" and "monks" already referred to, who
consumed, but were only too obviously unproductive, it will be
sufficiently plain that the Protestant Reformation had something very
much more than a purely speculative basis to work upon. Religious
reformers there had been in Germany throughout the Middle Ages, but
their preachings had taken no deep root. The powerful personality of
the Monk of Wittenberg found an economic soil ready to hand in which
his teachings could fructify, and hence the world-historic result. The
peasant revolts, sporadic the Middle Ages through, had for the
half-century preceding the Reformation been growing in frequency and
importance, but it needed nevertheless the sudden impulse, the
powerful jar given by a Luther in 1517, and the series of blows with
which it was followed during the years immediately succeeding, to
crystallize the mass of fluid discontent and social unrest in its
various forms and give it definite direction. The blow which was
primarily struck in the region of speculative thought and
ecclesiastical relations did not stop there in its effects. The attack
on the dominant theological system--at first merely on certain
comparatively unessential outworks of that system--necessarily of its
own force developed into an attack on the organization representing
it, and on the economic basis of the latter. The battle against
ecclesiastical abuses, again, in its turn, focussed the
ever-