eriod
of moral or intellectual decrepitude, with a few 'Reformers before the
Reformation' crying like voices in the wilderness, but an era of healthy
activity and abounding promise. He describes the flourishing state of
religious and secular education, the vitality of art, the comfort of the
peasantry, and the prosperity of the towns. On reaching the sixteenth
century, he denounces the paganism of the Humanists and paints a
terrible picture of the material and moral chaos into which Germany was
plunged by the Lutheran revolt. The later volumes are devoted to the era
of the Counter-Revolution and present a canvas of unrelieved gloom,
immorality and drunkenness, ignorance, superstition and violence. Thus
the story which opened with the bright colours of the fifteenth century
closes in deep shadows, and the moral is drawn that Germany was ruined
not by the Thirty Years War but by the Reformation.

Protestant historians fell upon the audacious iconoclast with fierce
cries of anger, and had no difficulty in exposing his uncritical use of
authorities, his habit of generalizing from isolated particulars, and
his suppression of facts damaging to his own side. But though it was a
dexterous polemic, not a work of disinterested science, Janssen's book
has made it impossible for any self-respecting Protestant to write on
the Reformation without knowing and weighing the Catholic side. Of
similar tendency though of far higher value is the monumental work in
which Pastor is narrating the story of the Renaissance and
sixteenth-century Popes from the Vatican archives, which neither Ranke
nor Creighton had been able to employ. No really objective picture of
the Reformation can be painted by Catholic or Protestant; but a good
deal of firm ground has been won, and the writings of Kawerau, the
greatest of Lutheran scholars, inspire us with a confidence that no
writings of the last generation deserved.

Though Ranke's chief works had been published before the period to which
this lecture is confined, his influence can be traced in almost every
writer on modern history during the last half-century. His greatest
service to scholarship was to divorce the study of the past from the
passions of the present, and, to quote the watchword of his first book,
to relate what actually occurred. A second was to establish the
necessity of founding historical construction on strictly contemporary
authorities. When he began to write in 1824 historians of hi