r was indignant. If the Mosaic law is to
govern everything, he said, we should be compelled to adopt
circumcision.[214] Nevertheless, as there is no prohibition of polygamy
in the New Testament, the reformers were unable to condemn it. They did
not forbid it as a matter of Divine law, and referred it entirely to the
decision of the civil legislator.[215] This, accordingly was the view
which guided Luther and Melanchthon in treating the problem, the
ultimate solution of which was the separation of England from the
Church.[216] When the Landgrave Philip afterwards appealed to this
opinion, and to the earlier commentaries of Luther, the reformers were
compelled to approve his having two wives. Melanchthon was a witness at
the wedding of the second, and the only reservation was a request that
the matter should not be allowed to get abroad.[217] It was the same
portion of Luther's theology, and the same opposition to the spirit of
the Church in the treatment of Scripture, that induced him to believe in
astrology and to ridicule the Copernican system.[218]

His view of the authority of Scripture and his theory of justification
both precluded him from appreciating freedom. "Christian freedom," he
said, "consists in the belief that we require no works to attain piety
and salvation."[219] Thus he became the inventor of the theory of
passive obedience, according to which no motives or provocation can
justify a revolt; and the party against whom the revolt is directed,
whatever its guilt may be, is to be preferred to the party revolting,
however just its cause.[220] In 1530 he therefore declared that the
German princes had no right to resist the Emperor in defence of their
religion. "It was the duty of a Christian," he said, "to suffer wrong,
and no breach of oath or of duty could deprive the Emperor of his right
to the unconditional obedience of his subjects."[221] Even the empire
seemed to him a despotism, from his scriptural belief that it was a
continuation of the last of the four monarchies.[222] He preferred
submission, in the hope of seeing a future Protestant Emperor, to a
resistance which might have dismembered the empire if it had succeeded,
and in which failure would have been fatal to the Protestants; and he
was always afraid to draw the logical consequences of his theory of the
duty of Protestants towards Catholic sovereigns. In consequence of this
fact, Ranke affirms that the great reformer was also one of the greates