divinely revealed over against all other
faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the
heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were
the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato
and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a
title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of
Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred
hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued
under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been
pitiful.

In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to
the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of God
over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians
regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which God and the devil
pulled the strings. Institutions of which they disapproved, such as
the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by
the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses
passed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source
in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history
did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and
ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely
forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing
under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or
distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened
only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign
growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and
deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference
between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge
deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.

[Sidenote: _Magdeburg Centuries_, 1559-74]

Among the most industrious and the most biassed must certainly be
numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing
the _Magdeburg Centuries_, a vast history of the church to the year
1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic
sources. Save for the accumulation of much material it deserves no
praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only
criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The