p to that time
{594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators
would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the
theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the
free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the
Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of
enforcing orthodoxy and punishing sinners, Hobbes drew the logical
inference that the state was the final authority for determining
religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers
themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable
religious truth.

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two
divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was.
Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had
in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a
form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the
people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the
whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical
conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English
Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it
began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the
Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Luther]

While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant
service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates
harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants'
War and the extravagance of Muenzer, he came to believe that "Herr
Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this
world are gods," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through
whom God sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly
through Satan, _i.e._, makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's
sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a
people doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely ordained
"powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in
no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up
against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in
1530.

That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine
majesty in the state is due not only to