hadow and revelation
the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will
should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli,
anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that
our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said
that he wanted no more light than he then had--an instructive contrast
to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence
or conviction, said that theological mysteries seeming absurd to reason
must be believed.

[Sidenote: Radical sects]

Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. Those who represented
the protest against Protestantism and the dissidence of dissent
appealed to the Bible as an authority and abhorred reason as much as
did the orthodox churches. The Antitrinitarians were no more deists or
free thinkers than were the Lutherans. Campanus and Adam Pastor and
Servetus and the Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made
no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian deism, as some modern
Unitarians would do. Their doubts were simply based on a different
exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a
subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Supreme God gave over the
government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an
illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of God {627}
in the Word and a communication of the substance of God in the Spirit."
This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete
heresy, that of Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find
Servetus lecturing on astrology.

[Sidenote: Spiritual Reformers]

Somewhat to the left of the Antitrinitarian sects were a few men, who
had hardly any followers, who may be called, for want of a better term,
Spiritual Reformers. They sought, quite in the nineteenth century
spirit, to make Christianity nothing but an ethical culture. James
Acontius, born in Trent [Sidenote: 1565] but naturalized in England,
published his _Stratagems of Satan_ in 1565 to reduce the fundamental
doctrines of Christianity to the very fewest possible. Sebastian
Franck of Ingolstadt [Sidenote: Franck, 1499-1542] found the only
authority for each man in his inward, spiritual message. He sought to
found no community or church, but to get only readers. These men
passed almost unnoticed in their day.

[Sidenote: Italian skeptics]

There was much skepticism through