ferent philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an
eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at
their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they
survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth
century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the
liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided
into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and
Darwinians began to assert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS.
(SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based
on the analogy of Scripture. God, it was thought, had chosen a
peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance,
particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a
{700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs.
God's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to
the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the
true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to
belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation"]

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies
_par eminence_, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should
be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in
the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like
Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and
Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to
Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the
spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he
incorporated it in the title of his greatest German pamphlet. The
other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party
was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing
nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus
and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive
away the foggy mists of superstition and to restore the purity of the
primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply _ad libitum_ quotations
showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general
purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to
the imper