tinent but more assiduous activity of the devil. It is
interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes.
Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his
movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the
Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also
saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was
no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was
inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and
suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing
before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that
there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such
as Muenzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an
overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary,
natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the
papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized
that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the
"first push and assault" given by the ungodly humanists. Burnet
followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many
documents he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing
facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by
the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the
flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in
the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of
the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf,
was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made
many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its
principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless
labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the
special student for the documents it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to
the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one
was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the
other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine
governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That
Luther was