ncumbent on the civil
power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy,
inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to
{710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought
and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the
largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention
of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular
character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to
the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses
by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves,
and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to
sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was
in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to
exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as
he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to
the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless
spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted
"those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to
a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the
eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to
that subject in his great history of _The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their
merit [_i.e._ of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what
articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the
Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised
at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers."
They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great
mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six
first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did
{711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their
reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in
scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence
in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and
popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith,