known
world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect
shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged
limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of
middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that
the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the
moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the
Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic
revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote
similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and
Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and
Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an
enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into
the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that
his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life
in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the
conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated
itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons
and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious
sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The
creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism,
individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very
moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and
sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and
America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first
emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the
Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated
Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same
time, in his fervent _Speeches to the German Nation_, called the
Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its
"perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period,
tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once
national and liberal. In his _Pictures from the German Past_, largely
painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on
"Deutschtum" and "Buergertum," {719} and all th