, has been expressed by
Salomon Reinach. "Instead of freedom of faith and thought the
Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of
religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that
they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} thanks to the breach made by Luther
in the ancient edifice of Rome."

[Sidenote: German nationalists]

A judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, to the effect that,
though the logical result of some of Luther's premises would have been
individual religion and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out,
"his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no resemblance whatever
to our subjectivism." His true originality was his personality which
imposed on an optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true
that the revolution was profound and yet it was not modern: "the classic
spirit, free institutions, democratic ideals, all these great forces by
which we live are not the heritage of Luther."

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept over Europe with the
Bismarckian wars, men began to judge the Reformation as everything else
by its relation, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. Even
in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to exactly what this
relation was. Paul de Lagarde idealized the Middle Ages as showing the
perfect expression of German character and he detested "the coarse,
scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two hobnailed shoes, and
who by his demagogy, brought in barbarism and split Germany into
fragments." Nevertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation
meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it significant that the
Basques, who were not a nation, should have produced, in Loyola and
Xavier, the two greatest champions of the anti-national church.

The tide soon started flowing the other way and scholars began to see
clearly that in some sort the Reformation was a triumph of "Deutschtum"
against the "Romanitas" of Latin religion and culture. Treitschke, as
the representative of this school, trumpeted forth that "the Reformation
arose from the good {737} German conscience," and that, "the Reformer of
our church was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the road to a
freer civilization." The dogma that might makes right was adopted at
Berlin--as Acton wrote in 1886--and the mere fact that the Reformation
was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historian