while they are developing--this is to make a new criticism of the
sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal
documentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of
past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and
thereby to reconstruct them anew.

But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme
limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an
occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a
point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors
in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which
they often found both the motives and the justification of their action,
we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure
appearance, a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of
the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his
contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was
but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic
revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court.
He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was
wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement
which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and
a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote
effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of
the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial
dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and
super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent
repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly
proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the
authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation,
particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best
of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the
fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the
circumstantial integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether
subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now,
the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly
in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in the Low
Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the
contrasts o