, charitable and ecclesiastical objects were no longer properly cultivated, supernatural interests fell into the background, and naturalistic aspirations aiming at the purely mundane, became widespread. The denial of the Divinely instituted authority of the Church, both as regards doctrine and ecclesiastical government, opened wide the door to every eccentricity, gave rise to the endless division into sects and the never-ending disputes characteristic of Protestantism, and could not but lead to the complete unbelief which necessarily arises from the Protestant principles. Of real freedom of belief among the Reformers of the sixteenth century there was not a trace; on the contrary, the representatives of the Reformation displayed the greatest tyranny in matters of conscience. Thus arose from the very beginning the various Protestant "national Churches", which are entirely discordant with the Christian universalism of the Catholic Church, and depend, alike for their faith and organization, on the will of the secular ruler. In this way the Reformation was a chief factor in the evolution of royal absolutism. In every land in which it found ingress, the Reformation was the cause of indescribable suffering among the people; it occasioned civil wars which lasted decades with all their horrors and devastations; the people were oppressed and enslaved; countless treasures of art and priceless manuscripts were destroyed; between members of the same land and race the seed of discord was sown. Germany in particular, the original home of the Reformation, was reduced to a state of piteous distress by the Thirty Years' War, and the German Empire was thereby dislodged from the leading position which it had for centuries occupied in Europe. Only gradually, and owing to forces which did not essentially spring from the Reformation, but were conditioned by other historical factors, did the social wounds heal, but the religious corrosion still continues desp...
