CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RENAISSANCE AND RELIGION

 

THE Popes who reigned from 1447 to 1521 were humanists. They favored with all their power the Renaissance of letters and the arts. The Renaissance was a new birth, a second spring, of Greek and Roman antiquity. Its origin can be found in the Middle Ages and its birthplace was Italy, where classical art had enjoyed a national home. In the fourteenth century it began to find expression in the poems of Petrarch, who lived in Avignon and Padua, and in the tales of Boccaccio, who lived in Florence. In the next century it was stimulated by the revived knowledge of Greek fostered in Florence by the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras and a group of scholars such as Bruni, Poggio, and Laurentius Valla, who finally demolished the Forged Decretals and the Donation of Constantine. In Italy learning became a passion with all classes of society. Florence was the first centre of culture, and was adorned by the splendid artistic work of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Ghiberti. Milan, Naples, and Ferrara soon joined in the enthusiastic worship of the antique; and at the beginning of the sixteenth century Rome had become the artistic capital of Italy, sought by painters, sculptors, and architects, who left it to carry a new message to the rest of Europe. They went not only to Paris and Madrid; their work can be traced in Westminster and Moscow.

A Christian historian of the fifth century remarks that the beautiful, wherever it may be, is the property of the truth. And it was possible for keen humanists to be devout Christians. But the assertion that man has a right to enjoy the world led to a selfish abuse of that right, the passion for study led to a pedantic imitation of the writings of classical authors, and the spirit of criticism led to the rejection of much that was permanently valuable in medieval life. An outward conformity with Christianity was accompanied by the parade of a self-conscious paganism. The moral corruption of Italy was profound, and Rome was defiled by an unabashed surrender to the worst vices of antiquity.

Behind these splendors and these vices there loomed the growing terror inspired by the Turks, and the Popes of the Renaissance must be considered not only in relation to learning and the religious welfare of the Church, but also in relation to the Muslim peril which they endeavored to avert.

Nicholas V (1447-1455) was a marvel of classical scholarship and the founder of the famous Vatican library. He has been called the Father of Humanism, and he was devoted to books and building. But his secretaries worked more for the library than for the Church, and among them was the obscene writer Poggio. The Jubilee held in Rome in 1450 attracted vast crowds of pilgrims. The result was a pestilence which filled the churches and hospitals and the roads to Rome with dead and dying people. In 1453 the plot of a young nobleman to seize and kill the Pope, and the news of the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, shattered the old man's health, and he died in March 1455. He was not wholly blind to the interests of Christendom. He confided to Nicholas of Cusa the reform of abuses among the priests and monks of Germany, to Cardinal William d'Estoute­ville the reform of schools and colleges in France, and he favored the preaching missions of the Franciscan St. John of Capistrano in Germany, Italy, and Poland. Nicholas was polished and gracious in his manners, he improved the secular government of Rome and the Papal States, and his grandiose schemes for rebuilding St. Peter's and the walls and churches of Rome were less the result of personal pride than the desire to restore the diminished prestige of the papacy itself.

Calixtus III (1455-1458) had been the Spanish cardinal, Alfonso Borgia. The Spaniards have a cynical proverb concerning nephews, and the nephews to whom the new Pope was so devoted did their uncle little credit. One of them whom he brought to Rome was Rodrigo, afterwards the infamous Pope Alexander VI. But his love for his nephews was equaled by his hatred of the Turks. He took an oath that, if necessary, he would shed his blood to free Constantinople from their sway, and he sold many of his possessions in order to equip a fleet for that purpose. But he appealed in vain to the princes of Christendom to join in a crusade. England and France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Portugal were deaf to his summons. Only Hungary, with the wolf at her door, provided the right man for the moment. That man was Hunyadi Janos.

Hunyadi several years earlier had inflicted more than one disaster upon the Turkish army. He had, since 1440, borne the burden of defending the life of Christendom, and he was ready to meet Muhammad II even when the Turk was flushed with the conquest of Constantinople. The Turk intended to take Hungary and to capture the Serbian capital Belgrad as holding the key to Hungary. Hunyadi, deserted by the other Magyar nobles, had no efficient helper except St. John of Capistrano, whose fervid eloquence stirred yeomen and peasants to rally to his support. At his own expense Hunyadi armed and victualled the fortress of Belgrad, and on July the 14th, 1456, his flotilla destroyed the Turkish fleet. A week later, after a desperate fight, Hunyadi captured the Turkish camp, and the defeated sultan retreated to Constantinople. In 1459 Serbia, which had never recovered from her dearly bought defeat at Kossovo in 1389, became a Turkish pashalik directly under the Porte. But Hungary was secure from the invader until 1526, when the Sultan Suleiman laid waste one-fourth of the country. Hunyadi's integrity, unselfishness, statecraft, and heroism entitle him to one of the highest places in the history of Christian chivalry, and his death from the plague only three weeks after his splendid victory was a tragic end to a career of tragic achievement. He was soon followed to the tomb by John of Capistrano; Scanderbeg, the Albanian who rivaled his exploits, was betrayed by his own nephew; and Pope Calixtus III died on the day that the Turks captured Corinth.

Pius II (1458-1464) was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who took the name of Pius, not without an allusion to the 'pius Aeneas' of Vergil. He was a diplomat and a humanist. He wrote a novel and a play, and certain 'Commentaries' which contain a frank account of his own life and times. But he showed more reserve in granting favors to other humanists than they had anticipated. He faced the world with the maxim, “Aeneam reiicite, Pium recipite”.

He was involved in a prolonged quarrel with George Podjebrad, King of Bohemia, refusing categorically to sanction Holy Communion in both kinds, the necessity of which George vigorously asserted. This quarrel, and the political complications which it involved, hindered the progress of the Pope's plans for a crusade. But in spite of undisguised opposition or coldness in every quarter, the Pope declared that he would put himself at the head of an expedition against the Turks. After a pilgrimage to Assisi he went to Ancona and waited for the fleet due to arrive from Venice. Twelve galleys arrived on August the 12th, 1464, and received his blessing. Three days later the frail pontiff died.

Paul II (1464-1471) was free from the guilt of nepotism and was a man of dignity and courage. He was a friend of learning, and made a fine collection of antiquities. But he was slandered as illiterate and as an enemy of humanism because he suppressed the so-called 'Roman academy', a club which professed to revive the worship of the pagan gods. Its head was 'Pomponius Laetus', a bastard whose real name was Giulio Bernardino, and from its members the College of Abbreviators of the Chancery was recruited. Paul II suppressed the college. He also pronounced the deposition of George Podjebrad, who had openly favored the extreme Hussite opinions of Rokyczan, including Anabaptism and consubstantiation.

Sixtus IV (1471-1484), an eloquent Franciscan who had never known the use of money, gave money away as long as he had any to give. He heaped favors upon unworthy relatives, and for their sake he concentrated his attention upon Italian politics, with inglorious results. His own life was strict and simple, he built a foundling hospital and gave privileges to the mendicant orders. He intervened in the affairs of the Spanish Inquisition, trying to check the misuse of its powers in the interest of party politics or royal authority. But Sixtus IV is chiefly remembered for his patronage of the fine arts. He built the Sistine chapel in Rome, and favored great artists such as Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and Perugino. He weakly introduced unworthy persons into the college of cardinals, and thereby prepared the way for the further degradation of the papacy.

Innocent VIII (1484-1492) was a man whose morals were the subject of a Roman jest. The great Sultan Muhammad II had died in 1481. His sons Bayazid and Jem disputed for the throne. Bayazid proved the winner, and committed his brother to the keeping of the Knights of St. John in Rhodes, the Grand Master transferred him to the Pope, and Bayazid, in return for this custody of his brother, promised the Pope perpetual peace and 40,00o ducats a year.

Alexander VI (1492-1503) a nephew of Calixtus III, purchased the papal throne by bribing his colleagues. His pontificate was one of unequalled infamy. He threw decorum to the winds, and his only serious interest was in his children. His favorite son, Giovanni, was murdered, probably by his second son, Cesare: both were cardinals. The Pope's daughter Lucrezia was left in charge of the 'apostolic palace' when the Pope was absent from Rome. He intrigued with the sultan against the King of France, and in 1493 he presented Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain with all islands and continents lying beyond a line of demarcation drawn from the North to the South Pole. Jem the Turk was one of the Pope’s boon companions.

Of the seven pontiffs whose reign has been briefly sketched above, there was not one, with the exception of Paul II, who had the irreproachable character and the strength of will required in their high position. Rome was dissolute and cruel, men conformed and disbelieved, and even Italy was shocked by the court of Alexander VI, its simony, murders, and indescribable vices.

In spite of the orgies of the Vatican, religion was not dead in Italy. There were occasional feverish revivals in cities and villages, gusts of penitence and attempts to propitiate God with fasts and litanies and processions. Foremost in preaching these revivals were the friars of the reformed mendicant orders. Of these we have as an example the work of St. Bernardino (d. 1444). He was noted for his devotion to the holy name of Jesus; and while believing in papal infallibility, he adhered to the view of some of the Fathers that 'the rock' mentioned by Christ in his promise to St. Peter, was Christ himself.

Above all the preachers of repentance was Girolamo Savona­rola, prior of the reformed Dominican convent of St. Mark, Florence. There, and later in the vast and sombre Duomo of Florence, he preached to multitudes with a fiery and lucid eloquence which seemed a miracle in one so feeble and so overstrained. The people listened with terror and sobbed aloud. He laid bare every abuse and every vice. He spoke like a prophet; he saw farther than other men because he saw deeper. Convinced that God's judgment would fall on Italy for her wickedness, he said that it would come soon and that the Church would then be renewed. His spiritual dictatorship began in 1490, when he set himself in opposition to Lorenzo de Medici, who, in spite of his opposition, said that he was the only honest friar that he knew, and sent for him when he was on his death-bed. Savonarola left him unabsolved, and became the champion of republican doctrines in the pulpit. A wave of fierce austerity came over Florence, laws were remodeled, many abolished, and in the carnival of 1497 a huge bonfire was made of lascivious pictures, lutes, harps, and cosmetics, which were burnt amid shouts of triumph. The same year Alexander VI, whose vices he had lashed, and who had vainly tried to bribe him with a cardinal's hat, excommunicated Savonarola. He had made many enemies, and in March 1498 the Signory, the supreme executive of Florence, besought him to suspend his preaching. Certain Franciscans provoked him to an ordeal by fire. Their own champions withdrew from the trial and the ordeal never took place. The populace were filled with rage, not against the Franciscans, but against Savonarola, who was imprisoned and then tortured. On May the 23rd he was hanged, his body was burnt, and his ashes were thrown into the Arno. His last words were: “The Lord has suffered as much for me”.

Hardly had his ashes been borne away by the river, when the fickle Florentines recognized that they had killed a prophet and a saint, and Savonarola almost attained the dubious honor of being canonized by a Pope of the period.

Alexander VI was followed by Pius III, who died within a 41 month, and the two last Popes of the Renaissance were Julius II and Leo X.

Julius II (1503-1513) had little of the priest about him. He was a lover of art and patronized Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo. He was an able ruler and diplomat, but he was essentially a man of war, and was said to have chosen the name Julius in memory of Julius Caesar. He beat Venice with the help of France and Germany, and then with Venice and Spain drove the French from Italy. Louis XII of France convened a French Council which renewed the Pragmatic Sanction, and with the co-operation of Germany convened a General Council at Pisa. The Pope put Pisa under an interdict, the Council was a failure, and the Pope summoned another Council at the Lateran. It is reckoned by Rome as the eighteenth Ecumenical Council. Only fifty-six bishops were present, and among the few archbishops was Christopher Bain­bridge, Archbishop of York, who was poisoned and found a burial-place in Rome. A concordat was made with the Emperor Maximilian and some serious grievances in Germany were redressed.

Leo X (1513-45z I), son of Lorenzo de Medici, was the last and greatest of the Popes of the Renaissance. Like his predecessor, he was an enthusiastic patron of art, and he furthered the erection of St. Peter's which had been begun by Julius II and was destined to cost Rome the price of the Reformation. His dealings with France were of political and ecclesiastical importance. Louis XII, who was hard pressed by Henry VIII of England, had decided to recognize the recent Lateran Council. His successor, Francis I, gained a brilliant victory over the Swiss at Marignano, securing the great duchy of Milan for himself. Rome was in a state of consternation when the news of this victory arrived, and Leo was obliged to make a treaty with the victor. The Pope succeeded in obtaining an abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of AD 1438, which had proclaimed the 'conciliar theory' of Church government. But in return the right of the king to nominate to the eighty-three sees of France and five hundred and twenty-seven abbacies was assured, the Pope reserving the power of confirming the elections. The arrangement was ratified in the bull Primitiva ills ecclesia of 1516. It had the serious result of widening the difference between the two classes of French ecclesiastics, the rich and aristocratic higher clergy who depended upon the king, and the poorer priests who represented the mind of the people and, to a considerable extent, the spirit of the universities. The Pope took an interest in the welfare of the great religious orders, but he was singularly blind to the need of reform in the Church as a whole. Kindly and courtly, devoted to learning and equally devoted to luxury, he was not an unbeliever. His moral weakness consisted in his worldliness, his passion for getting and spending money and his inability to realize 'the high calling of God'. His encounter with Luther falls outside the scope of this volume.

When the French entered Italy, Italy began to conquer France and bind her with silken cords. The French began to find Italy delightful, and the French temperament began to change under this refining influence. The secular spirit of the Renaissance attracted the wealthy classes, ecclesiastical literature declined, elegant castles were more often built than stately churches, and the patrons of art before long preferred mythological nudities to representations of the saints.

Nevertheless, this humanism was more often allied in France with Christian faith than it was in Italy. A desire for the reformation of the Church by the Church was the ideal of some noble souls. Among them the most influential was Lefevre d'Etaples, Faber Stapulensis, a native of Picardy (d. 1540). He was a doctor of the Sorbonne and numbered among his pupils the Orientalists Vatable and Postel, Bude, a man of vast learning, and Farel, who became a Protestant leader. Among his works was a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul written in 1512, and a critical work which maintained that there are in the New Testament three different Maries who are combined in the current ecclesiastical tradition concerning Mary Magdalene. He makes a strong moral appeal to return to Christ and His apostles, and insists upon divine grace as the only means of salvation. His influence was greatly strengthened by the support of a bishop and a princess of the blood royal.

In 1516 William Briçonnet was nominated Bishop of Meaux, and Meaux seemed likely to become the centre of reform without revolution. Briçonnet was enthusiastic, mystical, and practical, and drew around him Lefèvre and a group known as the Group or Coenaculum of Meaux. Lefèvre composed a translation of the New Testament, the bishop compelled priests to reside in their parishes, and established thirty preaching stations to which he sent young men penetrated with the new teaching. The king's sister, Margaret of Angouleme (d. 1549), put herself into contact with the good men of Meaux. She was a hearer of Lefèvre and corresponded with Briçonnet. She had imbibed the Platonism of Ficino and Nicholas of Cusa, and she learned Latin, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew. More poetic than dogmatic, she has expressed her religious belief in her verses. A gentle spirit, she cannot be called a creator of the moral and intellectual life of her time: she reflected it; and there is a certain unity in her religious ideas which suggests to us the point at which French reform might have paused before becoming Protestant.

At the period of the Renaissance, Germany and Flanders, which were in close political and social relations with each other, were remarkable for the wealth and culture of their cities. Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Mainz, Bruges, Ghent, and Louvain, to mention no others, were in contact with the trade of a large part of Europe. The citizens built florid and beautiful churches and town halls. Music was fostered, and artists such as the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weyden, and Memling created works in which realism and mysticism met together. The more strictly intellectual life was not neglected. Although Germany produced few great writers, it produced genuine thinkers, and the spirit of invention displayed itself in the art of printing and in the progress of astronomy. No less than nine universities were founded in Germany between 1456 and 1506, and almost every city of importance possessed some resident scholar of distinction.

The godless character of the Italian Renaissance did little to recommend its first representatives who arrived in Germany. But humanism soon began to strike its roots into German soil, first in the Latin schools, then in the universities. Its form was Christian and conservative. Rudolf Agricola (d. 1485) trained in Louvain and Paris, was a man of light and leading at Heidelberg, and his work was carried on at Deventer by Hegius and other disciples. The Universities of Erfurt, Tubingen, and Ingolstadt quickly opened their doors to humanism. Nuremberg, which was almost a German Florence, had a warm patron of the new learning in the patrician citizen Pirkheimer. He and others like Wimpheling, the scholar of Speier, and Trithemius, the Benedictine abbot, never left the Church in which they had been reared; nor did Ulrich von Hutten, the knight-errant of the revival of letters, who fought with sword and with pen, and died in poverty on an island in the lake of Zurich. But they helped to make Germany stir with an intellectual life which foreshadowed a change in religion.

The greatest German humanist at the beginning of the six­teenth century was Johann Reuchlin (d. 1522), a man of learning and the pioneer of Hebrew studies. He became, without intending it, the cause of a controversy which enlisted the greater part of Germany in a revolt against the Church. In 1509 a converted Jew, Johann Pfefferkorn, obtained an edict from Maximilian empowering him to confiscate Hebrew books on the ground that they hindered Jews from embracing the Christian faith. Reuchlin was one of the referees appointed to report to the emperor as to whether all Hebrew books, except the Old Testament, ought to be burnt. He produced a discriminating memoir in which he advised that, with the exception of two books, the Jews' books should not be burnt, that Hebrew literature should be studied and the Jews gently brought over to the faith. A sharp controversy ensued between Pfefferkorn and Reuchlin; the latter appealed to the Pope and he was acquitted of heresy by a commission which met at Speier in 1514. But behind Pfefferkorn were the Dominicans of Cologne and the inquisitor Hoogstraten, and their power at Rome was such that Pope Leo X issued a mandate which imposed silence on both parties and quashed the decision of Speier. The bigots there­fore gained a semi-success and a semi-condemnation at Rome; but they suffered a severe defeat in Germany. Reuchlin had met his opponents by publishing a volume of letters addressed to him by his learned admirers under the title of Clarorum Virorum Epistolae. This suggested to the wits of the new learning the idea of ridiculing the theologians by a collection of letters called Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. They were composed in the circle of Mutianus Rufus, canon of Gotha. Written in a parody of monkish Latin, and sometimes as coarse as they were flippant, they were greeted with ecstatic applause and caused monastic learning to be treated as a farce.

But the strength of northern humanism was not in the humorists but in Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536). He has fitly been called 'the king of the humanists', and he used his learning in the service of Church reform. He had been educated by the Brothers of the Common Life in Holland, he had entered a monastery in 1491, but was relieved from monastic rules by the Bishop of Cambrai, and he visited England in 1497. He travelled in order to study, and was familiar with Paris and Rome, Bologna and Florence. He corrected the press for Aldus at Venice; he learned Greek at Oxford and taught it at Cambridge; and later he settled at Basel. No one of his period, and no one since his period, enjoyed so great a literary reputa­tion. His Praise of Folly, his Adages, and his Colloquies had an immense circulation, his spontaneous and satirical Latin being of unrivalled vigour. His services to theology were as great as his services to the classical revival. In 1505 he republished the notes on the New Testament by Lorenzo Valla. In 1516 he published the New Testament in Greek with a Latin version, and he superintended the publication of the writings of several Fathers of the Church. He has been called indifferent in matters of religion; but the charge cannot be sustained. He remained in the Church, righteously discontented but not rebellious, hoping that reform would come with a study of the unadulterated records of early Christianity. His mind was too implacable towards the Schoolmen, and his ardor for doctrinal simplicity was not compatible with an appreciation of philosophy. But Erasmus remains in the first rank of the men who have aspired to unite reasonableness with religion, culture with Christianity.

The Englishmen John Colet and Sir Thomas More are more than worthy to be placed beside Reuchlin and Erasmus. Their enthusiasm for the new learning was united with Catholic devotion, unsullied by cynicism or disloyalty.

John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, was born in London in or near 1467. He was the son of Sir Henry Colet, who was twice Lord Mayor of London, and he was educated in Oxford.

After he had taken the degree of Master of Arts he enlarged his mind by visiting Paris and Italy, where he first met Erasmus. He returned to England, was ordained priest, and resided in Oxford, where he gave Latin lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. They attracted much attention, being free from scholastic methods of exegesis and colored with the Platonism of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. This taste for Platonism was allied with his respect for the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, under the influence of which he wrote a book on the Sacraments of the Church and another on the Composition of the Holy Mystical Body of Christ. He afterwards became convinced, like all modern scholars, that the so-called Dionysian writings are not works of primitive antiquity, but they strengthened his desire for ecclesiastical reform. He also wrote letters on the six days of creation, in which he interpreted the first chapters of Genesis as allegorical, an interpretation which is not absent from the writings of certain Fathers, including even Athanasius.

He was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1505 and continued to lecture on the New Testament. The wealth which he inherited from his father now enabled him to carry out his darling project, the foundation of a great school for the free teaching of one hundred and fifty-three poor children. The building was completed in 1510 and named St. Paul's School. Fitzjames, the Bishop of London, was suspicious of his teaching and his educational methods, and cited him for heresy before Archbishop Warham, who dismissed the charge. He continued to be quite outspoken in criticizing abuses in Church and State. In 1512, when preaching before Convocation, he eloquently deplored the evil of the Church being conformed to the world, and the next year denounced the evils of war in a sermon before Henry VIII. In 1514 he visited the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury in company with Erasmus, who describes his companion under the name of Gratianus Pullus, and represents him as having little respect for musty relics. That year he prepared to retire among the Carthusians of Sheen. Worn out by the sweating sickness he died in 1519. In simplicity of life he practiced what he preached. Neither a great scholar nor a great theologian, he was a great Christian who passionately desired to make the Bible understood, and saw the importance of studying the Christianity of early days.

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England, was one of the greatest representatives of this period of transition and was in a special sense its martyr. Like Colet, he was a Londoner by birth and an Oxonian by education. At the age of twenty-one he was, like many other young men, filled with an ascetic fervor which prompted him to become a priest; but he decided otherwise without abandoning his strong Christian faith. He lectured on St. Augustine at St. Lawrence Jewry in the City, and powerfully advocated the study of Greek. In 1516 he published his Utopia, the picture of an ideal commonwealth, implying a criticism of the evils of the day, and a plea for the widest toleration in matters of religion. Brilliant and upright as a lawyer, he steadily advanced in his profession; he became Speaker of the House of Commons, and in 1529 Lord Chancellor. Henry VIII was fully conscious of his attractive character and rare ability, and professed for More a friendship which More perceived to be inspired by cunning rather than affection. He assisted the king in his book against Luther, and himself sternly enforced the laws against heretics in spite of the views advocated in Utopia. He regarded the Pope's jurisdiction, which was interwoven with the canon law, as essential to the Catholic system, and he therefore came into conflict with the king when Henry married Anne Boleyn. He refused to attend the wedding. He refused to take the oath which required fidelity to Anne's issue, and he would not renounce the Pope. He was committed to the Tower, where he wrote a beautiful Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Charged with high treason, he refused to accept the Act of Supremacy, and he was beheaded on Tower Hill on July the 6th, 1535, after telling the people that he died 'in and for the faith of the Catholic Church'.

There is a touch of paradox in the fact that the memory of a man so keen in advocating practical reforms is linked with the word utopian, which has entered into the English language to describe political ideas which are too optimistic to be practicable. His Christian courage remains as a virtue to be admired and imitated in every age.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Church remained still powerful and majestic. It was not merely something that appealed to Schoolmen and theologians. It was throughout western and central Europe the only possible Church. The one country which might be called Protestant was Bohemia, and Bohemia was torn with strife within and without. Though the Papacy had become more political than religious, and more commercial than political, we must remember that by this time the conception of a papacy uncontaminated by nepotism and rapacity was virtually extinct in the minds of the people. The Church was the mother and guide of mankind, and the mismanagement of her affairs had not very widely shaken confidence in her authority. The clergy and the monks touched every class of society, and numerous new churches and charitable institutions proved how closely the life of the people was linked with the observances of religion. Small reforms, chiefly affecting the religious orders, had been carried out with good results. But attempts to reform the Popes and papal government had proved feeble and futile, and ordinary people were not stirred by the learned doctors who wished for a constitutional limitation of papal jurisdiction. A new religious idea of overwhelming strength, intelligible to the masses, was needed if a radical change was to be effected, an idea which would gather around it something from all the social and intellectual movements of the time. That idea was manifested in Luther's presentation of St. Paul's doctrine of faith in Christ.