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COMMENCEMENT OF PROTESTANT

LITERATURE.

KNOX. BUCHANAN.

WHEN once a route is opened, men will be found ready to enter upon it. Henry VIII speedily followed Luther. By establishing the most barbarous of religions and political tyrannies, he proved how much the Reformation favoured independence of opinion and liberty.

Though I have affirmed that the beautiful in literature will be found to exist in a greater or less degree in proportion as writers have approximated to the genius of the Roman church, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that the change of religion was succeeded by an immediate improvement in English literature. But why? Because the Reformation took place before

the language emerged from barbarism. All the great English writers appeared after the reign of Henry VIII.

But if the innovations in religion, on account of the period at which they were introduced, did not establish a very visible line of demacration in the ascending scale of literature, they traced a very deep line in the descending scale. The Reformation may be said to have severed the literature of Europe into two parts, which maintained a rivalry, and frequently an hostility, one to the other.

The examination and comparison of catholic and protestant literature, from the period of the division of ideas by the schism, would be a work useful to taste, curious to criticism, and calculated to throw a philosophic light on the history of the human mind. The literature of England, Scotland, Germany, Holland and calvinistic France, is not like the literature of that portion of France which remained faithful to her altars, nor like the literature of Spain and Italy. What would Milton, Addison, Hume, and Robertson have been if catholics? What would Racine, Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue have been if Protestants? These two opposite styles of literature have acted and reacted one upon the other. The eloquence of the pulpit, for example, has changed its course since the Reformation: the

pastors have preached morality and the priests dogma. The latter appeared to be intent only on defending themselves, harassed between Luther who pursued them and Voltaire who advanced to attack them face to face. The protestants went too far; the catholics have not gone far enough.

Politics and philosophy incroached upon the literature of the Reformation. That literature became formal and argumentative. Knox, an apostate Scottish priest, drew tears from the unfortunate Mary Stuart by his menacing fanaticism: he published The First Sound of the Trumpet against Female Government, and established the dogma of the sovereignty of the people in religious and political matters: plebis est religionem reformare: principes ob justas causas deponi possunt, &c. The bishop of Luçon, afterwards Cardinal Richelieu, refuted the principles of Knox in a controversial work. "Your

party," said he, "have written that, by right divine and human it is permitted to take the lives of impious kings; that it is a thing conformable to the word of God, that a private man may by special instinct kill a tyrant. But this is a detestable doctrine, in every point of view, and will never gain admittance into the catholic Church.

VOL. I.

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Buchanan unfolded the same principles as Knox in his Treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos. Knox and Buchanan lived at the commencement of the Reformation. They were the friends of Calvin and Theodore de Beza; the latter were contemporaries of Henry VIII, and both had written as catholics before they wrote as protestants. Knox was a priest, Buchanan was the domestic preceptor of Montaigne. It may be seen in the prose writings of the former, and in the poetry of the latter, how the new doctrines modified their genius.

THE WRITINGS OF HENRY VIII.

THE same metamorphosis of style and ideas may be seen in the writings of Henry VIII. How widely different are the "Institutions of a Christian Man," and the "Erudition of a Christian Name," from the Assertio septem Sacramentorum, a treatise, which Hume observes, "does no discredit to his capacity!" The Apostle King, in his impartiality, burned a Lutheran and a Catholic together.

We have seen how the anger of Luther was provoked by the work of Henry VIII. It is a fact scarcely known at the present day that the Assertio passed through a vast number of editions. It was published in 1521, and forty years afterwards (in the year 1562) it was reprinted in Paris. It is preceded by a dedication from the Iavincible Henry to Pope Leo X. Henry beseeches his Holiness to pardon him for having,

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