©2018 Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Luther and his contemporaries claimed they had been delegated by God to restore Primitive Christianity as Christ and the Apostles had taught it.
Let us examine the merits of this assumption.
What then did the Reformation accomplish? What primitive ideas, principles and practices did it restore to mankind in the sixteenth century?
The impartial reader would be compelled to admit it restored all the dominant ideas, hypotheses and effects of the pagan system of the Roman Empire. The fundamental principles of the pagan system were selfishness, love of power, riches, pomp, excitement, the pursuit of pleasure and a hatred and contempt for everything that stood in the way of one’s interests or passions. The pagan subjects of the Caesars delighted in disputes, conflicts and bloody civil wars. For the glory of their system and their national loyalty, they never hesitated to plunge the nations into fierce civil wars and kill millions of innocent people.
Contrast and compare the principles and results of both systems — of Luther’s Reformation and that of the pagan Roman Empire — and you will be compelled to admit Luther and his revolutionary imitators revived primitive paganism instead of primitive Christianity. Paganism was intolerant, arrogant, cruel, grasping, ostentatious, ambitious, warlike, greedy and worldly; the Protestant system exhibited the very same characteristics.
The religion and the priesthood of Jesus was ridiculed and attacked by the pagans of the first three hundred years of the Christian era. The Reformation revived, in all the original harshness, the same scorn, lies and persecutions against the same religion, the same Church and the same ecclesiastical body.
The cultured idolaters of the Augustan age were an enterprising, thrifty, prosperous and rich people; so, as a general rule, have been the advocates of Protestantism. In material prosperity, in the rich treasures and luxuries of earth, the pantheistic aristocrats of the first three centuries of the Christian era were far ahead of the humble followers and disciples of Christ; nor have the Protestant fatalists of the past almost five centuries lagged behind their primitive models.
The highly cultivated aristocrats of the golden age recognized no other authority in religion or morals than their own personal desires and opinions; neither did the followers of the Reformation.
Roman civilization, up until the invasion of the barbarians, was almost exclusively concerned with material prosperity, and morals were universally corrupt. Protestant civilization has developed in much the same direction.
The prominent idea of all the Reformers was the overthrow of the Catholic Church. To accomplish this, every evil passion was invoked, the truths of Christianity were set aside and warlike organizations were established. The question was not, “What is truth?” but “What does the Catholic Church teach and how can we undermine those teachings?” And all the power of the Reformers was arrayed against the Church.
This purely biased idea has dominated all the crusades of the Protestants down to the present time. Although the immediate result of the Reformation was the dividing of Christendom into innumerable sects, each hating the other, the hatred toward Catholicism was common to all. In the midst of their fiercest struggles, they could always pause for the moment and combine their forces to strike a blow against the ancient Church. On this one point — hatred of Catholicism — the sects have always been together.