least, nearly all the praiseworthy regulations and enactments of Innocent fell to the ground and were overthrown, by the indolence and the yielding temper of Alexander VIII. of the Ottoboni family, who was created pope in the year 1689.8 Innocent XII. of the family of Pignatelli, a good man, and possessed of fine talents, who succeeded Alexander, in the year 1691, wished to restore the regulations of Innocent XI. to their authority; and did partially restore them. But he, too, had to learn, that the wisest and most vigorous pontiffs are inadequate to cure the maladies of the court and church of Rome; nor did posterity long enjoy the benefits that he provided. Quite at the end of the century, 1699', Clement XI. of the family of Albani, was placed at the head of the Romish church. He was clearly the most learned of the cardinals, and not inferior to any of the preceding pontiffs in wisdom, mildness, and desire to reign well. Yet he was so far from strenuously opposing the inveterate maladies and the unseemly regulations of the Romish church, that, indiscreetly, and, as he supposed, for the glory and security of the church, i. e. of the head of the church, he rather admitted many things, which conduce to its dishonour, and which show that even the better sort of pontiffs, through their zeal to preserve or to augment their dignity and honour, may easily fall into the greatest errors and faults.2 be read, he always gave out that he was sick. His life was written by Philip Bonamici, the papal secretary of the Latin Briefs, with design, probably, to favour his canonization, in which business he was the Postulator: and it was entitled Commentar. de Vita et Rebus gestis venerab. Servi Dei, Innocentii XI. Pont. Max. Rome, 1776, 8vo. Schl.] 8 [1689-1691. Tr.-Alexander VIII. restored nepotism, condemned the Jesuitical error of philosophical sin, and benefited the Vatican library, by purchasing the library of queen Christina. Schl.] [1691-1700. Tr.] Cardinal H. Noris says much respecting Innocent XII., his election, character, and morals, in his Epistles; published in his Works, tom. v. p. 362.365.370.373.380. [His hostility to nepotism, and his inflexibility, his strictness, and his frugality, were as great as those of Innocent XI. His strictness he manifested, in particular, by forbidding the clergy to wear wigs, and by requiring the monks to live according to their rules. He was so little disposed to burn heretics, that the Inquisition began to doubt his orthodoxy; and when he wished to protect Molinos, they by commissioners put this question to him, What did Aloysius Pigniatelli believe? Schl.] 1 [A. D. 1701-1721. Tr.] There were published the last year [A. D. 1752], in French, two biographies of Clement XI.; the one composed by the celebrated Lafitau, bishop of Sisteron in France, Vie de Clément XI. Padua, 1752, 2 vols. 8vo; the other composed by Reboulet, chancellor of Avignon, Histoire de Clément XI. Avignon, 1752, 2 vols. 4to. Both (but especially the latter) are written with elegance; both contain many historical errors; which French historians are commonly not duly careful to avoid both are not so much histories as panegyrics; yet such, that discerning readers can easily discover, that, though very discreet, Clement, from a desire to confirm and exalt the pontifical majesty, did many things very imprudently, and by his own § 2. The pains taken by the Romish church to extend its power among the barbarous nations that were ignorant of Christianity, have been already noticed. We have, therefore, now, only to describe its care and efforts to recover its lost possessions, and to bring the protestants under subjection. And for this, its efforts were astonishingly great and various. In the struggle, it resorted to the power of genius, to arms and violence, to promises, to flatteries, to disputations, and to wiles and fallacies; but for the most part, with little success. In the first place, in order to demonstrate the justice of that war, which it had long been preparing to carry on by means of the house of Austria against the followers of the purer faith, it in part suffered, and in part caused, the peace settled with the protestants by Charles V. to be assailed by Casper Scioppius, a perfidious but learned man, by the Jesuits, Adam Tanner, Anthony Possevin, Balthazar Hager, Thomas Hederick, Laurence Forer, the jurists of Dillingen, and by others. For it wished people to believe, that this treaty of peace had no legitimate force; and that it was violated and rendered null, by the protestants themselves, because they had either corrupted or forsaken the Augsburg Confession.3 This malicious charge was repelled, privately, by many Lutheran divines; and publicly, in 1628 and 1631, by order of John George, elector of Saxony, in two volumes, accurately drawn up by Matthew Hoe ; which were called the Lutherans' defence of the apple of their eye, to indicate the importance of the subject. The assailants, however, did not retreat; but continued to dress up their bad cause in numerous books, written for the most part in an uncourteous and sarcastic style. And on the other hand, many of the Lutherans exposed their sophisms and invectives. § 3. The religious war, which the pontiffs had for a long time been projecting by means of the Austrians and Spaniards, commenced in the Austrian territories; where those who had renounced the Romish religion were, near the beginning of the century, oppressed in numberless ways by their adversaries, with impunity, and were divested of all their rights.5 Most of fault brought much vexation on himself. 3 Respecting these writings, see, besides others, Christ. Aug. Salig's Historie der August. Confession, vol. i. b. iv. ch. iii. p. 768, &c. [See also Schlegel's notes to this paragraph. Tr.] Defensio pupilla Evangelicæ. 5 What occurred in Austria itself, is laboriously narrated by Bern. Raupach, The them had neither resolution nor ability to defend their cause, though guaranteed by the most solemn treaties and laws. Bohemians alone, when they perceived it to be the fixed purpose of the adherents of the pope, to deprive them of all liberty of worshipping God according to the dictates of their consciences, though this was purchased with a prodigious expense of blood by their fathers, and but recently confirmed to them by royal charter, resolved to resist the enemies of their souls, with force and arms. Therefore, having entered into a league, they ventured courageously to avenge the wrongs done to them and to their religion. And that they sometimes went further than discretion, or the precepts of that religion which they defended, would justify, no one will deny. This boldness terrified their adversaries, but did not entirely dismay them. The Bohemians, therefore, in order to pluck up the very roots of their sufferings, when the emperor Matthias died in 1619, thought it their duty, to elect for their sovereign one who was not a Roman catholic. This they thought themselves entitled to do, by the ancient privileges of the nation, which had been accustomed to elect its sovereigns by a free suffrage, and not to receive such as came in the common course of nature. In consequence Frederic V. the electoral prince Palatine, who professed the Reformed religion, was chosen, and solemnly crowned, this very year at Prague.6 § 4. But this step, from which the Bohemians anticipated security to their cause, brought ruin upon their new king; and upon themselves various calamities, among which was that most dreaded by them, the loss of a religion purged of the Romish corruptions. Frederic, being vanquished by the imperial forces at Prague, in the year 1620, lost not only the kingdom that he had occupied, but also his hereditary dominions; and now an exile, had to give up his very flourishing territories, together in his Austria Evangelica, written in German. The sufferings of the friends of a purer faith, in Styria, Moravia, and Carinthia, and the arts by which they were utterly suppressed, the same diligent and pious writer intended to have described, from published and unpublished documents; but death prevented him. [Something on the subject, as far down as the year 1564, to which date Raupach had arrived when death overtook him, Dr. Winkler has left us, in his Anecdota Hist. Eccles. pt. viii. p. 233, &c. 6 Here, in addition to the writers of the ecclesiastical history of this century, Andrew Carolus, and Jo. Wolfg. Jaegerus, see Burch. Gotth. Struve's Syntagma Histor. German. p. 1487. 1510. 1523. 1538, &c. and the authors he cites. Add Mich. la Vassor, an accurate writer's Histoire de Louis XIII. tom. iii. p. 223, &c. with his treasures, to be depopulated and plundered by the Austrians and Bavarians. Many of the Bohemians were punished with imprisonment, exile, confiscation of their property, and death and the whole nation, from that time onward, was compelled to follow the religion of the conqueror, and to obey the decrees of the Roman pontiff. The Austrians would have obtained a much less easy victory, nay, would have been obliged at least to give better terms to the Bohemians, if they had not been aided and assisted by John George I., the elector of Saxony; who was influenced both by his hatred of the Reformed religion, and by other motives of a political nature. This overthrow of the prince Palatine was the commencement of the thirty years' war which occasioned so much misery to Germany. For some of the German princes entered into a league with the king of Denmark, and defended in war against the emperor the cause of the prince Palatine; who, they maintained, was unjustly de Here may be consulted, the Commentarii de bello Bohemico Germanico ab anno Chr. 1617 ad ann. Chr. 1630, 4to. Le Vassor's Histoire de Louis XIII. tom. iii. p. 444, &c. Compare, also, on many points of these affairs, Abraham Scultetus' Narratio Apologetica de Curriculo Vitæ suæ, p. 86, &c. It is a matter of notoriety, that the Roman catholics, and particularly the Jesuit Martin Becan induced Matthias Hoe, who was an Austrian by birth, and chaplain to the elector of Saxony, to make it appear to his master, that the cause of the Palatinate, as being that of the Reformed religion, was both unrighteous and injurious to the Lutheran religion; and to persuade him to espouse the cause of Austria. See the Unschuldige Nachricht. A. D. 1747, p. 858. [This Scultetus was the known court preacher to the unfortunate king of Bohemia; and he is said to have contributed much to his resolving to accept the Bohemian crown. Yet this last, Scultetus denied; though he admitted, that he subsequently commended the king for having taken that resolution, and in one of his sermons, exhorted him to manly courage. Matthias Hoe of Hoeneg, of noble Austrian birth, burned with the most terrible religious hatred, and actually abhorred the Reformed, more than he did the Roman catholics. To be convinced of this, we need only to read his Manifest Proofs, that the Calvinists harmonize with the Arians and the Turks; or his Thoughts respecting the Heilbron League of the protestant states with Sweden; which last piece is in the Unschuldige Nachrichten, vol. xxxiv. p. 570-581. These traits in his character were known; and perhaps also, the susceptibility of his heart in respect to gold. And hence the Jesuitical emissaries, and particularly Becan, were able, (by their unassuming and flattering letters, in which they represented the misfortune it would be, to have the Bohemians fall under the dominion of a Reformed prince,) to give such a direction to his mind, that he exerted himself against the Reformed, and hindered his master from entering into a league with them. His master was attached to the Evangelical Lutheran faith, was very conscientious, and believed simply whatever his confessor said, by whom (as it is expressed in the above cited Thoughts, &c.) he inquired of the Lord. The Austrian gold, at the same time, may also have had considerable influence on the court preacher's eloquence. At least it is openly stated, that the court preacher afterwards received 10,000 dollars, from the imperial court, to divest the elector of those scruples of conscience, which might cause him [to oppose] the peace of Prague, so injurious to the common cause. See Puffendorf, Rerum Suecicar. lib. vii. p. 193. Schl.] prived of his hereditary dominions. For they contended, that this prince, by invading Bohemia, had not injured the German emperor, but only the house of Austria; and that the emperor had no right to avenge the wrongs of that house by inflicting the penalties decreed against princes that should rebel against the Roman empire. But this war was not attended with success.8 § 5. The papists, therefore, being elated with the success of the emperor, were confident that the period most earnestly longed for had now arrived, when they could either destroy the whole mass of heretics, or bring them again under subjection to the church. The emperor, giving way too much to this impression, fearlessly carried his arms through a great part of Germany; and not only suffered his generals to harass with impunity those princes and states which manifested less docility than was agreeable to the Romish court, but also showed, by no doubtful indications, that the destruction of all Germanic liberty, civil and religious, was determined upon. And the fidelity of the elector of Saxony to the emperor, which he had abundantly evinced by his conduct towards the elector Palatine, and the disunion among the princes of Germany, encouraged the belief that the apparent obstructions to the accomplishment of this great object might be overcome with but moderate efforts. Hence, in the year 1629, Ferdinand II., to give some colour of justice to this religious war, issued that terrible decree, called, from its object, the Restitution-Edict; by which the Protestants were commanded to deliver up and restore to the Romish church all ecclesiastical property which they had gotten into their hands since the religious peace established in the preceding century. The Jesuits especially are said to have procured from the emperor this decree: and it is indeed ascertained, that this sect had proposed to claim a great part of the property demanded, as due to them in reward of their great services to the cause of religion; and hence arose a violent contest between them and the ancient possessors of that property. The sol [The principal historians of this war are Khevenhüller, Annales Fernandi; von Chemnitz, Swedish War; Puffendorf, de Rebus Suecicis; and the Histories of the thirty years' war, by Bougeant, Krause, Schiller, &c. See Henke's Kirchengesch. vol. iii. p. 321, note. Tr.] • This subject will be found illustrated by the authors mentioned in Struve's Syntagma Histor. German. p. 1553, &c. and by the others mentioned above. [See note, vol. iii. p. 157. Tr.] See Christ. Aug. Salig's Historie der Augsb. Confession, vol. i. book iv. ch. iii. § 25. p. 810, &c. |