ABSTRACT

I have spoken of new voices which began to be uplifted soon after the Reformation of Luther had become an accomplished fact: they were voices of a new spirit making its presence known, as if a gate had opened suddenly on new paths of doctrine or a sealed fountain had been loosened and its figurative waters were flowing through many minds of the age. I trust that this imagery will not suffer confusion or give birth thereto. If we care to affirm that the Reformation was itself a light, it was stained and clouded; if we think that it made for liberation, it was more especially the freedom to forge new chains and bonds; if we look to the land of reform for the fruits it bore, we shall find that the period which intervened between the death of Luther and the Thirty Years’ War was filled in the German Fatherland with a raging strife of sects. It would seem that the Holy Scriptures had come into the hands of everyone only to beget chaos: prophets, reformers and zealots sprang up on every side; and perhaps the most sorry cohort in all the fustian pageant was that which fell a prey to Second Advent mania, seeing portents in stars of heaven and omens innumerable in imagined meteors of mind. I am presumably the only person in English-speaking countries who has seen with his own eye the Naometria of Simon Studion 1 —from the date of its completion in 1604 to this present day of grace; and that unprinted document offers unawares an eloquent picture of its epoch, the spirit and mentality of which are reproduced and sometimes exaggerated in printed works by the score: a madder world, my masters, there never was through all the Christian centuries. 2