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An essay on the spirit and influence of the reformation. ...
An essay on the spirit and influence of the reformation Author:Charles de Villers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a prodigious noise, and terminated by covering the abettors of ignorance with shame. The Hebraists triumphed, Ulrich de flatten, a young gentleman of Franconia, ... more »warm and of great talents, a warrior, poet, scholar, and also theologian, on this occasion wrote the celebrated Letters from obscure Men (Epistolse virorum obscurorum'), a satire replete with spirit and point, which brought indelible disgrace on the opposite party. Reuchlin, and some others, were suspected of having contributed to them. Such were nearly the principal features in the picture of Europe, in respect of politics, religion, and intellectual improvement, at the time of the reformation. The Reformation. Catholicism was not a religion which had been given, completely formed, and at once, to a new people, where it might have acquired a uniform aspect. Christianity introduced at different times, into nations which differed greatly, had received a local modification from each, arising from the peculiar disposition of the nation. Thus the Roman language, introduced into the several countries of the empire, here met with the language of the Goths and Lombards; there, with that of the Celtse and Teutonic: in other places, with the Gallic, Saxon, or Cantabrian; and thus gradually became Italian, French, English, or Spanish. Christianity itself, during its successive transmutation into Roman catholicism, changed in its essence by the innovations of the court of Rome, and of the monks and theologians, did not everywhere undergo uniform variations. With a fundamental similitude in the principal dogmas, it acquired a different physiognomy in different places. Thus, even in our own times, the catholicism of Madrid does not entirely agree with that of Paris; nor is that of Rome similar to that of Vienna. In some places...« less