Note 35 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

It is noteworthy that Zwingli, the most open-minded of the Reformers, owed his relative enlightenment to his general humanist culture,35 and in particular to the influence of Pico della Mirandola and of Erasmus. It has even been argued that his whole theological system is derived from Pico,36 but it appears to have been from Erasmus that he drew his semi-rationalistic view of the eucharist,37 a development of that of Berengar, representing it as a simple commemoration. Such thinking was far from the “spirit of the Reformation”; and Luther, after the Colloquy of Marburg (1529), in which he and Melanchthon debated against Zwingli and Oecolampadius, spoke of those “Sacramentarians” as “not only liars, but the very incarnation of lying, deceit, and hypocrisy.”38 Zwingli’s language is less ferocious; but it is confessed of him that he too practised coercion against minorities in the case alike of the Anabaptists and of the monasteries and nunneries, and even in the establishment of his reformed eucharist.39 The expulsion of the nuns of St. Katherinenthal in particular was an act of sheer tyranny; and the outcome of the methods enforced by him at Zürich was the bitter hostility of the five Forest Cantons, which remained Catholic. In war with them he lost his life; and after his death (1531) his sacramental doctrine rapidly disappeared from Swiss and Continental Protestantism,40 even as it failed to make headway in England.41 At his fall “the words of triumph and cursing used by Lutherans and others were shameful and almost inhuman.”42 In the sequel, for sheer lack of a rational foundation, the other Protestant sects in turn fell to furious dissension and persecution, some apparently finding their sole bond of union in hatred of the rest.