Note 84 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

To sum up. In Germany Protestantism failed alike as a moral and as an intellectual reform. The lack of any general moral motive in the ecclesiastical revolution is sufficiently proved by the general dissolution of conduct which, on the express admission of Luther, followed upon it.84 This was quite apart from the special disorders of the Anabaptist movement, which, on the other hand, contained elements of moral and religious rationalism, as against Bibliolatry, that have been little recognized.85 Of that movement the summing-up is that, like the Lutheran, it turned to evil because of sheer lack of rationalism. Among its earlier leaders were men such as Denk, morally and temperamentally on a higher plane than any of the Lutherans. But Anabaptism too was fundamentally scriptural and revelationist, not rational; and it miscarried in its own way even more hopelessly than the theological “reform.” Lutheranism, renouncing the rational and ethical hope of social betterment, ran to insane dissension over irrational dogma; Anabaptism, ignorantly attaching the hope of social betterment to religious delusion, ran to irrational social schemes, ending in anarchy, massacre, and extinction. But the Lutheran failure was intellectually and morally no less complete. Luther was with good reason ill at ease about his cause when he died in 1546; and Melanchthon, dying in 1560, declared himself glad to be set free from the rabies theologorum.86