288                   MODERN  CIVILIZATION

"The Christian must close his eyes, his ears, all the
senses, and ask nothing more." The reformers
brought reproaches against the church of their owr
time, not on account of too much faith, but on accoum
of too little.

The Reformation was not a political revolutior
arranged in order to free the nations from an absolute
power. When the peasants of Germany rose in rebel-
lion in the name of the Scriptures, Luther vigorousl}
condemned them. "Whatever may be the rights oJ
the peasants, they are culpable on account of the very
act of making the demand; they ought to suffer and
be silent, if they want to be Christians. The Chris-
tian lets himself be robbed, flayed, killed, for he is a
martyr on the earth. The doctrine of resistance is a
pagan doctrine; the Greeks and the Romans preached
it, but the Gospel has nothing in common with natural
rights."

The reformers did not want to give freedom to
reason, nor to reform the state. They even pretended
that they would make no innovations in religion, but
that they wanted only to re-establish the Christian
faith in its primitive purity. They rejected the tradi-
tions taught by tfie church, not that they had found
these traditions unreasonable, but they believed them to
be contrary to the word of God. They pretended to
go back fifteen centuries, to the time of the apostles.
The church had modified the religion of Christ, they
went therefore to the Holy Scriptures in order to
search for the pure doctrine; it was no longer sufficient
for them to read it in the Latin translation, as had been
done up to that time; they insisted upon reading the