Reform Acts

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

2026 Editor's Note: This page uses language about other peoples, religions, or nationalities that was commonplace when the book was published and is offensive by today's standards. The text has been left exactly as it was printed, rather than cut or softened, so that the historical record — including how ordinary such language once was — is preserved. (Ed: ET 2026-07-22) a term applied to certain acts of the British Parliament by which the regulations as to the parliamentary representation of the people were altered, and especially to those of 1832, 1867, and 1884-1885. The first two acts provided both for an extension of the franchise and for a redistribution of seats. The Reform Act of 1832 disfranchised 56 rotten boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants each, and returning 111 members; 30 boroughs with less than 4,000 inhabitants, and two above that number, lost each a member, and thus 143 seats were obtained for distribution. Forty-three new boroughs were created, 22 of which received two members each, and 21 one member each. The county members for England and Wales were increased from 95 to 159, 26 of the large counties being divided, and a third member given to seven important county constituencies. Scotch and Irish Acts followed; the Scotch representation, fixed by the Act of Union at 45 was raised to 53 (30 of them given to counties and 23 to cities and boroughs), and the Irish members fixed by the Act of Union at 100, were increased to 105. The Reform Act of 1867 disfranchised 11 small English boroughs, took a member from 35 more, and two from Scotch counties, which with four seats obtained from boroughs disfranchised for corruption, gave 52 seats for redistribution. Five of these were given to as many large English and Scotch boroughs on the three-cornered system, and three to universities, the others to old or new county or borough divisions. Seven members were added to Scotland. There was no redistribution in Ireland. In the third successful effort for parliamentary reform, that of 1884-1885, the franchise and redistribution of seats constituted two distinct acts. The franchise bill received the royal assent on Dec. 6, 1884, and came into operation on Jan. 1, 1885. It established household and lodger franchise in the counties, introduced a service franchise, diminished, though it did not destroy, fagot voting, and made a uniform occupation franchise of $50 rent both in counties and in boroughs in place of the three formerly existing. It left untouched the 40-shilling freeholders of inheritance, and conferred votes on copyholders possessing ïand of greater value than $25 annually. By the Redistribution Act of 1885, 81 English, 2 Scotch, otch, and 22 Irish boroughs were totally disfranchised; 36 English and 3 Irish boroughs, each lost a member, as did two English counties; the city of London was reduced from four to two; six seats were obtained from places disfranchised for corruption, and the members of the House of Commons were increased by 12. The seats thus obtained for redistribution were 180. The great feature of the scheme which followed was the separation of populous boroughs and counties into divisions, each returning a single member. Only a few places hitherto with two members were left with the old arrangement. England has now 465 members, Wales 30, Scotland 72, and Ireland 103, the reduction from 105 occurring through the disfranchisement of Sligo and Cashel some years ago for corruption. REFORMATION. The religious revolution of the 16th century, known as the Reformation, is the greatest event in the history of civilization since Paganism gave place to Christianity as the faith of the leading nations of the world. It marks the supreme importance of this revolution that the age which preceded and the age which followed it belong to two different phases of the human spirit. With the Reformation begins what is distinctively known as Modern Europe, while the epoch that preceded it bears the equally distinctive designation of the Middle Ages. In the articles on Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII., Calvin, Knox, and others details will be found regarding the aims and methods of the revolution in the various countries where it declared itself. Here, therefore, it will be sufficient to indicate briefly the general causes which produced it, the special course and character it took among the different peoples, and its chief results for the human spirit at large. The central fact of the Reformation was the detachment from papal Christianity of the nations distinguished by the general name of Protestant. By this severance an order of things came to an end under which Christian Europe had been content to exist from the close of the 8th century. From the year 800, when, by a mutual understanding of their respective functions, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III., western Europe had come to regard the papacy as the essential condition of individual and corporate life, as a prime necessity in human affairs. Thus conceived, the power of the Church underlay all human relations. It was the consecration of the Church that constituted the family; the Church defined the relations of rulers and their subjects, and the Church was the final court of appeal on the ultimate questions of human life and destiny. In the nature of things such a power could never be realized as it was ideally conceived. Yet during the 11th and 12th centuries, the period when the power of the Popes was most adequate to their claims, they undoubtedly went far to make the idea a reality. But the energies of the human spirit were bound sooner or later to issue in developments with which mediawere fundamentally val conceptions irreconcilable. But in the 13th century along every line of man's activity, there were protests, conscious and unconscious, against the system typified in the Roman Church. The most remarkable of these protests was the order of ideas associated with the name of Joachim of Flora in Calabria 1202). Under the name of the (died 120 "Eternal Gospel" (used for the first time in 1254) these ideas ran a course which for a time seriously threatened the existence of the medieval Church. The new teaching struck at the very root of the papal system, for its essence was that the hour had come when a new dispensation, that of the Holy Spirit, should supersede the provisional Gospel delivered by Christ. During the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th century the influence of these ideas is traceable in every country of Christendom, and it was only the unflinching action of the Church that postponed its disintegration for over three centuries. Numerous sects which either sprang from or were quickened by this movement speak clearly to the revolutionary fever that had seized on men's spirits and was impelling them to other ideals than the traditions of Rome. Mainly the offspring of the third order of St. Francis, these sects swarmed throughout every Christian country under the names of Beguins, Bekhards, Fratricelli, Flagellants, Lollards, Apostolic Brethren, etc., and everywhere spread discontent with the existing Church. Even John Knox (in answer to a letter by James Tyrie, a Scottish Jesuit) claims Joachim of Flora as an ally in the work which it was the labor of his own life to achieve the change of the papacy, and the promotion of what he deemed a pure Gospel. Simultaneously with this manifestation of revolutionary feeling there were tendencies in the sphere of pure thought in essential antagonism to the teaching of the Church. The labor of the thinkers of the Middle Ages was to reconcile faith, as inculcated by religious authority, with human reason as they found it embodied in the accessible writings of Aristotle. In the 13th century, the Arabic texts of Aristotle, and notably that of the great commentator Averrhoes, made their way into the Christian schools, and thenceforward a leaven of skepticism was a present element in all the universities of Europe. As a result of the teaching of Averrhoes, a name of the most sinister import to every true son of the Church, materialism and pantheism became common creeds among thinkers, and the notion spread even among intelligent laymen that Christianity was not the absolute thing the Church had taught them to believe. In Dante's (died 1321) fierce exclamation that the knife is the one reply to him who denies the immortality of the soul we have the outburst of a passionate faith in presence of a wide-spread libertinism of thought. But the most serious menace against the integrity of the papal system lay in the political development of Europe during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages. As the countries of western Europe became more and more individualized, their peoples grew every year into a fuller consciousness of distinct national interests and national ideals. While this was the tendency of the various nations, the Pope during these centuries gradually lost his position as the disinterested umpire of Europe, and sank into an Italian prince, with a temporal policy of his own which led him to seek allies among other potentates, as they fell in with his own special ends of the moment. But such alliances naturally gave offense to the princes excluded from them, and led to a suspicious discontent with the Roman see, which, as was afterward proved in the case of England, needed only the requisite occasion to flame into outright rebellion. The saying of Philip Augustus (died 1223) - "Happy Saladin, who has no Pope!"-expressed the feeling which every century grew stronger, that the Pope would become an impossible factor in European politics. To this feeling should be added the fact that, as the middle classes grew in intelligence and well-being they looked with envy on the immense wealth of the clergy, and grumbled at the large sums that annually went to the coffers of Rome. During the 14th and 15th centuries mediævalism gave every sign of a harmonic phase of human development. By the so-called Babylonish Captivity, when the papal residence was fixed for 70 years at Avignon (1305-1376), and by the Great Schism (1378-1417), during which the spectacle was seen of first two and afterward three Popes claiming to be the vicars of God on earth, the papacy suffered a loss of prestige in the eyes of all Europe which it never afterward fully recovered. It was the further misfortune of the Church during this eclipse of its ancient glory that spiritual life seemed to have gone out of every rank of its clergy. Testimonies from every country prove beyond question that by the end of the 15th century the clergy had become often illy, sometimes grossly, unfit to be the spiritual guides of the people. The sources of intellectual life had equally failed whereever the old philosophy authorized by the Church continued to be the subject of teaching and study. In the later half of the 15th century scholasticism had become the veriest casuistry which ever engaged the mind of man. In all the interests of man's well-being, therefore, a renaissance was needed to evoke new motives and supply new ideals which should lift humanity to a higher plane of endeavor. Such a renaissance came and evolutionally the Church did not prove equal to suppressing this second burst of life as it had suppressed that of the 12th and 13th centuries. It was again in Italy that the new life first declared itself. While N. of the Alps scholasticism reigned in all the schools, the movement known as the Renaissance had in Italy been in full course for above a century. In itself the Renaissance was as far as possible from leading men to higher ideals in religion, yet in two of its results it gave a direct impetus to the Reformation. Inspired by the life of antiquity, the humanism of the Renaissance paganized the Church and quickened that moral disintegration which was the prime cause of the religious revolution. On the other hand, through its opening of men's minds by new studies, and new measures of things, the Renaissance lightened the load of tradition, and made a new departure in the life of Christendom a less formidable conception. In Erasmus (1467-1536), who has always been regarded as a true nursing father of the Reformation, we clearly discern these two results of the revival of the ancient literatures. In so many words he states his grave fears lest the Church should be wholly paganized by the universal imitation of classical modes of thought and speech; while his own unsparing criticism of the Church and its traditions proves how much he owed to the so-called "new learning." The very zeal with which the revival of antiquity was pursued in Italy was itself a countercheck to religious reform in the country that of all others needed it the most. All contemporary literature proves that during the later part of the 15th and the opening of the 16th century the court of Rome was as profoundly immoral as that of any of the heathen emperors had been in the same city. The spiritual claims of the papacy were the jest of ecclesiastics themselves. "This fable of Christ," a certain dignitary of the Church is reported to have said in the Vatican, "has been to us a source of great gain." Among the Italian people, however, there was never the slightest indication of a national movement toward any serious breach with the papacy. The religious melodrama enacted by Savonarola at Florence (1489-1498) never struck at the central ideas of papal Christianity; and Savonarola, besides, never like Luther or Knox woke a deep response in the national consciousness. While in Italy, therefore, there was no widespread religious quickening as in other countries of Christendom, there was no political reason such as elsewhere produced a breach with the papacy. For the Italian people the Pope was not a foreign prince with temporal interests of his own conflicting with those of the nation at large. The different republics which partitioned the country might at times regard the Pope as an enemy to their individual ambitions; but the nation as a whole was fully conscious of the honor of having the vicar of God in their midst, and as in the past they had stood by him against the emperors, so in the great religious revolution of the 16th century they also remained faithful to him throughout the gradual dismemberment of his spiritual dominion. Of the countries N. of the Alps Germany was the first to be widely influenced by that revival of learning which had its origin in Italy. In Germany, however, the new spirit wrought under fundamentally different conditions, and lighted the way to vastly different issues. There was every reason why Germany should lead the way in the schism from Rome. Outside Italy Germany was the country where every abuse of the medieval Church was seen in its fatalest form. The ignorance and sensuality of the clergy, the scandalous sale of livings, the disproportionate papal exactions-all these evils came to be vividly realized by the quickened consciousness of the nation. Between Rome and Germany, moreover, an antagonism existed in the very conditions from which mediævalism had sprung. It was in virtue of the mutual understanding between Pope and emperor that the Church came to fill the place it did in western Europe. But almost from the first the interests of Rome and the empire had been in collision, so that Pope and emperor came to be mere rivals for the first place ce among the Western powers. It was natural, therefore, that in Germany Rome should be regarded with a jealousy and suspicion which might easily grow into irreconcilable hostility. These workings of the national mind found intensified expression in the acts and writings of Martin Luther, who, with a genius and audacity which have given him a place among the molders of man's destinies, proclaimed the need of a new departure in the religious life of humanity. In rejecting the traditional claims of the papacy Luther at the same time supplied a new principle by which, as he contended, a higher and truer life of the soul might be lived. By his doctrine of Justification by Faith Luther threw each individual on his own responsibility for the reason and life which is intrusted to him. Hitherto the deep est concerns of men had been inextricably bound up with Pope and priest, and in this had lain the essential principle of medieval Christianity. By the new principle Luther made the Pope no longer an indispensable factor in individual or corporate life, and thus initiated a new phase in the development of society. As was to be expected, this principle, so organic in its working, cleft the German nation in twain, and gave rise to a struggle e which did not close till more than a century after the death of Luther himself. Luther's attack on the sale of indulgences (1517), the burning of the papal bull (1520), Luther's condemnation by the Emperor Charles V. at the Diet of Worms (1521), his temporary triumph at the first Diet of Spires in 1526 (the beginning of modern Germany, according to Ranke), the confession of the Protestant faith at Augsburg (1530), are the outstanding events in the contest closed by the peace of Augsburg in 1555, nine years after Luther's own death, but again renewed in the disastrous Th Thirty Years' War (1619-1648), and finally settled by the peace of Westphalia (1648). The religious revolt of Germany left no country of Christendom unmoved. Before the 16th century had closed the bulk of the Teutonic peoples had followed her example and broken with the papacy. Under one aspect, indeed, the Reformation may almost be regarded as a Teutonic revolt against the domination of the Latin races. Between 1525 and 1560 Denmark and Sweden, taking the occasion of a political revolution, both declared for Protestantism; and in 1581, the United Provinces definitively threw off their double allegiance to Spain and the Pope. But it is more important to trace the course of the revolution in the great powers of the West. In Spain heresy of all kinds had no chance of finding a home. In its hated Inquisition, reorganized in 1478, it had an institution ready made for effectually dealing with all attempts at reform or revolution. Luther found followers in Spain as in other countries; but they were literally extinguished before their voices could be heard, and of all the great powers Spain profited least by the evolutionary spirit of the Reformation. Much more interesting and important is the history of religious reform in France. Between 1520 and 1530, the period of Luther's greatest activity, both renaissance and reform found a firm footing in France, and so many circumstances seemed to favor the future of both that for a time it was doubtful with which side the victory would eventually lie. On the one side was the University of Paris, which throughout the Middle Ages had claimed for itself the right-denied to the Pope himself-of sovereign decree on the truth or falsity of all religious doctrine. As its decrees had in every case the strenuous support of the Parliament of Paris, the university was a formidable force to be forr reckoned with by every innovator in studies or religion. In 1519 Luther's dispute with Eck had been referred to the doctors of Paris for decision, and their judgment, delayed for two years, had been the unqualified censure of Luther's position. Thenceforward every advocate of the new religion, and they daily grew in numbers, especially among the middle class, both in Paris and in the provinces, was pursued by the fixed disapproval of the Parliament and the university. On the other hand, the king (Francis I.), eagerly encouraged by his famous sister, Margaret of Navarre, who herself had strong Protestant leanings, was at first disposed to use the new religious movement as a weapon to his hand in his dealings with the court of Rome. In the end Francis saw that separation from Rome meant the disruption of the French nation, and after 1534 he resolutely set himself to the extermination of every heretic in his dominions. His son and successor, Henry II. (1547- 1559), carried out his policy with even greater rigor, but in spite of all efforts to suppress them the French Protestants grew into a body formidable alike by their position, wealth, and intelligence. The Huguenot wars, the massacre of St. Bartholomew new (1572), and the Edict of Nantes (1598), are the outstanding events of this long struggle, which, involving political as well as religious questions of the first importance, threatened the very existence of France by suggesting to Philip II. the possibility of annexing the divided country as a province of Spain. By the edict of Nantes the French Protestants attained a certain measure of religious freedom; by its revocation in 1685 Protestantism was stamped out of the country, and France thus deprived of the most divaricating elements in its society. The religious revolution in Switzerland is second only to that of Germany in its direct influence on the subsequent fortunes of the European nations. In Switzerland we have the case of a double revolt from Rome springing from the same conditions, yet each having a character and an animating soul of its own. At Zurich, as early as 1519, and independently of Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, who, according to Ranke, combined in himself the best elements of renaissance and reform, gave rise to a movement which split the Swiss cantons into two hostile sections, and issued in the peace of Cappel (1531), which permitted to each canton the choice of its own form of faith. More important than the movement of Zwingli at Zurich is that associated with Calvin and Geneva. As in almost every other case of revolt, political considerations wrought with religious zeal in the breach of Geneva with Rome. Before 1530 the town had received the new religion from French refugees, who thus gave its peculiar character to the creed eventually associated with Calvin and Geneva. But it was in the successful effort of the town in throwing off the yoke of the Catholic Dukes of Savoy (1534) that it found itself forced to join the great Protestant schism, and to fashion a civil and religious polity compatible with an independent corporate life. It was in the accomplishment of this task that Calvin proved himself the great consolidator of the tendencies that underlay the Protestant movement. Inspired by Calvin, it was the pre-eminent destiny of Geneva at once to produce a reasoned civil and religious creed and a type of Christian believer that offered a solid front against the vast powers still at the command of the Roman see, and assured to Protestantism its own independent course in the history of mankind. In 1532 the schism of England from Rome also became an accomplished fact. In this result had issued the negotiations of Henry VIII. with Pope Clement VII. for his divorce from Catharine of Aragon. But the view summed up in Gray's line, "And gospel light first dawned from Bullen's eyes," implies a totally inadequate recognition of the many forces that went to produce the English Reformation. The king's divorce was the mere occasion of what must sooner or later have been the only solution of England's relations with the papacy. In England all the forces, in greater or less degree, were at work which had produced the religious revolutions in Germany. As in Germany, the Church alike in its teaching and practice no longer represented the highest consciousness of the nation. It has of late been shown that its degradation was far from being so general or so complete as the official reports of Henry had seemed to prove; yet the state to which it had come was clearly such as to lend some countenance to the most drastic measure against it. By the end of the 15th century, also, the Renaissance, which was everywhere the solvent of tradition, had found its representatives in England. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and Sir Thomas More were all men more or less emancipated from mediævalism, though none of them broke communion with Rome. Both More and Colet spoke their minds freely on the unworthy lives of the clergy; and the latter by his foundation of St. Paul's School in 1510, and by his placing it under lay supervision, took a step of the highest importance in the direction of the new order. But it is in the political development of England that we find the adequate explanation of her final breach with Rome. For centuries the Pope had come to be more and more regarded as a foreign prince, whose powers, as he claimed the right to exercise them over Englishmen and English property, were incompatible with English English interests and English liberty. When Clement VII., therefore, declared against the divorce from Catharine, Henry regarded the decision not as the oracle of Christendom, but as the counsel of an earthly prince whose own interests left him no other alternative. The breach with Rome was thus inevitable. Henry himself to the close of his life professed to have broken with the old only in the one point of the headship of the Church. In the reign of Edward VI. a clear departure was made from the doctrinal system of the ancient Church; but the temporary reaction under Mary showed how strong a hold that system still possessed on the hearts of the people. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 it was only her prudent policy that saved the country from the internecine divisions of France and Germany. Three parties were equally bent on realizing their own conceptions of a religious settlement. The adherents of the old religion, who still probably made a half of the people, had not lost hope of a return to the old spiritual allegiance. Those who had renounced the papacy themselves made two distinct parties, each bent on ends so conflicting, that it was evident from the first that they could never work in common. The governing principle of the one party, from which eventually sprang the Church of England, was to minimize the differences between the old faith and the new, and as far as possible to maintain the continuity of the religious tradition in the country. The other, which from Calvin and drew its inspiration ion Geneva, and was afterward known as the Puritan party, aimed at a root and branch rejection of papal Christianity, as at once in the interest of what they thought a purer creed, and as the only safeguard against a return to the old It was owing to her constitution. politic handling of these conflicting parties that at Elizabeth's death England was of one mind regarding the question of the papal supremacy, and that the severance from Rome became ent of a definitive fact in the development By happy turns of the country. events, such as her excommunication by Pius V. in 1570, and by the extraordinary issue of the Spanish Armada in 1588, not only was the number of Catholics reduced, but such as still clung to the ancient faith thenceforward put their allegiance to their native prince before It was this any claim of the Roman see. final triumph of the Protestant revolution in England that saved the movement in all the other countries of Europe. The triumph of the Protestant movement in Scotland is likewise a fact of the first importance in European history. In Scotland from the very beginning of Luther's revolt, we find the presence of the same elements which elsewhere led to revolution. As in other countries, the Scotch clergy had lost the respect of the country. As early as 1525 Lutheran books were so widely read that an act of Parliament was passed forbidding their importation. The very efforts of the Church to stamp out the new heresy, as in the burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1528, and of George Wishart in 1546, served only to hasten the turn of affairs which it had dreaded. Jealousy of the wealth and political influence of the to throw in clergy disposed the nobility ility their lot with the party of revolution. When in 1559 Knox returned from his long sojourn abroad, his unflinching zeal and personal force supplied the momentum that was needed to complete a revolution already in full course; and in the following year Protestantism was formally established as the religion of the country. The consequences of this revolution extended far beyond Scotland. Had Mary on her return in 1561 found Scotland united in the Catholic faith, she would have commanded the destinies Elizabeth could never have of England. Eliza effected a religious sett gious settlement, and, with England paralyzed, Protestantism could not have held its own against the united forces of Catholicism. Thus, by the middle of the 16th century, it seemed as if the revolution must sweep all before it, and the papal system be as completely effaced by Protestantism as paganism had been effaced by Christianity. At the beginning of the revolt the authorities of the ancient Church did not fully realize that the forces arrayed against them menaced their very existence. When the true extent of the danger was realized the Church displayed all the resources of an institution whose roots were in the very heart of Christendom, and which, alike by its traditions and by its special adapta tions to the wants of the human spirit, appealed to the deepest instincts of a large section of all the peoples eoples of western Europe. The Society of Jesus founded in 1540, supplied an army of enthusiasts, whose policy and devotion saved Rome from dissolution. By the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545- 1563), inspired by the spirit and aims of the Jesuits, the Church reaffirmed its traditional teaching, conceding nothing either to renaissance or reform; and a succession of Popes during the later half of the 16th century carried out with the zeal worthy of the better ages of the papacy the policy marked out for them by the Jesuits. Through the disunion of the Protestants and the strenuous efforts of the papacy, the middle of the 16th century saw the tide of revolution checked; and in certain countries, more especially in Germany, the Jesuits even gained ground which had been lost. By the close of the same century Europe was portioned between the two religions almost by the same dividing lines as exist at the present day. It has been said that the central fact of the religious revolution of the 16th century was the severance of the Protestant nations from the Roman see; but the great schism inevitably led to issues of which the Protestant reformers never dreamed, and which they would have denounced in as unqualified terms as any theologian of the medieval Church. The reform of religion preached by Luther or Calvin implied no real change in the modes of thought that distinguished mediævalism. Their theology was but another form of scholasticism, their attitude to the classical tradition or to any departure from their own conception of the scheme of things was precisely that of the Schoolmen trained on the Decretals and Aristotle. For an infallible they substituted the Bible as Church rch the unerring expression of God's reinterpretation of the Bible they left to the individual con of lation to man; the sciousness. This freedom was sity only nominal, since tho any Protestant Church were members only on condition of their accepting the Church's interpretation of the contents of the Bible, and since each different Church deemed itself the special depositary of the only true conception of the perfect will of God. Nevertheless, it was from this attitude of the Protestant reformers to the Bible that the developments of modern thought sprang. A reformer like John Knox would have stamped out every form of thought hostile to his own synthesis of things divine and human; but it was not in the power of the Protestant system to do what had been so effectually done by the Church of the Middle Ages. In the medieval conception Church and State made one organism; what menaced the life of the one menaced the life of the other. Hence the State was at the Church's bidding whenever its arm was needed to deal with any suggestion of heresy. But having no great central head, such an organic union was impossible for any Protestant Church, and religious error could not be regarded as a crime against the existing government. So complete ete the revolution wrought by this was changed relation of Church and State that toleration of different creeds, and not an iron uniformity, was in time seen to be the indispensable condition of civil society. But in this lies the fundamental distinction between mediævalism and the modern spirit. Mediævalism rested on the belief that society was threatened if any of its members questioned the body of truth of which the Church was the custodian; it is the distinctive principle of the modern spirit that truth shall be followed wherever facts are believed to lead.