Janssen’s object was to show that the fifteenth century was not a period of moral or intellectual decrepitude, with a few ’Reformers before the Reformation’ crying like voices in the wilderness, but an era of healthy activity and abounding promise.  He describes the flourishing state of religious and secular education, the vitality of art, the comfort of the peasantry, and the prosperity of the towns.  On reaching the sixteenth century, he denounces the paganism of the Humanists and paints a terrible picture of the material and moral chaos into which Germany was plunged by the Lutheran revolt.  The later volumes are devoted to the era of the Counter-Revolution and present a canvas of unrelieved gloom, immorality and drunkenness, ignorance, superstition and violence.  Thus the story which opened with the bright colours of the fifteenth century closes in deep shadows, and the moral is drawn that Germany was ruined not by the Thirty Years War but by the Reformation.

Protestant historians fell upon the audacious iconoclast with fierce cries of anger, and had no difficulty in exposing his uncritical use of authorities, his habit of generalizing from isolated particulars, and his suppression of facts damaging to his own side.  But though it was a dexterous polemic, not a work of disinterested science, Janssen’s book has made it impossible for any self-respecting Protestant to write on the Reformation without knowing and weighing the Catholic side.  Of similar tendency though of far higher value is the monumental work in which Pastor is narrating the story of the Renaissance and sixteenth-century Popes from the Vatican archives, which neither Ranke nor Creighton had been able to employ.  No really objective picture of the Reformation can be painted by Catholic or Protestant; but a good deal of firm ground has been won, and the writings of Kawerau, the greatest of Lutheran scholars, inspire us with a confidence that no writings of the last generation deserved.

Though Ranke’s chief works had been published before the period to which this lecture is confined, his influence can be traced in almost every writer on modern history during the last half-century.  His greatest service to scholarship was to divorce the study of the past from the passions of the present, and, to quote the watchword of his first book, to relate what actually occurred.  A second was to establish the necessity of founding historical construction on strictly contemporary authorities.  When he began to write in 1824 historians of high repute believed memoirs and chronicles to be trustworthy guides.  When he laid down his pen in 1886 every scholar with a reputation to make had learned to content himself with nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events they describe.  A third service was to found the science of evidence by the analysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light