UNIVERSITY EXTENSION LECTURES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18280, 24 June 1921, Page 6

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION LECTURES.

SEQUEL’TO THE LUTHERAN REFORMATION. A good audience assembled on Wednesday night in the University to hear Dr Elder’s lecture on “The Sequel to the Lutheran Reformation.” The lectures dealt with the peasants’ revolt of 1524 and 1525, and spoke of Luther’s responsibility in the matter. The rebellion sprang from the feudal extortions and ecclesiastical extortions under which, the peasanty laboured. Luther’s teaching merely supplied the mental stimulus necessary to inspire revolt. Tho peasants’ demands corresponded closely with those made, in France in 1789. The revolt was cruelly suppressed and the German peasanty became the most wretched in Europe, with the sole exception of the serfs of Russia. Democracy was crushed and the peasanty turned from tho Church of Luther, who had leagued himself with the oppressors. Luther saved his Church by alliance with the Princes of Germany, but ceased to be the leader of the Gorman people. Hence forth he was merely the prophet of a sect, an upholder of the doctrine of the Divine right of kings; the absolute princes of Germany were supreme in the Lutheran Church. Th e Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which temporarily ended strife between Catholics and I Protestants in Germany, was itself a victory for the princes, with the ultimate resuit that “ morally, and politically Germany was a desert, and it was called religious peace” Germany ceased to be a force in Europe till the days of Frederick the Great. Lutheranism was established also in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The three countries united from 1397 under Denmark until the Swedes rebelled in 1521 under Gustavus Vasa the ancestor of the famous Giistavus Adolphus, “the Lion of tho North,” the leader of Northern Protestantism in the Thirty Years’ War. In England the Reformation was a political as much as a religious movement, and the final settlement of Elizabeth was a compromise between extreme Protestantism and extreme Roman Catholicism. The final lecture of the course will be delivered next Wednesday, when the subject of lecture will bo “Zwingli and Calvin.”