But though the cloud still continued to rest on Schwitz, the light shone on the cantons around and beyond it.
Appenzell opened its mountain fastnesses for the entrance of the heralds of the Reformed faith. Walter Klarer, a native of the canton, who had studied at Paris, and been converted by the writings of Luther, began in 1522 to preach here with great zeal. He found an efficient coadjutor in James Schurtanner, minister at Teufen. We find Zwingli writing to the latter in 1524 as follows: "Be manly and firm, dear James, and let not yourself be overcome, that you may be called Israel. We must contend with the foe till the day dawn, and the powers of darkness hide themselves in their own black night. .. It is to be hoped that, athough your canton is the last in the order of the Confederacy, ' it will not be the last in the faith. For these people dwell not in the center of a fertile country, where the dangers of selfishness and pleasure are greatest, but in a mountain district where a pious simplicity can be better preserved, which guileless simplicity, joined to an intelligent piety, affords the best and surest abiding-place for faith." The audiences became too large for the churches to contain.
'The Gospel needs neither pillared aisle nor fretted roof," said they; "let us go to the meadow." They assembled in the open fields, and their worship lost nothing of impressiveness, or sublimity, by the change. The echoes of their mountains awoke responsive to the voice of the preacher proclaiming the "good tidings," and the psalm with which their service was closed blended with the sound of the torrents as they rolled down from the summits. Out of the eight parishes of the canton, six embraced the Reformation.
Following the course of the Upper Rhine, the Protestant movement penetrated to Coire, which nestles at the foot of the Splugen pass. The soil had been prepared here by the schoolmaster Salandrinus, a friend of Zwingli. In 1523 the Diet met at Coire to take into consideration the abuses in the Church, and to devise means for their removal. Eighteen articles were drawn up and confirmed in the year following, of which we give only the first as being the most important: "Each clergyman shall, for himself, purely and fully preach the Word of God and the doctrine of Christ to his people, and shall not mislead them by the doctrines of human invention. Whoever will not or cannot fulfill this official duty shall be deprived of his living, and draw no part of the same." In virtue of this decision, the Dean of St. Martin's, after a humiliating confession of his inability to preach, was obliged to give way to Zwingli's friend, John Dorfman, or Comander – a man of great courage, and renowned for his scholarship – who now became the chief instrument in the reform of the city and canton. Many of the priests were won to the Gospel: those who remained on the side of Rome, with the bishop at their head, attempted to organise an opposition to the movement. Their violence was so great that the Protestant preacher, Comander, had to be accompanied to the church by an armed guard, and defended, even in the sanctuary, from insult and outrage. In the country districts, where more than forty Protestant evangelists, "like fountains of living water, were refreshing hill and dale," the same precautions had to be taken. Finding that the work was progressing nevertheless, the bishop complained of the preachers to the Diet, as "heretics, insurrectionists, sacrilegists, abusers of the holy Sacraments, and despisers of the mass-sacrifice," and besought the aid of the civil power to put them down. When Zwingli heard of the storm that was gathering, he wrote to the magistrates of Coire with apostolic vigor, pointing to the sort of opposition that was being offered to the Gospel and its preachers in their territories, and he charged them, as they valued the light now beginning to illuminate their land, and dreaded being plunged again into the old darkness, in which the Truth had been held captive, and its semblance palmed upon them, to the cozening them of their worldly goods, and, as he feared he had ground to add, of their souls' salvation, that they should protect the heralds of the Gospel from insult and violence.
Zwingli's earnest appeal produced a powerful effect in all the councils and communities of the Grisons; and when the bishop, through the Abbot of St. Luzi, presented his accusation against the Protestant preachers, in the Diet which met at Coire on Christmas Day, 1525, craving that they should be condemned without a hearing, that assembly answered with dignity, "The law which demands that no one be condemned unheard, shall also be observed in this instance." There followed a public disputation at Ilanz, and the conversion of seven more mass-priests. The issue was that the canton was won. "Christ waxed strong everywhere in these mountains," writes Salandrinus to Zwingli, "like the tender grass in spring."
Nor did the reform find here its limits. Napoleon had not yet cut a path across these glacier-crowned mountains for his cannon to pass into Italy, but the Gospel, without waiting for the picks and blasting agencies of the conqueror to open its path, climbed these mighty steeps and took possession of the Grisons, the ancient Rhaetia. The bishop fled to the Tyrol; religious liberty was proclaimed in the territory; the Protestant faith took root, and here where are placed the sources of those waters which, rushing down the mountains' sides, form rivers in the valleys below, were opened fountains of living waters. From the crest of the Alps, where it had now seated itself, the Gospel may be said to have looked down upon Italy. Not yet, however, was that land to be given to it.
It is interesting to think that the light spread on the east as far as to Constance and its lake, where a hundred years before John Huss had poured out his blood. After various reverses the movement of reform was at last crowned, in the year 1528, by the removal of the images and altars from the churches, and the abolition of all ceremonies, including that of the mass itself. All the districts that lie along the banks of the Thur, of the Lake of Constance, and of the Upper Rhine, embraced the Gospel. At Mammeren, which adjoins the spot where the Rhine issues from the lake, the inhabitants flung their images into the water. The statue of St. Blaise, on being thrown in, stood upright for a short while, and casting a reproachful look at the ungrateful and impious men who had formerly worshipped and were now attempting to drown it, swam across the lake to Cataborn on the opposite shore. So does a monk named Lang, whom Hotfinger quotes, relate.
After a protracted struggle, Protestantism gained the victory over the Papacy in Schaffhausen. The chief laborers there were Sebastian Heftmeister, Sebastian Hoffman, and Erasmus Ritter. On the Reformed worship being set up there, after the model of Zurich in 1529, the inhabitants of Eastern Switzerland generally may be said to have enjoyed the light of Protestant truth. The change that had passed over their land was like that which spring brings with it, when the snows melt, and the torrents gush forth, and the flowers appear, and all is fertility and verdure up to the very margin of the glacier. Yet more welcome was this spiritual spring-time, and a higher joy did it inspire. The winter – the winter of ascetic severities, vain mummeries, profitless services, and burdensome rites – was past, and the sweet light of a returning spring-time now shone upon the Swiss. From the husks of superstition they turned to feed on the bread and water of life.
Perhaps the most efficient instrument in this reform remains to be mentioned. In every canton a little band of laborers arose at the moment when they were needed. All of them were men of intrepidity and zeal, and most of them were pre-eminent in piety and scholarship. In this distinguished phalanx, Zwingli was the most distinguished; but in those around him there were worthy companions in arms, well entitled to fight side by side with him. But the little army was joined by another combatant, and that combatant was one common to all the German-speaking cantons – the Word of God. Luther's German edition of the New Testament appeared in 1522. Introduced into Switzerland, it became the mightiest instrumentality for the furtherance of the movement. It came close to the conscience and heart of the people. The pastor could not be always by their side, but in the Bible they had an instructor who never left them. By night as well as by day this voice spoke to them, cheering, inspiring, and upholding them. Of the dissemination of the Holy Scriptures in the mother tongue, Zwingli said, "Every peasant's cottage became a school, in which the highest art of all was practiced, the reading of the Old and New Testament; for the right and true Schoolmaster of His people is God, without Whom all languages and all arts are but nets of deception and treachery. Every cow and goose herd became thereby better instructed in the knowledge of salvation than the schoolmen." From the Bible eminently had Zwingli drawn his knowledge