Word: durants
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...clock one morning last week, found him still going hard in the Genesee County town of Grand Blanc at 7 that night. He suddenly realized that he was already go minutes late for a dinner date with his wife Charlotte, even then waiting for him in front of the Durant Hotel, in nearby Flint. Chamberlain leaped into his red-white-and-blue Chevrolet station wagon, which he uses along with his trailer, and sped toward Flint at 60 m.p.h. His pace had been exhausting, but Chuck Chamberlain seemed to thrive on it, and his words tumbled out in a turmoil...
Patiently, precisely, Durant portrays the manifold consequences of Luther's revolt. Every man might now be his own theologian; every state (if it had the power) might withhold its allegiance to Rome. The tortures and burnings of heretics on both sides became part of each nation's struggle to maintain its chosen order. Britain's Henry VIII, for example, quarreled with Papists as well as Protestants when he deemed them a menace to his royal law and order, was apt to burn both on the same day. Luther condemned radical sectarians-Zwinglians, Anabaptists, peasant-reformers-with righteous...
Before he concludes, Author Durant pays tribute to the Catholic Church's own movement to reform itself. Says Durant in a passage typical of his style and temper: "The Counter Reformation succeeded in its principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war. But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind . . . All in all, it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products...
Lesson of Tolerance. Author William James Durant (who was raised a Roman Catholic, now describes himself as a humanist) is a tolerant man who enjoys riding above the battle. With gently malicious humor, he quotes Catholic historians when he has something anti-Catholic to say, Protestant historians when he is anti-Protestant. To Durant, the men who tried to heal the wounds of Christendom, rather than the zealots on either side, are the "good" men of the day; but he believes that "our sympathy can go to all the combatants." Concludes Durant: "A religion is at its best when...
This note, however true in itself, rings somewhat strange at the end of a turbulent story of an era in which religious "competition" meant fire and death. The need for tolerance is thus the major moral Durant draws from the Reformation-which would never have happened had not "intolerant" men been willing to die (or kill) for their beliefs. Yet this somewhat anticlimactic touch of gentle rationalism does not diminish the excellence of Author Durant's work, and in a way perhaps foreshadows the subject of his next volume, The Age of Reason, to be published in five years...