ers.

POLITICAL EFFECTS OF THE REFORMATION.

515

which it took in this great war, and by the treaty which followed it, acquired a political standing which it had not before possessed. By this war, the northern powers were brought into connection with the rest of Europe, so that Europe, for the first time, formed one political system.1 The Treaty of Westphalia is the monument of this event. It established a balance of power and terms of peace between the religious parties in Germany. During the fourth period (1648-1702), Louis XIV. appears as the champion of absolutism, and William III. comes forward as the leader of Protestantism and of the cause of liberty. Under his auspices, constitutional freedom is finally established in England. Prussia, which began its political career at the Reformation, rose in importance under "the Great Elector" (1640-1688), and at length took the place of Sweden, as the first of the northern powIt was in the seventeenth century, during the reign of the Stuarts, that the English colonies in North America were planted, and the foundations were laid for the future Republic of the United States. Without the victory of constitutional liberty in England, and without the political example of Holland, the North American Republic could not have arisen. Among the political effects of the Reformation, must be reckoned the upbuilding of Sweden and of Prussia. But when we are inquiring into the influence of Protestantism upon political liberty, it can be said with truth, that the Reformation made the free Netherlands; the Reformation made free England, or was an essential agent in this work; the Reformation made the free Republic of America. "The greatest part of British America," says De Tocqueville, " was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy. They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity, which I cannot better describe than by styling it 1 Heeren, p. 88.

a democratic and republican religion. This contributed powerfully to the establishment of a republic and a democracy in public affairs; and from the beginning, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved."1 The town system and the "town spirit," in which this sagacious writer recognizes the germ of our political institutions, stood in intimate connection with the control of the laity in Church affairs, and with the religious polity of the early colonists. It is true, as this same writer has remarked, that the Roman Catholic system is not unfriendly to democracy, in a certain sense of the term; in the sense of an equality of condition. But this equality of condition is the result of a common subjection of the high and the low to the priesthood; and it is attended, therefore, with two dangers: first, that a habit of mind will be formed, which is unfavorable to personal independence, and therefore to the maintenance of political freedom; and secondly, that the ecclesiastical rulers will be impelled to fortify their sway by an alliance with absolutism in the State.

In opposition to the claim that Protestantism is friendly to religious liberty, an appeal is sometimes made to facts. It is said that the history of Protestant States contains many instances of religious intolerance and persecution. This must be conceded. The first effect of the Reformation was to augment the power of princes. The clergy stood in an altered relation to the civil authority, and were deprived of a shield which had given them a measure of protection against its encroachments. The old idea that there should be, in a political community, substantial uniformity in the profession of religion and in worship, was at first prevalent, and has slowly been abandoned. Catholic has been persecuted by Protestant; among Protestants, Lutheran has been persecuted by Calvinist, and Calvinist by Lutheran; Puritan by Church

1 Democracy in America, 1. ch. xvii.

PROTESTANT INTOLERANCE.

517

man, and Churchman by Puritan. Penal laws against Catholics, or against the exercise of Catholic worship, have existed in most Protestant countries. Much can be said in defense of such enactments at the time of the Catholic Reaction, when Roman Catholics were banded together in Europe for the forcible destruction of the Protestant religion. At that period, the Jesuit order instigated Catholic rulers in different countries to multiplied acts of violence against their Protestant subjects. Moreover, the doctrine was preached that it is lawful for subjects to revolt against heretical sovereigns and to dethrone them. Protestant rulers might naturally apprehend danger from those who acknowledged a foreign jurisdiction, the limits of which were not defined, but which was often asserted to override the obligation of obedience to the civil authority. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Catholic, even more than from Protestant countries, partly on political grounds, in the last century, is not to be deemed an act of religious persecution; any more than the entire abolition of that Order by Clement XIV., in 1773. It must not be forgotten, however, that not unfrequently, in times past, penal laws against Roman Catholics or their worship have been framed on other than political grounds. The fact that they acknowledge some other authority in religion than the Bible, or that their rites are considered idolatrous, has been the real and the avowed reason for enactments of this character. Let it be observed, however, of these and other instances of religious intolerance, which stain the annals of Protestantism, that even by the concession of its adversaries, they are incongruous with its principles and with its true spirit. What is the charge commonly made against Protestants? That, while claiming liberty for themselves and a right of private judgment, they have at times proved themselves ready to deny these privileges to Catholics and to one another. In a word, they are charged with inconsis

tency, with infidelity to their own theory. The charge is equivalent to the admission that the genius of Protestantism is adverse to intolerance and demands liberty of conscience. If this be true, then we should expect that the force of logic, and the moral spirit inherent in the Protestant system, would eventually work out their legitimate results. This we find to be the fact. Among Protestant nations there has been a growing sense of obligation to respect conscience and to abstain from the use of coercion in matters of religious faith. How does an enlightened Protestant look upon the records of religious intolerance in the past, among professed disciples of the Reformation? He does not justify acts of this nature; he reprobates or deplores them. He acknowledges that they were wrong; that deeds of this kind, if done now, would deserve abhorrence, and that the guilt of those who were concerned in them is only mitigated by their comparative ignorance. This prevalent feeling among Protestants at the present day indicates the true genius and the ultimate operation of the system. Protestants. abjure the principles on which the codes of intolerance were framed. How is it with their opponents? It is true that thousands of Roman Catholics would declare themselves opposed to these measures which the Protestant condemns. Their humane feelings would be shocked at a proposition to revive the dungeon and the fagot as instruments for crushing dogmatic error or an obnoxious ritual. But the authorities of the Church of Rome do not profess any compunction for the employment of these instruments of coercion, in past ages; nor do they repudiate the principles from which persecution arose and on which it was justified. So far from this, one of the pestilent errors of the age, which is thought worthy of special denunciation from the Chair of Peter, is the doctrine of liberty of conscience.1 The massacre of St. Bartholo

1 In the Encyclical Letter of Pius IX. (December 8, 1864), addressed to all Ro

INFLUENCE OF PROTESTANTISM UPON LITERATURE.

519 mew and the fires of Smithfield will cease to be justly chargeable upon the Church of Rome when this Church authoritatively disavows and condemns the principle of coercing the conscience and of inflicting penalties upon what is judged to be religious error, which was at the bottom of these and of a long catalogue of like cruelties.

If the true tendency of Protestantism has evinced itself as friendly to religious and civil liberty, the Reformation has nevertheless not fostered an undue license and revolutionary disorder. The modern history of England and of the United States exhibits the gradual and wholesome growth of free political institutions. With comparatively little bloodshed, English liberty went through the crisis in which it won its victory, and embodied itself in the organic law. In recent times it is the Roman Catholic lands, in the Old World and in the New - France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, the South American States - which have been the theatre of most frequent revolutions.

We turn to the influence which the Reformation has exerted upon the intellect, or its relation to literature and science. Reference is frequently made by polemical

man Catholic bishops, the opinion is denounced as erroneous and most pernicious, that "liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every man; and that this right ought, in every well-governed state, to be proclaimed and asserted by law." The Encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI. is quoted, in which this opinion is called an insanity- "deliramentum." It is among the errors which, Pius IX. declares, are to be abhorred, shunned, as the contagion of a pestilence. This figure of a contagion or a plague has always been used as a description of heresy, and lay at the foundation of the treatment of heretics; with the difference that in this case the disease was held to be guilty, and deserving of extreme penalties. The Syllabus of Pius IX., connected with the Encyclical (x. 78), condemns, in countries where the Catholic Church is the established faith, the allowance to others than Catholics to "enjoy the public exercise of their own worship." The Syllabus (x. 79) denounces as corrupting, the opinion that civil liberty should be granted to every mode of worship, and that there should be freedom of speech and of the press, with regard to religion. The Dublin Review (Jan. 1872, p. 2), speaks of the opposition of liberal Catholics to what is called "persecution; i. e., the laws enacted and enforced, for repression of heresy, during the ages of faith." The Review adds: "Now it is undeniable that for the existence of such laws, the church is mainly responsible."