V. THE PROTESTANT THEORY OF PERSECUTION[193]…

V. THE PROTESTANT THEORY OF PERSECUTION[193]

The manner in which Religion influences State policy is more easily ascertained in the case of Protestantism than in that of the Catholic Church: for whilst the expression of Catholic doctrines is authoritative and unvarying, the great social problems did not all arise at once, and have at various times received different solutions. The reformers failed to construct a complete and harmonious code of doctrine; but they were compelled to supplement the new theology by a body of new rules for the guidance of their followers in those innumerable questions with regard to which the practice of the Church had grown out of the experience of ages. And although the dogmatic system of Protestantism was not completed in their time, yet the Protestant spirit animated them in greater purity and force than it did any later generation. Now, when a religion is applied to the social and political sphere, its general spirit must be considered, rather than its particular precepts. So that in studying the points of this application in the case of Protestantism, we may consult the writings of the reformers with greater confidence than we could do for an exposition of Protestant theology; and accept them as a greater authority, because they agree more entirely among themselves. We can be more sure that we have the true Protestant opinion in a political or social question on which all the reformers are agreed, than in a theological question on which they differ; for the concurrent opinion must be founded on an element common to all, and therefore essential. If it should further appear that this opinion was injurious to their actual interests, and maintained at a sacrifice to themselves, we should then have an additional security for its necessary connection with their fundamental views.

The most important example of this law is the Protestant theory of toleration. The views of the reformers on religious liberty are not fragmentary, accidental opinions, unconnected with their doctrines, or suggested by the circumstances amidst which they lived; but the product of their theological system, and of their ideas of political and ecclesiastical government. Civil and religious liberty are so commonly associated in people's mouths, and are so rare in fact, that their definition is evidently as little understood as the principle of their connection. The point at which they unite, the common root from which they derive their sustenance, is the right of self-government. The modern theory, which has swept away every authority except that of the State, and has made the sovereign power irresistible by multiplying those who share it, is the enemy of that common freedom in which religious freedom is included. It condemns, as a State within the State, every inner group and community, class or corporation, administering its own affairs; and, by proclaiming the abolition of privileges, it emancipates the subjects of every such authority in order to transfer them exclusively to its own. It recognises liberty only in the individual, because it is only in the individual that liberty can be separated from authority, and the right of conditional obedience deprived of the security of a limited command. Under its sway, therefore, every man may profess his own religion more or less freely; but his religion is not free to administer its own laws. In other words, religious profession is free, but Church government is controlled. And where ecclesiastical authority is restricted, religious liberty is virtually denied.

For religious liberty is not the negative right of being without any particular religion, just as self-government is not anarchy. It is the right of religious communities to the practice of their own duties, the enjoyment of their own constitution, and the protection of the law, which equally secures to all the possession of their own independence. Far from implying a general toleration, it is best secured by a limited one. In an indifferent State, that is, in a State without any definite religious character (if such a thing is conceivable), no ecclesiastical authority could exist. A hierarchical organisation would not be tolerated by the sects that have none, or by the enemies of all definite religion; for it would be in contradiction to the prevailing theory of atomic freedom. Nor can a religion be free when it is alone, unless it makes the State subject to it. For governments restrict the liberty of the favoured Church, by way of remunerating themselves for their service in preserving her unity. The most violent and prolonged conflicts for religious freedom occurred in the Middle Ages between a Church which was not threatened by rivals and States which were most attentive to preserve her exclusive predominance. Frederic II., the most tyrannical oppressor of the Church among the German emperors, was the author of those sanguinary laws against heresy which prevailed so long in many parts of Europe. The Inquisition, which upheld the religious unity of the Spanish nation, imposed the severest restrictions on the Spanish Church; and in England conformity has been most rigorously exacted by those sovereigns who have most completely tyrannised over the Established Church. Religious liberty, therefore, is possible only where the co-existence of different religions is admitted, with an equal right to govern themselves according to their own several principles. Tolerance of error is requisite for freedom; but freedom will be most complete where there is no actual diversity to be resisted, and no theoretical unity to be maintained, but where unity exists as the triumph of truth, not of force, through the victory of the Church, not through the enactment of the State.

This freedom is attainable only in communities where rights are sacred, and where law is supreme. If the first duty is held to be obedience to authority and the preservation of order, as in the case of aristocracies and monarchies of the patriarchal type, there is no safety for the liberties either of individuals or of religion. Where the highest consideration is the public good and the popular will, as in democracies, and in constitutional monarchies after the French pattern, majority takes the place of authority; an irresistible power is substituted for an idolatrous principle, and all private rights are equally insecure. The true theory of freedom excludes all absolute power and arbitrary action, and requires that a tyrannical or revolutionary government shall be coerced by the people; but it teaches that insurrection is criminal, except as a corrective of revolution and tyranny. In order to understand the views of the Protestant reformers on toleration, they must be considered with reference to these points.

While the Reformation was an act of individual resistance and not a system, and when the secular Powers were engaged in supporting the authority of the Church, the authors of the movement were compelled to claim impunity for their opinions, and they held language regarding the right of governments to interfere with religious belief which resembles that of friends of toleration. Every religious party, however exclusive or servile its theory may be, if it is in contradiction with a system generally accepted and protected by law, must necessarily, at its first appearance, assume the protection of the idea that the conscience is free.[194] Before a new authority can be set up in the place of one that exists, there is an interval when the right of dissent must be proclaimed. At the beginning of Luther's contest with the Holy See there was no rival authority for him to appeal to. No ecclesiastical organism existed, the civil power was not on his side, and not even a definite system had yet been evolved by controversy out of his original doctrine of justification. His first efforts were acts of hostility, his exhortations were entirely aggressive, and his appeal was to the masses. When the prohibition of his New Testament confirmed him in the belief that no favour was to be expected from the princes, he published his book on the Civil Power, which he judged superior to everything that had been written on government since the days of the Apostles, and in which he asserts that authority is given to the State only against the wicked, and that it cannot coerce the godly. "Princes," he says, "are not to be obeyed when they command submission to superstitious errors, but their aid is not to be invoked in support of the Word of God."[195] Heretics must be converted by the Scriptures, and not by fire, otherwise the hangman would be the greatest doctor.[196] At the time when this was written Luther was expecting the bull of excommunication and the ban of the empire, and for several years it appeared doubtful whether he would escape the treatment he condemned. He lived in constant fear of assassination, and his friends amused themselves with his terrors. At one time he believed that a Jew had been hired by the Polish bishops to despatch him; that an invisible physician was on his way to Wittenberg to murder him; that the pulpit from which he preached was impregnated with a subtle poison.[197] These alarms dictated his language during those early years. It was not the true expression of his views, which he was not yet strong enough openly to put forth.[198]

The Zwinglian schism, the rise of the Anabaptists, and the Peasants' War altered the aspect of affairs. Luther recognised in them the fruits of his theory of the right of private judgment and of dissent,[199] and the moment had arrived to secure his Church against the application of the same dissolving principles which had served him to break off from his allegiance to Rome.[200] The excesses of the social war threatened to deprive the movement of the sympathy of the higher classes, especially of the governments; and with the defeat of the peasants the popular phase of the Reformation came to an end on the Continent. "The devil," Luther said, "having failed to put him down by the help of the Pope, was seeking his destruction through the preachers of treason and blood."[201] He instantly turned from the people to the princes;[202] impressed on his party that character of political dependence, and that habit of passive obedience to the State, which it has ever since retained, and gave it a stability it could never otherwise have acquired. In thus taking refuge in the arms of the civil power, purchasing the safety of his doctrine by the sacrifice of its freedom, and conferring on the State, together with the right of control, the duty of imposing it at the point of the sword, Luther in reality reverted to his original teaching.[203] The notion of liberty, whether civil or religious, was hateful to his despotic nature, and contrary to his interpretation of Scripture. As early as 1519 he had said that even the Turk was to be reverenced as an authority.[204] The demoralising servitude and lawless oppression which the peasants endured, gave them, in his eyes, no right to relief; and when they rushed to arms, invoking his name as their deliverer, he exhorted the nobles to take a merciless revenge.[205] Their crime was, that they were animated by the sectarian spirit, which it was the most important interest of Luther to suppress.

The Protestant authorities throughout Southern Germany were perplexed by their victory over the Anabaptists. It was not easy to show that their political tenets were revolutionary, and the only subversive portion of their doctrine was that they held, with the Catholics, that the State is not responsible for religion.[206] They were punished, therefore, because they taught that no man ought to suffer for his faith. At Nuremberg the magistrates did not know how to proceed against them. They seemed no worse than the Catholics, whom there was no question at that time of exterminating. The celebrated Osiander deemed these scruples inconsistent. The Papists, he said, ought also to be suppressed; and so long as this was not done, it was impossible to proceed to extremities against the Anabaptists, who were no worse than they. Luther also was consulted, and he decided that they ought not to be punished unless they refused to conform at the command of the Government.[207] The Margrave of Brandenburg was also advised by the divines that a heretic who could not be converted out of Scripture might be condemned; but that in his sentence nothing should be said about heresy, but only about sedition and murderous intent, though he should be guiltless of these.[208] With the aid of this artifice great numbers were put to death.

Luther's proud and ardent spirit despised such pretences. He had cast off all reserve, and spoke his mind openly on the rights and duties of the State towards the Church and the people. His first step was to proclaim it the office of the civil power to prevent abominations.[209] He provided no security that, in discharging this duty, the sovereign should be guided by the advice of orthodox divines;[210] but he held the duty itself to be imperative. In obedience to the fundamental principle, that the Bible is the sole guide in all things, he defined the office and justified it by scriptural precedents. The Mosaic code, he argued, awarded to false prophets the punishment of death, and the majesty of God is not to be less deeply reverenced or less rigorously vindicated under the New Testament than under the Old; in a more perfect revelation the obligation is stronger. Those who will not hear the Church must be excluded from the communion; but the civil power is to intervene when the ecclesiastical excommunication has been pronounced, and men must be compelled to come in. For, according to the more accurate definition of the Church which is given in the Confession of Schmalkald, and in the Apology of the Confession of Augsburg, excommunication involves damnation. There is no salvation to be hoped for out of the Church, and the test of orthodoxy against the Pope, the devil, and all the world, is the dogma of justification by faith.[211]

The defence of religion became, on this theory, not only the duty of the civil power, but the object of its institution. Its business was solely the coercion of those who were out of the Church. The faithful could not be the objects of its action; they did of their own accord more than any laws required. "A good tree," says Luther, "brings forth good fruit by nature, without compulsion; is it not madness to prescribe laws to an apple-tree that it shall bear apples and not thorns?"[212] This view naturally proceeded from the axiom of the certainty of the salvation of all who believe in the Confession of Augsburg.[213] It is the most important element in Luther's political system, because, while it made all Protestant governments despotic, it led to the rejection of the authority of Catholic governments. This is the point where Protestant and Catholic intolerance meet. If the State were instituted to promote the faith, no obedience could be due to a State of a different faith. Protestants could not conscientiously be faithful subjects of Catholic Powers, and they could not therefore be tolerated. Misbelievers would have no rights under an orthodox State, and a misbelieving prince would have no authority over orthodox subjects. The more, therefore, Luther expounded the guilt of resistance and the Divine sanction of authority, the more subversive his influence became in Catholic countries. His system was alike revolutionary, whether he defied the Catholic powers or promoted a Protestant tyranny. He had no notion of political right. He found no authority for such a claim in the New Testament, and he held that righteousness does not need to exhibit itself in works.

It was the same helpless dependence on the letter of Scripture which led the reformers to consequences more subversive of Christian morality than their views on questions of polity. When Carlstadt cited the Mosaic law in defence of polygamy, Luther was indignant. If the Mosaic law is to govern everything, he said, we should be compelled to adopt circumcision.[214] Nevertheless, as there is no prohibition of polygamy in the New Testament, the reformers were unable to condemn it. They did not forbid it as a matter of Divine law, and referred it entirely to the decision of the civil legislator.[215] This, accordingly was the view which guided Luther and Melanchthon in treating the problem, the ultimate solution of which was the separation of England from the Church.[216] When the Landgrave Philip afterwards appealed to this opinion, and to the earlier commentaries of Luther, the reformers were compelled to approve his having two wives. Melanchthon was a witness at the wedding of the second, and the only reservation was a request that the matter should not be allowed to get abroad.[217] It was the same portion of Luther's theology, and the same opposition to the spirit of the Church in the treatment of Scripture, that induced him to believe in astrology and to ridicule the Copernican system.[218]

His view of the authority of Scripture and his theory of justification both precluded him from appreciating freedom. "Christian freedom," he said, "consists in the belief that we require no works to attain piety and salvation."[219] Thus he became the inventor of the theory of passive obedience, according to which no motives or provocation can justify a revolt; and the party against whom the revolt is directed, whatever its guilt may be, is to be preferred to the party revolting, however just its cause.[220] In 1530 he therefore declared that the German princes had no right to resist the Emperor in defence of their religion. "It was the duty of a Christian," he said, "to suffer wrong, and no breach of oath or of duty could deprive the Emperor of his right to the unconditional obedience of his subjects."[221] Even the empire seemed to him a despotism, from his scriptural belief that it was a continuation of the last of the four monarchies.[222] He preferred submission, in the hope of seeing a future Protestant Emperor, to a resistance which might have dismembered the empire if it had succeeded, and in which failure would have been fatal to the Protestants; and he was always afraid to draw the logical consequences of his theory of the duty of Protestants towards Catholic sovereigns. In consequence of this fact, Ranke affirms that the great reformer was also one of the greatest conservatives that ever lived; and his biographer, Jürgens, makes the more discriminating remark that history knows of no man who was at once so great an insurgent and so great an upholder of order as he.[223] Neither of these writers understood that the same principle lies at the root both of revolution and of passive obedience, and that the difference is only in the temper of the person who applies it, and in the outward circumstances.

Luther's theory is apparently in opposition to Protestant interests, for it entitles Catholicism to the protection of Catholic Powers. He disguised from himself this inconsistency, and reconciled theory with expediency by the calculation that the immense advantages which his system offered to the princes would induce them all to adopt it. For, besides the consolatory doctrine of justification,--"a doctrine original, specious, persuasive, powerful against Rome, and wonderfully adapted, as if prophetically, to the genius of the times which were to follow,"[224]--he bribed the princes with the wealth of the Church, independence of ecclesiastical authority, facilities for polygamy, and absolute power. He told the peasants not to take arms against the Church unless they could persuade the Government to give the order; but thinking it probable, in 1522, that the Catholic clergy would, in spite of his advice, be exterminated by the fury of the people, he urged the Government to suppress them, because what was done by the constituted authority could not be wrong.[225] Persuaded that the sovereign power would be on his side, he allowed no limits to its extent. It is absurd, he says, to imagine that, even with the best intentions, kings can avoid committing occasional injustice; they stand, therefore, particularly in need--not of safeguards against the abuse of power, but--of the forgiveness of sins.[226] The power thus concentrated in the hands of the rulers for the guardianship of the faith, he wished to be used with the utmost severity against unregenerate men, in whom there was neither moral virtue nor civil rights, and from whom no good could come until they were converted. He therefore required that all crimes should be most cruelly punished and that the secular arm should be employed to convert where it did not destroy. The idea of mercy tempering justice he denounced as a Popish superstition.[227]

The chief object of the severity thus recommended was, of course, efficaciously to promote the end for which Government itself was held to be instituted. The clergy had authority over the conscience, but it was thought necessary that they should be supported by the State with the absolute penalties of outlawry, in order that error might be exterminated, although it was impossible to banish sin.[228] No Government, it was maintained, could tolerate heresy without being responsible for the souls that were seduced by it;[229] and as Ezechiel destroyed the brazen serpent to prevent idolatry, the mass must be suppressed, for the mass was the worst kind of idolatry.[230] In 1530, when it was proposed to leave the matters in dispute to the decision of the future Council, Luther declared that the mass and monastic life could not be tolerated in the meantime, because it was unlawful to connive at error.[231] "It will lie heavy on your conscience," he writes to the Duke of Saxony, "if you tolerate the Catholic worship; for no secular prince can permit his subjects to be divided by the preaching of opposite doctrines. The Catholics have no right to complain, for they do not prove the truth of their doctrine from Scripture, and therefore do not conscientiously believe it."[232] He would tolerate them only if they acknowledged themselves, like the Jews, enemies of Christ and of the Emperor, and consented to exist as outcasts of society.[233] "Heretics," he said, "are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard, and whilst they perish by fire, the faithful ought to pursue the evil to its source, and bathe their hands in the blood of the Catholic bishops, and of the Pope, who is a devil in disguise."[234]

The persecuting principles which were involved in Luther's system, but which he cared neither to develop, to apply, nor to defend, were formed into a definite theory by the colder genius of Melanchthon. Destitute of Luther's confidence in his own strength, and in the infallible success of his doctrine, he clung more eagerly to the hope of achieving victory by the use of physical force. Like his master he too hesitated at first, and opposed the use of severe measures against the Zwickau prophets; but when he saw the development of that early germ of dissent, and the gradual dissolution of Lutheran unity, he repented of his ill-timed clemency.[235] He was not deterred from asserting the duty of persecution by the risk of putting arms into the hands of the enemies of the Reformation. He acknowledged the danger, but he denied the right. Catholic powers, he deemed, might justly persecute, but they could only persecute error. They must apply the same criterion which the Lutherans applied, and then they were justified in persecuting those whom the Lutherans also proscribed. For the civil power had no right to proscribe a religion in order to save itself from the dangers of a distracted and divided population. The judge of the fact and of the danger must be, not the magistrate, but the clergy.[236] The crime lay, not in dissent, but in error. Here, therefore, Melanchthon repudiated the theory and practice of the Catholics, whose aid he invoked; for all the intolerance in the Catholic times was founded on the combination of two ideas--the criminality of apostasy, and the inability of the State to maintain its authority where the moral sense of a part of the community was in opposition to it. The reformers, therefore, approved the Catholic practice of intolerance, and even encouraged it, although their own principles of persecution were destitute not only of connection, but even of analogy, with it. By simply accepting the inheritance of the mediæval theory of the religious unity of the empire, they would have been its victims. By asserting that persecution was justifiable only against error, that is, only when purely religious, they set up a shield for themselves, and a sword against those sects for whose destruction they were more eager than the Catholics. Whether we refer the origin of Protestant intolerance to the doctrines or to the interests of the Reformation, it appears totally unconnected with the tradition of Catholic ages, or the atmosphere of Catholicism. All severities exercised by Catholics before that time had a practical motive; but Protestant persecution was based on a purely speculative foundation, and was due partly to the influence of Scripture examples, partly to the supposed interests of the Protestant party. It never admitted the exclusion of dissent to be a political right of the State, but maintained the suppression of error to be its political duty. To say, therefore, that the Protestants learnt persecution from the Catholics, is as false as to say that they used it by way of revenge. For they founded it on very different and contradictory grounds, and they admitted the right of the Catholics to persecute even the Protestant sects.

Melanchthon taught that the sects ought to be put down by the sword, and that any individual who started new opinions ought to be punished with death.[237] He carefully laid down that these severities were requisite, not in consideration of the danger to the State, nor of immoral teaching, nor even of such differences as would weaken the authority or arrest the action of the ecclesiastical organisation, but simply on account of a difference, however slight, in the theologumena of Protestantism.[238] Thamer, who held the possibility of salvation among the heathen; Schwenkfeld, who taught that not the written Word, but the internal illumination of grace in the soul was the channel of God's influence on man; the Zwinglians, with their error on the Eucharist, all these met with no more favour than the fanatical Anabaptists.[239] The State was held bound to vindicate the first table of the law with the same severity as those commandments on which civil society depends for its existence. The government of the Church being administered by the civil magistrates, it was their office also to enforce the ordinances of religion; and the same power whose voice proclaimed religious orthodoxy and law held in its hand the sword by which they were enforced. No religious authority existed except through the civil power.[240] The Church was merged in the State; but the laws of the State, in return, were identified with the commandments of religion.[241]

In accordance with these principles, the condemnation of Servetus by a civil tribunal, which had no authority over him, and no jurisdiction over his crime--the most aggressive and revolutionary act, therefore, that is conceivable in the casuistry of persecution--was highly approved by Melanchthon. He declared it a most useful example for all future ages, and could not understand that there should be any who did not regard it in the same favourable light.[242] It is true that Servetus, by denying the divinity of Christ, was open to the charge of blasphemy in a stricter sense than that in which the reformers generally applied it. But this was not the case with the Catholics. They did not represent, like the sects, an element of dissolution in Protestantism, and the bulk of their doctrine was admitted by the reformers. They were not in revolt against existing authority; they required no special innovations for their protection; they demanded only that the change of religion should not be compulsory. Yet Melanchthon held that they too were to be proscribed, because their worship was idolatrous.[243] In doing this he adopted the principle of aggressive intolerance, which was at that time new to the Christian world; and which the Popes and Councils of the Catholic Church had condemned when the zeal of laymen had gone beyond the lawful measure. In the Middle Ages there had been persecution far more sanguinary than any that has been inflicted by Protestants. Various motives had occasioned it and various arguments had been used in its defence. But the principle on which the Protestants oppressed the Catholics was new. The Catholics had never admitted the theory of absolute toleration, as it was defined at first by Luther, and afterwards by some of the sects. In principle, their tolerance differed from that of the Protestants as widely as their intolerance. They had exterminated sects which, like the Albigenses, threatened to overturn the fabric of Christian society. They had proscribed different religions where the State was founded on religious unity, and where this unity formed an integral part of its laws and administration. They had gone one step further, and punished those whom the Church condemned as apostates; thereby vindicating, not, as in the first case, the moral basis of society, nor, as in the second, the religious foundation of the State, but the authority of the Church and the purity of her doctrine, on which they relied as the pillar and bulwark of the social and political order. Where a portion of the inhabitants of any country preferred a different creed, Jew, Mohammedan, heathen, or schismatic, they had been generally tolerated, with enjoyment of property and personal freedom, but not with that of political power or autonomy. But political freedom had been denied them because they did not admit the common ideas of duty which were its basis. This position, however, was not tenable, and was the source of great disorders. The Protestants, in like manner, could give reasons for several kinds of persecution. They could bring the Socinians under the category of blasphemers; and blasphemy, like the ridicule of sacred things, destroys reverence and awe, and tends to the destruction of society. The Anabaptists, they might argue, were revolutionary fanatics, whose doctrines were subversive of the civil order; and the dogmatic sects threatened the ruin of ecclesiastical unity within the Protestant community itself. But by placing the necessity of intolerance on the simple ground of religious error, and in directing it against the Church which they themselves had abandoned, they introduced a purely subjective test, and a purely revolutionary system. It is on this account that the tu quoque, or retaliatory argument, is inadmissible between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic intolerance is handed down from an age when unity subsisted, and when its preservation, being essential for that of society, became a necessity of State as well as a result of circumstances. Protestant intolerance, on the contrary was the peculiar fruit of a dogmatic system in contradiction with the facts and principles on which the intolerance actually existing among Catholics was founded. Spanish intolerance has been infinitely more sanguinary than Swedish; but in Spain, independently of the interests of religion, there were strong political and social reasons to justify persecution without seeking any theory to prop it up; whilst in Sweden all those practical considerations have either been wanting, or have been opposed to persecution, which has consequently had no justification except the theory of the Reformation. The only instance in which the Protestant theory has been adopted by Catholics is the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Towards the end of his life, Melanchthon, having ceased to be a strict Lutheran, receded somewhat from his former uncompromising position, and was adverse to a strict scrutiny into minor theological differences. He drew a distinction between errors that required punishment and variations that were not of practical importance.[244] The English Calvinists who took refuge in Germany in the reign of Mary Tudor were ungraciously received by those who were stricter Lutherans than Melanchthon. He was consulted concerning the course to be adopted towards the refugees, and he recommended toleration. But both at Wesel and at Frankfort his advice was, to his great disgust, overruled.[245]

The severities of the Protestants were chiefly provoked by the Anabaptists, who denied the lawfulness of civil government, and strove to realise the kingdom of God on earth by absorbing the State in the Church.[246] None protested more loudly than they against the Lutheran intolerance, or suffered from it more severely. But while denying the spiritual authority of the State, they claimed for their religious community a still more absolute right of punishing error by death. Though they sacrificed government to religion, the effect was the same as that of absorbing the Church in the State. In 1524 Münzer published a sermon, in which he besought the Lutheran princes to extirpate Catholicism. "Have no remorse," he says; "for He to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth means to govern alone."[247] He demanded the punishment of all heretics, the destruction of all who were not of his faith, and the institution of religious unity. "Do not pretend," he says, "that the power of God will accomplish it without the use of your sword, or it will grow rusty in the scabbard. The tree that bringeth not forth good fruit must be cut down and cast into the fire." And elsewhere, "the ungodly have no right to live, except so far as the elect choose to grant it them."[248] When the Anabaptists were supreme at Münster, they exhibited the same intolerance. At seven in the morning of Friday, 27th February 1534, they ran through the streets crying, "Away with the ungodly!" Breaking into the houses of those who refused their baptism, they drove the men out of the town, and forcibly rebaptized the women who remained behind.[249] Whilst, therefore, the Anabaptists were punished for questioning the authority of the Lutherans in religious matters, they practically justified their persecution by their own intolerant doctrines. In fact, they carried the Protestant principles of persecution to an extreme. For whereas the Lutherans regarded the defence of truth and punishment of error as being, in part, the object of the institution of civil government, they recognised it as an advantage by which the State was rewarded for its pains; but the Anabaptists repudiated the political element altogether, and held that error should be exterminated solely for the sake of truth, and at the expense of all existing States.

Bucer, whose position in the history of the Reformation is so peculiar, and who differed in important points from the Saxon leaders, agreed with them on the necessity of persecuting. He was so anxious for the success of Protestantism, that he was ready to sacrifice and renounce important doctrines, in order to save the appearance of unity;[250] but those opinions in which he took so little dogmatic interest, he was resolved to defend by force. He was very much dissatisfied with the reluctance of the Senate of Strasburg to adopt severe measures against the Catholics. His colleague Capito was singularly tolerant; for the feeling of the inhabitants was not decidedly in favour of the change.[251] But Bucer, his biographer tells us, was, in spite of his inclination to mediate, not friendly to this temporising system; partly because he had an organising intellect, which relied greatly on practical discipline to preserve what had been conquered, and on restriction of liberty to be the most certain security for its preservation; partly because he had a deep insight into the nature of various religious tendencies, and was justly alarmed at their consequences for Church and State.[252] This point in the character of Bucer provoked a powerful resistance to his system of ecclesiastical discipline, for it was feared that he would give to the clergy a tyrannical power.[253] It is true that the demoralisation which ensued on the destruction of the old ecclesiastical authority rendered a strict attention on the part of the State to the affairs of religion highly necessary.[254] The private and confidential communications of the German reformers give a more hideous picture of the moral condition of the generation which followed the Reformation than they draw in their published writings of that which preceded it. It is on this account that Bucer so strongly insisted on the necessity of the interference of the civil power in support of the discipline of the Church.

The Swiss reformers, between whom and the Saxons Bucer forms a connecting link, differ from them in one respect, which greatly influenced their notions of government. Luther lived under a monarchy which was almost absolute, and in which the common people, who were of Slavonic origin, were in the position of the most abject servitude; but the divines of Zürich and Bern were republicans. They did not therefore entertain his exalted views as to the irresistible might of the State; and instead of requiring as absolute a theory of the indefectibility of the civil power as he did, they were satisfied with obtaining a preponderating influence for themselves. Where the power was in hands less favourable to their cause, they had less inducement to exaggerate its rights.

Zwingli abolishes both the distinction between Church and State and the notion of ecclesiastical authority. In his system the civil rulers possess the spiritual functions; and, as their foremost duty is the preservation and promotion of the true religion, it is their business to preach. As magistrates are too much occupied with other things, they must delegate the ministry of the word to preachers, for whose orthodoxy they have to provide. They are bound to establish uniformity of doctrine, and to defend it against Papists and heretics. This is not only their right, but their duty; and not only their duty, but the condition on which they retain office.[255] Rulers who do not act in accordance with it are to be dismissed. Thus Zwingli combined persecution and revolution in the same doctrine. But he was not a fanatical persecutor, and his severity was directed less against the Catholics than against the Anabaptists,[256] whose prohibition of all civil offices was more subversive of order in a republic than in a monarchy. Even, however, in the case of the Anabaptists the special provocation was--not the peril to the State, nor the scandal of their errors, but--the schism which weakened the Church.[257] The punishment of heresy for the glory of God was almost inconsistent with the theory that there is no ecclesiastical power. It was not so much provoked in Zürich as elsewhere, because in a small republican community, where the governing body was supreme over both civil and religious affairs, religious unity was a matter of course. The practical necessity of maintaining unity put out of sight the speculative question of the guilt and penalty of error.

Soon after Zwingli's death, Leo Judæ called for severer measures against the Catholics, expressly stating, however, that they did not deserve death. "Excommunication," he said, "was too light a punishment to be inflicted by the State which wields the sword, and the faults in question were not great enough to involve the danger of death."[258] Afterwards he fell into doubts as to the propriety of severe measures against dissenters, but his friends Bullinger and Capito succeeded in removing his scruples, and in obtaining his acquiescence in that intolerance, which was, says his biographer, a question of life and death for the Protestant Church.[259] Bullinger took, like Zwingli, a more practical view of the question than was common in Germany. He thought it safer strictly to exclude religious differences than to put them down with fire and sword; "for in this case," he says, "the victims compare themselves to the early martyrs, and make their punishment a weapon of defence."[260] He did not, however, forbid capital punishment in cases of heresy. In the year 1535 he drew up an opinion on the treatment of religious error, which is written in a tone of great moderation. In this document he says "that all sects which introduce division into the Church must be put down, and not only such as, like the Anabaptists, threaten to subvert society, for the destruction of order and unity often begins in an apparently harmless or imperceptible way. The culprit should be examined with gentleness. If his disposition is good he will not refuse instruction; if not, still patience must be shown until there is no hope of converting him. Then he must be treated like other malefactors, and handed over to the torturer and the executioner."[261] After this time there were no executions for religion in Zürich, and the number, even in the lifetime of Zwingli, was less considerable than in many other places. But it was still understood that confirmed heretics would be put to death. In 1546, in answer to the Pope's invitation to the Council of Trent, Bullinger indignantly repudiates the insinuation that the Protestant cantons were heretical, "for, by the grace of God, we have always punished the vices of heresy and sodomy with fire, and have looked upon them, and still look upon them, with horror."[262] This accusation of heresy inflamed the zeal of the reformers against heretics, in order to prove to the Catholics that they had no sympathy with them. On these grounds Bullinger recommended the execution of Servetus. "If the high Council inflicts on him the fate due to a worthless blasphemer, all the world will see that the people of Geneva hate blasphemers, and that they punish with the sword of justice heretics who are obstinate in their heresy.... Strict fidelity and vigilance are needed, because our churches are in ill repute abroad, as if we were heretics and friends of heresy. Now God's holy providence has furnished an opportunity of clearing ourselves of this evil suspicion."[263] After the event he advised Calvin to justify it, as there were some who were taken aback. "Everywhere," he says, "there are excellent men who are convinced that godless and blaspheming men ought not only to be rebuked and imprisoned, but also to be put to death.... How Servetus could have been spared I cannot see."[264]

The position of OEcolampadius in reference to these questions was altogether singular and exceptional. He dreaded the absorption of the ecclesiastical functions by the State, and sought to avoid it by the introduction of a council of twelve elders, partly magistrates, partly clergy, to direct ecclesiastical affairs. "Many things," he said, "are punished by the secular power less severely than the dignity of the Church demands. On the other hand, it punishes the repentant, to whom the Church shows mercy. Either it blunts the edge of its sword by not punishing the guilty, or it brings some hatred on the Gospel by severity."[265] But the people of Basel were deaf to the arguments of the reformer, and here, as elsewhere, the civil power usurped the office of the Church. In harmony with this jealousy of political interference, OEcolampadius was very merciful to the Anabaptists. "Severe penalties," he said, "were likely to aggravate the evil; forgiveness would hasten the cure."[266] A few months later, however, he regretted this leniency. "We perceive," he writes to a friend, "that we have sometimes shown too much indulgence; but this is better than to proceed tyrannically, or to surrender the keys of the Church."[267] Whilst, on the other hand, he rejoiced at the expulsion of the Catholics, he ingeniously justified the practice of the Catholic persecutors. "In the early ages of the Church, when the divinity of Christ manifested itself to the world by miracles, God incited the Apostles to treat the ungodly with severity. When the miracles ceased, and the faith was universally adopted, He gained the hearts of princes and rulers, so that they undertook to protect with the sword the gentleness and patience of the Church. They rigorously resisted, in fulfilment of the duties of their office, the contemners of the Church."[268] "The clergy," he goes on to say, "became tyrannical because they usurped to themselves a power which they ought to have shared with others; and as the people dread the return of this tyranny of ecclesiastical authority, it is wiser for the Protestant clergy to make no use of the similar power of excommunication which is intrusted to them."

Calvin, as the subject of an absolute monarch, and the ruling spirit in a republic, differed both from the German and the Swiss reformers in his idea of the State both in its object and in its duty towards the Church. An exile from his own country, he had lost the associations and habits of monarchy, and his views of discipline as well as doctrine were matured before he took up his abode in Switzerland.[269] His system was not founded on existing facts; it had no roots in history, but was purely ideal, speculative, and therefore more consistent and inflexible than any other. Luther's political ideas were bounded by the horizon of the monarchical absolutism under which he lived. Zwingli's were influenced by the democratic forms of his native country, which gave to the whole community the right of appointing the governing body. Calvin, independent of all such considerations, studied only how his doctrine could best be realised, whether through the instrumentality of existing authorities, or at their expense. In his eyes its interests were paramount, their promotion the supreme duty, opposition to them an unpardonable crime. There was nothing in the institutions of men, no authority, no right, no liberty, that he cared to preserve, or towards which he entertained any feelings of reverence or obligation.

His theory made the support of religious truth the end and office of the State,[270] which was bound therefore to protect, and consequently to obey, the Church, and had no control over it. In religion the first and highest thing was the dogma: the preservation of morals was one important office of government; but the maintenance of the purity of doctrine was the highest. The result of this theory is the institution of a pure theocracy. If the elect were alone upon the earth, Calvin taught, there would be no need of the political order, and the Anabaptists would be right in rejecting it;[271] but the elect are in a minority; and there is the mass of reprobates who must be coerced by the sword, in order that all the world may be made subject to the truth, by the conquerors imposing their faith upon the vanquished.[272] He wished to extend religion by the sword, but to reserve death as the punishment of apostasy; and as this law would include the Catholics, who were in Calvin's eyes apostates from the truth, he narrowed it further to those who were apostates from the community. In this way, he said, there was no pretext given to the Catholics to retaliate.[273] They, as well as the Jews and Mohammedans, must be allowed to live: death was only the penalty of Protestants who relapsed into error; but to them it applied equally whether they were converted to the Church or joined the sects and fell into unbelief. Only in cases where there was no danger of his words being used against the Protestants, and in letters not intended for publication, he required that Catholics should suffer the same penalties as those who were guilty of sedition, on the ground that the majesty of God must be as strictly avenged as the throne of the king.[274]

If the defence of the truth was the purpose for which power was intrusted to princes, it was natural that it should be also the condition on which they held it. Long before the revolution of 1688, Calvin had decided that princes who deny the true faith, "abdicate" their crowns, and are no longer to be obeyed;[275] and that no oaths are binding which are in contradiction to the interests of Protestantism.[276] He painted the princes of his age in the blackest colours,[277] and prayed to God for their destruction;[278] though at the same time he condemned all rebellion on the part of his friends, so long as there were great doubts of their success.[279] His principles, however, were often stronger than his exhortations, and he had difficulty in preventing murders and seditious movements in France,[280] When he was dead, nobody prevented them, and it became clear that his system, by subjecting the civil power to the service of religion, was more dangerous to toleration than Luther's plan of giving to the State supremacy over the Church.

Calvin was as positive as Luther in asserting the duty of obedience to rulers irrespective of their mode of government[281] He constantly declared that tyranny was not to be resisted on political grounds; that no civil rights could outweigh the divine sanction of government; except in cases where a special office was appointed for the purpose. Where there was no such office--where, for instance, the estates of the realm had lost their independence--there was no protection. This is one of the most important and essential characteristics of the politics of the reformers. By making the protection of their religion the principal business of government, they put out of sight its more immediate and universal duties, and made the political objects of the State disappear behind its religious end. A government was to be judged, in their eyes, only by its fidelity to the Protestant Church. If it fulfilled those requirements, no other complaints against it could be entertained. A tyrannical prince could not be resisted if he was orthodox; a just prince could be dethroned if he failed in the more essential condition of faith. In this way Protestantism became favourable at once to despotism and to revolution, and was ever ready to sacrifice good government to its own interests. It subverted monarchies, and, at the same time, denounced those who, for political causes, sought their subversion; but though the monarchies it subverted were sometimes tyrannical, and the seditions it prevented sometimes revolutionary, the order it defended or sought to establish was never legitimate and free, for it was always invested with the function of religious proselytism,[282] and with the obligation of removing every traditional, social, or political right or power which could oppose the discharge of that essential duty.

The part Calvin had taken in the death of Servetus obliged him to develop more fully his views on the punishment of heresy. He wrote a short account of the trial,[283] and argued that governments are bound to suppress heresy, and that those who deny the justice of the punishment, themselves deserve it.[284] The book was signed by all the clergy of Geneva, as Calvin's compurgators. It was generally considered a failure; and a refutation appeared, which was so skilful as to produce a great sensation in the Protestant world.[285] This famous tract, now of extreme rarity, did not, as has been said, "contain the pith of those arguments which have ultimately triumphed in almost every part of Europe;" nor did it preach an unconditional toleration.[286] But it struck hard at Calvin by quoting a passage from the first edition of his Institutes, afterwards omitted, in which he spoke for toleration. "Some of those," says the author, "whom we quote have subsequently written in a different spirit. Nevertheless, we have cited the earlier opinion as the true one, as it was expressed under the pressure of persecution,"[287] The first edition, we are informed by Calvin himself, was written for the purpose of vindicating the Protestants who were put to death, and of putting a stop to the persecution. It was anonymous, and naturally dwelt on the principles of toleration.

Although this book did not denounce all intolerance, and although it was extremely moderate, Calvin and his friends were filled with horror. "What remains of Christianity," exclaimed Beza, "if we silently admit what this man has expectorated in his preface?... Since the beginning of Christianity no such blasphemy was ever heard."[288] Beza undertook to defend Calvin in an elaborate work,[289] in which it was easy for him to cite the authority of all the leading reformers in favour of the practice of putting heretics to death, and in which he reproduced all the arguments of those who had written on the subject before him. More systematic than Calvin, he first of all excludes those who are not Christians--the Jews, Turks, and heathen--whom his inquiry does not touch; "among Christians," he proceeds to say, "some are schismatics, who sin against the peace of the Church, or disbelievers, who reject her doctrine. Among these, some err in all simplicity; and if their error is not very grave, and if they do not seduce others, they need not be punished."[290] "But obstinate heretics are far worse than parricides, and deserve death, even if they repent."[291] "It is the duty of the State to punish them, for the whole ecclesiastical order is upheld by the political."[292] In early ages this power was exercised by the temporal sovereigns; they convoked councils, punished heretics, promulgated dogmas. The Papacy afterwards arose, in evil times, and was a great calamity; but it was preferable a hundred times to the anarchy which was defended under the name of merciful toleration.

The circumstances of the condemnation of Servetus make it the most perfect and characteristic example of the abstract intolerance of the reformers. Servetus was guilty of no political crime; he was not an inhabitant of Geneva, and was on the point of leaving it, and nothing immoral could be attributed to him. He was not even an advocate of absolute toleration.[293] The occasion of his apprehension was a dispute between a Catholic and a Protestant, as to which party was most zealous in suppressing egregious errors. Calvin, who had long before declared that if Servetus came to Geneva he should never leave it alive,[294] did all he could to obtain his condemnation by the Inquisition at Vienne. At Geneva he was anxious that the sentence should be death,[295] and in this he was encouraged by the Swiss churches, but especially by Beza, Farel, Bullinger, and Peter Martyr.[296] All the Protestant authorities, therefore, agreed in the justice of putting a writer to death in whose case all the secondary motives of intolerance were wanting. Servetus was not a party leader. He had no followers who threatened to upset the peace and unity of the Church. His doctrine was speculative, without power or attraction for the masses, like Lutheranism; and without consequences subversive of morality, or affecting in any direct way the existence of society, like Anabaptism.[297] He had nothing to do with Geneva, and his persecutors would have rejoiced if he had been put to death elsewhere. "Bayle," says Hallam,[298] "has an excellent remark on this controversy." Bayle's remark is as follows: "Whenever Protestants complain, they are answered by the right which Calvin and Beza recognised in magistrates; and to this day there has been nobody who has not failed pitiably against this argumentum ad hominem."

No question of the merits of the Reformation or of persecution is involved in an inquiry as to the source and connection of the opinions on toleration held by the Protestant reformers. No man's sentiments on the rightfulness of religious persecution will be affected by the theories we have described, and they have no bearing whatever on doctrinal controversy. Those who--in agreement with the principle of the early Church, that men are free in matters of conscience--condemn all intolerance, will censure Catholics and Protestants alike. Those who pursue the same principle one step farther and practically invert it, by insisting on the right and duty not only of professing but of extending the truth, must, as it seems to us, approve the conduct both of Protestants and Catholics, unless they make the justice of the persecution depend on the truth of the doctrine defended, in which case they will divide on both sides. Such persons, again, as are more strongly impressed with the cruelty of actual executions than with the danger of false theories, may concentrate their indignation on the Catholics of Languedoc and Spain; while those who judge principles, not by the accidental details attending their practical realisation, but by the reasoning on which they are founded, will arrive at a verdict adverse to the Protestants. These comparative inquiries, however, have little serious interest. If we give our admiration to tolerance, we must remember that the Spanish Moors and the Turks in Europe have been more tolerant than the Christians; and if we admit the principle of intolerance, and judge its application by particular conditions, we are bound to acknowledge that the Romans had better reason for persecution than any modern State, since their empire was involved in the decline of the old religion, with which it was bound up, whereas no Christian polity has been subverted by the mere presence of religious dissent. The comparison is, moreover, entirely unreasonable, for there is nothing in common between Catholic and Protestant intolerance. The Church began with the principle of liberty, both as her claim and as her rule; and external circumstances forced intolerance upon her, after her spirit of unity had triumphed, in spite both of the freedom she proclaimed and of the persecutions she suffered. Protestantism set up intolerance as an imperative precept and as a part of its doctrine, and it was forced to admit toleration by the necessities of its position, after the rigorous penalties it imposed had failed to arrest the process of internal dissolution.[299]

At the time when this involuntary change occurred the sects that caused it were the bitterest enemies of the toleration they demanded. In the same age the Puritans and the Catholics sought a refuge beyond the Atlantic from the persecution which they suffered together under the Stuarts. Flying for the same reason, and from the same oppression, they were enabled respectively to carry out their own views in the colonies which they founded in Massachusetts and Maryland, and the history of those two States exhibits faithfully the contrast between the two Churches. The Catholic emigrants established, for the first time in modern history, a government in which religion was free, and with it the germ of that religious liberty which now prevails in America. The Puritans, on the other hand, revived with greater severity the penal laws of the mother country. In process of time the liberty of conscience in the Catholic colony was forcibly abolished by the neighbouring Protestants of Virginia; while on the borders of Massachusetts the new State of Rhode Island was formed by a party of fugitives from the intolerance of their fellow-colonists.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 193: The Rambler, March 1862.]

[Footnote 194: "Le vrai principe de Luther est celui-ci: La volonté est esclave par nature.... Le libre examen a été pour Luther un moyen et non un principe. Il s'en est servi, et était contraint de s'en servir pour établir son vrai principe, qui était la toute-puissance de la foi et de la grâce.... C'est ainsi que le libre examen s'imposa au Protestantisme. L'accessoire devint le principal, et la forme dévora plus ou moins le fond" (Janet, Histoire de la Philosophie Morale, ii. 38. 39).]

[Footnote 195: "If they prohibit true doctrine, and punish their subjects for receiving the entire sacrament, as Christ ordained it, compel the people to idolatrous practices, with masses for the dead, indulgences, invocation of saints, and the like, in these things they exceed their office, and seek to deprive God of the obedience due to Him. For God requires from us this above all, that we hear His Word, and follow it; but where the Government desires to prevent this, the subjects must know that they are not bound to obey it" (Luther's Werke, xiii. 2244). "Non est, mi Spalatine, principum et istius saeculi Pontificum tueri verbum Dei, nec ea gratia ullorum peto praesidium" (Luther's Briefe, ed. De Wette, i. 521, Nov. 4, 1520). "I will compel and urge by force no man; for the faith must be voluntary and not compulsory, and must be adopted without violence" ("Sermonen an Carlstadt," Werke, xx. 24, 1522).]

[Footnote 196: "Schrift an den christlichen Adel" (Werke, x. 574, June 1520). His proposition, Haereticos comburi esse contra voluntatem spiritus, was one of those condemned by Leo X. as pestilent, scandalous, and contrary to Christian charity.]

[Footnote 197: "Nihil non tentabunt Romanenses, nec potest satis Huttenus me monere, adeo mihi de veneno timet" (De Wette, i. 487). "Etiam inimici mei quidam miserti per amicos ex Halberstadio fecerunt moneri me: esse quemdam doctorem medicinae, qui arte magica factus pro libito invisibilis, quemdam occidit, mandatum habentem et occidendi Lutheri, venturumque ad futuram Dominicam ostensionis reliquiarum: valde hoc constanter narratur" (De Wette, i. 441). "Est hic apud nos Judaeus Polonus, missus sub pretio 2000 aureorum, ut me veneno perdat, ab amicis per literas mihi proditus. Doctor est medicinae, et nihil non audere et facere paratus incredibili astutia et agilitate" (De Wette, ii. 616). See also Jarcke, Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation, p. 176.]

[Footnote 198: "Multa ego premo et causa principis et universitatis nostrae cohibeo, quae (si alibi essem) evomerem in vastatricem Scripturae et Ecclesiae Romanae.... Timeo miser, ne forte non sim dignus pati et occidi pro tali causa: erit ista felicitas meliorum hominum, non tam foedi peccatoris. Dixi tibi semper me paratum esse cedere loco, si qua ego principi ill. viderer periculo hic vivere. Aliquando certe moriendum est, quanquam jam edita vernacula quadam apologia satis aduler Romanae Ecclesiae et Pontifici, si quid forte id prosit" (De Wette, i. 260, 261). "Ubi periculum est, ne iis protectoribus tutus saevius in Romanenses sim grassaturus, quam si sub principis imperio publicis militarem officiis docendi.... Ego vicissim, nisi ignem habere nequeam damnabo, publiceque concremabo jus pontificium totum, id est, lernam illam haeresium; et finem habebit humilitatis exhibitae hactenusque frustratae observantia qua nolo amplius inflari hostes Evangelii" (Ibid. pp. 465, 466, July 10, 1520).]

[Footnote 199: "Out of the Gospel and divine truth come devilish lies; ... from the blood in our body comes corruption; out of Luther come Müntzer, and rebels, Anabaptists, Sacramentarians, and false brethren" (Werke, i. 75).]

[Footnote 200: "Habemus," wrote Erasmus, "fructum tui spiritus.... Non agnoscis hosce seditiosos, opinor, sed illi te agnoscunt ... nec tamen efficis quominus credant homines per tuos libellos ... pro libertare evangelica, contra tyrannidem humanam, hisce tumultibus fuisse datam occasionem." "And who will deny," adds a Protestant classic, "that the fault was partly owing to them?" (Planck, Geschichte der protestantischen Kirche, ii, 183).]

[Footnote 201: "Ich sehe das wohl, dass der Teufel, so er mich bisher nicht hat mögen umbringen durch den Pabst, sucht er mich durch die blutdürstigen Mordpropheten und Rottengeisten, so unter euch sind, zu vertilgen und auffressen" (Werke, xvi. 77).]

[Footnote 202: Schenkel. Wesen des Protestantismus, iii. 348, 351; Hagen, Geist der Reformation, ii. 146, 151; Menzel, Neuere Geschichte der Deutschen, i. 115.]

[Footnote 203: See the best of his biographies, Jürgens, Luther's Leben, iii. 601.]

[Footnote 204: "Quid hoc ad me? qui sciam etiam Turcam honorandum et ferendum potestatis gratia. Quia certus sum non nisi volente Deo ullam potestatem consistere" (De Wette, i. 236).]

[Footnote 205: "I beg first of all that you will not help to mollify Count Albert in these matters, but let him go on as he has begun.... Encourage him to go on briskly, to leave things in the hands of God, and obey His divine command to wield the sword as long as he can." "Do not allow yourselves to be much disturbed, for it will redound to the advantage of many souls that will be terrified by it, and preserved." "If there are innocent persons amongst them, God will surely save and preserve them, as He did with Lot and Jeremiah. If He does not, then they are certainly not innocent.... We must pray for them that they obey, otherwise this is no time for compassion; just let the guns deal with them." "Sentio melius esse omnes rusticos caedi quam principes et magistratus, eo quod rustici sine autoritate Dei gladium accipiunt. Quam nequitiam Satanae sequi non potest nisi mera Satanica vastitas regni Dei, et mundi principes etsi excedunt, tamen gladium autoritate Dei gerunt. Ibi utrumque regnum consistere potest, quare nulla misericordia, nulla patientia rusticis debetur, sed ira et indignatio Dei et hominum" (De Wette, ii. 653, 655, 666, 669, 671).]

[Footnote 206: "Wir lehren die christlich Obrigkeit möge nicht nur, sondern solle auch sich der Religion und Glaubenssachen mit Ernst annehmen; davon halten die Wiedertäufer steif das Widerspiel, welches sie auch zum Theil gemein haben mit den Prälaten der römischen Kirche" (Declaration of the Protestants, quoted in Jörg, Deutschland von 1522 bis 1526, p. 709).]

[Footnote 207: "As to your question, how they are to be punished, I do not consider them blasphemers, but regard them in the light of the Turks, or deluded Christians, whom the civil power has not to punish, at least bodily. But if they refuse to acknowledge and to obey the civil authority, then they forfeit all they have and are, for then sedition and murder are certainly in their hearts" (De Wette, ii. 622; Osiander's opinion in Jörg, p. 706).]

[Footnote 208: "Dass in dem Urtheil und desselben öffentlicher Verkündigung keines Irrthums oder Ketzereien ... sondern allein der Aufruhr und fürgenommenen Morderei, die ihm doch laut seiner Urgicht nie lieb gewesen, gedacht werde" (Jörg, p. 708).]

[Footnote 209: "Principes nostri non cogunt ad fidem et Evangelion, sed cohibent externas abominationes" (De Wette, iii. 50). "Wenn die weltliche Obrigkeit die Verbrechen wider die zweite Gesetzestafel bestrafen, und aus der menschlichen Gesellschaft tilgen solle, wie vielmehr denn die Verbrechen wider die erste?" (Luther, apud Bucholtz, Geschichte Ferdinands I., iii. 571).]

[Footnote 210: Planck, iv. 61, explains why this was not thought of.]

[Footnote 211: Linde, Staatskirche, p. 23. "Der Papst sammt seinem Haufen glaubt nicht; darum bekennen wir, er werde nicht selig, das ist verdammt werden" (Table-Talk, ii. 350).]

[Footnote 212: Kaltenborn, Vorläufer des Grotius, 208.]

[Footnote 213: Möhler, Symbolik, 428.]

[Footnote 214: "Quodsi unam legem Mosi cogimur servare, eadem ratione et circumcidemur, et totam legem servare oportebit.... Nunc vero non sumus amplius sub lege Mosi, sed subjecti legibus civilibus in talibus rebus" (Luther to Barnes, Sept. 5, 1531; De Wette, iv. 296).]

[Footnote 215: "All things that we find done by the patriarchs in the Old Testament ought to be free and not forbidden. Circumcision is abolished, but not so that it would be a sin to perform it, but optional, neither sinful nor acceptable.... In like manner it is not forbidden that a man should have more than one wife. Even at the present day I could not prohibit it; but I would not recommend it" (Commentary on Genesis, 1528; see Jarcke, Studien, p. 108). "Ego sane fateor, me non posse prohibere, siquis plures velit uxores ducere, nec repugnat sacris literis: verum tamen apud Christianos id exempli nollem primo introduci, apud quos decet etiam ea intermittere, quae licita sunt, pro vitando scandalo, et pro honestate vitae" (De Wette, ii. 459, Jan. 13, 1524). "From these instances of bigamy (Lamech, Jacob) no rule can be drawn for our times; and such examples have no power with us Christians, for we live under our authorities, and are subject to our civil laws" (Table-Talk, v. 64).]

[Footnote 216: "Antequam tale repudium, probarem potius regi permitterem alteram reginam quoque ducere, et exemplo patrum et regum duas simul uxores seu reginas habere.... Si peccavit ducendo uxorem fratris mortui, peccavit in legem humanam seu civilem; si autem repudiaverit, peccabit in legem mere divinam" (De Wette, iv. 296). "Haud dubio rex Angliae uxorem fratris mortui ductam retinere potest ... docendus quod has res politicas commiserit Deus magistratibus, neque nos alligaverit ad Moisen.... Si vult rex successioni prospicere, quanto satius est, id facere sine infamia prioris conjugii. Ac potest id fieri sine ullo periculo conscientiae cujuscunque aut famae per polygamiam. Etsi enim non velim concedere polygamiam vulgo, dixi enim supra, nos non ferre leges, tamen in hoc casu propter magnam utilitatem regni, fortassis etiam propter conscientiam regis, ita pronuncio: tutissimum esse regi, si ducat secundam uxorem, priore non abjecta, quia certum est polygamiam non esse prohibitam jure divino, nec res est omnino inusitata" (Melanthonis Opera, ed. Bretschneider, ii. 524, 526). "Nolumus esse auctores divortii, cum conjugium cum jure divino non pugnet. Hi, qui diversum pronunciant, terribiliter exaggerant et exasperant jus divinum. Nos contra exaggeramus in rebus politicis auctoritatem magistratus, quae profecto non est levis, multaque justa sunt propter magistratus auctoritatem, quae alioqui in dubium vocantur" (Melanchthon to Bucer, Bretschneider, ii. 552).]

[Footnote 217: "Suadere non possumus ut introducatur publice et velut lege sanciatur permissio, plures quam unam uxores ducendi.... Primum ante omnia cavendum, ne haec res inducatur in orbem ad modum legis, quam sequendi libera omnibus sit potestas. Deinde considerare dignetur vestra celsitudo scandalum, nimirum quod Evangelio hostes exclamaturi sint, nos similes esse Anabaptistis, qui plures simul duxerunt uxores" (De Wette, v. 236. Signed by Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer).]

[Footnote 218: "He that would appear wise will not be satisfied with anything that others do; he must do something for himself, and that must be better than anything. This fool (Copernicus) wants to overturn the whole science of astronomy. But, as the holy Scriptures tell us, Joshua told the sun to stand still, and not the earth" (Table-Talk, iv. 575).]

[Footnote 219: "Das ist die christliche Freiheit, der einige Glaube, der da macht, nicht dass wir müssig gehen oder übel thun mögen, sondern dass wir keines Werks bedürfen, die Frömmigkeit und Seligkeit zu erlangen" (Sermon von der Freiheit). A Protestant historian, who quotes this passage, goes on to say: "On the other hand, the body must be brought under discipline by every means, in order that it may obey and not burden the inner man. Outward servitude, therefore, assists the progress towards internal freedom" (Bensen, Geschichte des Bauernkriegs, 269.)]

[Footnote 220: Werke, x. 413.]

[Footnote 221: "According to Scripture, it is by no means proper that one who would be a Christian should set himself against his superiors, whether by God's permission they act justly or unjustly. But a Christian must suffer violence and wrong, especially from his superiors.... As the emperor continues emperor, and princes, though they transgress all God's commandments, yea, even if they be heathen, so they do even when they do not observe their oath and duty.... Sin does not suspend authority and allegiance" (De Wette, iii. 560).]

[Footnote 222: Ranke, Reformation, iii. 183.]

[Footnote 223: Ranke, iv. 7; Jürgens, iii. 601.]

[Footnote 224: Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. 386.]

[Footnote 225: "Was durch ordentliche Gewalt geschieht, ist nicht für Aufruhr zu halten" (Bensen, p. 269; Jarcke, Studien, p. 312; Janet, ii. 40).]

[Footnote 226: "Princes, and all rulers and governments, however pious and God-fearing they may be, cannot be without sin in their office and temporal administration.... They cannot always be so exactly just and successful as some wiseacres suppose; therefore they are above all in need of the forgiveness of sins" (see Kaltenborn, p. 209).]

[Footnote 227: "Of old, under the Papacy, princes and lords, and all judges, were very timid in shedding blood, and punishing robbers, murderers, thieves, and all manner of evil-doers; for they knew not how to distinguish a private individual who is not in office from one in office, charged with the duty of punishing.... The executioner had always to do penance, and to apologise beforehand to the convicted criminal for what he was going to do to him, just as if it was sinful and wrong." "Thus they were persuaded by monks to be gracious, indulgent, and peaceable. But authorities, princes and lords ought not to be merciful" (Table-Talk, iv. 159, 160).]

[Footnote 228: "Den weltlichen Bann sollten Könige und Kaiser wieder aufrichten, denn wir können ihn jetzt nicht anrichten.... Aber so wir nicht können die Sünde des Lebens bannen und strafen, so bannen wir doch die Sünde der Lehre" (Bruns, Luther's Predigten, 63).]

[Footnote 229: "Wo sie solche Rottengeister würden zulassen und leiden, so sie es doch wehren und vorkommen können, würden sie ihre Gewissen gräulich beschweren, und vielleicht nimmermehr widder stillen können, nicht allein der Seelen halben, die dadurch verführt und verdammt werden ... sondern auch der gauzen heiligen Kirchen halben" (De Wette, iv. 355).]

[Footnote 230: "Nu ist alle Abgötterey gegen die Messe ein geringes" (De Wette, v. 191; sec. iv. 307)]

[Footnote 231: Bucholtz, iii. 570.]

[Footnote 232: "Sie aber verachten die Schrift muthwilliglich, darum wären sie billig aus der einigen Ursach zu stillen, oder nicht zu leiden" (De Wette, iii. 90).]

[Footnote 233: "Wollen sie aber wie die Juden seyn, nicht Christen heissen, noch Kaisers Glieder, sondern sich lassen Christus und Kaisers Feinde nennen, wie die Juden; wohlan, so wollen wir's auch leiden, dass sie in ihren Synagogen, wie die Juden, verschlossen lästern, so lang sie wollen" (De Wette, iv. 94).]

[Footnote 234: Riffel, Kirchengeschichte, ii. 9; Table-Talk, iii. 175.]

[Footnote 235: "Ego ab initio, cum primum caepi nosse Ciconiam et Ciconiae factionem, unde hoc totum genus Anabaptistarum exortum est, fui stulte clemens. Sentiebant enim et alii haereticos non esse ferro opprimendos. Et tunc dux Fridericus vehementer iratus erat Ciconiae: ac nisi a nobis tectus esset, fuisset de homine furioso et perdite malo sumtum supplicium. Nunc me ejus clementiae non parum poenitet.... Brentius nimis clemens est" (Bretschneider, ii. 17, Feb. 1530).]

[Footnote 236: "Sed objiciunt exemplum nobis periculosum: si haec pertinent ad magistratus, quoties igitur magistratus judicabit aliquos errare, saeviet in eos. Caesar igitur debet nos opprimere, quoniam ita judicat nos errare. Respondeo: certe debet errores et prohibere et punire.... Non est enim solius Caesaris cognitio, sicut in urbibus haec cognitio non est tantum magistratus prophani, sed est doctorum. Viderit igitur magistratus ut recte judicet" (Bretschneider, ii. 712). "Deliberent igitur principes, non cum tyrannis, non cum pontificibus, non cum hypocritis, monachis aut aliis, sed cum ipsa Evangelii voce, cum probatis scriptoribus" (Bretschneider, iii. 254).]

[Footnote 237: "Quare ita sentias, magistratum debere uti summa severitate in coercendis hujusmodi spiritibus.... Sines igitur novis exemplis timorem incuti multitudini ... ad haec notae tibi sint causae seditionum, quas gladio prohiberi oportet.... Propterea sentio de his qui etiamsi non defendunt seditiosos articulos, habent manifeste blasphemos, quod interfici a magistratu debeant" (ii. 17, 18). "De Anabaptistis tulimus hic in genere sententiam: quia constat sectam diabolicam esse, non esse tolerandam: dissipari enim ecclesias per eos, cum ipsi nullam habeant certam doctrinam.... Ideo in capita factionum in singulis locis ultima supplicia constituenda esse judicavimus" (ii. 549). "It is clear that it is the duty of secular government to punish blasphemy, false doctrine, and heresy, on the bodies of those who are guilty of them.... Since it is evident that there are gross errors in the articles of the Anabaptist sect, we conclude that in this case the obstinate ought to be punished with death" (iii. 199). "Propter hanc causam Deus ordinavit politias ut Evangelium propagari possit ... nec revocamus politiam Moysi, sed lex moralis perpetua est omnium aetatum ... quandocumque constat doctrinam esse impiam, nihil dubium est quin sanior pars Ecclesiae debeat malos pastores removere et abolere impios cultus. Et hanc emendationem praecipue adjuvare debent magistratus, tanquam potiora membra Ecclesiae" (iii. 242, 244). "Thammerus, qui Mahometicas seu Ethnicas opiniones spargit, vagatur in dioecesi Mindensi, quem publicis suppliciis adficere debebant.... Evomuit blasphemias, quae refutandae sunt non tantum disputatione aut scriptis, sed etiam justo officio pii magistratus" (ix. 125, 131).]

[Footnote 238: "Voco autem blasphemos qui articulos habent, qui proprie non pertinent ad civilem statum, sed continent [Greek: theôrias] ut de divinitate Christi et similes. Etsi enim gradus quidam sunt, tamen huc etiam refero baptismum infantum.... Quia magistratui commissa est tutela totius legis, quod attinet ad externam disciplinam et externa facta. Quare delicta externa contra primam tabulam prohibere ac punire debet.... Quare non solum concessum est, sed etiam mandatum est magistratui, impias doctrinas abolere, et tueri pias in suis ditionibus" (ii. 711). "Ecclesiastica potestas tantum judicat et excommunicat haereticos, non occidit. Sed potestas civilis debet constituere poenas et supplicia in haereticos, sicut in blasphemos constituit supplicia.... Non enim plectitur fides, sed haeresis" (xii. 697).]

[Footnote 239: "Notum est etiam, quosdam tetra et [Greek: dysphéma] dixisse de sanguine Christi, quos puniri oportuit, et propter gloriam Christi, et exempli causa" (viii. 553). "Argumentatur ille praestigiator (Schwenkfeld), verbum externum non esse medium, quo Deus est efficax. Talis sophistica principum severitate compescenda erat" (ix. 579).]

[Footnote 240: "The office of preacher is distinct from that of governor, yet both have to contribute to the praise of God. Princes are not only to protect the goods and bodily life of their subjects, but the principal function is to promote the honour of God, and to prevent idolatry and blasphemy" (iii. 199). "Errant igitur magistratus, qui divellunt gubernationem a fine, et se tantum pacis ac ventris custodes esse existimant.... At si tantum venter curandus esset, quid differrent principes ab armentariis? Nam longe aliter sentiendum est. Politias divinitus admirabili sapientia et bonitate constitutas esse, non tantum ad quaerenda et fruenda ventris bona, sed multo magis, ut Deus in societate innotescat, ut aeterna bona quaerantur" (iii. 246).]

[Footnote 241: "Neque illa barbarica excusatio audienda est, leges illas pertinere ad politiam Mosaicam, non ad nostram. Ut Decalogus ipse ad omnes pertinet, ita judex ubique omnia Decalogi officia in externa disciplina tueatur" (viii. 520).]

[Footnote 242: "Legi scriptum tuum, in quo refutasti luculenter horrendas Serveti blasphemias, ac filio Dei gratias ago, qui fuit [Greek: brabeutês] hujus tui agonis. Tibi quoque Ecclesia et nunc et ad posteros gratitudinem debet et debebit. Tuo judicio prorsus adsentior. Affirmo etiam, vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt" (Melanchthon to Calvin, Bretschneider, viii. 362). "Judico etiam Senatum Genevensem recte fecisse, quod hominem pertinacem et non omissurum blasphemias sustulit. Ac miratus sum, esse, qui severitatem illam improbent" (viii. 523). "Dedit vero et Genevensis reip. magistratus ante annos quatuor punitae insanabilis blasphemiae adversus filium Dei, sublato Serveto Arragone pium et memorabile ad omnem posteritatem exemplum" (ix. 133).]

[Footnote 243: "Abusus missae per magistratus debet tolli. Non aliter, atque sustulit aeneum serpentem Ezechias, aut excelsa demolitus est Josias" (i. 480). "Politicis magistratibus severissime mandatum est, ut suo quisque loco manibus et armis tollant statuas, ad quas fiunt hominum concursus et invocationes, et puniant suppliciis corporum insanabiles, qui idolorum cultum pertinaciter retinent, aut blasphemias serunt" (ix. 77).]

[Footnote 244: "If the French and English community at Frankfort shared the errors of Servetus or Thamer, or other enemies of the Symbols, or the errors of the Anabaptists on infant baptism, against the authority of the State, etc., I should faithfully advise and strongly recommend that they should be soon driven away; for the civil power is bound to prevent and to punish proved blasphemy and sedition. But I find that this community is orthodox in the symbolical articles on the Son of God, and in other articles of the Symbol.... If the faith of the citizens in every town were inquired into, what trouble and confusion would not arise in many countries and towns!" (ix. 179).]

[Footnote 245: Schmidt, Philipp Melanchthon, p. 640. His exhortations to the Landgrave to put down the Zwinglians are characteristic: "The Zwinglians, without waiting for the Council, persecute the Papists and the Anabaptists; why must it be wrong for others to prohibit their indefensible doctrine independent of the Council?" Philip replied: "Forcibly, to prohibit a doctrine which neither contradicts the articles of faith nor encourages sedition, I do not think right.... When Luther began to write and to preach, he admonished and instructed the Government that it had no right to forbid books or to prevent preaching, and that its office did not extend so far, but that it had only to govern the body and goods.... I had not heard before that the Zwinglians persecute the Papists; but if they abolish abuses, it is not unjust, for the Papists wish to deserve heaven by their works, and so blaspheme the Son of God. That they should persecute the Anabaptists is also not wrong, for their doctrine is in part seditious." The divines answered: "If by God's grace our true and necessary doctrine is tolerated as it has hitherto been by the emperor, though reluctantly, we think that we ought not to prevent it by undertaking the defence of the Zwinglian doctrine, if that should not be tolerated. ... As to the argument that we ought to spare the people while persecuting the leaders, our answer is, that it is not a question of persons, but only of doctrine, whether it be true or false" (Correspondence of Brenz and Melanchthon with Landgrave Philip of Hesse, Bretschneider, ii. 95, 98, 101).]

[Footnote 246: Hardwicke, Reformation, p. 274.]

[Footnote 247: Seidemann, Thomas Münzer, p. 35.]

[Footnote 248: Schenkel, iii. 381.]

[Footnote 249: Heinrich Grosbeck's Bericht, ed. Cornelius, 19.]

[Footnote 250: Herzog, Encyclopädie für protestantische Theologie, ii. 418.]

[Footnote 251: Bussierre, Establissement du Protestantisme en Alsace, p. 429.]

[Footnote 252: Baum, Capito und Butzer, p. 489.]

[Footnote 253: Baum, p. 492; Erbkam, Protestantische Sekten, p. 581.]

[Footnote 254: Ursinus writes to Bullinger: "Liberavit nos Deus ab idolatria: succedit licentia infinita et horribilis divini nominis, ecclesiae doctrinae purioris et sacramentorum prophanatio et sub pedibus porcorum et canum, conniventibus atque utinam non defendentibus iis qui prohibere suo loco debebant, conculcatio" (Sudhoff, Olevianus und Ursinus, p. 340).]

[Footnote 255: "Adserere audemus, neminem magistratum recte gerere ne posse quidem, nisi Christianus sit" (Zuingli, Opera, iii. 296). "If they shall proceed in an unbrotherly way, and against the ordinance of Christ, then let them be deposed, in God's name" (Schenkel, iii. 362).]

[Footnote 256: Christoffel, Huldreich Zwingli, p. 251.]

[Footnote 257: Zwingli's advice to the Protestants of St. Gall, in Pressel, Joachim Vadian, p. 45.]

[Footnote 258: Pestalozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, p. 95.]

[Footnote 259: Ibid., Leo Judä, p. 50.]

[Footnote 260: Pestalozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, p. 146.]

[Footnote 261: Ibid. p. 149.]

[Footnote 262: Ibid. p. 270.]

[Footnote 263: Pestalozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, p. 426.]

[Footnote 264: In the year 1555 he writes to Socinus: "I too am of opinion that heretical men must be cut off with the spiritual sword.... The Lutherans at first did not understand that sectaries must be restrained and punished, but after the fall of Münster, when thousands of poor misguided men, many of them orthodox, had perished, they were compelled to admit that it is wiser and better for the Government not only to restrain wrong-headed men, but also, by putting to death a few that deserve it, to protect thousands of inhabitants" (Ibid. p. 428).]

[Footnote 265: Herzog, Leben Oekolampads, ii 197.]

[Footnote 266: Ibid. p. 189.]

[Footnote 267: Ibid. p. 206.]

[Footnote 268: Herzog, Leben Oekolampads, ii. 195. Herzog finds an excuse for the harsh treatment of the Lutherans at Basel in the still greater severity of the Lutheran Churches against the followers of the Swiss reformation (Ibid. 213).]

[Footnote 269: Hundeshagen, Conflikte des Zwinglianismus und Calvinismus, 41.]

[Footnote 270: "Huc spectat (politia) ... ne idololatria, ne in Dei nomen sacrilegia, ne adversus ejus veritatem blasphemiae aliaeque religionis offensiones publice emergant ac in populum spargantur.... Politicam ordinationem probo, quae in hoc incumbit, ne vera religio, quae Dei lege continetur, palam, publicisque sacrilegiis impune violetur" (Institutio Christianae Religionis, ed. Tholuck, ii. 477). "Hoc ergo summopere requiritur a regibus, ut gladio quo praediti sunt utuntur ad cultum Dei asserendum" (Praelectiones in Prophetas, Opera, v. 233, ed. 1667).]

[Footnote 271: "Huic etiam colligere promptum est, quam stulta fuerit imaginatio eorum qui volebant usum gladii tollere e mundo, Evangelii praetextu. Scimus Anabaptistas fuisse tumultuatos, quasi totus ordo politicus repugnaret Christi regno, quia regnum Christi continetur sola doctrina; deinde nulla futura sit vis. Hoc quidem verum esset, si essemus in hoc mundo angeli: sed quemadmodum jam dixi, exiguus est piorum numerus: ideo necesse est reliquam turbam cohiberi violento freno: quia permixti sunt filii Dei vel saevis belluis, vel vulpibus et fraudulentis hominibus" (Pr. in Michaeam, v. 310). "In quo non suam modo inscitiam, sed diabolicum fastum produnt, dum perfectionem sibi arrogant; cujus ne centesima quidem pars in illis conspicitur" (Institutio, ii. 478).]

[Footnote 272: "Tota igitur excellentia, tota dignitas, tota potentia Ecclesiae debet huc referri, ut omnia subjaceant Deo, et quicquid erit in gentibus hoc totum sit sacrum, ut scilicet cultus Dei tam apud victores quam apud victos vigeat" (Pr. in Michaeam, v. 317).]

[Footnote 273: "Ita tollitur offensio, quae multos imperitos fallit, dum metuunt ne hoc praetextu ad saeviendum armentur Papae carnifices." Calvin was warned by experience of the imprudence of Luther's language. "In Gallis proceres in excusanda saevitia immani allegant autoritatem Lutheri" (Melanchthon. Opera, v. 176).]

[Footnote 274: "Vous avez deux espèces de mutins qui se sont eslevez entre le roy et l'estat du royaume: Les uns sont gens fantastiques, qui soubs couleur de l'évangile vouldroient mettre tout en confusion. Les aultres sont gens obstinés aux superstitions de l'Antéchrist de Rome. Tous ensemble méritent bien d'estre réprimés par le glayve qui vous est commis, veu qu'ils s'attaschent non seulement au roy, mais à Dieu qui l'a assis au siège royal" (Calvin to Somerset, Oct. 22, 1540: Lettres de Calvin, ed. Bonnet, i. 267. See also Henry, Leben Calvins, ii. Append. 30).]

[Footnote 275: "Abdicant enim se potestate terreni principes dum insurgunt contra Deum: imo indigni sunt qui censeantur in hominum numero. Potius ergo conspuere oportet in ipsorum capita, quam illis parere, ubi ita proterviunt ut velint etiam spoliare Deum jure suo, et quasi occupare solium ejus, acsi possent eum a coelo detrahere" (Pr. in Danielem, v. 91).]

[Footnote 276: "Quant au serment qu'on vous a contraincte de faire, comme vous avez failli et offensé Dieu en le faisant, aussi n'estes-vous tenue de le garder" (Calvin to the Duchess of Ferrara, Bonnet, ii. 338). She had taken an oath, at her husband's death, that she would not correspond with Calvin.]

[Footnote 277: "In aulis regum videmus primas teneri a bestiis. Nam hodie, ne repetamus veteres historias, ut reges fere omnes fatui sunt ac bruti, ita etiam sunt quasi equi et asini brutorum animalium.... Reges sunt hodie fere mancipia" (Pr. in Danielem, v. 82). "Videmus enim ut hodie quoque pro sua libidine commoveant totum orbem principes; quia produnt alii aliis innoxios populus, et exercent foedam nundinationem, dum quisque commodum suum venatur, et sine ullo pudore, tantum ut augeat suam potentiam, alios tradit in manum inimici" (Pr. in Nahum, v. 363). "Hodie pudet reges aliquid prae se ferre humanum, sed omnes gestus accommodant ad tyrannidem" (Pr. in Jeremiam, v. 257).]

[Footnote 278: "Sur ce que je vous avais allégué, quo David nous instruict par son exemple de haïr les ennemis de Dieu, vous respondez que c'estoit pour ce temps-là duquel sous la loi de rigueur il estoit permis de haïr les ennemis. Or, madame, ceste glose seroit pour renverser toute l'Escriture, et partant il la fault fuir comme une peste mortelle.... Combien que j'aye tousjours prié Dieu de luy faire mercy, si est-ce que j'ay souvent désiré que Dieu mist la main sur luy (Guise) pour en deslivrer son Eglise, s'il ne le vouloit convertir" (Calvin to the Duchess of Ferrara, Bonnet, ii. 551). Luther was in this respect equally unscrupulous: "This year we must pray Duke Maurice to death, we must kill him with our prayers; for he will be an evil man" (MS. quoted in Döllinger, Reformation, iii, 266).]

[Footnote 279: "Quod de praepostero nostrorum fervore scribis, verissimum est, neque tamen ulla occurrit moderandi ratio, quia sanis consiliis non obtemperant. Passim denuntio, si judex essem me non minus severe in rabioso, istos impetus vindicaturum, quam rex suis edictis mandat. Pergendum nihilominus, quando nos Deus voluit stultis esse debitores" (Calvin to Beza; Henry, Leben Calvins, iii. Append. 164).]

[Footnote 280: "Il n'a tenu qu'à moi que, devant la guerre, gens de faict et d'exécution ne se soyent efforcez de l'exterminer du monde (Guise) lesquels ont esté retenus par ma seule exhortation."--Bonnet, ii. 553.]

[Footnote 281: "Hoc nobis si assidue ob animos et oculos obversetur, eodem decreto constitui etiam nequissimos reges, quo regum auctoritas statuitur; nunquam in animum nobis seditiosae illae cogitationes venient, tractandum esse pro meritis regem nec aequum esse, ut subditos ei nos praestemus, qui vicissim regem nobis se non praestet.... De privatis hominibus semper loquor. Nam si qui nunc sint populares magistratus ad moderandam regum libidinem constituti (quales olim erant ... ephori ... tribuni ... demarchi: et qua etiam forte potestate, ut nunc res habent, funguntur in singulis regnis tres ordines, quum primarios conventus peragunt) ... illos ferocienti regum licentiae pro officio intercedere non veto" (Institutio, ii. 493, 495).]

[Footnote 282: "Quum ergo ita licentiose omnia sibi permittent (Donatistae), volebant tamen impune manere sua scelera: et in primis tenebant hoc principium: non esse poenas sumendas, si quis ab aliis dissideret in religionis doctrina: quemadmodum hodie videmus quosdam de hac re nimis cupide contendere. Certum est quid cupiant. Nam si quis ipsos respiciat, sunt impii Dei contemptores: saltem vellent nihil certum esse in religione; ideo labefactare, et quantum in se est etiam convellere nituntur omnia pietatis principia. Ut ergo liceat ipsis evomere virus suum, ideo tantopere litigant pro impunitate, et negant poenas de haereticis et blasphemis sumendas esse" (Pr. in Danielem, v. 51).]

[Footnote 283: "Defensio Orthodoxae Fidei ... ubi ostenditur Haereticos jure gladii coercendos esse," 1554.]

[Footnote 284: "Non modo liberum esse magistratibus poenas sumere de coelestis doctrinae corruptoribus, sed divinitus esse mandatum, ut pestiferis erroribus impunitatem dare nequeant, quin desciscant ab officii sui fide.... Nunc vero quisquis haereticis et blasphemis injuste paenam infligi contenderet, sciens et volens se obstringet blasphemiae reatu.... Ubi a suis fundamentis convellitur religio, detestandae in Deum blasphemiae proferuntur, impiis et pestiferis dogmatibus in exitium rapiuntur animae; denique ubi palam defectio ab unico Deo puraque doctrina tentatur, ad extremum illud remedium descendere necesse" (see Schenkel, iii. 389; Dyer, Life of Calvin, p. 354; Henry, iii. 234).]

[Footnote 285: De Haereticis an sint persequendi, Magdeburgi, 1554. Chataillon, to whom it is generally attributed, was not the author (see Heppe, Theodor Beza, p. 37).]

[Footnote 286: Hallam, Literature of Europe, ii. 81; Schlosser, Leben des Beza, p. 55. This is proved by the following passage from the dedication: "This I say not to favour the heretics, whom I abhor, but because there are here two dangerous rocks to be avoided. In the first place, that no man should be deemed a heretic when he is not ... and that the real rebel be distinguished from the Christian who, by following the teaching and example of his Master, necessarily causes separation from the wicked and unbelieving. The other danger is, lest the real heretics be not more severely punished than the discipline of the Church requires" (Baum, Theodor Beza, i. 215).]

[Footnote 287: "Multis piis hominibus in Gallia exustis grave passim apud Germanos odium ignes illi excitaverant, sparsi sunt, ejus restinguendi causa, improbi ac mendaces libelli, non alios tam crudeliter tractari, quam Anabaptistas ac turbulentos homines, qui perversis deliriis non religionem modo sed totum ordinem politicum convellerent.... Haec mihi edendae Institutionis causa fuit, primum ut ab injusta contumelia vindicarem fratres meos, quorum mors pretiosa erat in conspectu Domini; deinde quum multis miseris eadem visitarent supplicia, pro illis dolor saltem aliquis et sollicitudo exteras gentes tangeret" (Praefatio in Psalmos. See "Historia Litteraria de Calvini Institutione." in Scrinium Antiquarium, ii. 452).]

[Footnote 288: Baum, i. 206. "Telles gens," says Calvin, "seroient contents qu'il n'y eust ne loy, ne bride au monde. Voilà pourquoy ils ont basti ce beau libvre De non comburendis Haereticis, où ils out falsifié les noms tant des villes que des personnes, non pour aultre cause sinon pource que le dit livre est farcy de blasphèmes insupportables" (Bonnet, ii. 18).]

[Footnote 289: De Haereticis a civili Magistratu puniendis, 1554.]

[Footnote 290: "Absit autem a nobis, ut in eos, qui vel simplicitate peccant, sine aliorum pernicie et insigni blasphemia, vel in explicando quopiam Scripturae loco dissident a recepta opinione, magistratum armemus" (Tractatus Theologici, i. 95).]

[Footnote 291: This was sometimes the practice in Catholic countries, where heresy was equivalent to treason. Duke William of Bavaria ordered obstinate Anabaptists to be burnt; those who recanted to be beheaded. "Welcher revocir, den soll man köpfen; welcher nicht revocir, den soll man brennen" (Jörg, p. 717).]

[Footnote 292: "Ex quibus omnibus una conjunctio efficitur, istos quibus haeretici videntur non esse puniendi, opinionem in Ecclesiam Dei conari longe omnium pestilentissimam invehere et ex diametro repugnantem doctrinae primum a Deo Patre proditae, deinde a Christo instauratae, ab universa denique Ecclesia orthodoxa perpetuo consensu usurpatae, ut mihi quidem magis absurde facere videantur quam si sacrilegas aut parricidas puniendos negarent, quum sint istis omnibus haeretici infinitis partibus deteriores" (Tract. Theol. i. 143).]

[Footnote 293: "Verum est quod correctione non exspectata Ananiam et Sapphiram occidit Petrus. Quia Spiritus Sanctus tunc maxime vigens, quem spreverant, docebat esse incorrigibiles, in malitia obstinatos. Hoc crimen est morte simpliciter dignum et apud Deum et apud homines. In aliis autem criminibus, ubi Spiritus Sanctus speciale quid non docet, ubi non est inveterata malitia, aut obstinatio certa non apparet aut atrocitas magna, correctionem per alias castigationes sperare potius debemus" (Servetus, Restitutio Christianismi, 656; Henry, iii. 235).]

[Footnote 294: "Nam si venerit, modo valeat mea authoritas, vivum exire nunquam patiar" (Calvin to Farel, in Henry, iii. Append. 65; Audin, Vie de Calvin, ii. 314; Dyer, 544).]

[Footnote 295: "Spero capitale saltem fore judicium; poenae vero atrocitatem remitti cupio" (Calvin to Farel, Henry, iii. 189). Dr. Henry makes no attempt to clear Calvin of the imputation of having caused the death of Servetus. Nevertheless he proposed, some years later, that the three-hundredth anniversary of the execution should be celebrated in the Church of Geneva by a demonstration. "It ought to declare itself in a body, in a manner worthy of our principles, admitting that in past times the authorities of Geneva were mistaken, loudly proclaiming toleration, which is truly the crown of our Church, and paying due honour to Calvin, because he had no hand in the business (parcequ'il n'a pas trempé dans cette affaire), of which he has unjustly borne the whole burden." The impudence of this declaration is surpassed by the editor of the French periodical from which we extract it. He appends to the words in our parenthesis the following note: "We underline in order to call attention to this opinion of Dr. Henry, who is so thoroughly acquainted with the whole question" (Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français, ii. 114).]

[Footnote 296: "Qui scripserunt de non plectendis haereticis, semper mihi visi sunt non parum errare" (Farel to Blaarer, Henry, iii. 202). During the trial he wrote to Calvin: "If you desire to diminish the horrible punishment, you will act as a friend towards your most dangerous enemy. If I were to seduce anybody from the true faith, I should consider myself worthy of death; I cannot judge differently of another than of myself" (Schmidt, Farel und Viret, p. 33).

Before sentence was pronounced Bullinger wrote to Beza: "Quid vero amplissimus Senatus Genevensis ageret cum blasphemo illo nebulone Serveto. Si sapit et officium suum facit, caedit, ut totus orbis videat Genevam Christi gloriam cupere servatam" (Baum, i. 204). With reference to Socinus he wrote: "Sentio ego spirituali gladio abscindendos esse homines haereticos" (Henry, iii. 225).

Peter Martyr Vermili also gave in his adhesion to Calvin's policy: "De Serveto Hispano, quid aliud dicam non habeo, nisi eum fuisse genuinum Diaboli filium, cujus pestifera et detestanda doctrina undique profliganda est, neque magistratus, qui de illo supplicium extremum sumpsit, accusandus est, cum emendationis nulla indiçia in eo possent deprehendi, illiusque blasphemiae omnino intolerabiles essent" (Loci Communes, 1114. See Schlosser, Leben des Beza und des Peter Martyr Vermili, 512).

Zanchi, who at the instigation of Bullinger also published a treatise, De Haereticis Coercendis, says of Beza's work: "Non poterit non probari summopere piis omnibus. Satis superque respondit quidem ille novis istis academicis, ita ut supervacanea et inutilis omnino videatur mea tractatio" (Baum, i. 232).]

[Footnote 297: "The trial of Servetus," says a very ardent Calvinist, "is illegal only in one point--the crime, if crime there be, had not been committed at Geneva; but long before the Councils had usurped the unjust privilege of judging strangers stopping at Geneva, although the crimes they were accused of had not been committed there" (Haag, La France Protestante, iii. 129).]

[Footnote 298: Literature of Europe, ii. 82.]

[Footnote 299: This is the ground taken by two Dutch divines in answer to the consultation of John of Nassau in 1579: "Neque in imperio, neque in Galliis, neque in Belgio speranda esset unquam libertas in externo religionis exercitio nostris ... si non diversarum religionum exercitia in una eademque provincia toleranda.... Sic igitur gladio adversus nos armabimus Pontificios, si hanc hypothesin tuebimur, quod exercitium religionis alteri parti nullum prorsus relinqui debeat" (Scrinium Antiquarium, i. 335).]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH[300]

There is, perhaps, no stronger contrast between the revolutionary times in which we live and the Catholic ages, or even the period of the Reformation, than in this: that the influence which religious motives formerly possessed is now in a great measure exercised by political opinions. As the theory of the balance of power was adopted in Europe as a substitute for the influence of religious ideas, incorporated in the power of the Popes, so now political zeal occupies the place made vacant by the decline of religious fervour, and commands to an almost equal extent the enthusiasm of men. It has risen to power at the expense of religion, and by reason of its decline, and naturally regards the dethroned authority with the jealousy of a usurper. This revolution in the relative position of religious and political ideas was the inevitable consequence of the usurpation by the Protestant State of the functions of the Church, and of the supremacy which, in the modern system of government, it has assumed over her. It follows also that the false principles by which religious truth was assailed have been transferred to the political order, and that here, too, Catholics must be prepared to meet them; whilst the objections made to the Church on doctrinal grounds have lost much of their attractiveness and effect, the enmity she provokes on political grounds is more intense. It is the same old enemy with a new face. No reproach is more common, no argument better suited to the temper of these times, than those which are founded on the supposed inferiority or incapacity of the Church in political matters. As her dogma, for instance, is assailed from opposite sides,--as she has had to defend the divine nature of Christ against the Ebionites, and His humanity against Docetism, and was attacked both on the plea of excessive rigorism and excessive laxity (Clement Alex., Stromata, iii. 5),--so in politics she is arraigned on behalf of the political system of every phase of heresy. She was accused of favouring revolutionary principles in the time of Elizabeth and James I., and of absolutist tendencies under James II. and his successors. Since Protestant England has been divided into two great political parties, each of these reproaches has found a permanent voice in one of them. Whilst Tory writers affirm that the Catholic religion is the enemy of all conservatism and stability, the Liberals consider it radically opposed to all true freedom.

"What are we to think," says the Edinburgh Review (vol. ciii. p. 586), "of the penetration or the sincerity of a man who professes to study and admire the liberties of England and the character of her people, but who does not see that English freedom has been nurtured from the earliest times by resistance to Papal authority, and established by the blessing of a reformed religion? That is, under Heaven, the basis of all the rights we possess; and the weight we might otherwise be disposed to concede to M. de Montalembert's opinions on England is materially lessened by the discovery that, after all, he would, if he had the power, place this free country under that spiritual bondage which broods over the empires of Austria or of Spain."

On the other hand, let us hearken to the Protestant eloquence of the Quarterly Review (vol. xcii. p. 41):--

Tyranny, fraud, base adulation, total insensibility, not only to the worth of human freedom, but to the majesty of law and the sacredness of public and private right; these are the malignant and deadly features which we see stamped upon the conduct of the Roman hierarchy.

Besides which, we have the valuable opinion of Lord Derby, which no Catholic, we should suppose, east of the Shannon has forgotten, that Catholicism is "religiously corrupt, and politically dangerous." Lord Macaulay tells us that it exclusively promoted the power of the Crown; Ranke, that it favours revolution and regicide. Whilst the Belgian and Sardinian Liberals accuse the Church of being the enemy of constitutional freedom, the celebrated Protestant statesman, Stahl, taunts her with the reproach of being the sole support and pillar of the Belgian constitution. Thus every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.

Among Catholics the state of opinion on these questions, whether it be considered the result of unavoidable circumstances, or a sign of ingenious accommodation, or a thing to be deplored, affords at least a glaring refutation of the idea that we are united, for good or for evil, in one common political system. The Church is vindicated by her defenders, according to their individual inclinations, from the opposite faults imputed to her; she is lauded, according to circumstances, for the most contradictory merits, and her authority is invoked in exclusive support of very various systems. O'Connell, Count de Montalembert, Father Ventura, proclaim her liberal, constitutional, not to say democratic, character; whilst such writers as Bonald and Father Taparelli associate her with the cause of absolute government. Others there are, too, who deny that the Church has a political tendency or preference of any kind; who assert that she is altogether independent of, and indifferent to, particular political institutions, and, while insensible to their influence, seeks to exercise no sort of influence over them. Each view may be plausibly defended, and the inexhaustible arsenal of history seems to provide impartially instances in corroboration of each. The last opinion can appeal to the example of the Apostles and the early Christians, for whom, in the heathen empire, the only part was unconditional obedience. This is dwelt upon by the early apologists: "Oramus etiam pro imperatoribus, pro ministris eorum et potestatibus, pro statu saeculi, pro rerum quiete, pro mora finis."[301] It has the authority, too, of those who thought with St. Augustine that the State had a sinful origin and character: "Primus fuit terrenae civitatis conditor fratricida."[302] The Liberals, at the same time, are strong in the authority of many scholastic writers, and of many of the older Jesuit divines, of St. Thomas and Suarez, Bellarmine, and Mariana. The absolutists, too, countenanced by Bossuet and the Gallican Church, and quoting amply from the Old Testament, can point triumphantly to the majority of Catholic countries in modern times. All these arguments are at the same time serviceable to our adversaries; and those by which one objection is answered help to fortify another.

The frequent recurrence of this sort of argument which appears to us as treacherous for defence as it is popular as a weapon of attack, shows that no very definite ideas prevail on the subject, and makes it doubtful whether history, which passes sentence on so many theories, is altogether consistent with any of these. Nevertheless it is obviously an inquiry of the greatest importance, and one on which controversy can never entirely be set at rest; for the relation of the spiritual and the secular power is, like that of speculation and revelation, of religion and nature, one of those problems which remain perpetually open, to receive light from the meditations and experience of all ages, and the complete solution of which is among the objects, and would be the end, of all history.

At a time when the whole system of ecclesiastical government was under discussion, and when the temporal power was beginning to predominate over the Church in France, the greatest theologian of the age made an attempt to apply the principles of secular polity to the Church. According to Gerson (Opera, ii. 254), the fundamental forms into which Aristotle divides all government recur in the ecclesiastical system. The royal power is represented in the Papacy, the aristocracy by the college of cardinals, whilst the councils form an ecclesiastical democracy (timocratia). Analogous to this is the idea that the constitution of the Church served as the model of the Christian States, and that the notion of representation, for instance, was borrowed from it. But it is not by the analogy of her own forms that the Church has influenced those of the State; for in reality there is none subsisting between them, and Gerson's adoption of a theory of Grecian origin proves that he scarcely understood the spirit of that mediæval polity which, in his own country especially, was already in its decay. For not only is the whole system of government, whether we consider its origin, its end, or its means absolutely and essentially different, but the temporal notion of power is altogether unknown in the Church. "Ecclesia subjectos non habet ut servos, sed ut filios."[303] Our Lord Himself drew the distinction: "Reges gentium dominantur eorum; et qui potestatem habent super eos, benefici vocantur. Vos autem non sic: sed qui major est in vobis, fiat sicut minor; et qui praedecessor, sicut minor" (Luc. xxii. 25, 26). The supreme authority is not the will of the rulers, but the law of the Church, which binds those who are its administrators as strictly as those who have only to obey it. No human laws were ever devised which could so thoroughly succeed in making the arbitrary exercise of power impossible, as that prodigious system of canon law which is the ripe fruit of the experience and the inspiration of eighteen hundred years. Nothing can be more remote from the political notions of monarchy than the authority of the Pope. With even less justice can it be said that there is in the Church an element of aristocracy, the essence of which is the possession of hereditary personal privileges. An aristocracy of merit and of office cannot, in a political sense, legitimately bear the name. By baptism all men are equal before the Church. Yet least of all can anything be detected corresponding to the democratic principle, by which all authority resides in the mass of individuals, and which gives to each one equal rights. All authority in the Church is delegated, and recognises no such thing as natural rights.

This confusion of the ideas belonging to different orders has been productive of serious and dangerous errors. Whilst heretics have raised the episcopate to a level with the papacy, the priesthood with the episcopate, the laity with the clergy, impugning successively the primacy, the episcopal authority, and the sacramental character of orders, the application of ideas derived from politics to the system of the Church led to the exaggeration of the papal power in the period immediately preceding the Reformation, to the claim of a permanent aristocratic government by the Council of Basel, and to the democratic extravagance of the Observants in the fourteenth century.

If in the stress of conflicting opinions we seek repose and shelter in the view that the kingdom of God is not of this world; that the Church, belonging to a different order, has no interest in political forms, tolerates them all, and is dangerous to none; if we try to rescue her from the dangers of political controversy by this method of retreat and evasion, we are compelled to admit her inferiority, in point of temporal influence, to every other religious system. Every other religion impresses its image on the society that professes it, and the government always follows the changes of religion. Pantheism and Polytheism, Judaism and Islamism, Protestantism, and even the various Protestant as well as Mahometan sects, call forth corresponding social and political forms. All power is from God, and is exercised by men in His stead. As men's notions are, therefore, in respect to their position towards God, such must their notion of temporal power and obedience also be. The relation of man to man corresponds with his relations to God--most of all his relations towards the direct representative of God.

The view we are discussing is one founded on timidity and a desire of peace. But peace is not a good great enough to be purchased by such sacrifices. We must be prepared to do battle for our religious system in every other sphere as well as in that of doctrine. Theological error affects men's ideas on all other subjects, and we cannot accept in politics the consequences of a system which is hateful to us in its religious aspect. These questions cannot be decided by mere reasoning, but we may obtain some light by inquiring of the experience of history; our only sure guide is the example of the Church herself. "Insolentissima est insania, non modo disputare, contra id quod videmus universam ecclesiam credere sed etiam contra id quod videmus eam facere. Fides enim ecclesiae non modo regula est fidei nostrae, sed etiam actiones ipsius actionum nostrarum, consuetudo ipsius consuetudinis quam observare debemus."[304]

The Church which our Lord came to establish had a twofold mission to fulfil. Her system of doctrine, on the one hand, had to be defined and perpetually maintained. But it was also necessary that it should prove itself more than a mere matter of theory,--that it should pass into practice, and command the will as well as the intellect of men. It was necessary not only to restore the image of God in man, but to establish the divine order in the world. Religion had to transform the public as well as the private life of nations, to effect a system of public right corresponding with private morality and without which it is imperfect and insecure. It was to exhibit and confirm its victory and to perpetuate its influence by calling into existence, not only works of private virtue, but institutions which are the product of the whole life of nations, and bear an unceasing testimony to their religious sentiments. The world, instead of being external to the Church, was to be adopted by her and imbued with her ideas. The first, the doctrinal or intellectual part of the work, was chiefly performed in the Roman empire, in the midst of the civilisation of antiquity and of that unparalleled intellectual excitement which followed the presence of Christ on earth. There the faith was prepared for the world whilst the world was not yet ready to receive it. The empire in which was concentrated all the learning and speculation of ancient times was by its intellectual splendour, and in spite, we might even say by reason, of its moral depravity, the fit scene of the intellectual establishment of Christianity. For its moral degradation ensured the most violent antipathy and hostility to the new faith; while the mental cultivation of the age ensured a very thorough and ingenious opposition, and supplied those striking contrasts which were needed for the full discussion and vigorous development of the Christian system. Nowhere else, and at no other period, could such advantages have been found.

But for the other, equally essential part of her work the Church met with an insurmountable obstacle, which even the official conversion of the empire and all the efforts of the Christian emperors could not remove. This obstacle resided not so much in the resistance of paganism as a religion, as in the pagan character of the State. It was from a certain political sagacity chiefly that the Romans, who tolerated all religions,[305] consistently opposed that religion which threatened inevitably to revolutionise a state founded on a heathen basis. It appeared from the first a pernicious superstition ("exitiabilem superstitionem," Tacit. Annal. xv. 44), that taught its followers to be bad subjects ("exuere patriam," Tacitus, Hist. v. 5), and to be constantly dissatisfied ("quibus praesentia semper tempora cum enormi libertate displicent," Vopiscus, Vit. Saturn. 7). This hostility continued in spite of the protestations of every apologist, and of the submissiveness and sincere patriotism of the early Christians. They were so far from recognising what their enemies so vaguely felt, that the empire could not stand in the presence of the new faith, that it was the common belief amongst them, founded perhaps on the words of St. Paul, 2 Thess. ii. 7,[306] that the Roman empire would last to the end of the world.[307]

The persecution of Julian was caused by the feeling of the danger which menaced the pagan empire from the Christian religion. His hostility was not founded on his attachment to the old religion of Rome, which he did not attempt to save. He endeavoured to replace it by a new system which was to furnish the State with new vigour to withstand the decay of the old paganism and the invasion of Christianity. He felt that the old religious ideas in which the Roman State had grown up had lost their power, and that Rome could only be saved by opposing at all hazards the new ideas. He was inspired rather with a political hatred of Christianity than with a religious love of paganism. Consequently Christianity was the only religion he could not tolerate. This was the beginning of the persecution of the Church on principles of liberalism and religious toleration, on the plea of political necessity, by men who felt that the existing forms of the State were incompatible with her progress. It is with the same feeling of patriotic aversion for the Church that Symmachus says (Epist. x. 61): "We demand the restoration of that religion which has so long been beneficial to the State ... of that worship which has subdued the universe to our laws, of those sacrifices which repulsed Hannibal from our walls and the Gauls from the Capitol."

Very soon after the time of Constantine it began to appear that the outward conversion of the empire was a boon of doubtful value to religion. "Et postquam ad Christianos principes venerint, potentia quidem et divitiis major sed virtutibus minor facta est," says St. Jerome (in Vita Malchi). The zeal with which the emperors applied the secular arm for the promotion of Christianity was felt to be incompatible with its spirit and with its interest as well. "Religion," says Lactantius (Inst. Div. v. 19), "is to be defended by exhorting, not by slaying, not by severity, but by patience; not by crime, but by faith: ... nihil enim est tam voluntarium quam religio."[308] "Deus," says St. Hilary of Poitiers ("ad Constantium," Opp. i. p. 1221 C), "obsequio non eget necessario, non requirit coactam confessionem."[309] St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom protest in like manner against the intemperate proselytism of the day.[310] For the result which followed the general adoption of Christianity threw an unfavourable light on the motives which had caused it. It became evident that the heathen world was incapable of being regenerated, that the weeds were choking the good seed. The corruption increased in the Church to such a degree that the Christians, unable to divest themselves of the Roman notion of the orbis terrarum, deemed the end of the world at hand. St. Augustine (sermo cv.) rebukes this superstitious fear: "Si non manet civitas quae nos carnaliter genuit, manet quae nos spiritualiter genuit. Numquid (Dominus) dormitando aedificium suum perdidit, aut non custodiendo hostes admisit?... Quid expavescis quia pereunt regna terrena? Ideo tibi coeleste promissum est, ne cum terrenis perires.... Transient quae fecit ipse Deus; quanto citius quod condidit Romulus.... Non ergo deficiamus, fratres: finis erit terrenis omnibus regnis."[311] But even some of the fathers themselves were filled with despair at the spectacle of the universal demoralisation: "Totius mundi una vox Christus est ... Horret animus temporum nostrorum ruinas persequi.... Romanus orbis ruit, et tamen cervix nostra erecta non flectitur.... Nostris peccatis barbari fortes sunt. Nostris vitiis Romanus superatur exercitus.... Nec amputamus causas morbi, ut morbus pariter auferatur.... Orbis terrarum ruit, in nobis peccata non ruunt."[312] St. Ambrose announces the end still more confidently: "Verborum coelestium nulli magis quam nos testes sumus, quos mundi finis invenit.... Quia in occasu saeculi sumus, praecedunt quaedam aegritudines mundi."[313] Two generations later Salvianus exclaims: "Quid est aliud paene omnis coetus Christianorum quam sentina vitiorum?"[314] And St. Leo declares, "Quod temporibus nostris auctore diabolo sic vitiata sunt omnia, ut paene nihil sit quod absque idolatria transigatur."[315]

When, early in the fifth century, the dismemberment of the Western empire commenced, it was clear that Christianity had not succeeded in reforming the society and the polity of the ancient world. It had arrested for a time the decline of the empire, but after the Arian separation it could not prevent its fall. The Catholics could not dissociate the interests of the Church and those of the Roman State, and looked with patriotic as well as religious horror at the barbarians by whom the work of destruction was done. They could not see that they had come to build up as well as to destroy, and that they supplied a field for the exercise of all that influence which had failed among the Romans. It was very late before they understood that the world had run but half its course; that a new skin had been prepared to contain the new wine; and that the barbarous tribes were to justify their claim to the double inheritance of the faith and of the power of Rome. There were two principal things which fitted them for their vocation. The Romans had been unable to be the instruments of the social action of Christianity on account of their moral depravity. It was precisely for those virtues in which they were most deficient that their barbarous enemies were distinguished. Salvianus expresses this in the following words (De Gubern. Dei, vii. 6): "Miramur si terrae ... nostrorum omnium a Deo barbaris datae sunt, cum eas quae Romani polluerant fornicatione, nunc mundent barbari castitate?"[316] Whilst thus their habits met half-way the morality of the Christian system, their mythology, which was the very crown and summit of all pagan religions, predisposed them in like manner for its adoption, by predicting its own end, and announcing the advent of a system which was to displace its gods. "It was more than a mere worldly impulse," says a famous northern divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek, like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonderful facility with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of civilisation was in every way retarded, the virtues together with the ignorance of the barbarous State.

At a time when Arianism was extinct in the empire, it assumed among the Teutonic tribes the character of a national religion, and added a theological incitement to their animosity against the Romans. The Arian tribes, to whom the work of destruction was committed, did it thoroughly. But they soon found that their own preservation depended on their submission to the Church. Those that persisted in their heresy were extirpated. The Lombards and Visigoths saved themselves by a tardy conversion from the fate with which they were threatened so long, as their religion estranged them from the Roman population, and cut them off from the civilisation of which the Church was already the only guardian. For centuries the pre-eminence in the West belonged to that race which alone became Catholic at once, and never swerved from its orthodoxy. It is a sense of the importance of this fidelity which dictated the well-known preamble of the Salic law: "Gens Francorum inclita, Deo auctore condita, ad Catholicam fidem conversa et immunis ab haeresi," etc.[318]

Then followed the ages which are not unjustly called the Dark Ages, in which were laid the foundations of all the happiness that has been since enjoyed, and of all the greatness that has been achieved, by men. The good seed, from which a new Christian civilisation sprang, was striking root in the ground. Catholicism appeared as the religion of masses. In those times of simple faith there was no opportunity to call forth an Augustine or an Athanasius. It was not an age of conspicuous saints, but sanctity was at no time so general. The holy men of the first centuries shine with an intense brilliancy from the midst of the surrounding corruption. Legions of saints--individually for the most part obscure, because of the atmosphere of light around them--throng the five illiterate centuries, from the close of the great dogmatic controversies to the rise of a new theology and the commencement of new contests with Hildebrand, Anselm, and Bernard. All the manifestations of the Catholic spirit in those days bear a character of vastness and popularity. A single idea--the words of one man--electrified hundreds of thousands. In such a state of the world, the Christian ideas were able to become incarnate, so to speak, in durable forms, and succeeded in animating the political institutions as well as the social life of the nations.

The facility with which the Teutonic ideas of Government shaped themselves to the mould of the new religion, was the second point in which that race was so peculiarly adapted for the position it has ever since occupied towards Christianity. They ceased to be barbarians only in becoming Christians. Their political system was in its infancy, and was capable of being developed variously, according to the influences it might undergo. There was no hostile civilisation to break down, no traditions to oppose which were bound up with the recollections of the national greatness. The State is so closely linked with religion, that no nation that has changed its religion has ever survived in its old political form. In Rome it had proved to be impossible to alter the system, which for a thousand years had animated every portion of the State; it was incurably pagan. The conversion of the people and the outward alliance with the Church could not make up for this inconsistency.

But the Teutonic race received the Catholic ideas wholly and without reserve. There was no region into which they failed to penetrate. The nation was collectively Catholic, as well as individually. The union of the Church with the political system of the Germans was so complete, that when Hungary adopted the religion of Rome, it adopted at the same time, as a natural consequence, the institutions of the empire. The ideas of Government which the barbarians carried with them into every land which they conquered were always in substance the same. The Respublica Christiana of the Middle Ages, consisting of those States in which the Teutonic element combined with the Catholic system, was governed by nearly the same laws. The mediæval institutions had this also in common, that they grew up everywhere under the protection and guidance of the Church; and whilst they subsisted in their integrity, her influence in every nation, and that of the Pope over all the nations, attained their utmost height. In proportion as they have since degenerated or disappeared, the political influence of religion has declined. As we have seen that the Church was baffled in the full performance of her mission before Europe was flooded by the great migration, so it may be said that she has never permanently enjoyed her proper position and authority in any country where it did not penetrate. No other political system has yet been devised, which was consistent with the full development and action of Catholic principles, but that which was constructed by the northern barbarians who destroyed the Western empire.

From this it does not seem too much to conclude, that the Catholic religion tends to inspire and transform the public as well as the private life of men; that it is not really master of one without some authority over the other. Consequently, where the State is too powerful by long tradition and custom, or too far gone in corruption, to admit of the influence of religion, it can only prevail by ultimately destroying the political system. This helps us to understand the almost imperceptible progress of Christianity against Mahometanism, and the slowness of its increase in China, where its growth must eventually undermine the whole fabric of government. On the other hand, we know with what ease comparatively savage tribes--as the natives of California and Paraguay--were converted to a religion which first initiated them in civilisation and government. There are countries in which the natural conditions are yet wanting for the kingdom of grace. There is a fulness of time for every nation--a time at which it first becomes capable of receiving the faith.[319] It is not harder to believe that certain political conditions are required to make a nation fit for conversion than that a certain degree of intellectual development is indispensable; that the language, for instance, must have reached a point which that of some nations has not attained before it is capable of conveying the truths of Christianity.

We cannot, therefore, admit that political principles are a matter of utter indifference to the Church. To what sort of principles it is that she inclines may be indicated by a single example. The Christian notion of conscience imperatively demands a corresponding measure of personal liberty. The feeling of duty and responsibility to God is the only arbiter of a Christian's actions. With this no human authority can be permitted to interfere. We are bound to extend to the utmost, and to guard from every encroachment, the sphere in which we can act in obedience to the sole voice of conscience, regardless of any other consideration. The Church cannot tolerate any species of government in which this right is not recognised. She is the irreconcilable enemy of the despotism of the State, whatever its name or its forms may be, and through whatever instruments it may be exercised. Where the State allows the largest amount of this autonomy, the subject enjoys the largest measure of freedom, and the Church the greatest legitimate influence. The republics of antiquity were as incapable as the Oriental despotisms of satisfying the Christian notion of freedom, or even of subsisting with it. The Church has succeeded in producing the kind of liberty she exacts for her children only in those States which she has herself created or transformed. Real freedom has been known in no State that did not pass through her mediæval action. The history of the Middle Ages is the history of the gradual emancipation of man from every species of servitude, in proportion as the influence of religion became more penetrating and more universal. The Church could never abandon that principle of liberty by which she conquered pagan Rome. The history of the last three centuries exhibits the gradual revival of declining slavery, which appears under new forms of oppression as the authority of religion has decreased. The efforts of deliverance have been violent and reactionary, the progress of dependence sure and inevitable. The political benefits of the mediæval system have been enjoyed by no nation which is destitute of Teutonic elements. The Slavonic races of the north-east, the Celtic tribes of the north-west, were deprived of them. In the centre of mediæval civilisation, the republic of Venice, proud of its unmixed descent from the Romans, was untouched by the new blood, and that Christian people failed to obtain a Christian government. Where the influence of the ideas which prevailed in those times has not been felt, the consequence has been the utmost development of extreme principles, such as have doomed Asia for so many ages to perpetual stagnation, and America to endless heedless change. It is a plain fact, that that kind of liberty which the Church everywhere and at all times requires has been attained hitherto only in States of Teutonic origin. We need hardly glance at the importance of this observation in considering the missionary vocation of the English race in the distant regions it has peopled and among the nations it has conquered; for, in spite of its religious apostasy, no other country has preserved so pure that idea of liberty which gave to religion of old its power in Europe, and is still the foundation of the greatness of England. Other nations that have preserved more faithfully their allegiance to the Church have more decidedly broken with those political traditions, without which the action of the Church is fettered.

It is equally clear that, in insisting upon one definite principle in all government, the Church has at no time understood that it could be obtained only by particular political forms. She attends to the substance, not to the form, in politics. At various times she has successively promoted monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; and at various times she has been betrayed by each. The three fundamental forms of all government are founded on the nature of things. Sovereignty must reside with an individual, or with a minority, or with the majority. But there are seasons and circumstances where one or the other is impossible, where one or the other is necessary; and in a growing nation they cannot always remain in the same relative proportions. Christianity could neither produce nor abolish them. They are all compatible with liberty and religion, and are all liable to diverge into tyranny by the exclusive exaggeration of their principle. It is this exaggeration that has ever been the great danger to religion and to liberty, and the object of constant resistance, the source of constant suffering for the Church.

Christianity introduced no new forms of government, but a new spirit, which totally transformed the old ones. The difference between a Christian and a pagan monarchy, or between a Christian and a rationalist democracy, is as great, politically, as that between a monarchy and a republic. The Government of Athens more nearly resembled that of Persia than that of any Christian republic, however democratic. If political theorists had attended more to the experience of the Christian Ages, the Church and the State would have been spared many calamities. Unfortunately, it has long been the common practice to recur to the authority of the Greeks and the Jews. The example of both was equally dangerous; for in the Jewish as in the Gentile world, political and religious obligations were made to coincide; in both, therefore,--in the theocracy of the Jews as in the [Greek: politeia] of the Greeks,--the State was absolute. Now it is the great object of the Church, by keeping the two spheres permanently distinct,--by rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's--to make all absolutism, of whatever kind, impossible.

As no form of government is in itself incompatible with tyranny, either of a person or a principle, nor necessarily inconsistent with liberty, there is no natural hostility or alliance between the Church and any one of them. The same Church which, in the confusion and tumult of the great migrations, restored authority by raising up and anointing kings, held in later times with the aristocracy of the empire, and called into existence the democracies of Italy. In the eighth century she looked to Charlemagne for the reorganisation of society; in the eleventh she relied on the people to carry out the reformation of the clergy. During the first period of the Middle Ages, when social and political order had to be reconstructed out of ruins, the Church everywhere addresses herself to the kings, and seeks to strengthen and to sanctify their power. The royal as well as the imperial dignity received from her their authority and splendour. Whatever her disputes on religious grounds with particular sovereigns, such as Lothar, she had in those ages as yet no contests with the encroachments of monarchical power. Later on in the Middle Ages, on the contrary, when the monarchy had prevailed almost everywhere, and had strengthened itself beyond the limits of feudal ideas by the help of the Roman law and of the notions of absolute power derived from the ancients, it stood in continual conflict with the Church. From the time of Gregory VII., all the most distinguished pontiffs were engaged in quarrels with the royal and imperial power, which resulted in the victory of the Church in Germany and her defeat in France. In this resistance to the exaggeration of monarchy, they naturally endeavoured to set barriers to it by promoting popular institutions, as the Italian democracies and the aristocratic republics of Switzerland, and the capitulations which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were imposed on almost every prince. Times had greatly changed when a Pope declared his amazement at a nation which bore in silence the tyranny of their king.[320] In modern times the absolute monarchy in Catholic countries has been, next to the Reformation, the greatest and most formidable enemy of the Church. For here she again lost in great measure her natural influence. In France, Spain, and Germany, by Gallicanism, Josephism, and the Inquisition, she came to be reduced to a state of dependence, the more fatal and deplorable that the clergy were often instrumental in maintaining it. All these phenomena were simply an adaptation of Catholicism to a political system incompatible with it in its integrity; an artifice to accommodate the Church to the requirements of absolute government, and to furnish absolute princes with a resource which was elsewhere supplied by Protestantism. The consequence has been, that the Church is at this day more free under Protestant than under Catholic governments--in Prussia or England than in France or Piedmont, Naples or Bavaria.

As we have said that the Church commonly allied herself with the political elements which happened to be insufficiently represented, and to temper the predominant principle by encouraging the others, it might seem hardly unfair to conclude that that kind of government in which they are all supposed to be combined,--"aequatum et temperatum ex tribus optimis rerum publicarum modis" (Cicero, Rep. i. 45),--must be particularly suited to her. Practically--and we are not here pursuing a theory--this is a mere fallacy. If we look at Catholic countries, we find that in Spain and Piedmont the constitution has served only to pillage, oppress, and insult the Church; whilst in Austria, since the empire has been purified in the fiery ordeal of the revolution, she is free, secure, and on the highroad of self-improvement. In constitutional Bavaria she has but little protection against the Crown, or in Belgium against the mob. The royal power is against her in one place, the popular element in the other. Turning to Protestant countries, we find that in Prussia the Church is comparatively free; whilst the more popular Government of Baden has exhibited the most conspicuous instance of oppression which has occurred in our time. The popular Government of Sweden, again, has renewed the refusal of religious toleration at the very time when despotic Russia begins to make a show, at least, of conceding it. In the presence of these facts, it would surely be absurd to assume that the Church must look with favour on the feeble and transitory constitutions with which the revolution has covered half the Continent. It does not actually appear that she has derived greater benefits from them than she may be said to have done from the revolution itself, which in France, for instance in 1848, gave to the Church, at least for a season, that liberty and dignity for which she had struggled in vain during the constitutional period which had preceded.

The political character of our own country bears hardly more resemblance to the Liberal Governments of the Continent,--which have copied only what is valueless in our institutions,--than to the superstitious despotism of the East, or to the analogous tyranny which in the Far West is mocked with the name of freedom. Here, as elsewhere, the progress of the constitution, which it was the work of the Catholic Ages to build up, on the principles common to all the nations of the Teutonic stock, was interrupted by the attraction which the growth of absolutism abroad excited, and by the Reformation's transferring the ecclesiastical power to the Crown. The Stuarts justified their abuse of power by the same precepts and the same examples by which the Puritans justified their resistance to it. The liberty aimed at by the Levellers was as remote from that which the Middle Ages had handed down, as the power of the Stuarts from the mediæval monarchy. The Revolution of 1688 destroyed one without favouring the other. Unlike the rebellion against Charles I., that which overthrew his son did not fall into a contrary extreme. It was a restoration in some sort of the principles of government, which had been alternately assailed by absolute monarchy and by a fanatical democracy. But, as it was directed against the abuse of kingly and ecclesiastical authority, neither the Crown nor the established Church recovered their ancient position; and a jealousy of both has ever since subsisted. There can be no question but that the remnants of the old system of polity--the utter disappearance of which keeps the rest of Christendom in a state of continual futile revolution--exist more copiously in this country than in any other. Instead of the revolutions and the religious wars by which, in other Protestant countries, Catholics have obtained toleration, they have obtained it in England by the force of the very principles of the constitution. "I should think myself inconsistent," says the chief expounder of our political system, "in not applying my ideas of civil liberty to religious." And speaking of the relaxation of the penal laws, he says: "To the great liberality and enlarged sentiments of those who are the furthest in the world from you in religious tenets, and the furthest from acting with the party which, it is thought, the greater part of the Roman Catholics are disposed to espouse, it is that you owe the whole, or very nearly the whole, of what has been done both here and in Ireland."[321] The danger which menaces the continuance of our constitution proceeds simply from the oblivion of those Christian ideas by which it was originally inspired. It should seem that it is the religious as well as the political duty of Catholics to endeavour to avert this peril, and to defend from the attacks of the Radicals and from the contempt of the Tories the only constitution which bears some resemblance to those of Catholic times, and the principles which are almost as completely forgotten in England as they are misunderstood abroad. If three centuries of Protestantism have not entirely obliterated the ancient features of our government, if they have not been so thoroughly barren of political improvement as some of its enemies would have us believe,--there is surely nothing to marvel at, nothing at which we may rejoice. Protestants may well have, in some respects, the same terrestrial superiority over Catholics that the Gentiles had over the people of God. As, at the fall of paganism, the treasures it had produced and accumulated during two thousand years became the spoils of the victor,--when the day of reckoning shall come for the great modern apostasy, it will surrender all that it has gathered in its diligent application to the things of this world; and those who have remained in the faith will have into the bargain those products of the Protestant civilisation on which its claims of superiority are founded.

When, therefore, in the political shipwreck of modern Europe, it is asked which political form of party is favoured by the Church, the only answer we can give is, that she is attached to none; but that though indifferent to existing forms, she is attached to a spirit which is nearly extinct. Those who, from a fear of exposing her to political animosity, would deny this, forget that the truth is as strong against political as against religious error, and shut their eyes to the only means by which the political regeneration of the modern world is a possibility. For the Catholic religion alone will not suffice to save it, as it was insufficient to save the ancient world, unless the Catholic idea equally manifests itself in the political order. The Church alone, without influence on the State, is powerless as a security for good government. It is absurd to pretend that at the present day France, or Spain, or Naples, are better governed than England, Holland, or Prussia. A country entirely Protestant may have more Catholic elements in its government than one where the population is wholly Catholic. The State which is Catholic par excellence is a by-word for misgovernment, because the orthodoxy and piety of its administrators are deemed a substitute for a better system. The demand for a really Catholic system of government falls with the greatest weight of reproach on the Catholic States.

Yet it is important to remember that in the ages of faith the same unity prevailed in political ideas, and that the civil as well as the religious troubles of our time are in great measure due to the Reformation. It is common to advise Catholics to make up their minds to accept the political doctrines of the day; but it would be more to the purpose to recall the ideas of Catholic times. It is not in the results of the political development of the last three centuries that the Church can place her trust; neither in absolute monarchy, nor in the revolutionary liberalism, nor in the infallible constitutional scheme. She must create anew or revive her former creations, and instil a new life and spirit into those remains of the mediæval system which will bear the mark of the ages when heresy and unbelief, Roman law, and heathen philosophy, had not obscured the idea of the Christian State. These remains are to be found, in various stages of decay, in every State,--with the exception, perhaps, of France,--that grew out of the mediæval civilisation. Above all they will be found in the country which, in the midst of its apostasy, and in spite of so much guilt towards religion, has preserved the Catholic forms in its Church establishment more than any other Protestant nation, and the Catholic spirit in her political institutions more than any Catholic nation. To renew the memory of the times in which this spirit prevailed in Europe, and to preserve the remains of it, to promote the knowledge of what is lost, and the desire of what is most urgently needed,--is an important service and an important duty which it behoves us to perform. We are greatly mistaken if these are not reflections which force themselves on every one who carefully observes the political history of the Church in modern Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 300: The Rambler, 1858.]

[Footnote 301: Tertullian, Apologeticum, 39; see also 30, 32. "We pray also for the emperors, for the ministers of their Government, for the State, for the peace of the world, for the delay of the last day."]

[Footnote 302: De Civil. Dei, xv. 5. "The fratricide was the first founder of the secular State."]

[Footnote 303: "The Church reckons her subjects not as her servants but as her children."]

[Footnote 304: "It is the maddest insolence, not only to dispute against that which we see the universal Church believing, but also against what we see her doing. For not only is the faith of the Church the rule of our faith, but also her actions of ours, and her customs of that which we ought to observe" (Morinus, Comment. de Discipl. in administ. Poenitentiae, Preface).]

[Footnote 305: "Apud vos quodvis colere jus est Deum verum" (Tertullian, Apolog. xxiv.).]

[Footnote 306: August. de Civ. Dei, xx. 19. 3.]

[Footnote 307: "Christianus nullius est hostis, nedum imperatoris, quem ... necesse est ut ... salvum velit cum toto Romano imperio quousque saeculum stabit; tamdiu enim stabit" (Tert. ad Scapulam, 2). "Cum caput illud orbis occiderit et [Greek: rhym] esse coeperit, quod Sibyllae fore aiunt, quis dubitet venisse jam finem rebus humanis orbique terrarum?" (Lactantius, Inst. Div. vii. 25). "Non prius veniet Christus, quam regni Romani defectio fiat" (Ambrose ad ep. i. ad Thess.).]

[Footnote 308: "There is nothing so voluntary as religion."]

[Footnote 309: "God does not want unwilling worship, nor does he require a forced repentance."]

[Footnote 310: Athanas. i. 363 B and 384 C [Greek: mhê hanagkhazein halla peithein] "not compulsion, but persuasion" (Chrysost. ii. 540 A and C).]

[Footnote 311: "If the State of which we are the secular children passes away, that of which we are spiritual children passes not. Has God gone to sleep and let the house be destroyed, or let in the enemy through want of watchfulness? Why fearest thou when earthly kingdoms fall? Heaven is promised thee, that thou mightest not fall with them. The works of God Himself shall pass: how much sooner the works of Romulus! Let us not quail, my brethren: all earthly kingdoms must come to an end."]

[Footnote 312: "The cry of the whole world is 'Christ.' The mind is horrified in reviewing the ruins of our age. The Roman world is falling, and yet our stiff neck is not bent. The barbarians' strength is in our sins; the defeat of the Roman armies in our vices. We will not cut off the occasions of the malady, that the malady may be healed. The world is falling, but in us there is no falling off from sin" (St. Jerome, ep. 35, ad Heliodorum; ep. 98, ad Gaudentium).]

[Footnote 313: "None are better witnesses of the words of heaven than we, on whom the end of the world has come. We assist at the world's setting, and diseases precede its dissolution" (Expos. Ep. sec. Lucam, x.).]

[Footnote 314: "What is well-nigh all Christendom but a sink of iniquity?" (De Gub. Dei, iii. 9).]

[Footnote 315: "In our age the devil has so defiled everything that scarcely a thing is done without idolatry."]

[Footnote 316: "Do we wonder that God has granted all our lands to the barbarians, when they now purify by their chastity the places which the Romans had polluted with their debauchery?"]

[Footnote 317: Pope Anastasius writes to Clovis: "Sedes Petri in tanta occasione non potest non laetari, cum plenitudinem gentium intuetur ad eam veloci gradu concurrere" (Bouquet, iv. 50).]

[Footnote 318: "The noble people of the Franks, founded by God, converted to the Catholic faith, and free from heresy."]

[Footnote 319: "Vetati sunt a Spiritu sancto loqui verbum Dei in Asia ... Tentabant ire in Bithyniam, et non permisit eos spiritus Jesu" (Acts xvi. 6, 7).]

[Footnote 320: Innocent IV. wrote in 1246 to the Sicilians: "In omnem terram vestrae sonus tribulationis exivit ... multis pro miro vehementi ducentibus, quod pressi tam dirae servitutis opprobrio, et personarum ac rerum gravati multiplici detrimento, neglexeritis habere concilium, per quod vobis, sicut gentibus caeteris, aliqua provenirent solatia libertatis ... super hoc apud sedem apostolicam vos excusante formidine.... Cogitate itaque corde vigili, ut a collo vestrae servitutis catena decidat, et universitas vestra in libertatis et quietis gaudio reflorescat; sitque ubertate conspicuum, ita divina favente potentia secura sit libertate decorum" (Raynaldus, Ann. ad ann. 1246).]

[Footnote 321: Burke's Works, i. 391, 404.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII

INTRODUCTION TO L.A. BURD'S EDITION OF IL PRINCIPE BY MACHIAVELLI

Mr. Burd has undertaken to redeem our long inferiority in Machiavellian studies, and it will, I think, be found that he has given a more completely satisfactory explanation of The Prince than any country possessed before. His annotated edition supplies all the solvents of a famous problem in the history of Italy and the literature of politics. In truth, the ancient problem is extinct, and no reader of this volume will continue to wonder how so intelligent and reasonable a man came to propose such flagitious counsels. When Machiavelli declared that extraordinary objects cannot be accomplished under ordinary rules, he recorded the experience of his own epoch, but also foretold the secret of men since born. He illustrates not only the generation which taught him, but the generations which he taught, and has no less in common with the men who had his precepts before them than with the Viscontis, Borgias, and Baglionis who were the masters he observed. He represents more than the spirit of his country and his age. Knowledge, civilisation, and morality have increased; but three centuries have borne enduring witness to his political veracity. He has been as much the exponent of men whom posterity esteems as of him whose historian writes: "Cet homme que Dieu, après l'avoir fait si grand, avait fait bon aussi, n'avait rien de la vertu." The authentic interpreter of Machiavelli, the Commentarius Perpetuus of the Discorsi and The Prince, is the whole of later history.

Michelet has said: "Rapportons-nous-en sur ceci à quelqu'un qui fut bien plus Machiavéliste que Machiavel, à la republique de Venise." Before his day, and long after, down almost to the time when a price was set on the heads of the Pretender and of Pontiac, Venice employed assassins. And this was not the desperate resource of politicians at bay, but the avowed practice of decorous and religious magistrates. In 1569 Soto hazards an impersonal doubt whether the morality of the thing was sound: "Non omnibus satis probatur Venetorum mos, qui cum complures a patria exules habeant condemnatos, singulis facultatem faciunt, ut qui alium eorum interfecerit, vita ac libertate donetur." But his sovereign shortly after obtained assurance that murder by royal command was unanimously approved by divines: "A los tales puede el Principe mandarlos matar, aunque esten fuera de su distrito y reinos.--Sin ser citado, secretamente se le puede quitar la vita.--Esta es doctrina comun y cierta y recevida de todos los theologos." When the King of France, by despatching the Guises, had restored his good name in Europe, a Venetian, Francesco da Molino, hoped that the example would not be thrown away on the Council of Ten: "Permeti sua divina bontà che questo esempio habbi giovato a farlo proceder come spero con meno fretta e più sodamente a cose tali e d' importanza." Sarpi, their ablest writer, their official theologian, has a string of maxims which seem to have been borrowed straight from the Florentine predecessor: "Proponendo cosa in apparenza non honesta, scusarla come necessaria, come praticata da altri, come propria al tempo, che tende a buon fine, et conforme all' opinione de' molti.--La vendetta non giova se non per fugir lo sprezzo.--Ogn'huomo ha opinione che il mendacio sia buono in ragion di medicina, et di far bene a far creder il vero et utile con premesse false." One of his countrymen, having examined his writings, reports: "I ricordi di questo grand' uomo furono più da politico che da christiano." To him was attributed the doctrine of secret punishment, and the use of poison against public enemies: "In casi d' eccessi incorrigibili si punissero secretamente, a fine che il sangue patrizio non resti profanato.--Il veleno deve esser l' unico mezzo per levarli dal mondo, quando alla giustizia non complisse farli passare sotto la manaia del carnefice." Venice, otherwise unlike the rest of Europe, was, in this particular, not an exception.

Machiavelli enjoyed a season of popularity even at Rome. The Medicean popes refused all official employment to one who had been the brain of a hostile government; but they encouraged him to write, and were not offended by the things he wrote for them. Leo's own dealings with the tyrant of Perugia were cited by jurists as a suggestive model for men who have an enemy to get rid of. Clement confessed to Contarini that honesty would be preferable, but that honest men get the worst of it: "Io cognosco certo che voi dicete il vero, et che ad farla da homo da bene, et a far il debito, seria proceder come mi aricordate; ma bisognerebbe trovar la corrispondentia. Non vedete che il mondo è ridutto a un termine che colui il qual è più astuto et cum più trame fa il fatto suo, è più laudato, et estimato più valente homo, et più celebrato, et chi fa il contrario vien detto di esso; quel tale è una bona persona, ma non val niente? Et se ne sta cum quel titulo solo di bona persona.--Chi va bonamente vien trata da bestia." Two years after this speech the astute Florentine authorised The Prince to be published at Rome.

It was still unprinted when Pole had it pressed on his attention by Cromwell, and Brosch consequently suspects the story. Upon the death of Clement, Pole opened the attack; but it was not pursued during the reaction against things Medicean which occupied the reign of Farnese. Machiavelli was denounced to the Inquisition on the 11th of November 1550, by Muzio, a man much employed in controversy and literary repression, who, knowing Greek, was chosen by Pius V. for the work afterwards committed to Baronius: "Senza rispetto alcuno insegna a non servar ne fede, ne charità, ne religione; et dice che di queste cosi, gli huomini se ne debbono servire per parer buoni, et per le grandezze temporali, alle quali quando non servono non se ne dee fare stima. Et non è questo peggio che heretica dottrina? Vedendosi che ciò si comporta, sono accetate come opere approvate dalla Santa Madre chiesa." Muzio, who at the same time recommended the Decamerone, was not acting from ethical motives. His accusation succeeded. When the Index was instituted, in 1557, Machiavelli was one of the first writers condemned, and he was more rigorously and implacably condemned than anybody else. The Trent Commissioners themselves prepared editions of certain prohibited authors, such as Clarius and Flaminius; Guicciardini was suffered to appear with retrenchments; and the famous revision of Boccaccio was carried out in 1573. This was due to the influence of Victorius, who pleaded in vain for a castigated text of Machiavelli. He continued to be specially excepted when permission was given to read forbidden books. Sometimes there were other exceptions, such as Dumoulin, Marini, or Maimbourg; but the exclusion of Machiavelli was permanent, and when Lucchesini preached against him at the Gesù, he had to apply to the Pope himself for licence to read him. Lipsius was advised by his Roman censors to mix a little Catholic salt in his Machiavellism, and to suppress a seeming protest against the universal hatred for a writer qui misera qua non manu hodie vapulat. One of the ablest but most contentious of the Jesuits, Raynaud, pursued his memory with a story like that with which Tronchin improved the death of Voltaire: "Exitus impiissimi nebulonis metuendus est eius aemulatoribus, nam blasphemans evomuit reprobum spiritum."

In spite of this notorious disfavour, he has been associated with the excesses of the religious wars. The daughter of the man to whom he addressed The Prince was Catharine of Medici, and she was reported to have taught her children "surtout des traictz de cet athée Machiavel." Boucher asserted that Henry III. carried him in his pocket: "qui perpetuus ei in sacculo atque manibus est"; and Montaigne confirms the story when he says: "Et dict on, de ce temps, que Machiavel est encores ailleurs en crédit." The pertinently appropriate quotation by which the Queen sanctified her murderous resolve was supplied, not by her father's rejected and discredited monitor, but by a bishop at the Council of Trent, whose sermons had just been published: "Bisogna esser severo et acuto, non bisogna esser clemente; è crudeltà l' esser pietoso, è pietà l' esser crudele." And the argument was afterwards embodied in the Controversies of Bellarmin: "Haereticis obstinatis beneficium est, quod de hac vita tollantur, nam quo diutius vivunt, eo plures errores excogitant; plures pervertunt, et majorem sibi damnationem acquirunt."

The divines who held these doctrines received them through their own channels straight from the Middle Ages. The germ theory, that the wages of heresy is death, was so expanded as to include the rebel, the usurper, the heterodox or rebellious town, and it continued to develop long after the time of Machiavelli. At first it had been doubtful whether a small number of culprits justified the demolition of a city: "Videtur quod si aliqui haeretici sunt in civitate potest exuri tota civitas." Under Gregory XIII. the right is asserted unequivocally: "Civitas ista potest igne destrui, quando in ea plures sunt haeretici." In case of sedition, fire is a less suitable agent: "Propter rebellionem civitas quandoque supponitur aratro et possunt singuli decapitari." As to heretics the view was: "Ut hostes latronesque occidi possunt etiamsi sunt clerici." A king, if he was judged a usurper, was handed over to extinction: "Licite potest a quolibet de populo occidi, pro libertate populi, quando non est recursus ad superiorem, a quo possit iustitia fieri." Or, in the words of the scrupulous Soto: "Tunc quisque ius habet ipsum extinguendi." To the end of the seventeenth century theologians taught: "Occidatur, seu occidendus proscribatur, quando non alitur potest haberi tranquillitas Reipublicae."

This was not mere theory, or the enforced logic of men in thrall to mediæval antecedents. Under the most carnal and unchristian king, the Vaudois of Provence were exterminated in the year 1545, and Paul Sadolet wrote as follows to Cardinal Farnese just before and just after the event: "Aggionta hora questa instantia del predetto paese di Provenza a quella che da Mons. Nuntio s'era fatta a Sua Maestà Christianissima a nome di Sua Beatitudine et di Vostra Reverendissima Signoria, siamo in ferma speranza, che vi si debbia pigliare qualche bono expediente et farci qualche gagliarda provisione.--È seguito, in questo paese, quel tanto desiderato et tanto necessario effetto circa le cose di Cabrieres, che da vostra Signoria Reverendissima è stato si lungamente ricordato et sollicitato et procurato." Even Melanchthon was provoked by the death of Cromwell to exclaim that there is no better deed than the slaughter of a tyrant; "Utinam Deus alicui forti viro hanc mentem inserat!" And in 1575 the Swedish bishops decided that it would be a good work to poison their king in a basin of soup--an idea particularly repugnant to the author of De Rege et Regis Institutione. Among Mariana's papers I have seen the letter from Paris describing the murder of Henry III., which he turned to such account in the memorable sixth chapter: "Communicò con sus superiores, si peccaria mortalmente un sacerdote que matase a un tirano. Ellos le diceron que non era pecado, mas que quedaria irregular. Y no contentandose con esto, ni con las disputas que avia de ordinario en la Sorbona sobre la materia, continuando siempre sus oraciones, lo preguntò a otros theologos, que le afirmavan lo mismo; y con esto se resolviò enteramente de executarlo. Por el successo es de collegir que tuvo el fraile alguna revelacion de Nuestro Señor en particular, y inspiracion para executar el caso." According to Maffei, the Pope's biographer, the priests were not content with saying that killing was no sin: "Cum illi posse, nec sine magno quidem merito censuissent." Regicide was so acceptable a work that it seemed fitly assigned to a divine interposition.

When, on the 21st of January 1591, a youth offered his services to make away with Henry IV., the Nuncio remitted the matter to Rome: "Quantunque mi sia parso di trovarlo pieno di tale humilità, prudenza, spirito et cose che arguiscono che questa sia inspiratione veramente piuttosto che temerità e leggerezza." In a volume which, though recent, is already rare, the Foreign Office published D'Avaux's advice to treat the Protestants of Ireland much as William treated the Catholics of Glencoe; and the argument of the Assassination Plot came originally from a Belgian seminary. There were at least three men living far into the eighteenth century who defended the massacre of St. Bartholomew in their books; and it was held as late as 1741 that culprits may be killed before they are condemned: "Etiam ante sententiam impune occidi possunt, quando de proximo erant banniendi, vel quando eorum delictum est notorium, grave, et pro quo poena capitis infligenda esset."

Whilst these principles were current in religion as well as in society, the official censures of the Church and the protests of every divine since Catharinus were ineffectual. Much of the profaner criticism uttered by such authorities as the Cardinal de Retz, Voltaire, Frederic the Great, Daunou, and Mazzini is not more convincing or more real. Linguet was not altogether wrong in suggesting that the assailants knew Machiavelli at second hand: "Chaque fois que je jette les yeux sur les ouvrages de ce grand génie, je ne saurais concevoir, je l'avoue, la cause du décri où il est tombé. Je soupçonne fortement que ses plus grands ennemis sont ceux qui ne l'ont pas lu." Retz attributed to him a proposition which is not in his writings. Frederic and Algernon Sidney had read only one of his books, and Bolingbroke, a congenial spirit, who quotes him so often, knew him very little. Hume spoils a serious remark by a glaring eighteenth-century comment: "There is scarcely any maxim in The Prince which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted. The errors of this politician proceeded, in a great measure, from his having lived in too early an age of the world to be a good judge of political truth." Bodin had previously written: "Il n'a jamais sondé le gué de la science politique." Mazzini complains of his analisi cadaverica ed ignoranza della vita; and Barthélemy St Hilaire, verging on paradox, says: "On dirait vraiment que l'histoire ne lui a rien appris, non plus que la conscience." That would be more scientific treatment than the common censure of moralists and the common applause of politicians. It is easier to expose errors in practical politics than to remove the ethical basis of judgments which the modern world employs in common with Machiavelli.

By plausible and dangerous paths men are drawn to the doctrine of the justice of History, of judgment by results, the nursling of the nineteenth century, from which a sharp incline leads to The Prince. When we say that public life is not an affair of morality, that there is no available rule of right and wrong, that men must be judged by their age, that the code shifts with the longitude, that the wisdom which governs the event is superior to our own, we carry obscurely tribute to the system which bears so odious a name. Few would scruple to maintain with Mr. Morley that the equity of history requires that we shall judge men of action by the standards of men of action; or with Retz: "Les vices d'un archevêque peuvent être, dans une infinité de rencontres, les vertus d'un chef de parti." The expounder of Adam Smith to France, J.B. Say, confirms the ambitious coadjutor: "Louis XIV. et son despotisme et ses guerres n'ont jamais fait le mal qui serait résulté des conseils de ce bon Fénelon, l'apôtre et le martyr de la vertu et du bien des hommes." Most successful public men deprecate what Sir Henry Taylor calls much weak sensibility of conscience, and approve Lord Grey's language to Princess Lieven: "I am a great lover of morality, public and private; but the intercourse of nations cannot be strictly regulated by that rule." While Burke was denouncing the Revolution, Walpole wrote: "No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary." All which had been formerly anticipated by Pole: "Quanto quis privatam vitam agens Christi similior erit tanto minus aptus ad regendum id munus iudicio hominum existimabitur." The main principle of Machiavelli is asserted by his most eminent English disciple: "It is the solecism of power to think, to command the end, and yet not to endure the means." And Bacon leads up to the familiar Jesuit: "Cui licet finis, illi et media permissa sunt."

The austere Pascal has said: "On ne voit rien de juste ou d'injuste qui ne change de qualité en changeant de climat" (the reading presque rien was the precaution of an editor). The same underlying scepticism is found not only in philosophers of the Titanic sort, to whom remorse is a prejudice of education, and the moral virtues are "the political offspring which flattery begat upon pride," but among the masters of living thought. Locke, according to Mr. Bain, holds that we shall scarcely find any rule of morality, excepting such as are necessary to hold society together, and these too with great limitations, but what is somewhere or other set aside, and an opposite established by whole societies of men. Maine de Biran extracts this conclusion from the Esprit des Lois: "Il n'y a rien d'absolu ni dans la religion, ni dans la morale, ni, à plus forte raison, dans la politique." In the mercantile economists Turgot detects the very doctrine of Helvetius: "Il établit qu'il n'y a pas lieu à la probité entre les nations, d'où suivroit que la monde doit être éternellement un coupe-gorge. En quoi il est bien d'accord avec les panégyristes de Colbert."

These things survive, transmuted, in the edifying and popular epigram: "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht." Lacordaire, though he spoke so well of "L'empire et les ruses de la durée," recorded his experience in these words: "J'ai toujours vu Dieu se justifier à la longue." Reuss, a teacher of opposite tendency and greater name, is equally consoling: "Les destinées de l'homme s'accomplissent ici-bas; la justice de Dieu s'exerce et se manifeste sur cette terre." In the infancy of exact observation Massillon could safely preach that wickedness ends in ignominy: "Dieu aura son tour." The indecisive Providentialism of Bossuet's countrymen is shared by English divines.

"Contemporaries," says Hare, "look at the agents, at their motives and characters; history looks rather at the acts and their consequences." Thirlwall hesitates to say that whatever is, is best; "but I have a strong faith that it is for the best, and that the general stream of tendency is toward good." And Sedgwick, combining induction with theology, writes: "If there be a superintending Providence, and if His will be manifested by general laws, operating both on the physical and moral world, then must a violation of those laws be a violation of His will, and be pregnant with inevitable misery."

Apart from the language of Religion, an optimism ranging to the bounds of fatalism is the philosophy of many, especially of historians: "Le vrai, c'est, en toutes choses, le fait." Sainte-Beuve says: "Il y a dans tout fait général et prolongé une puissance de démonstration insensible"; and Scherer describes progress as "une espèce de logique objective et impersonelle qui résout les questions sans appel." Ranke has written: "Der beste Prüfstein ist die Zeit"; and Sybel explains that this was not a short way out of confusion and incertitude, but a profound generalisation: "Ein Geschlecht, ein Volk löst das andere ab, und der Lebende hat Recht." A scholar of a different school and fibre, Stahr the Aristotelian, expresses the same idea: "Die Geschichte soll die Richtigkeit des Denkens bewähren." Richelieu's maxim: "Les grands desseins et notables entreprises ne se vérifient jamais autrement que par le succès"; and Napoleon's: "Je ne juge les hommes que par les résultats," are seriously appropriated by Fustel de Coulanges: "Ce qui caractérise le véritable homme d'état, c'est le succès, on le reconnaît surtout à ce signe, qu'il réussit." One of Machiavelli's gravest critics applied it to him: "Die ewige Aufgabe der Politik bleibt unter den gegebenen Verhältnissen und mit den vorhandenen Mitteln etwas zu erreichen. Eine Politik die das verkennt, die auf den Erfolg verzichtet, sich auf eine theoretische Propaganda, auf ideale Gesichtspunkte beschränkt, von einer verlorenen Gegenwart an eine künftige Gerechtigkeit appellirt, ist keine Politik mehr." One of the mediæval pioneers, Stenzel, delivered a formula of purest Tuscan cinquecento: "Was bei anderen Menschen gemeine Schlechtigkeit ist, erhält, bei den ungewöhnlichen Geistern, den Stempel der Grösse, der selbst dem Verbrechen sich aufdrückt. Der Maassstab ist anders; denn das Ausserordentliche lässt sich nur durch Ausserordentliches bewirken." Treitschke habitually denounces the impotent Doctrinaires who do not understand "dass der Staat Macht ist und der Welt des Willens angehört," and who know not how to rise "von der Politik des Bekenntnisses zu der Politik der That." Schäfer, though a less pronounced partisan, derides Macaulay for thinking that human happiness concerns political science: "Das Wesen des Staates ist die Macht, und die Politik die Kunst ihn zu erhalten." Rochau's Realpolitik was a treatise in two volumes written to prove "dass der Staat durch seine Selbsterhaltung das oberste Gebot der Sittlichkeit erfüllt." Wherefore, nobody finds fault when a State in its decline is subjugated by a robust neighbour. In one of those telling passages which moved Mr. Freeman to complain that he seems unable to understand that a small State can have any rights, or that a generous or patriotic sentiment can find a place anywhere except in the breast of a fool, Mommsen justifies the Roman conquests: "Kraft des Gesetzes dass das zum Staat entwickelte Volk die politisch unmündigen, das civilisirte die geistig unmündigen in sich auflöst." The same idea was imparted into the theory of ethics by Kirchmann, and appears, with a sobering touch, in the Geschichte Jesu of Hase, the most popular German divine: "Der Einzelne wird nach der Grösse seiner Ziele, nach den Wirkungen seiner Thaten für das Wohl der Völker gemessen, aber nicht nach dem Maasse der Moral und des Rechts.--Vom Leben im Geiste seiner Zeit hängt nicht der sittliche Werth eines Menschen, aber seine geschichtliche Wirksamkeit ab." Rümelin, both in politics and literature the most brilliant Suabian of his time, and a strenuous adversary of Machiavelli, wrote thus in 1874: "Für den Einzelnen im Staat gilt das Princip der Selbsthingabe, für den Staat das der Selbstbehauptung. Der Einzelne dient dem Recht; der Staat handhabt, leitet und schafft dasselbe. Der Einzelne ist nur ein flüchtiges Glied in dem sittlichen Ganzen; der Staat ist, wenn nicht dieses Ganze selbst, doch dessen reale, ordnende Macht; er ist unsterblich und sich selbst genug.--Die Erhaltung des Staats rechtfertigt jedes Opfer und steht über jedem Gebot." Nefftzer, an Alsatian borderer, says: "Le devoir suprême des individus est de se dévouer, celui des nations est de se conserver, et se confond par conséquent avec leur intérêt." Once, in a mood of pantheism, Renan wrote: "L'humanité a tout fait, et, nous voulons le croire, tout bien fait." Or, as Michelet abridges the Scienza Nuova: "L'humanité est son oeuvre à elle-même. Dieu agit sur elle, mais par elle." Mr. Leslie Stephen thus lays down the philosophy of history according to Carlyle, "that only succeeds which is based on divine truth, and permanent success therefore proves the right, as the effect proves the cause." Darwin, having met Carlyle, notes that "in his eyes might was right," and adds that he had a narrow and unscientific mind; but Mr. Goldwin Smith discovers the same lesson: "History, of itself, if observed as science observes the facts of the physical world, can scarcely give man any principle or any object of allegiance, unless it be success." Dr. Martineau attributes this doctrine to Mill: "Do we ask what determines the moral quality of actions? We are referred, not to their spring, but to their consequences." Jeremy Bentham used to relate how he found the greatest happiness principle in 1768, and gave a shilling for it, at the corner of Queen's College. He found it in Priestley, and he might have gone on finding it in Beccaria and Hutcheson, all of whom trace their pedigree to the Mandragola: "Io credo che quello sia bene che facci bene a' più, e che i più se ne contentino." This is the centre of unity in all Machiavelli, and gives him touch, not with unconscious imitators only, but with the most conspicuous race of reasoners in the century.

English experience has not been familiar with a line of thought plainly involving indulgence to Machiavelli. Dugald Stewart raises him high, but raises him for a heavy fall: "No writer, certainly, either in ancient or in modern times, has ever united, in a more remarkable degree, a greater variety of the most dissimilar and seemingly the most discordant gifts and attainments.--To his maxims the royal defenders of the Catholic faith have been indebted for the spirit of that policy which they have uniformly opposed to the innovations of the reformers." Hallam indeed has said: "We continually find a more flagitious and undisguised abandonment of moral rules for the sake of some idol of a general principle than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel." But the unaccustomed hyperbole had been hazarded a century before in the obscurity of a Latin dissertation by Feuerlein: "Longe detestabiliores errores apud alios doctores politicos facile invenias, si eidem rigorosae censurae eorum scripta subiicienda essent." What has been, with us, the occasional aphorism of a masterful mind, encountered support abroad in accredited systems, and in a vast and successful political movement. The recovery of Machiavelli has been essentially the product of causes operating on the Continent.

When Hegel was dominant to the Rhine, and Cousin beyond it, the circumstances favoured his reputation. For Hegel taught: "Der Gang der Weltgeschichte steht ausserhalb der Tugend, des Lasters, und der Gerechtigkeit." And the great eclectic renewed, in explicit language, the worst maxim of the Istorie Fiorentine: "L'apologie d'un siècle est dans son existence, car son existence est un arrêt et un jugement de Dieu même, ou l'histoire n'est qu'une fastasmagorie insignifiante.--Le caractère propre, le signe d'un grand homme, c'est qu'il réussit.--Ou nul guerrier ne doit être appelé grand homme, ou, s'il est grand, il faut l'absoudre, et absoudre en masse tout ce qu'il a fait.--Il faut prouver que le vainqueur non seulement sert la civilisation, mais qu'il est meilleur, plus moral, et que c'est pour cela qu'il est vainqueur. Maudire la puissance (j'entends une puissance longue et durable) c'est blasphémer l'humanité."

This primitive and everlasting problem assumed a peculiar shape in theological controversy. The Catholic divines urged that prosperity is a sign by which, even in the militant period, the true Church may be known; coupling Felicitas Temporalis illis collata qui ecclesiam defenderunt with Infelix exitus eorum qui ecclesiam oppugnant. Le Blanc de Beaulieu, a name famous in the history of pacific disputation, holds the opposite opinion: "Crucem et perpessiones esse potius ecclesiae notam, nam denunciatum piis in verbo Dei fore ut in hoc mundo persecutionem patiantur, non vero ut armis sint adversariis suis superiores." Renan, outbidding all, finds that honesty is the worst policy: "En général, dans l'histoire, l'homme est puni de ce qu'il fait de bien, et récompensée de ce qu'il fait de mal.--L'histoire est tout le contraire de la vertu récompensée."

The national movement which united, first Italy and then Germany, opened a new era for Machiavelli. He had come down, laden with the distinctive reproach of abetting despotism; and the men who, in the seventeenth century, levelled the course of absolute monarchy, were commonly known as novi politici et Machiavellistae. In the days of Grotius they are denounced by Besold: "Novi politici, ex Italia redeuntes qui quavis fraude principibus a subditis pecuniam extorquere fas licitumque esse putant, Machiavelli plerumque praeceptis et exemplis principum, quorum rationes non capiunt, ad id abutentes." But the immediate purpose with which Italians and Germans effected the great change in the European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli's time had come. The problems once more were his own: and in many forward and resolute minds the spirit also was his, and displayed itself in an ascending scale of praise. He was simply a faithful observer of facts, who described the fell necessity that governs narrow territories and unstable fortunes; he discovered the true line of progress and the law of future society; he was a patriot, a republican, a Liberal, but above all this, a man sagacious enough to know that politics is an inductive science. A sublime purpose justifies him, and he has been wronged by dupes and fanatics, by irresponsible dreamers and interested hypocrites.

The Italian Revolution, passing from the Liberal to the national stage, at once adopted his name and placed itself under his invocation. Count Sclopis, though he declared him Penseur profond, écrivain admirable, deplored this untimely preference: "Il m'a été pénible de voir le gouvernement provisoire de la Tuscane, en 1859, le lendemain du jour où ce pays recouvrait sa liberté, publier un décret, portant qu'une édition complète des oeuvres de Machiavel serait faite aux frais de l'état." The research even of our best masters, Villari and Tommasini, is prompted by admiration. Ferrari, who comes so near him in many qualities of the intellect, proclaims him the recorder of fate: "Il décrit les rôles que la fatalité distribue aux individus et aux masses dans ces moments funestes et glorieux où ils sont appelés à changer la loi et la foi des nations." His advice, says La Farina, would have saved Italy. Canello believes that he is disliked because he is mistaken for a courtier: "L'orrore e l' antipatia che molti critici hanno provato per il Machiavelli son derivati dal pensare che tutti i suoi crudi insegnamenti fossero solo a vantaggio del Principe." One biographer, Mordenti, exalts him as the very champion of conscience: "Risuscitando la dignità dell' umana coscienza, ne affermò l' esistenza in faccia alla ragione." He adds, more truly, "È uno dei personaggi del dramma che si va svolgendo nell' età nostra."

That is the meaning of Laurent when he says that he has imitators but no defenders: "Machiavel ne trouve plus un seul partisan au XIXe siècle.--La postérité a voué son nom à l'infamie, tout en pratiquant sa doctrine." His characteristic universality has been recognised by Baudrillart: "En exprimant ce mauvais côté, mais ce mauvais côté, hélas, éternel! Machiavel n'est plus seulement le publiciste de son pays et de son temps; it est le politique de tous les siècles.--S'il fait tout dépendre de la puissance individuelle, et de ses facultés de force, d'habileté de ruse, c'est que, plus le théâtre se rétrécit, plus l'homme influe sur la marche des évènements." Matter finds the same merits which are applauded by the Italians: "Il a plus innové pour la liberté que pour le despotisme, car autour de lui la liberté était inconnue, tandis que le despotisme lui posait partout." And his reviewer, Longpérier, pronounces the doctrine "parfaitement appropriée aux états d'Italie." Nourrisson, with Fehr, one of the few religious men who still have a good word for the Secretary, admires his sincerity: "Le Prince est un livre de bonne foi, où l'auteur, sans songer à mal, n'a fait que traduire en maximes les pratiques habituelles à ses contemporains." Thiers, though he surrendered The Prince, clung to the Discorsi--the Discorsi, with the pointed and culminating text produced by Mr. Burd. In the archives of the ministry he might have found how the idea struck his successful predecessor, Vergennes: "Il est des choses plus fortes que les hommes, et les grands intérêts des nations sont de ce genre, et doivent par conséquent l'emporter sur la façon de penser de quelques particuliers."

Loyalty to Frederic the Great has not restrained German opinion, and philosophers unite with historians in rejecting his youthful moralities. Zimmerman wonders what would have become of Prussia if the king had practised the maxims of the crown prince; and Zeller testifies that the Anti-Machiavel was not permitted to influence his reign: "Wird man doch weder in seiner Staatsleitung noch in seinen politischen Grundsätzen etwas von dem vermissen, worauf die Ueberlegenheit einer gesunden Realpolitik allem liberalen oder conservativen, radikalen oder legitimistischen, Doktrinarismus gegenüber beruht." Ahrens and Windelband insist on the virtue of a national government: "Der Staat ist sich selbst genug, wenn er in einer Nation wurzelt,--das ist der Grundgedanke Machiavelli's." Kirchmann celebrates the emancipation of the State from the moral yoke: "Man hat Machiavelli zwar in der Theorie bekämpft, allein die Praxis der Staaten hat seine Lehren immer eingehalten.--Wenn seine Lehre verletzt, so kommt diess nur von der Kleinheit der Staaten und Fürsten, auf die er sie verwendet.--Es spricht nur für seine tiefe Erkenntniss des Staatswesens, dass er die Staatsgewalt nicht den Regeln der Privatmoral unterwirft, sondern selbst vor groben Verletzungen dieser Moral durch den Fürsten nicht zurückschreckt, wenn das Wohl des Ganzen und die Freiheit des Vaterlandes nicht anders vorbereitet und vermittelt werden kann." In Kuno Fischer's progress through the systems of metaphysics Machiavelli appears at almost every step; his influence is manifest to Dr. Abbott throughout the whole of Bacon's political writings; Hobbes followed up his theory to the conclusions which he abstained from; Spinoza gave him the benefit of a liberal interpretation; Leibniz, the inventor of the acquiescent doctrine which Bolingbroke transmitted to the Essay on Man, said that he drew a good likeness of a bad prince; Herder reports him to mean that a rogue need not be a fool; Fichte frankly set himself to rehabilitate him. In the end, the great master of modern philosophy pronounces in his favour, and declares it absurd to robe a prince in the cowl of a monk: "Ein politischer Denker und Künstler dessen erfahrener und tiefer Verstand aus den geschichtlich gegebenen Verhältnissen besser, als aus den Grundsätzen der Metaphysik, die politischen Nothwendigkeiten, den Charakter, die Bildung und Aufgabe weltlicher Herrschaft zu begreifen wusste.--Da man weiss, dass politische Machtfragen nie, am Wenigsten in einem verderbten Volke, mit den Mitteln der Moral zu lösen sind, so ist es unverständig, das Buch vom Fürsten zu verschreien. Machiavelli hatte einen Herrscher zu schildern, keinen Klosterbruder."

Ranke was a grateful student of Fichte when he spoke of Machiavelli as a meritorious writer, maligned by people who could not understand him: "Einem Autor von höchstem Verdienst, und der keineswegs ein böser Mensch war.--Die falsche Auffassung des Principe beruht eben darauf, dass man die Lehren Machiavells als allgemeine betrachtet, während sie bloss Anweisungen für einen bestimmten Zweck sind." To Gervinus, in 1853, he is "der grosse Seher," the prophet of the modern world: "Er errieth den Geist der neuern Geschichte." Gervinus was a democratic Liberal, and, taken with Gentz from another quarter, he shows how widely the elements of the Machiavellian restoration were spread over Europe. Gentz had not forgotten his classics in the service of Austria when he wrote to a friend: "Wenn selbst das Recht je verletzt werden darf, so geschehe es, um die rechtmässige Macht zu erhalten; in allem Uebrigen herrsche es unbedingt" Twesten is as well persuaded as Machiavelli that the world cannot be governed "con Pater nostri in mano," and he deemed that patriotism atoned for his errors: "Dass der weltgeschichtliche Fortschritt nicht mit Schonung und Gelindigkeit, nicht in den Formen des Rechts vollzogen werden könnte, hat die Geschichte aller Länder bestätigt.--Auch Machiavellis Sünden mögen wir als gesühnt betrachten, durch das hochsinnige Streben für das Grosse und das Ansehen seines Volkes." One censor of Frederic, Boretius, makes him answerable for a great deal of presuming criticism: "Die Gelehrten sind bis heute in ihrem Urtheil über Machiavelli nicht einig, die öffentliche Meinung ist hierin glücklicher.--Die öffentliche Meinung kann sich für alle diese Weisheit beim alten Fritz bedanken." On the eve of the campaign in Bohemia, Herbst pointed out that Machiavelli, though previously a republican, sacrificed liberty to unity: "Der Einheit soll die innere Freiheit--Machiavelli war kurz zuvor noch begeisterter Anhänger der Republik--geopfert werden." According to Feuerlein the heart of the writer was loyal, but the conditions of the problem were inexorable; and Klein detects in The Prince, and even in the Mandragola, "die reformatorische Absicht eines Sittenspiegels." Chowanetz wrote a book to hold up Machiavelli as a teacher of all ages, but especially of our own: "Die Absicht aber, welche Machiavel mit seinem Buche verband, ist trefflich für alle Zeiten." And Weitzel hardly knows a better writer, or one less worthy of an evil name: "Im Interesse der Menschheit und gesetzmässiger Verfassungen kann kaum ein besseres Werk geschrieben werden.--Wohl ist mancher in der Geschichte, wie in der Tradition der Völker, auf eine unschuldige Weise um seinen verdienten, oder zu einem unverdienten Rufe gekommen, aber keiner vielleicht unschuldiger als Machiavelli."

These are remote and forgotten names. Stronger men of the imperial epoch have resumed the theme with better means of judging, and yet with no harsher judgment. Hartwig sums up his penetrating and severe analysis by confessing that the world as Machiavelli saw it, without a conscience, is the real world of history as it is: "Die Thatsachen selbst scheinen uns das Geheimniss ihrer Existenz zu verrathen; wir glauben vor uns die Fäden sich verknüpfen und verschlingen zu sehen, deren Gewebe die Weltgeschichte ist." Gaspary thinks that he hated iniquity, but that he knew of no righteousness apart from the State: "Er lobte mit Wärme das Gute und tadelte mit Abscheu das Böse; aber er studirte auch dieses mit Interesse.--Er erkennt eben keine Moral, wie keine Religion, über dem Staate, sondern nur in demselben; die Menschen sind von Natur schlecht, die Gesetze machen sie gut.--Wo es kein Gericht giebt, bei dem man klagen könnte, wie in den Handlungen der Fürsten, betrachtet man immer das Ende." The common opinion is expressed by Baumgarten in his Charles the Fifth, that the grandeur of the purpose assures indulgence to the means proposed: "Wenn die Umstände zum Wortbruch, zur Grausamkeit, Habgier, Lüge treiben, so hat man sich nicht etwa mit Bedauern, dass die Not dazu zwinge, sondern schlechtweg, weil es eben politisch zweckmässig ist und ohne alles Bedenken so zu verhalten.--Ihre Deduktionen sind uns unerträglich, wenn wir nicht sagen können: alle diese schrecklichen Dinge empfahl Machiavelli, weil er nur durch sie die Befreiung seines Vaterlandes zu erreichen hoffte. Dieses erhabene Ziel macht uns die fürchterlichen Mittel annehmbar, welche Machiavelli seinem Fürsten empfiehlt." Hillebrand was a more international German; he had swum in many European waters, and wrote in three languages. He is scarcely less favourable in his interpretation: "Cette dictature, il ne faut jamais le perdre de vue, ne serait jamais que transitoire, et devrait faire place à un gouvernement libre dès que la grande réforme nationale et sociale serait accomplie.--Il a parfaitement conscience du mal. L'atmosphère ambiante de son siècle et de son pays n'a nullement oblitéré son sens moral--Il a si bien conscience de l'énormité de ces crimes, qu'il la condamne hautement lorsque la dernière nécessité ne les impose pas."

Among these utterances of capable and distinguished men, it will be seen that some are partially true, and others, without a particle of truth, are at least representative and significant, and serve to bring Machiavelli within fathomable depth. He is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world. Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion, have not reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. He obtains a new lease of life from causes that are still prevailing, and from doctrines that are apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. Without sparing censure, or employing for comparison the grosser symptoms of the age, we find him near our common level, and perceive that he is not a vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence. Where it is impossible to praise, to defend, or to excuse, the burden of blame may yet be lightened by adjustment and distribution, and he is more rationally intelligible when illustrated by lights falling not only from the century he wrote in, but from our own, which has seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime.

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