and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as
hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat
which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting.
Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating
religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the
main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys
appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never
attempted to light a fire.
When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall
have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or
secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no
longer be possible. A few rudely constructed, diminutive bombs can lay
the proudest city in ruins.
To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is
to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be
far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us;
for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (Job XXI. 14). Churches,
here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross
has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and
hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of
the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and
avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from
the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if
the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and
stifle him there, then--_patuit Deus_.”
LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY
Liberty is, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity
and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other
influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many
slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of
character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there
are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that
great transition” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258).
There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church
proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters,
whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even
assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all
human laws.
Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took
from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against
those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who
beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the
whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to
shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves”
(Wright’s _Political Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle
Ages_). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its
dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen
to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection
was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (_History of
Rationalism_, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of
slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from
polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky,
“has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of
the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was
elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was
recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated
only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person
of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a
reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was
idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for
the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a
harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a
conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest
civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with no
barren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new
sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in
this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in
Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin
of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (_History of
Rationalism_, I, 231).
These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that
all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the
weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in
Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the
condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity.
After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all
Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,”
writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his
efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians”
(_Essai sur les mœurs_).
Mr. Hallam has satirically remarked in his _History of the Middle Ages_,
page 221, that “though several popes and the clergy enforced manumission
as a duty on laymen, the villeins on church lands were the last to be
emancipated.” But he well knows, for he has told us himself on page 217
of the same work, that “the mildness of ecclesiastical rule and the
desire to obtain the prayers of the monks induced many to attach
themselves as serfs to monasteries.” An old German proverb, too, says:
“It is good to live under the crozier.” When the monasteries were
suppressed by Henry VIII, we know by Strype’s _Chronicles_, that misery
and vagrancy reached terrible proportions.
But while freely admitting that “in the transition from slavery to
serfdom, and from serfdom to liberty, the Catholic Church was the most
zealous and the most efficient agent” (II, 234), Lecky is loath to admit
that her action in the sphere of political liberty was equally
efficacious, and that this second emancipation could have been
accomplished slowly, and judiciously, as was the first, without the
upheavals, the violence, and the excesses of the sixteenth and the
eighteenth centuries. Yet on page 158, vol. II, he reminds us that “St.
Thomas Aquinas, the ablest theologian of the Middle Ages, distinctly
asserts the right of subjects to withhold obedience from rulers who were
usurpers or unjust.” “To the scholastics of those days also,” he says,
“we chiefly owe the doctrine of the mediate rights of kings, which is
very remarkable as the embryo of the principles of Locke and Rousseau.”
Authority considered in the abstract is of divine origin; but still the
direct and immediate source of regal power is the nation, according to
Suarez. Apparently, the noisy standard-bearers of civil liberties and
political rights, in the eighteenth century, were not exactly pioneers,
but mere plagiarists.
“As long,” continues Lecky, “as the object was not so much to produce
freedom, as to mitigate servitude, the Church was still the champion of
the people.... The balance of power created by the numerous corporations
she created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition, which created a
network of unwritten customs with the force of public law, the
dependence of the civil on the ecclesiastical power, and the right of
excommunication and deposition, had all contributed to lighten the
pressure of despotism” (II, 235).
We must array Mr. Lecky against himself, and conclude that the Church
did more than “mitigate servitude”; she also produced freedom by the
institution of these numerous guilds and unwritten laws, many of which
still existed until they were swept away by the Revolution of 1790,
which left nothing standing but an omnipotent tyrant, called the State,
and a defenceless people, _corvéable_, _taillable_, and guillotinable,
at mercy. These “unwritten customs with the force of public law” made
Spain the freest country in Europe, until the seventeenth century. To
suppress these _fueros_ of the commons, or unwritten constitutional
liberties, was one of the chief objects of the Spanish Inquisition,
established by royal authority, and aimed chiefly at the bishops, as
champions of popular rights. One of its first victims was the saintly
Archbishop of Toledo. The Basque provinces retain their _fueros_ intact
to this day.
In France too liberty succumbed with the Public Law of Europe (1648).
In 1314 Philippe le Bel, in order to obtain subsidies, convoked the
States General (Les Trois Etats). From that time to 1359, they were
convoked seven times. In the first half of the fifteenth century there
were fourteen convocations. From 1506 to 1558 there was an interruption
of fifty-two years. From Henry II to the minority of Louis XIII, the
States met six times. In 1614 was held the last convocation of the Trois
Etats, until 1789.
Under the despotic Louis XI (1401-83), Philippe de Commines still dared
to write with impunity: “Il n’y a roi ni seigneur qui ait pouvoir, outre
son domaine, de mettre un denier sur ses sujets sans octroi et
consentement, sinon par tyrannie et violence.” (“It would be tyranny and
violence for any king or lord to raise a penny of taxation on his
subjects, without their leave and consent.”)[23]
“Nevertheless,” writes de Tocqueville, “the elections were not abolished
till 1692 ... the cities still preserved the right to govern themselves.
Until the end of the seventeenth century we find some which were small
republics, in which the magistrates were freely elected by the citizens
and answerable to them, and in which public spirit was active and proud
of its independence” (_Ancien Régime_, p. 83).
Mr. Lecky is pleased to attribute to the papal power “some of the worst
calamities--the Crusades, religious persecutions, the worst features of
the semi-religious struggle that convulsed Italy.... It is not
necessary,” he continues, “to follow in detail the history of [what he
is pleased to call] the encroachments of the spiritual on the civil
power” (II, 155), though it would be more correct to say the
encroachments of the civil on the religious power.
But it is very necessary to do so, because though the main object of
these struggles of the spiritual power with despotic kings was the
independence of the Church, it cannot be gainsaid that personal and
civil liberty were thereby enhanced, as Lecky himself admits (p. 235).
It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us
from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged
persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses,
menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their
subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they
were to ecclesiastical and to civil government.
The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which
both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian
independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in
England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and
Stephen Langton were worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII
and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better
than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English
Church.
“It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the
struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not
had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the
question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They
felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred
cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not
yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the
one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the
task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical
age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of
crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen
Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to
wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues:
“From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers
threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and
the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both she
was saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s
laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles
not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of
tradition.”
It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing
to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority, _alias_
Grand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most
sacred liberties--the right to live in community and the right to
educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers,
“once delivered to the saints.”
The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought
to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church
by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the
glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance,
which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political
liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of
time.
After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa,
Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile
anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian
Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and
other cities, which had been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked
the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an
important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful
liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms:
“Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III,
kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit
le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has
permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should
triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (_Essai
sur les mœurs_, II, 82).[24]
In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and
long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a
revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was
also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither
personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in this _Bas Empire_.
“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant
historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to
the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety
within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism
stifled and checked every free movement” (Neander, _History of the
Church_, VIII, 244).
The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove
hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves
from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom,
constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western
or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife,
unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or
nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.
On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced
stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more
self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably
in France.
The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts
of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.”
“Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration
against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for
ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive
scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.
For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the
Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience,
notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders
were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects
relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the
ancient faith.
Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was
necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding
diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of
Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its
highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (_Essay on
Ranke_), was formulated the monstrous axiom _Cujus regio ejus religio_,
which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing
rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days,
each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his
subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial
system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of
Protestantism.
There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the
so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him
read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had
shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to
miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice
versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants, all on account
of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.
Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from
Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced
by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic,
which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the
Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and
sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope
to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights.
Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest
necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most
hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of
religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was
instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set
up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was
gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but
of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first
Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the
things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and
imprison men for their consciences.”
The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in
the other balance the excesses committed, and the penal laws enacted
from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics
in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved
Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were
maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The
principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s
imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands;
they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not
teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five
miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under
penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them
by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of
obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the
truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to
travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with
the Reformation.
In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of the _Cujus
regio ejus religio_ (Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite
of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg
James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not
dragged to the altar.”
The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made, modified, and changed
the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the
Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often
pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of
Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where
Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger,
“that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only
the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude
weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all
representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (_Geshicte von
Rugen_, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger).
“The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to
exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the
nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts
the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were
accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe
serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of
the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that
freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of
serfdom since the Reformation.
In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa,
appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the
weirs, the mines, and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course,
obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more
oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded.
In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the
peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer
sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the
peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave
chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few
decades of the present day” (_Mecklenburg Geschichte_). In 1820 this
glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke.
In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation,
Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the
peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even
those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing
grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of
1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers
were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit.
The Elector of Brandenburg, it will be recalled, was the first to abjure
Catholicism, and founded what became in 1701 the Prussian monarchy.
There was no general Diet since 1656. The Estates no longer met, and the
rulers imposed taxes at their will. Peasants fled to Poland, or became
mendicant vagrants or brigands.