An enlightened toleration is a blessing of the last age--it would seem
to have been practised by the Romans, when they did not mistake the
primitive Christians for seditious members of society; and was
inculcated even by Mahomet, in a passage in the Koran, but scarcely
practised by his followers. In modern history it was condemned when
religion was turned into a political contest under the aspiring house of
Austria--and in Spain--and in France. It required a long time before its
nature was comprehended--and to this moment it is far from being clear,
either to the tolerators or the tolerated.
It does not appear that the precepts or the practice of Jesus and the
apostles inculcate the _compelling_ of any to be Christians;[161] yet an
expression employed in the nuptial parable of the great supper, when the
hospitable lord commanded the servant, finding that he had still room to
accommodate more guests, to go out in the highways and hedges, and
"_compel them to come in, that my house may be filled_," was alleged as
an authority by those catholics who called themselves "the converters,"
for using religious force, which, still alluding to the hospitable lord,
they called "a charitable and salutary violence." It was this
circumstance which produced Bayle's "Commentaire Philosophique sur ces
Paroles de Jesus Christ," published under the supposititious name of an
_Englishman_, as printed at Canterbury in 1686, but really at Amsterdam.
It is curious that Locke published his first letter on "Toleration" in
Latin at Gouda, in 1689--the second in 1690--and the third in 1692.
Bayle opened the mind of Locke, and some time after quotes Locke's Latin
letter with high commendation.[162] The caution of both writers in
publishing in foreign places, however, indicates the prudence which it
was deemed necessary to observe in writing in favour of toleration.
These were the first _philosophical_ attempts; but the earliest
advocates for toleration may be found among the religious
controversialists of a preceding period; it was probably started among
the fugitive sects who had found an asylum in Holland. It was a blessing
which they had gone far to find, and the miserable, reduced to humane
feelings, are compassionate to one another. With us the sect called "the
Independents" had, early in our revolution under Charles the First,
pleaded for the doctrine of religious liberty, and long maintained it
against the presbyterians. Both proved persecutors when they possessed
power. The first of our respectable divines who advocated this cause
were Jeremy Taylor, in his "Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying,"
1647, and Bishop Hall, who had pleaded the cause of _moderation_ in a
discourse about the same period.[163] Locke had no doubt examined all
these writers. The history of opinions is among the most curious of
histories; and I suspect that Bayle was well acquainted with the
pamphlets of our sectarists, who, in their flight to Holland, conveyed
those curiosities of theology, which had cost them their happiness and
their estates: I think he indicates this hidden source of his ideas by
the extraordinary ascription of his book to _an Englishman_, and fixing
the place of its publication at _Canterbury_!
Toleration has been a vast engine in the hands of modern politicians. It
was established in the United Provinces of Holland, and our numerous
non-conformists took refuge in that asylum for disturbed consciences; it
attracted a valuable community of French refugees; it conducted a colony
of Hebrew fugitives from Portugal; conventicles of Brownists, quakers'
meetings, French churches, and Jewish synagogues, and (had it been
required) Mahometan mosques, in Amsterdam, were the precursors of its
mart, and its exchange; the moment they could preserve their consciences
sacred to themselves, they lived without mutual persecution, and mixed
together as good Dutchmen.
The excommunicated part of Europe seemed to be the most enlightened, and
it was then considered as a proof of the admirable progress of the human
mind, that Locke and Clarke and Newton corresponded with Leibnitz, and
others of the learned in France and Italy. Some were astonished that
philosophers who differed in their _religious opinions_ should
communicate among themselves with so much toleration.[164]
It is not, however, clear that had any one of these sects at Amsterdam
obtained predominance, which was sometimes attempted, they would have
granted to others the toleration they participated in common. The
infancy of a party is accompanied by a political weakness which disables
it from weakening others.
The catholic in this country pleads for toleration; in his own he
refuses to grant it. Here, the presbyterian, who had complained of
persecution, once fixed in the seat of power, abrogated every kind of
independence among others. When the flames consumed Servetus at Geneva,
the controversy began, whether the civil magistrate might punish
heretics, which Beza, the associate of Calvin, maintained; he triumphed
in the small predestinating city of Geneva; but the book he wrote was
fatal to the protestants a few leagues distant, among a majority of
catholics. Whenever the protestants complained of the persecutions they
suffered, the catholics, for authority and sanction, never failed to
appeal to the volume of their own Beza.
M. Necker de Saussure has recently observed on "what trivial
circumstances the change or the preservation of the established religion
in different districts of Europe has depended!" When the Reformation
penetrated into Switzerland, the government of the principality of
Neufchatel, wishing to allow liberty of conscience to all their
subjects, invited each parish to vote "for or against the adoption of
the new worship; and in all the parishes, except two, the majority of
suffrages declared in favour of the protestant communion." The
inhabitants of the small village of Cressier had also assembled; and
forming an even number, there happened to be an equality of votes for
and against the change of religion. A shepherd being absent, tending
the flocks on the hills, they summoned him to appear and decide this
important question: when, having no liking to innovation, he gave his
voice in favour of the existing form of worship; and this parish
remained catholic, and is so at this day, in the heart of the protestant
cantons.
I proceed to some facts which I have arranged for the history of
Toleration. In the Memoirs of James the Second, when that monarch
published "The Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," the catholic
reasons and liberalises like a modern philosopher: he accuses "the
jealousy of our clergy, who had degraded themselves into intriguers; and
like mechanics in a trade, who are afraid of nothing so much as
interlopers--they had therefore induced indifferent persons to imagine
that their earnest contest was not about their faith, but about their
temporal possessions. It was incongruous that a church, which does not
pretend to be infallible, should constrain persons, under heavy
penalties and punishments, to believe as she does: they delighted, he
asserted, to hold an iron rod over dissenters and catholics; so sweet
was dominion, that the very thought of others participating in their
freedom made them deny the very doctrine they preached." The chief
argument the catholic urged on this occasion was "the reasonableness of
repealing laws which made men liable to the greatest punishments for
that it was not in their power to remedy, for that no man could force
himself to believe what he really did not believe."[165]
Such was the rational language of the most bigoted of zealots!--The fox
can bleat like the lamb. At the very moment James the Second was
uttering this mild expostulation, in his own heart he had anathematised
the nation; for I have seen some of the king's private papers, which
still exist; they consist of communications, chiefly by the most bigoted
priests, with the wildest projects, and most infatuated prophecies and
dreams, of restoring the true catholic faith in England! Had the
Jesuit-led monarch retained the English throne, the language he now
addressed to the nation would have been no longer used; and in that case
it would have served his protestant subjects. He asked for toleration,
to become intolerant! He devoted himself, not to the hundredth part of
the English nation; and yet he was surprised that he was left one
morning without an army! When the catholic monarch issued this
declaration for "liberty of conscience," the Jekyll of his day observed,
that "it was but scaffolding: they intend to build another house, and
when that house (Popery) is built, they will take down the
scaffold."[166]
When presbytery was our lord, they who had endured the tortures of
persecution, and raised such sharp outcries for freedom, of all men were
the most intolerant: hardly had they tasted of the Circean cup of
dominion, ere they were transformed into the most hideous or the most
grotesque monsters of political power. To their eyes toleration was an
hydra, and the dethroned bishops had never so vehemently declaimed
against what, in ludicrous rage, one of the high-flying presbyterians
called "a cursed intolerable toleration!" They advocated the rights of
persecution; and "shallow Edwards," as Milton calls the author of "The
Gangraena," published a treatise _against toleration_. They who had so
long complained of "the licensers," now sent all the books they
condemned to penal fires. Prynne now vindicated the very doctrines under
which he himself had so severely suffered; assuming the highest possible
power of civil government, even to the infliction of death on its
opponents. Prynne lost all feeling for the ears of others!
The idea of toleration was not intelligible for too long a period in the
annals of Europe: no parties probably could conceive the idea of
toleration in the struggle for predominance. Treaties are not proffered
when conquest is the concealed object. Men were immolated! a massacre
was a sacrifice! medals were struck to commemorate these holy
persecutions![167] The destroying angel, holding in one hand a cross,
and in the other a sword, with these words--_Vgonottorum Strages_,
1572--"The massacre of the Huguenots"--proves that toleration will not
agree with that date.[168] Castelnau, a statesman and a humane man, was
at a loss how to decide on a point of the utmost importance to France.
In 1532 they first began to burn the Lutherans or Calvinists, and to cut
out the tongues of all protestants, "that they might no longer protest."
According to Father Paul, fifty thousand persons had perished in the
Netherlands, by different tortures, for religion. But a change in the
religion of the state, Castelnau considered, would occasion one in the
government: he wondered how it happened, that the more they punished
with death, it only increased the number of the victims: martyrs
produced proselytes. As a statesman, he looked round the great field of
human actions in the history of the past; there he discovered that the
Romans were more enlightened in their actions than ourselves; that
Trajan commanded Pliny the younger not to molest the Christians for
their _religion_, but should their conduct endanger the state, to put
down _illegal assemblies_; that Julian the Apostate expressly forbad the
_execution_ of the Christians, who then imagined that they were securing
their salvation by martyrdom; but he ordered all their goods to be
_confiscated_--a severe punishment--by which Julian prevented more than
he could have done by persecutions. "All this," he adds, "we read in
ecclesiastical history."[169] Such were the sentiments of Castelnau, in
1560. Amidst perplexities of state necessity, and of our common
humanity, the notion of _toleration_ had not entered into the views of
the statesman. It was also at this time that De Sainctes, a great
controversial writer, declared, that had the fires lighted for the
destruction of Calvinism not been extinguished, the sect had not spread!
About half a century subsequent to this period, Thuanus was, perhaps,
the first great mind who appears to have insinuated to the French
monarch and his nation, that they might live at peace with heretics; by
which avowal he called down on himself the haughty indignation of Rome,
and a declaration that the man who spoke in favour of heretics must
necessarily be one of the first class. Hear the afflicted historian:
"Have men no compassion, after forty years passed full of continual
miseries? Have they no fear after the loss of the Netherlands,
occasioned by the frantic obstinacy which marked the times? I grieve
that such sentiments should have occasioned my book to have been
examined with a rigour that amounts to calumny." Such was the language
of Thuanus, in a letter written in 1606;[170] which indicates an
approximation to _toleration_, but which term was not probably yet found
in any dictionary. We may consider, as so many attempts at toleration,
the great national synod of Dort, whose history is amply written by
Brandt; and the mitigating protestantism of Laud, to approximate to the
ceremonies of the Roman church; but the synod, after holding about two
hundred sessions, closed, dividing men into universalists and
semi-universalists, supralapsarians and sublapsarians! The _reformed_
themselves produced the _remonstrants_; and Laud's ceremonies ended in
placing the altar eastward, and in raising the scaffold for the monarchy
and the hierarchy. Error is circuitous when it will do what it has not
yet learnt. They were pressing for conformity to do that which, a
century afterwards, they found could only be done by _toleration_.
The _secret history of toleration_ among certain parties has been
disclosed to us by a curious document, from that religious Machiavel,
the fierce ascetic republican John Knox, a calvinistical Pope. "While
the posterity of Abraham," says that mighty and artful reformer, "were
_few in number_, and while they sojourned in _different countries_, they
were merely required to avoid all participation in the idolatrous rites
of the heathen; but _as soon as they prospered into a kingdom_, and had
obtained _possession of Canaan_, they were strictly charged to suppress
idolatry, and to destroy all the monuments and incentives. The same duty
was _now_ incumbent on the professors of the true religion in Scotland.
Formerly, when not more than _ten persons in a county_ were enlightened,
it would have been _foolishness_ to have demanded of the nobility the
suppression of idolatry. But _now_, when knowledge had been increased,"
&c.[171] Such are the men who cry out for toleration during their state
of political weakness, but who cancel the bond by which they hold their
tenure whenever they "obtain possession of Canaan." The only commentary
on this piece of the secret history of _toleration_ is the acute remark
of Swift:--"We are fully convinced that we shall always tolerate them,
but not that they will tolerate us."
The truth is that TOLERATION was allowed by none of the parties! and I
will now show the dilemmas into which each party thrust itself.
When the kings of England would forcibly have established episcopacy in
Scotland, the presbyters passed an act _against the toleration of
dissenters from presbyterian doctrines and discipline_; and thus, as
Guthrie observes, they were committing the same violence on the
consciences of their brethren which they opposed in the king. The
presbyterians contrived their famous _covenant_ to dispossess the
royalists of their livings; and the independents, who assumed the
principle of toleration in their very name, shortly after enforced what
they called the _engagement_, to eject the presbyterians! In England,
where the dissenters were ejected, their great advocate Calamy complains
that the dissenters were only making use of the same arguments which the
most eminent reformers had done in their noble defence of the
reformation against the papists; while the arguments of the established
church against the dissenters were the same which were urged by the
papists against the protestant reformation![172] When the presbyterians
were our masters, and preached up the doctrine of passive obedience in
spiritual matters to the civil power, it was unquestionably passing a
self-condemnation on their own recent opposition and detraction of the
former episcopacy. Whenever men act from a secret motive entirely
contrary to their ostensible one, such monstrous results will happen;
and as extremes will join, however opposite they appear in their
beginnings, John Knox and Father Petre, in office, would have equally
served James the Second as confessor and prime minister!
A fact relating to the famous Justus Lipsius proves the difficulty of
forming a clear notion of TOLERATION. This learned man, after having
been ruined by the religious wars of the Netherlands, found an
honourable retreat in a professor's chair at Leyden, and without
difficulty abjured papacy. He published some political works: and
adopted as his great principle, that only _one religion_ should be
allowed to a people, and that no clemency should be granted to
non-conformists, who, he declares, should be pursued by sword and fire:
in this manner a single member would be cut off to preserve the body
sound. _Ure, seca_--are his words. Strange notions these in a protestant
republic; and, in fact, in Holland it was approving of all the horrors
of their oppressors, the Duke d'Alva and Philip the Second, from which
they had hardly recovered.[173] It was a principle by which we must
inevitably infer, says Bayle, that in Holland no other mode of religious
belief but one sect should be permitted; and that those Pagans who had
hanged the missionaries of the gospel had done what they ought. Lipsius
found himself sadly embarrassed when refuted by Theodore Cornhert,[174]
the firm advocate of political and religious freedom, and at length
Lipsius, that protestant with a catholic heart, was forced to eat his
words, like Pistol his onion, declaring that the two objectionable
words, _ure_, _seca_, were borrowed from medicine, meaning not literally
_fire_ and _sword_, but a strong efficacious remedy, one of those
powerful medicines to expel poison. Jean de Serres, a warm Huguenot,
carried the principle of TOLERATION so far in his "Inventaire generale
de l'Histoire de France," as to blame Charles Martel for compelling the
Frisans, whom he had conquered, to adopt Christianity! "A pardonable
zeal," he observes, "in a warrior; but in fact the minds of men cannot
be gained over by arms, nor that religion forced upon them, which must
be introduced into the hearts of men by reason." It is curious to see a
protestant, in his zeal for toleration, blaming a king for forcing
idolaters to become Christians; and to have found an opportunity to
express his opinions in the dark history of the eighth century, is an
instance how historians incorporate their passions in their works, and
view ancient facts with modern eyes.
The protestant cannot grant toleration to the catholic, unless the
catholic ceases to be a papist; and the Arminian church, which opened
its wide bosom to receive every denomination of Christians, nevertheless
were forced to exclude the papists, for their passive obedience to the
supremacy of the Roman pontiff. The catholic has curiously told us, on
this word _toleration_, that _Ce mot devient fort en usage a mesure que
le nombre des tolerans augmente_.[175] It was a word which seemed of
recent introduction, though the book is modern! The protestants have
disputed much how far they might tolerate, or whether they should
tolerate at all; "a difficulty," triumphantly exclaims the catholic,
"which they are not likely ever to settle, while they maintain their
principles of pretended reformation; the consequences which naturally
follow excite horror to the Christian. It is the weak who raise such
outcries for toleration; the strong find authority legitimate."
A religion which admits not of _toleration_ cannot be safely tolerated,
if there is any chance of its obtaining a political ascendancy.
When Priscillian and six of his followers were condemned to torture and
execution for asserting that the three persons of the Trinity were to be
considered as three different _acceptions_ of the same being, Saint
Ambrose and Saint Martin asserted the cause of offended humanity, and
refused to communicate with the bishops who had called out for the blood
of the Priscillianists; but Cardinal Baronius, the annalist of the
church, was greatly embarrassed to explain how men of real purity could
abstain from _applauding_ the ardent zeal of the _persecution_: he
preferred to give up the saints rather than to allow of toleration--for
he acknowledges that the toleration which these saints would have
allowed was not exempt from sin.[176]
In the preceding article, "Political Religionism," we have shown how to
provide against the possible evil of the _tolerated_ becoming the
_tolerators_! Toleration has been suspected of indifference to religion
itself; but with sound minds, it is only an indifference to the
logomachies of theology--things "not of God, but of man," that have
perished, and that are perishing around us!