Reformation Day, as it is called, was celebrated on October 31
throughout the Protestant part of Germany. Three hundred and
seventy-five years have rolled by since Martin Luther broke from the
Roman Catholic Church. Emperor William went to Wittenberg, with a great
array of Evangelical personages; and, as usual, the Emperor made a
speech, which for him was excellent. "There is no coercion," he said,
"in matters of religion. Here only free conviction of the heart is
decisive, and the perception of this fact is the blissful fruit of the
Reformation."
This is a fine-sounding declaration, but it has the misfortune to be
untrue. Liberty of conscience is not the fruit of the Reformation,
but an indirect and unintended result. Nor is liberty of conscience
a reality in any part of the German empire. Christians are allowed to
differ among themselves, but Freethinkers are prosecuted for dissenting
alike from Catholic and Protestant. Since the present Emperor's
accession there have been many blasphemy prosecutions, sometimes for
what would be regarded in other countries as very mild expressions of
disbelief. Several men and women have been sentenced to severe penalties
for exercising the right of free speech, which, in the land of Goethe,
Heine, Strauss, and Schopenhauer, is still confined to professed
Christians.
The Reformation, in fact, was a superficial movement. Except for its
moral revolt against the sale of indulgences, it touched no deep and
durable principle. It merely substituted an infallible Bible for an
infallible Church. Differences of opinion crept into the Protestant
fold, but that was an accident, arising from the varied and discordant
nature of the Bible itself. Every new Protestant sect had to fight as
strenuously for its right to exist as ever Martin Luther fought against
the Catholic Church. Protestantism, in short, was one priesthood saying
to another priesthood "We are right and you are wrong." The Catholic
Church had an immense advantage in its central organisation; the
Protestant Church could only operate from different points; hence it was
unable to bring about the same uniformity.
The movement that was not superficial was the scientific and humanist
movement, of which the Reformation was in a certain sense an episode.
Italy and France did more for the world than Germany. Martin Luther
was a great fighter, but not a more heroic one than Giordano Bruno.
Melancthon was not so important a man as Galileo. Rabelais even, with
all his dirt and jesting, was more in the stream of progress than
Luther, and far more than Calvin. In the long run, it is knowledge
and idea? that rule the world. Luther was not great in knowledge,
and certainly not great in ideas. He was a born fighter and a strong
character. His proper place is among the heroic figures of history. He
was a man of leading, but scarcely a man of light.
Luther was violently opposed to the scientific movement. He called
Copernicus an old fool. He would hear nothing against the accepted
Biblical theory of the universe. Genesis was to him, as well as to
the Pope, the beginning and the end of sound science. Nor was he more
friendly to philosophy. Draper truly asserts that the leaders of the
Reformation "were determined to banish philosophy from the Church."
Aristotle was villified by Luther as "truly a devil, a horrid
calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon,
a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, a public and professed liar,
a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle." Such
was Luther's style in controversy. We commend it to the attention of
Protestants who rail at the _Freethinker_.
Liberty of conscience is a principle of which Luther had no conception.
He claimed the right to think against the Pope; he denied the right of
others to think against himself. His attitude towards the Anabaptists
was fiendish. During the Peasants War he urged the authorities to
exterminate the rebels, to "stab, kill, and strangle them without
mercy." Melancthon taught that heretics "ought to be restrained by the
sword." Luther likewise declared that whoever denied even one article of
the Protestant faith should be punished severely. Referring to a false
teacher, he exclaimed, "Drive him away as an apostle of hell; and if he
does not flee, deliver him up as a seditious man to the executioner."
Hallam, Buckle, Lecky, and all reputable historians, agree that
the Protestant party held the same principle of persecution as the
Catholics. It was not disputed that death was the proper punishment of
obstinate heresy. The only dispute was--which were the heretics, and who
should die?
Luther's influence was very great in England, as Calvin's was in
Scotland, and the leaders of the Reformation in our own country had
no doubt as to the justice of killing men for a difference of opinion.
Cranmer taught that heretics were first to be excommunicated; if that
made no impression on them they were to suffer death. It satisfies one
sense of the fitness of things that Cranmer himself perished at the
stake. Becon taught that the duty of magistrates with regard to heretics
was to punish them--"yea, and also to take them out of this life." This
same Becon called upon the temporal rulers to "be no longer the pope's
hangmen." He preferred their being the hangmen of Protestantism. Latimer
himself said of the Anabaptists who were executed, "Well, let them go!"
Bishop Jewel, the great apologist of the Protestant Church of England,
in answering Harding the Jesuit, replies in this way to the charge of
being of the brotherhood of Servetus, David George, and Joan of
Kent: "We detected their heresies, and not you. We arraigned them; we
condemned them. We put them to the execution of the laws. It seemeth
very much to call them our brothers, because we burnt them."
Calvin held the same persecuting doctrine. All who opposed him were
dealt with ruthlessly. He was a veritable Pope of Geneva. His treatment
of Servetus was infamous. But so universal was the principle on which
Calvin acted, that even the mild Melancthon called the cruel roasting
of Servetus at a slow fire "a pious and memorable example for all
posterity."
Protestantism boasts of having asserted the right of private judgment.
It never did anything of the kind. Not a single leader of the
Reformation ever asserted such a principle. Erasmus did, though not in
decisive language; but Erasmus never belonged to the Protestant Church,
and his humanity, no less than his philosophy, brought upon him the
vituperation of Luther. The hero of Protestantism did not intend the
consequences of his revolt against Rome. He would have been appalled
at the thought of them. He made a breach, for his own purposes, in the
great wall of faith. He did not anticipate that others would widen it,
or that the forces of reason would march through and occupy post after
post. He simply did his own stroke of work, and we do not judge him
by later standards. We only object to the extravagance of Protestant
laudation.