History joins forces with reason in proving that union of church and
state is an intolerable evil. The state religions of antiquity were
either the agents of political despotism, or themselves, as in Egypt,
formed a special despotism under which both rulers and people were
crushed to the earth. Since the advent of Christianity, the rule of the
church has never failed to bring disaster. The beginning of the calamity
is traceable to the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine, sometimes
misnamed "The Great." Of many bad emperors, this man stands out
conspicuously among the worst. Usurper, liar, perjurer, thief, murderer,
and villain in many other regards, he adopted Christianity as a state
religion from motives of an unusually crafty policy. So little did
his newly professed faith influence his underlying character, that
his crimes of the blackest type continued unabated after his professed
conversion. He did not even respect the foundation principles of
Christianity sufficiently to become baptized until he lay on his
deathbed, when his grossly superstitious mind deluded itself with the
fantasy that a few drops of water and a few mumbled incantations would
have the magical effect of atoning for a lifetime of infamy, and would
carry him straightway into a region of eternal gratification of every
desire. During Constantine's reign, organized Christianity began by
dividing official honors with the more ancient Roman religion, and ended
by usurping the entire authority, and by persecuting those who still
clung to the faith of their fathers. Later emperors carried the process
still further, ostentatious piety and unbounded corruption going hand in
hand, until Rome became a synonym of utter rottenness, and fell an easy
prey to the barbarian hordes which poured down from northern Europe.
With the union of church and state under Constantine began a period of
mental and moral stagnation, which continued for about ten centuries.
It was an anti-millennium, a thousand years of distinctively Christian
rule, productive of every conceivable evil, with scarcely a redeeming
feature. So black a night settled down on the human race that by common
consent the epoch is appropriately known as that of the "Dark Ages."
The church was sole master, and independence of thought was visited with
torture and death. Persecution, massacre, religious wars without end,
and extermination of whole populations and the merciless slaughter of
the noblest of the race were its characteristics. Rome, the alleged
"holy city," the centre of church power, was a pestilential swamp of
vice and crime beyond the ability of words to describe. Not a ray of
hope appeared in the blackness until the raising of voices against the
extreme control of the church. The human mind refused to remain forever
in fetters, and the rising movements of humanism and the renaissance
witnessed the beginnings of the great revolt. The Protestant
Reformation, an attempt to purify Christianity from within, succeeded
in rending the church asunder, but failed to redeem it from the worst of
its inherent evils. Its leaders loved religious liberty as little as did
their Catholic rivals. Calvinism proved to be as ready to murder in
the name of God as ever Romanism has been. Persecution of heretics,
witch-hunting and the oppression of the whole people for the profit of
ecclesiasticism went merrily on in all lands. The gradual fading out
of these horrors has been brought about step by step by no other agency
than by the gradual emancipation of the state from the clutches of the
church.