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, Juergens, 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
mediaeval 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 Muenzer 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 Muenster, 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 Zuerich 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.