limb of the robber, and injuries against property were made a question
of life and death, it soon followed that injury to life could be made a
question of payment. To expiate robbery by death, and to expiate murder
by the payment of a fine, are correlative ideas. Practically this
custom often told with a barbarous inequality against those who were too
poor to purchase forgiveness; but it was otherwise both just and humane
in principle, and it was generally encouraged by the Church. For in her
eyes the criminal was guilty of an act of which it was necessary that he
should repent; this made her desire, not his destruction, but his
conversion. She tried, therefore, to save his life, and to put an end to
revenge, mutilation, and servitude; and for all this the alternative was
compensation. This purpose was served by the right of asylum. The Church
surrendered the fugitive only on condition that his life and person
should be spared in consideration of a lawful fine, which she often paid
for him herself. "Concedatur ei vita et omnia membra. Emendat autem
causam in quantum potuerit," says a law of Charlemagne, given in the
year 785, when the influence of religion on legislation was most
powerful in Europe.
No idea occurs more frequently in the work we are reviewing than that of
the persecuting character of the Catholic Church; it is used as a
perpetual apology for the penal laws in Ireland:--
"When the Catholics writhe under this wrong, let them turn their eyes
to the history of Catholic countries, and remember that, while the
Catholic Church was stripped of her endowments and doomed to
political degradation by Protestant persecutors in Ireland, the
Protestant churches were exterminated with fire and sword by Catholic
persecutors in France, Austria, Flanders, Italy, and Spain" (p. 92).
He speaks of Catholicism as "a religion which all Protestants
believed to be idolatrous, and knew by fearful experience to be
persecuting" (p. 113). "It would not be difficult to point to
persecuting laws more sanguinary than these. Spain, France, and
Austria will at once supply signal examples.... That persecution was
the vice of an age and not only of a particular religion, that it
disgraced Protestantism as well as Catholicism, is true. But no one
who reads the religious history of Europe with an open mind can fail
to perceive that the persecutions carried on by Protestants were far
less bloody and less extensive than those carried on by Catholics;
that they were more frequently excusable as acts of retaliation; that
they arose more from political alarm, and less from the spirit of the
religion; and that the temper of their authors yielded more rapidly
to the advancing influence of humanity and civilisation" (pp. 127.
129).
All these arguments are fallacies; but as the statements at the same
time are full of error, we believe that the author is wrong because he
has not studied the question, not because he has designed to
misrepresent it. The fact that he does not distinguish from each other
the various kinds and occasions of persecution, proves that he is wholly
ignorant of the things with which it is connected.
Persecution is the vice of particular religions, and the misfortune of
particular stages of political society. It is the resource by which
States that would be subverted by religious liberty escape the more
dangerous alternative of imposing religious disabilities. The exclusion
of a part of the community by reason of its faith from the full benefit
of the law is a danger and disadvantage to every State, however highly
organised its constitution may otherwise be. But the actual existence of
a religious party differing in faith from the majority is dangerous only
to a State very imperfectly organised. Disabilities are always a danger.
Multiplicity of religions is only dangerous to States of an inferior
type. By persecution they rid themselves of the peculiar danger which
threatens them, without involving themselves in a system universally
bad. Persecution comes naturally in a certain period of the progress of
society, before a more flexible and comprehensive system has been
introduced by that advance of religion and civilisation whereby
Catholicism gradually penetrates into hostile countries, and Christian
powers acquire dominion over infidel populations. Thus it is the token
of an epoch in the political, religious, and intellectual life of
mankind, and it disappears with its epoch, and with the advance of the
Church militant in her Catholic vocation. Intolerance of dissent and
impatience of contradiction are a characteristic of youth. Those that
have no knowledge of the truth that underlies opposite opinions, and no
experience of their consequent force, cannot believe that men are
sincere in holding them. At a certain point of mental growth, tolerance
implies indifference, and intolerance is inseparable from sincerity.
Thus intolerance, in itself a defect, becomes in this case a merit.
Again, although the political conditions of intolerance belong to the
youth and immaturity of nations, the motives of intolerance may at any
time be just and the principle high. For the theory of religious unity
is founded on the most elevated and truest view of the character and
function of the State, on the perception that its ultimate purpose is
not distinct from that of the Church. In the pagan State they were
identified; in the Christian world the end remains the same, but the
means are different.
The State aims at the things of another life but indirectly. Its course
runs parallel to that of the Church; they do not converge. The direct
subservience of the State to religious ends would imply despotism and
persecution just as much as the pagan supremacy of civil over religious
authority. The similarity of the end demands harmony in the principles,
and creates a decided antagonism between the State and a religious
community whose character is in total contradiction with it. With such
religions there is no possibility of reconciliation. A State must be at
open war with any system which it sees would prevent it from fulfilling
its legitimate duties. The danger, therefore, lies not in the doctrine,
but in the practice. But to the pagan and to the mediaeval State, the
danger was in the doctrine. The Christians were the best subjects of the
emperor, but Christianity was really subversive of the fundamental
institutions of the Roman Empire. In the infancy of the modern States,
the civil power required all the help that religion could give in order
to establish itself against the lawlessness of barbarism and feudal
dissolution. The existence of the State at that time depended on the
power of the Church. When, in the thirteenth century, the Empire
renounced this support, and made war on the Church, it fell at once into
a number of small sovereignties. In those cases persecution was
self-defence. It was wrongly defended as an absolute, not as a
conditional principle; but such a principle was false only as the modern
theory of religious liberty is false. One was a wrong generalisation
from the true character of the State; the other is a true conclusion
from a false notion of the State. To say that because of the union
between Church and State it is right to persecute would condemn all
toleration; and to say that the objects of the State have nothing to do
with religion, would condemn all persecution. But persecution and
toleration are equally true in principle, considered politically; only
one belongs to a more highly developed civilisation than the other. At
one period toleration would destroy society; at another, persecution is
fatal to liberty. The theory of intolerance is wrong only if founded
absolutely upon religious motives; but even then the practice of it is
not necessarily censurable. It is opposed to the Christian spirit, in
the same manner as slavery is opposed to it. The Church prohibits
neither intolerance nor slavery, though in proportion as her influence
extends, and civilisation advances, both gradually disappear.
Unity and liberty are the only legitimate principles on which the
position of a Church in a State can be regulated, but the distance
between them is immeasurable, and the transition extremely difficult. To
pass from religious unity to religious liberty is to effect a complete
inversion in the character of the State, a change in the whole spirit of
legislation, and a still greater revolution in the minds and habits of
men. So great a change seldom happens all at once. The law naturally
follows the condition of society, which does not suddenly change. An
intervening stage from unity to liberty, a compromise between toleration
and persecution, is a common but irrational, tyrannical, and impolitic
arrangement. It is idle to talk of the guilt of persecution, if we do
not distinguish the various principles on which religious dissent can be
treated by the State. The exclusion of other religions--- the system of
Spain, of Sweden, of Mecklenburg, Holstein, and Tyrol--is reasonable in
principle, though practically untenable in the present state of European
society. The system of expulsion or compulsory conformity, adopted by
Lewis XIV. and the Emperor Nicholas, is defensible neither on religious
nor political grounds. But the system applied to Ireland, which uses
religious disabilities for the purpose of political oppression,[325]
stands alone in solitary infamy among the crimes and follies of the
rulers of men.
The acquisition of real definite freedom is a very slow and tardy
process. The great social independence enjoyed in the early periods of
national history is not yet political freedom. The State has not yet
developed its authority, or assumed the functions of government. A
period follows when all the action of society is absorbed by the ruling
power, when the license of early times is gone, and the liberties of a
riper age are not yet acquired. These liberties are the product of a
long conflict with absolutism, and of a gradual development, which, by
establishing definite rights revives in positive form the negative
liberty of an unformed society. The object and the result of this
process is the organisation of self-government, the substitution of
right for force, of authority for power, of duty for necessity, and of a
moral for a physical relation between government and people. Until this
point is reached, religious liberty is an anomaly. In a State which
possesses all power and all authority there is no room for the autonomy
of religious communities. Those States, therefore, not only refuse
liberty of conscience, but deprive the favoured Church of ecclesiastical
freedom. The principles of religious unity and liberty are so opposed
that no modern State has at once denied toleration and allowed freedom
to its established Church. Both of these are unnatural in a State which
rejects self-government, the only secure basis of all freedom, whether
religious or political. For religious freedom is based on political
liberty; intolerance, therefore, is a political necessity against all
religions which threaten the unity of faith in a State that is not free,
and in every State against those religions which threaten its existence.
Absolute intolerance belongs to the absolute State; special persecution
may be justified by special causes in any State. All mediaeval
persecution is of the latter kind, for the sects against which it was
directed were revolutionary parties. The State really defended, not its
religious unity, but its political existence.
If the Catholic Church was naturally inclined to persecute, she would
persecute in all cases alike, when there was no interest to serve but
her own. Instead of adapting her conduct to circumstances, and accepting
theories according to the character of the time, she would have
developed a consistent theory out of her own system, and would have been
most severe when she was most free from external influences, from
political objects, or from temporary or national prejudices. She would
have imposed a common rule of conduct in different countries in
different ages, instead of submitting to the exigencies of each time and
place. Her own rule of conduct never changed. She treats it as a crime
to abandon her, not to be outside her. An apostate who returns to her
has a penance for his apostasy; a heretic who is converted has no
penance for his heresy. Severity against those who are outside her fold
is against her principles. Persecution is contrary to the nature of a
universal Church; it is peculiar to the national Churches.
While the Catholic Church by her progress in freedom naturally tends to
push the development of States beyond the sphere where they are still
obliged to preserve the unity of religion, and whilst she extends over
States in all degrees of advancement, Protestantism, which belongs to a
particular age and state of society, which makes no claim to
universality, and which is dependent on political connection, regards
persecution, not as an accident, but as a duty.
Wherever Protestantism prevailed, intolerance became a principle of
State, and was proclaimed in theory even where the Protestants were in a
minority, and where the theory supplied a weapon against themselves. The
Reformation made it a general law, not only against Catholics by way of
self-defence or retaliation, but against all who dissented from the
reformed doctrines, whom it treated, not as enemies, but as
criminals,--against the Protestant sects, against Socinians, and against
atheists. It was not a right, but a duty; its object was to avenge God,
not to preserve order. There is no analogy between the persecution which
preserves and the persecution which attacks; or between intolerance as a
religious duty, and intolerance as a necessity of State. The Reformers
unanimously declared persecution to be incumbent on the civil power; and
the Protestant Governments universally acted upon their injunctions,
until scepticism escaped the infliction of penal laws and condemned
their spirit.
Doubtless, in the interest of their religion, they acted wisely. Freedom
is not more decidedly the natural condition of Catholicism than
intolerance is of Protestantism; which by the help of persecution
succeeded in establishing itself in countries where it had no root in
the affections of the people, and in preserving itself from the internal
divisions which follow free inquiry. Toleration has been at once a cause
and an effect of its decline. The Catholic Church, on the other hand,
supported the mediaeval State by religious unity, and has saved herself
in the modern State by religious freedom. No longer compelled to devise
theories in justification of a system imposed on her by the exigencies
of half-organised societies, she is enabled to revert to a policy more
suited to her nature and to her most venerable traditions; and the
principle of liberty has already restored to her much of that which the
principle of unity took away. It was not, as our author imagines (p.
119), by the protection of Lewis XIV. that she was formidable; nor is it
true that in consequence of the loss of temporalities, "the chill of
death is gathering round the heart of the great theocracy" (p. 94); nor
that "the visible decline of the papacy" is at hand because it no longer
wields "the more efficacious arms of the great Catholic monarchies" (p.
190).
The same appeal to force, the same principles of intolerance which
expelled Catholicism from Protestant countries, gave rise in Catholic
countries to the growth of infidelity. The Revolutions of 1789 in
France, and of 1859 in Italy, attest the danger of a practice which
requires for its support the doctrines of another religion, or the
circumstances of a different age. Not till the Church had lost those
props in which Mr. Goldwin Smith sees the secret of her power, did she
recover her elasticity and her expansive vigour. Catholics may have
learnt this truth late, but Protestants, it appears, have yet to learn
it.
In one point Mr. Goldwin Smith is not so very far from the views of the
Orange party. He thinks, indeed, that the Church is no longer dangerous,
and would not therefore have Catholics maltreated; but this is due, not
to her merits, but to her weakness.
Popes might now be as willing as ever, if they had the power, to step
between a Protestant State and the allegiance of its subjects (p.
190).
Mr. Smith seems to think that the Popes claim the same authority over
the rulers of a Protestant State that they formerly possessed over the
princes of Catholic countries. Yet this political power of the Holy See
was never a universal right of jurisdiction over States, but a special
and positive right, which it is as absurd to censure as to fear or to
regret at the present time. Directly, it extended only over territories
which were held by feudal tenure of the Pope, like the Sicilian
monarchy. Elsewhere the authority was indirect, not political but
religious, and its political consequences were due to the laws of the
land. The Catholic countries would no more submit to a king not of their
communion than Protestant countries, England for instance, or Denmark.
This is as natural and inevitable in a country where the whole
population is of one religion, as it is artificial and unjust in a
country where no sort of religious unity prevails, and where such a law
might compel the sovereign to be of the religion of the minority.
At any rate, nobody who thinks it reasonable that any prince abandoning
the Established Church should forfeit the English throne, can complain
of a law which compelled the sovereign to be of the religion, not of a
majority, but of the whole of his subjects. The idea of the Pope
stepping between a State and the allegiance of its subjects is a mere
misapprehension. The instrument of his authority is the law, and the law
resides in the State. The Pope could intervene, therefore, only between
the State and the occupant of the throne; and his intervention
suspended, not the duty of obeying, but the right of governing. The line
on which his sentence ran separated, not the subjects from the State,
but the sovereign from the other authorities. It was addressed to the
nation politically organised against the head of the organism, not to
the mass of individual subjects against the constituted authorities.
That such a power was inconsistent with the modern notion of sovereignty
is true; but it is also true that this notion is as much at variance
with the nature of ecclesiastical authority as with civil liberty. The
Roman maxim, _princeps legibus solutus_, could not be admitted by the
Church; and an absolute prince could not properly be invested in her
eyes with the sanctity of authority, or protected by the duty of
submission. A moral, and _a fortiori_ a spiritual, authority moves and
lives only in an atmosphere of freedom.
There are, however, two things to be considered in explanation of the
error into which our author and so many others have fallen. Law follows
life, but not with an equal pace. There is a time when it ceases to
correspond to the existing order of things, and meets an invincible
obstacle in a new society. The exercise of the mediaeval authority of the
Popes was founded on the religious unity of the State, and had no basis
in a divided community. It was not easy in the period of transition to
tell when the change took place, and at what moment the old power lost
its efficacy; no one could foresee its failure, and it still remained
the legal and recognised means of preventing the change. Accordingly, it
was twice tried during the wars of religion, in France with success, in
England with disastrous effects. It is a universal rule that a right is
not given up until the necessity of its surrender is proved. But the
real difficulty arises, not from the mode in which the power was
exercised, but from the way in which it was defended. The mediaeval
writers were accustomed to generalise; they disregarded particular
circumstances, and they were generally ignorant of the habits and ideas
of their age. Living in the cloister, and writing for the school, they
were unacquainted with the polity and institutions around them, and
sought their authorities and examples in antiquity, in the speculations
of Aristotle, and the maxims of the civil law. They gave to their
political doctrines as abstract a form, and attributed to them as
universal an application, as the modern absolutists or the more recent
liberals. So regardless were they of the difference between ancient
times and their own, that the Jewish chronicles, the Grecian
legislators, and the Roman code supplied them indifferently with rules
and instances; they could not imagine that a new state of things would
one day arise in which their theories would be completely obsolete.
Their definitions of right and law are absolute in the extreme, and seem
often to admit of no qualification. Hence their character is essentially
revolutionary, and they contradict both the authority of law and the
security of freedom. It is on this contradiction that the common notion
of the danger of ecclesiastical pretensions is founded. But the men who
take alarm at the tone of the mediaeval claims judge them with a theory
just as absolute and as excessive. No man can fairly denounce imaginary
pretensions in the Church of the nineteenth century, who does not
understand that rights which are now impossible may have been
reasonable and legitimate in the days when they were actually exercised.
The zeal with which Mr. Goldwin Smith condemns the Irish establishment
and the policy of the ascendency is all the more meritorious because he
has no conception of the amount of iniquity involved in them.
The State Church of Ireland, however anomalous and even scandalous
its position may be as the Church of a dominant minority upheld by
force in the midst of a hostile people, does not, in truth, rest on a
principle different from that of other State Churches. To justify the
existence of any State Church, it must be assumed as an axiom that
the State is the judge of religious truth; and that it is bound to
impose upon its subjects, or at least to require them as a community
to maintain, the religion which it judges to be true (p. 91).
No such analogy in reality subsists as is here assumed. There is a great
difference between the Irish and the English establishment; but even the
latter has no similarity of principle with the Catholic establishments
of the continent.