CHAPTER XIII. The Temper of the Times

THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES

SECTION 1. TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE

Because religion has in the past protested its own intolerance the most loudly, it is commonly regarded as the field of persecution par excellence. This is so far from being the case that it is just in the field of religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work in the vineyard had been forcibly hauled thither, whereas the other son, admitting his willingness to go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by going bare-foot and long-haired than by proclaiming novel religious views; he would be in vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result, and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the other, respect for each other's rights.

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost all religions and almost all statesmen were then equally intolerant when they had the power to be so. The Catholic church, with that superb consistency that no new light can alter, has {642} always asserted that the opinion that everyone should have freedom of conscience [Sidenote: Freedom of conscience] was "madness flowing from the most foul fountain of indifference." Augustine believed that the church should "compel men to enter in" to the kingdom, by force. Aquinas argued that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have heard the truth a sin, and that "heretics deserve not only to be excommunicated but to be put to death." One of Luther's propositions condemned by the bull Exsurge Domine was that it is against the will of the Holy Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote: "Who ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to slaughter heretics who were nothing else than heretics?" the proposition was condemned, by the Sorbonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of God and of man. The power of the pope to depose and punish heretical princes was asserted in the bull of February 15, 1559.

The theory of the Catholic church was put into instant practice; the duty of persecution was carried out by the Holy Office, of which Lord Acton, though himself a Catholic, has said:

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed or assented, as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. . . . It is the principal thing with which the papacy is identified and by which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination.

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not the judgment of the church. A prelate of the papal {643} household published in 1895, the following words in the Annales ecclesiastici:

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberalism that bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little reasons to defend the Inquisition! Let no one speak of the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the church needed excuses. O blessed flames of those pyres by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and eternal damnation! O noble and venerable memory of Torquemada!

So much for the Catholics. If any one still harbors the traditional prejudice that the early Protestants were more liberal, he must be undeceived. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, [Sidenote: Luther] confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did.

In his first period Luther expressed the theory of toleration as well as anyone can. He wrote: "The pope is no judge of matters pertaining to God's Word and the faith, but a Christian must examine and judge them himself, as he must live and die by thorn." Again he said: "Heresy can never be prevented by force. . . . Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be cut with iron nor burnt with fire nor drowned in water." And yet again, "Faith is free. What could a heresy trial do? No more than make people agree by mouth or in writing; it could not compel the heart. For true is the proverb: 'Thoughts are free of taxes.'" Even {644} when the Anabaptists began to preach doctrines that he thoroughly disliked, Luther at first advised the government to leave them unmolested to teach and believe what they liked, "be it gospel or lies."

But alas for the inconsistency of human nature! When Luther's party ripened into success, he saw things quite differently. The first impulse came from the civil magistrate, whom the theologians at first endured, then justified and finally urged on. All persons save priests were forbidden [Sidenote: February 26, 1527] by the Elector John of Saxony to preach or baptize, a measure aimed at the Anabaptists. In the same year, under this law, twelve men and one woman were put to death, and such executions were repeated several times in the following years, e.g. in 1530, 1532 and 1538. In the year 1529 came the terrible imperial law, passed by an alliance of Catholics and Lutherans at the Diet of Spires, condemning all Anabaptists to death, and interpreted to cover cases of simple heresy in which no breath of sedition mingled. A regular inquisition was set up in Saxony, with Melanchthon on the bench, and under it many persons were punished, some with death, some with life imprisonment, and some with exile.

While Luther took no active part in these proceedings, and on several occasions gave the opinion that exile was the only proper punishment, he also, at other times, justified persecution on the ground that he was suppressing not heresy but blasphemy. As he interpreted blasphemy, in a work published about 1530, it included the papal mass, the denial of the divinity of Christ or of any other "manifest article of the faith, clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout Christendom." The government should also, in his opinion, put to death those who preached sedition, anarchy or the abolition of private property.

Melanchthon was far more active in the pursuit of {645} heretics than was his older friend. He reckoned the denial of infant baptism, or of original sin, and the opinion that the eucharistic bread did not contain the real body and blood of Christ, as blasphemy properly punishable by death. He blamed Brenz for his tolerance, asking why we should pity heretics more than does God, who sends them to eternal torment? Brenz was convinced by this argument and became a persecutor himself.

The Strassburgers, who tried to take a position intermediate between Lutherans and Zwinglians, were as intolerant as any one else. They put to death a man for saying that Christ was a mere man and a false prophet, and then defended this act in a long manifesto asking whether all religious customs of antiquity, such as the violation of women, be tolerated, and, if not, why they should draw the line at those who aimed not at the physical dishonor, but at the eternal damnation, of their wives and daughters?

The Swiss also punished for heresy. Felix Manz was put to death by drowning, [Sidenote: January 5, 1527] the method of punishment chosen as a practical satire on his doctrine of baptism of adults by immersion. At the same time George Blaurock was cruelly beaten and banished under threat of death. [Sidenote: September 9, 1527] Zurich, Berne and St. Gall published a joint edict condemning Anabaptists to death, and under this law two Anabaptists were sentenced in 1528 and two more in 1532.

In judicially murdering Servetus the Genevans were absolutely consistent with Calvin's theory. In the preface to the Institutes he admitted the right of the government to put heretics to death and only argued that Protestants were not heretics. Grounding himself on the law of Moses, he said that the death decreed by God to idolatry in the Old Testament was a universal law binding on Christians. He thought that {646} Christians should hate the enemies of God as much as did David, and when Renee of Ferrara suggested that that law might have been abrogated by the new dispensation, Calvin retorted that any such gloss on a plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin went further, and when Castellio argued that heretics should not be punished with death, Calvin said that those who defended heretics in this manner were equally culpable and should be equally punished.

Given the premises of the theologians, their arguments were unanswerable. Of late the opinion has prevailed that his faith cannot be wrong whose life is in the right. But then it was believed that the creed was the all-important thing; that God would send to hell those who entertained wrong notions of his scheme of salvation. "We utterly abhor," says the Scots' Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those that affirm that men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion so ever they have professed."

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ventured to protest in the name of their master. In general, the persecuted sects, Anabaptists and Unitarians, were firmly for tolerance, by which their own position would have been improved. [Sidenote: Erasmus] Erasmus was thoroughly tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise specially devoted to the subject, uttered many obiter dicta in favor of mercy and wrote many letters to the great ones of the earth interceding for the oppressed. His broad sympathies, his classical tastes, his horror of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not have permitted him to resort to the coarse arms of rack and stake even against infidels and Turks.

The noblest plea for tolerance from the Christian standpoint was that written by Sebastian Castellio [Sidenote: Castellio] as a protest against the execution of Servetus. He {647} collects all the authorities ancient and modern, the latter including Luther and Erasmus and even some words, inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by Calvin himself. "The more one knows of the truth the less one is inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely observes, and yet, "there is no sect which does not condemn all others and wish to reign alone. Thence come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments, burnings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture and torment that is plied every day because of some opinions not pleasing to the government, or even because of things unknown." But Christians burn not only infidels but even each other, for the heretic calls on the name of Christ as he perishes in agony.

Who would not think that Christ were Moloch, or some such god, if he wished that men be immolated to him and burnt alive? . . . Imagine that Christ, the judge of all, were present and himself pronounced sentence and lit the fire,--who would not take Christ for Satan? For what else would Satan do than burn those who call on the name of Christ? O Christ, creator of the world, dost thou see such things? And hast thou become so totally different from what thou wast, so cruel and contrary to thyself? When thou wast on earth, there was no one gentler or more compassionate or more patient of injuries.

Calvin called upon his henchmen Beza to answer this "blasphemy" of one that must surely be "the chosen vessel of Satan." Beza replied to Castellio that God had given the sword to the magistrate not to be borne in vain and that it was better to have even a cruel tyrant than to allow everyone to do as he pleased. Those who forbid the punishment of heresy are, in Beza's opinion, despisers of God's Word and might as well say that even parricides should not be chastized.

Two authors quoted in favor of tolerance more than {648} they deserve to be are Sir Thomas More [Sidenote: More] and Montaigne. In Utopia, indeed, there was no persecution, save of the fanatic who wished to persecute others. But even in Utopia censure of the government by a private individual was punishable by death. And, twelve years after the publication of the Utopia, More came to argue "that the burning of heretics is lawful and well done," and he did it himself accordingly. The reason he gave, in his Dialogue, was that heretics also persecute, and that it would put the Catholics at an unfair disadvantage to allow heresy to wax unhindered until it grew great enough to crush them. There is something in this argument. It is like that today used against disarmament, that any nation which started it would put itself at the mercy of its rivals.

The spirit of Montaigne was thoroughly tolerant, because he was always able to see both sides of everything; one might even say that he was negatively suggestible, and always saw the "other" side of an opinion better than he saw his own side of it. He never came out strongly for toleration, but he made two extremely sage remarks about it. The first was that it was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put men to death for their sake. The second was thus phrased, in the old English translation: "It might be urged that to give factions the bridle to uphold their opinion, is by that facility and ease, the ready way to mollify and release them; and to blunt the edge, which is sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty."

Had the course of history been decided by weight of argument, persecution would have been fastened on the world forever, for the consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience. But just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital question by argument, so the course of races and of civilizations is decided by factors lying deeper than {649} the logic of publicists can reach. Modern toleration developed from two very different sources; by one of which the whole point of view of the race has changed, and by the other of which a truce between warring factions, at first imposed as bitter necessity, has developed, because of its proved value, into a permanent peace.

The first cause of modern tolerance is the growing rationalism of which the seeds were sown by the Renaissance. The generation before Luther saw an almost unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian ethics; Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the soul; More could frame a Utopia of deists, and Machiavelli could treat religion as an instrument in the hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this liberty was admirable; but it was really narrow and "academic" in the worst sense of the word. The scholars who vindicated for themselves the right to say and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and in university halls, never dreamed that the people had the same rights. Even Erasmus was always urging Luther not to communicate imprudent truths to the vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so vexed that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted or boiled" for it. Erasmus's good friend Ammonius jocosely complained that heretics were so plentiful in England in 1511 before the Reformation had been heard of, that the demand for faggots to burn them was enhancing the price of fire-wood. Indeed, in this enlightened era of the Renaissance, what porridge was handed to the common people? What was free, except dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal and persecuted everywhere else? What tolerance was extended to the Hussites? What mercy was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola?

{650} [Sidenote: Reformation]

Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has been said of the intolerance of the Reformers, the second cause that extended modern freedom of conscience from the privileged few to the masses, was the Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few years, all the glorious culture of the Renaissance with a dark mist of fanaticism, it nevertheless proved, contrary to its own purpose, one of the two parents of liberty. What neither the common ground of the Christians in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of God, nor their enlightenment by the Spirit, could produce, was finally wrung from their mutual and bitter hatreds. Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark and noisome soil, that of religious liberty sprouting from religious war has been the fairest.

The steps were gradual. First, after the long deadlock of Lutheran and Catholic, came to be worked out the principle of the toleration of the two churches, [Sidenote: 1555] embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The Compact of Warsaw [Sidenote: 1573] granted absolute religious liberty to the nobles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with slaughter in the name of the faith, took a longer step in the direction of toleration in the Union of Utrecht. [Sidenote: 1579] The government of Elizabeth, acting from prudential motives only, created and maintained an extra-legal tolerance of Catholics, again and again refusing to molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The papists even hoped to obtain legal recognition when Francis Bacon proposed to tolerate all Christians except those who refused to fight a foreign enemy. France found herself in a like position, [Sidenote: 1592] and solved it by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians for each other blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, [Sidenote: 1598] but after that lesson persecution on a large scale was at an end. Indeed, before its end, wide religious {651} liberty had been granted in some of the American colonies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland.

Gregory XVI, Encyclical, Mirari vos, 1832.

Letters to Mary Gladstone, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p. 298 f.

C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums, 3, 1911, p. 390.