B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Religious liberty guarantees every other kind of freedom, as every form of slavery walks in the train of priestly despotism. In America religious emancipation led the way to the Declaration of Independence, and still continues to make this continent the chosen home of thousands of Liberals whom the material prosperity of the New World would have failed to attract. It is possible that a policy of intolerance would have averted or postponed the fate of the Moorish empire, which was ultimately overthrown by the fanatics of a creed which the followers of a more rational faith had permitted to survive in their midst; yet it is not less certain that for nearly five hundred years religious tolerance made the realm of the Spanish caliphs the one bright Goshen in a world of intellectual darkness. In northern Europe the history of civilization begins only with the triumph of Rationalism. Protestantism, in that wider sense which made the revolt of the Germanic nations an insurrection against the powers of superstition, has laid the foundation of national prosperity in Great Britain, in the Netherlands, and in the rising empire of northern Germany. The real founder of that empire was at once the greatest statesman [[129]]and the boldest Freethinker of the last fourteen centuries. His capital became a city of refuge for the philosophers of Christian Europe. The eastern provinces of his kingdom were colonized by refugees from the tyranny of clerical autocrats. His absolute tolerance protected even the Jesuits, expelled by the Catholic rulers of France and Spain. During the reign of that crowned philosopher the religious and political dissenters of Prussia expressed their views with a freedom which in semi-republican England would have involved them in a maze of endless lawsuits. Among the fruits of that freedom were products of science and philosophy which have made that period the classic age of German literature. “Before the appearance of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ ” says Schopenhauer, “the works of duly installed government professors of philosophy were mostly medleys of sophisms, pretending to reconcile science and dogma, or reason and despotism. Here, at last, a state university could boast of a man who lived at once by and for the service of Truth—a phenomenon made possible only by the circumstance that, for the first time since the days of the great Aurelius and the greater Julian, a Freethinker had mounted the throne of an independent monarchy.”
The protection of Freethought is likewise the best safeguard against that virus of hypocrisy that has undermined the moral health of so many modern nations.
“What an incalculable advantage to a nation as well as to its ruler,” says a modern philosopher, “to know that the pillars of state are founded on [[130]]the eternal verities, on natural science, logic, and arithmetic, instead of casuistry and immaculate conceptions!”
The consciousness of that advantage has more than once upheld the birthland of Protestantism in its struggles against the allied powers of despotism, and should uphold our republic in the inevitable struggle against the allied despots of the twentieth century.