[12] The author alludes to the Systema Theologicum of Leibnitz, first published in Paris in the year 1819, from the manuscript sent by the court of Prussia to that of France. It was published by the Abbe Emery, who accompanied the Latin original with a French translation.—Trans.
END OF LECTURE XVI.
LECTURE XVII.
Parallel between the religious peace of Germany and that of the other countries of Europe.—The political system of the Balance of Power, and the principle of false Illuminism prevalent in the eighteenth century.
The great benefits of the religious peace of Germany, which founded upon, and springing out of a great historical necessity, has struck such deep roots in the public mind, and at last become a second nature to the Germans, may be best appreciated by a comparison with the state of religious liberty such as it now exists, or did recently exist among other nations—and those in truth which are in every other respect the most civilized of modern Europe. In Germany, indeed, the strict and vigilant maintenance of that religious peace, on which her whole political existence depends, and without which she would fall into an anarchic struggle of parties; has received in recent times a new
confirmation; and this religious peace, which has been revived, not indeed in its old forms, but in its general spirit and essential import, has become only the more necessary, as by the recent partitions of territories, a great intermixture of religions has been introduced into states where formerly one religion only prevailed. Thus in that state,[13] which was originally the greatest of all the Protestant states of Germany, and is now even still more powerful than formerly, a full half of the population is Catholic. Nearly to the same extent, the same observation will apply, though inversely, to that Catholic state[14] in Germany, which next to the Imperial state itself, is the greatest. So strongly has this Magna Charta[15] of the religious liberty of Germany, (which scarcely needs any external securities, now that most of those securities no longer exist, or at least have been very materially altered in the forms under which they formerly existed in the Confederation and in the Imperial courts of Judicature), so strongly, I say, has this Magna Charta taken root both in the public mind and state-policy of Germany, that the principle of religious freedom no longer depends on the degree of population, or the relation of numbers. Thus, for example, in the German Catholic provinces of the Austrian Empire, the Protestants, though compared with the rest of the population they form so very small a
minority, have been long in possession of the most unlimited religious freedom; and in the country[16] which was the very cradle of Protestantism, the fact that the royal dynasty and a very small minority of the nation profess the Catholic religion, has been no obstacle to the most cordial, deep, and solid attachment on the part of the people to their old hereditary rulers—an attachment which has been evinced in the most unequivocal and affecting manner by all classes of the nation at every period of misfortune. If now we look to the other great states and civilized countries of Europe, which like Germany were involved for a century and more in the turmoil of religious wars, and consider what issue these wars have had, what results they have produced, we shall find that in England civil war indeed no longer rages. But how the relations between the Anglican church on the one hand, which force alone maintains in its political privileges and ascendancy, and the Protestant dissenters (who have a different character from those in Germany, or elsewhere, and are distinguished by a very violent sectarian spirit) and the Catholic population of Ireland, on the other; how these relations, I say, can be said to exhibit a state of religious peace, I am at a loss to understand; for at no very remote period the latter country was the theatre of a bloody civil war. We must at least allow that a solid
and permanent internal peace, a perfect conciliation of minds, and an equitable adjustment of the respective rights and claims of both parties, have apparently not yet been brought to a quiet and satisfactory issue. Nay, to judge from those great parliamentary discussions in England, wherein not unfrequently and from passages the most obscure, and the least observed by the superficial eye, the most secret motives, the deepest springs of policy, and the most hidden thoughts and disquietudes of the statesman come to light in that wonderful stage of public life; it would appear that great self-apprehension reigned in the minds of English politicians;—a fear which is the more likely to arise on every serious retrospect that people take of the old abyss of their civil contests; for more than any other nation, they are conversant with their own annals, and have them ever before their eyes, and live in the past with all the intense feelings of the present. Hence every individual among them knows full well that the fearful and fermenting elements of their great old civil commotion have never been perfectly appeased, and finally allayed, but have been merely repressed from time to time, and prevented from breaking out anew by means of a Constitution, which on that account is reputed glorious. And must not every Englishman ask himself the peremptory question, how a country can be, or be termed free, when its Catholic inhabitants, amounting to a third part of its entire population, are doomed