We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had changed when Rudolf II became emperor.
This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved his empire from too drastic a change of policy.
That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year 1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic.
He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and Bohemia and Silesia.
Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange family, which acquired vast quantities of European real estate with every new wife, an effort was made to drive the Protestants from their Magyar strongholds. But backed up by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain their independence until the second half of the eighteenth century. And by that time a great change had taken place in Austria itself.
The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last even their sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference with their affairs on the part of the Popes and they were willing for once to risk a policy contrary to the wishes of Rome.
In an earlier part of this book I have already told how many medieval Catholics believed that the organization of the Church was all wrong. In the days of the martyrs, these critics argued, the Church was a true democracy ruled by elders and bishops who were appointed by common consent of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede that the Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct successor of the Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite position in the councils of the Church, but they insisted that this power had been purely honorary and that the popes therefore should never have considered themselves superior to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend their influence beyond the confines of their own territory.
The popes from their side had fought this idea with all the bulls, anathemas and excommunications at their disposal and several brave reformers had lost their lives as a result of their bold agitation for greater clerical decentralization.
The question had never been definitely settled, and then during the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was revived by the vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop of Trier. His name was Johann von Hontheim, but he is better known by his Latin pseudonym of Febronius. Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal education. After a few years spent at the University of Louvain he had temporarily forsaken his own people and had gone to the University of Leiden. He got there at a time when that old citadel of undiluted Calvinism was beginning to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This suspicion had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard Noodt, a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to enter the field of theology and had been permitted to publish a speech in which he had extolled the ideal of religious tolerance.
His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.