“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to lay down certain laws of science which hold good for all people at all times and under all conditions. It follows that it would have been very easy for him, had he desired to do so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that they all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject of religion. We know that He did not do anything of the sort. Therefore, we act against the express will of God if we try to coerce others by force to believe that which we ourselves hold to be true.”
Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or not, it is hard to say. But something of that same spirit of Erasmian rationalism can be found in those works of Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own ideas upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.
That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in February of the year 1764) is of course no more than was to be expected. But it happened to suit the interests of Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and Febronianism or Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started was called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the son of Maria Theresa, bestowed upon his subjects on the thirteenth of October of the year 1781.
Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great enemy, Frederick of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing the right thing at the wrong moment. During the last two hundred years the little children of Austria had been sent to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those same infants henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors (who, as they all knew, had horns and a long black tail), as their dearly beloved brothers and sisters was to ask the impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard working, blundering Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles and aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and cardinals and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden outburst of courage. He was the first among the Catholic rulers who dared to advocate tolerance as a desirable and practical possibility of statecraft.
And what he did three months later was even more startling. On the second of February of the year of grace 1782 he issued his famous decree concerning the Jews and extended the liberty then only enjoyed by Protestants and Catholics to a category of people who thus far had considered themselves fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the same air as their Christian neighbors.
Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe that the good work continued indefinitely and that Austria now became a Paradise for those who wished to follow the dictates of their own conscience.
I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught since time immemorial to regard the Jew as his natural enemy and the Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his natural enemies.
A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century. Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black.
So much for paper decrees.