These were only the most comprehensive of a multitude of Protestant divisions. In the sixteenth century there are enumerated by ecclesiastical historians at least eighty Protestant sects, all named for certain special tenets, or after leaders who held themselves apart. The general resort to the Bible had thus revived the phenomena of the early ages of the faith; and each leading sect or church within its own sphere sought in the papal fashion to suppress variation. The result was a maximum of dogmatism and malice. Every sect split into many. Thus there were some thirteen groups of Anabaptists; over thirty separate confessions were drawn up among the main bodies; and Luther enumerated nine varieties of doctrine on the eucharist alone. The doctrine seldomest broached was that of mutual toleration. Between Lutherans and Calvinists the quarrel went so far that when John Laski, the learned Polish Calvinist, was sailing from England to the continent on his expulsion with his adherents from England under Mary, he was refused leave to remain at the Lutheran ports of Elsinore, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Rostock. But as time went on the Lutherans were divided endlessly and irreconcilably on doctrinal issues among themselves. Melanchthon died declaring the gladness with which he passed away from a world filled with the rabid hatreds of theologians; and after his day matters grew worse instead of better.
From the very first, in short, the temper of Protestant propaganda, met as it was by brutal resistance, had been one of brutal animosity. There is indeed no more grotesque spectacle in human history than the association of the phrase “a religion of love” with the masses of furious controversy which constitute the bulk of Christian theological literature in all ages of faith. Amenity has been much rarer in religious strife than in actual warfare, where animal good humour could at times mitigate or overlay animal hate. Fighters could meet and banquet after a fight: theologians could not. They could feel kindly towards those only who joined them in hating the foe. England, with her Pecock and her Hooker, makes as good a show in this matter as any other country; but in England the temper of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism is from the first one of intense hate, the cultured Catholic Sir Thomas More showing as little capacity for gentleness of spirit as do the violent assailants who exasperated him. Bale, a typical Protestant polemist, seems habitually to foam at the mouth. War was the natural and inevitable expression of such hatreds wherever it could come about; and when the establishment of Protestantism left the sectarian spirit free play as between sects, they turned to the new debate all the ferocity that had marked the old.
It was thus abundantly proved that the cult of the Bible gave no help towards peace and goodwill; and Catholicism naturally profited by the demonstration, many peaceable Protestants returning to its fold. In Germany such reversions were set up alike by the attitude of Luther towards the revolting peasants, many of whom in turn rejected his doctrine, and by the wild licence of the Anabaptists, whose madness could be traced to his impetus. Equally did Romanism gain from the admission that freedom of profession was found to give outlets for atheism; and from the open growth of Unitarianism which, taking rise in Italy in the Lutheran period, was thence carried to Switzerland and elsewhere, and made considerable headway in Poland. The younger Socinus (Sozzini), who joined and developed the movement, was not its founder even in Poland; but when modified and organized by him there it received his name. The Socinian cult terrified many Protestants, driving them back to the old ways; and it may have been partly the resentful fear of such effects that led Calvin to commit his historic crime of causing the Spaniard Servetus to be burned at the stake (1553) for uttering Unitarian doctrine. But Calvin’s language at every stage of the episode, his heartless account of the victim’s sufferings, and his gross abuse of him afterwards, tell of the ordinary spirit of the bigot—incensed at opposition and exulting in vengeance.
Where a scholar could so sink, the bulk of the Protestant communities inevitably became fanatical and hard. In Holland, where Calvin’s church became that of the republic, it treated Arminianism in the seventeenth century as itself had been treated by Lutheranism in the sixteenth. Arminius (Jacobus Harmensen) had sought in a halting fashion to modify the dogma of predestination, and to prove that all men might repent and be saved. Dying after much controversy (1609), he left a sect who went further than he; and the strife came to the verge of civil war, the Arminian Barneveldt being beheaded as a traitor (1619), and the illustrious Grotius sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, from which however he contrived to escape. In England in the next generation the Presbyterians, whose doctrine was Calvinistic, showed the same tyrannous temper; the Arminian archbishop Laud was no better; and in Calvinist Scotland and Lutheran Germany alike the common people were similarly intolerant. Standing with their leaders on the Bible as the beginning and end of truth, the Protestants everywhere assumed infallibility, and proceeded to decree pains and penalties with a quite papal inhumanity. Had Luther been able to give effect to his hatred of the Jews, they would have been persecuted as they never had been—apart from the chronic massacres—in the Catholic period. He would have left them neither synagogues nor homes, neither books nor property. Thus taught, Protestants became persecutors in mass.
In particular, they everywhere turned with a new zest to the burning of witches, the old superstitions being frightfully reinforced by the newly current doctrine of the Pentateuch. No argument—though it was tried by some—could countervail the testimony of the Sacred Book against witchcraft, and its decree of the death penalty. As the frenzy of witch-burning was equally intense in the Catholic countries in the Lutheran period, the mania may be traced in the first instance to the Inquisition, which made a specialty of such action. But it is clear that the new study of the Bible in Protestant countries gave it as strong a stimulus. In England and Scotland, for instance, there had been very little witch-burning in the Catholic period; and the first English law for the purpose was passed under Henry VIII, in 1541; but in both countries the madness thenceforth went step for step with the growth of Puritanism; and the amount of insane cruelty caused by it is past human power to realize.
If the merits of Christianity as a civilizing force are to be in any way determined by its influence in working bloodshed, its record in the matter of witch-slaying alone would serve to place it, in that regard, lower than any other creed. Classic paganism knew no such infamy. All the horrors which Christians are wont to cite as typically heathen, the legends of Juggernaut and the pictures of Dahomey, dwindle in moral bulk beside the dreadful sum of evil set forth in the past of their own faith. For the Protestant lands burned at least as many hapless women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft as the Inquisition burned men for heresy. Most of the victims were women whose sole offence had been to have few friends. To be left a childless widow or an old maid was to run the risk of impeachment as a witch by any superstitious or malevolent neighbour; and the danger seems to have been actually doubled when such a woman gave herself to the work of rustic medicine-making in a spirit of goodwill to her kind. Lonely women who suffered in their minds from their very loneliness were almost sure to be condemned; and in cases where partial insanity did not lead them to admit the insane charges against them, torture easily attained the same end. But the mere repute for scientific studies could bring a man to his death; and in Scotland a physician was horribly tortured and at last burned on the charge of having raised the storm which endangered the life of King James on his return voyage from Denmark with his bride.
The crowning touch of horror is the fact that in Protestant history for generations there is hardly a trace of popular compassion for the victims. In the north of Catholic Italy there was a rebellion against witch-burning, perhaps because it was a part of the machinery of the Inquisition; in the Protestant countries there was nothing of the kind. Luther, a man normally fond of children, was capable of advising that a “possessed” child should be thrown into the river to drown or be cured. In Italy and France there had always been skepticism on the matter among educated men; in the Protestant world the new Bibliolatry made such skepticism go in fear of its life. Wherever it arose, piety met it with the consciousness of perfect wisdom, derived from revelation. Calvin was as confident on the subject as Luther; and when Doctor John Wier of Clèves, apparently a believer in demons, whose numbers he afterwards statistically estimated at over seven thousand millions, ventured to argue in 1563 that many of the so-called witches were simply lunatics, he met as little favour in the Protestant as in the Catholic sphere. It is to be remembered, as a landmark in intellectual history, that the great French publicist Jean Bodin, the most original political thinker of his age, and far from orthodox on the Christian creed, was the foremost champion of the reigning superstition, which had become one of his rooted prejudices.
In England, in 1584, a notable book was written against it, the Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot; but still the mania deepened. King James I caused Scot’s book to be burned by the hangman in the next generation; and the superstition, thus accredited, reached its height in the period of the Commonwealth, whereafter it declined in the skeptical era of the Restoration. Nowhere did effective resistance arise on the religious plane. The reaction was conspicuously the work of the skeptics, noted as such. Montaigne began it in France, by the sheer force of his hardy and luminous common sense, which made no account of either the theology or the learning arrayed against it; and inasmuch as the most brutal fanaticism was in this matter everywhere bound up with the popular creed, the new enlightenment became in England anti-democratic because democracy there was the power of persecution, as in France it became anti-clerical. The Protestant movement had in its own despite set up a measure of mental freedom, by breaking up the ecclesiastical unity of Europe; but its spirit soon revealed to clear eyes that freedom of thought was not to be reached by mere reform of the Church as such. It thus evolved a skepticism which struck at the roots of all Christian beliefs.
The intellectual fatality of the Reformation was that it set up against the principle of papal authority not that of private judgment but that of revelation, and thus still made ancient ignorance the arbiter in the deepest problems. It is indeed vain to say, with Erasmus and with Goethe, that Luther did ill to force a crisis, and that the reform of the Church should have been left to time and the process of culture. No culture could have reformed the papacy as an economic system: the struggle there was finally not between knowledge and ignorance but between vested interests and outsiders’ rights. In the Rome of Leo X, as Ranke has calculated, there were twenty-five hundred venal offices, half of them created by Leo to raise funds for the building of St. Peter’s; and probably most were held by cultured men. What they fought for was not dogma but revenue: Luther when among them had been scandalized by their irreligion, not by their superstition. Looking back, we may still say that a violent rupture was inevitable. Two generations later, we find Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) raising money as did Leo X by the sale of places, and putting the prices so high as to promote official corruption in an extreme degree.
Rome, as a city, lived on its ecclesiastical revenue, and the total vested interest was irreversible. During the long papal schism in which the main wealth of the Church went to the Popes of Avignon, Rome sank visibly to the level of “a town of cowherds,” and the old church of St. Peter’s was in danger of falling to pieces. From the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the popes laboured successively to make their city the most splendid in Europe; and only a great revenue, extorted by corrupt or corrupting methods, could maintain it. The great Council of Trent, begun in 1545 to reform and reorganize the Church, had accomplished at its close in 1563 only a few doctrinal, disciplinary, and hierarchical modifications; and its own history proved the impossibility of a vital reform from within. Twice suspended for long periods, on the pretext of the disturbed state of Europe, it revealed in its closing session the inability of the nations as such to agree on any curative policy. The emperor, Ferdinand I, called for many reforms in a Protestant direction, such as marriage of priests, schools for the poor, “the cup for the laity,” and the reform of convents; and the French prelates supported him; but those of Spain violently resisted, though they agreed in wishing to restrict the pope’s power; while the Italians, the most numerous party, stood by the pope in all things, denouncing all gainsayers. In the end, the diplomatic cardinal Morone arranged matters with the different courts; the bishops had for the most part to give way; and the powers of the pope, which in 1545 the movers of the Council had been bent on curtailing, were established in nearly every particular, without any important change being made in the administrative system. The Council had indeed repudiated the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of predestination to sin and salvation; and on this head the Lutherans gradually came round to the Catholic view; but on the side of Church government the Reformation remained practically justified. Still, it is the historic fact that its first general result was intellectual retrogression. Save in England, where Elizabeth’s irreligious regimen gave scope for a literary and scientific renascence while it correlatively humiliated religion and the Church, leaving the fanatical growth of Protestantism to come later, the Protestant atmosphere was everywhere one of theological passion and superstition, in which art and science and fine letters were for a time blighted.