The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance, which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of time.
After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and other cities, which had been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms: “Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III, kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (Essai sur les mœurs, II, 82).[24]
In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in this Bas Empire.
“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism stifled and checked every free movement” (Neander, History of the Church, VIII, 244).
The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom, constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife, unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.
On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably in France.
The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.” “Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.
For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the ancient faith.
Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (Essay on Ranke), was formulated the monstrous axiom Cujus regio ejus religio, which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days, each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of Protestantism.
There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants, all on account of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.