The Lutheran clergy were mere puppets in the hands of their tyrannical rulers, who even dictated or revised their sermons at times. Prussian despotism reached high-water mark under Frederick the Great, but he being a frank and consistent rationalist, who believed “in letting every man be blessed in his own way,” religious persecution ceased.
In Brunswick and Hanover the spoils of the Church appeased for a time the greed of reformation princes, but habits of luxury were engendered by their ill-gotten wealth, and they soon resorted to “money clipping.” The towns lost all their inherited independence. For the decisions of municipal councils were substituted governmental decrees and circulars, as in France to-day, and ere long all trace of the ancient freedom of the Estates was lost. “The clergy,” writes Havemann, “had long since sunk into dependence.... The cities were languishing from lack of public spirit.... The power of modern states was unfolding itself over the sad remains of the ancient life and liberty of the Estates.”
In Saxony there was a nip-and-tuck struggle between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the rack and the scaffold were freely used by Lutheran princes, who enforced their form of Protestantism according to the axiom Cujus regio ejus religio.
On the Church lands in England had lived a dense population of tenant farmers. When these lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, thousands of these peasantry became helpless paupers under the new regime. Vagrancy and mendicancy reached alarming proportions. It was enacted that vagrant beggars should be enslaved. If they tried to escape they were to be killed.
It appeared to Burnet (History of Reformation) that the intention of the nobility was to restore slavery. According to Lecky there were 72,000 executions in the reign of Henry VIII; vagrant beggars furnishing a large contingent.
Under Elizabeth charity by taxation or poor rates was resorted to for the first time in the history of Christendom.
I think we must admit that liberty, both civil and religious, made shipwreck at the Reformation, and that the champions of the Protestant revolt were not exactly actuated by a desire for the well-being and freedom of conscience of their fellow-men.
In England all was laboriously reconquered till 1829, when Catholics were emancipated on their native soil.[25]
Some Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, were saved from the horrors of religious wars, but all felt the effects of the new rationalistic spirit, which, being a diminution of Christianity, was also a diminution of liberty. They lost many civil liberties, and despotism strengthened its bands, till the great upheaval of 1790 destroyed the whole fabric of Europe and inaugurated a system of constitutional representative government.
Representative government, our modern fetish, was not unjustly rated by J. J. Rousseau, when he said “that a people with a representative government were slaves except during the period of elections, when they were sovereigns.” France to-day is a striking illustration.[26]