Let it not be forgotten that Germany was indebted to Protestantism for her condition of peace and prosperity. We have seen that the demoralized condition of the clergy was employed by Loyola to justify the papal approval of his society, and the learned Jesuit historian, the Abbé Maynard, is forced to admit that when Luther gave the first impulse to the Reformation, "the clergy of Germany offered a sad example of corrupted faith and relaxed morals." He calls it a "mournful period,"[73] notwithstanding for a thousand years these and other evils had been growing and spreading under the patronage of Rome. The papacy then dictated the Christianity of Germany. Mark the difference when Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Carlstadt announced the necessity for reform, and put the ball of the Reformation in motion. The great Ranke, whose impartiality has extorted even Jesuit praise, when referring to the effect produced by the Reformation in Germany, says:
"In short, from west to east and from north to south, throughout all Germany, Protestantism had unquestionably the preponderance. The nobility were attached to it from the very first; the body of public functionaries, already in those days numerous and important, was trained up in the new doctrine; the common people would hear no more of certain articles—such, for instance, as purgatory—or of certain ceremonies, such as the pilgrimages; not a man durst come forward with holy relics. A Venetian ambassador calculates, in the year 1558, that but a tenth part of the inhabitants of Germany still clung to the ancient faith."[74]
Maynard also refers to this approvingly, and the Jesuits make it a matter of boasting, in order to support their claim to superior merit for having extirpated so much Protestant heresy, and for bringing back such multitudes of people to papal obedience. Nine Protestants to one papist! Germany, then, was a Protestant nation, governed by Protestant authorities, under Protestant laws, tolerant towards all who adhered to the ancient faith, allowing no interference with the freedom of religious opinions, happy, prosperous, and free, under her own institutions. In these respects she was in the same condition as the United States is to-day, so far as she could be in the absence of written constitutional guarantees.
What people upon earth, other than the Germans themselves, had the just right, under the law of nations or any other human law, to interfere with their condition, or to plot, openly or secretly, against their independence? What was all this, however, to the pope or to the Jesuits? From whence did they derive the authority to form a conspiracy at Rome to invade Germany, overthrow her existing institutions, bind the limbs of her people with fetters they had already broken, to gather up the rusty iron they had cast away, and reforge it into manacles to hold them in obedience to an alien and foreign power? Was this conspiracy commanded by the law of God? If it was, wherein is that law changed? If not changed, and God's laws are all immutable, may not the Jesuits of to-day enter into fresh conspiracies to subvert the present institutions of Germany, or of Great Britain, or of the United States, or of any other nation that maintains the principles of Protestantism and the freedom of conscience?
These questions command the most serious thought, and are pregnant with considerations we are not allowed to put aside. Before this volume closes, answers to all of them may be so plainly discovered as to enable the friends of free thought and popular government to see wherein their greatest danger lies. "The Jesuits," says Ranke, "conquered the Germans on their own soil, in their very home, and wrested from them a part of their native land." Will there not be other conquests to be achieved by them so long as the freedom of conscience is sheltered and guaranteed by Protestant institutions?
FOOTNOTES:
[67] History of the Jesuits. By Greisinger. Page 212.
[68] Ibid., p. 213, note.
[69] Greisinger, p. 48, etc.
[70] Ibid., p. 63.