The fault Sir Walter mentions was not peculiar to the middle ages, and is not less in European countries to-day than it was then. The representatives or delegates of the cities and communes constituted the third estate, and sat in the assembly of the estates as early as the reign of Philip the Fair. If the rural population were not represented in the estates, they were not forgotten. The church had received that population as either slaves or serfs. She had succeeded in completely abolishing slavery in all continental Europe before the fifteenth century, and had made much progress toward putting an end to serfage. The enslaved populations were emancipated in nearly all Catholic Europe before the Reformation, and in the early part of the seventeenth century the French courts decided that "a slave could not breathe the air of France." The maxim of the English courts was plagiarized from the French judges. There may be a question whether the European peasant has gained much since the middle ages; whether his increased wants have not more than kept pace with his increased means of supply; and as for protection, they who most need it never find it under any political régime. The most cruel and heartless landlords could not have been more cruel and heartless than are your cotton-mills and mammoth moneyed corporations, especially when Mammon was not exclusively worshipped.
But be all this as it may, this much is certain: that during the feudal ages there was, under the influence and untiring exertions of the pope and the monastic orders, a constant social amelioration of society going on, and the whole tendency of those marvellous ages, so little understood, and so foully belied, was toward the establishment in every nation of a well-ordered liberty, under the safeguard of the church, and of Christian or Christianized traditions and manners. The fifteenth century came, and brought with it not only the revival of pagan literature, but of pagan politics, which gave to the secular order a predominance over the spiritual, as we have explained in previous articles. The unhappy residence of the popes at Avignon, that "Babylonian captivity," as it has been called, and the great schism of the west, which followed it, in the fourteenth century, had served much to diminish the splendor and to weaken the political power of the papacy. This, coupled with the secular development of the age, and the pagan revival, gave a chance for Cæsarism to raise its head, and for the sovereigns to declare themselves absolute, and responsible to God alone for their exercise of power. The feudal constitution of Europe was crushed, and the pagan empire took its place. Not only the emperor and the mightiest kings, but the pettiest sovereign duke or count became a Cæsar in his own dominions.
At this moment, just as Cæsarism was on the point of winning the victory, the Reformation broke out, not in behalf of the old liberties, but to help abolish them and secure to Cæsar his triumph. So far from founding or even aiding liberty, it interrupted its progress, and gave the movement in its favor, which had from the seventh century been going on, a false and fatal direction. The originators of the Reformation may have been simply heterodox theologians; but they could not sustain themselves without the aid of the princes, and that aid could be obtained only by ministering to their love of power, and submitting to their supremacy alike in spirituals and temporals. The princes that favored the Reformation became each in his own principality absolute prince and pontifex maximus. The prince protects the reformers, and uses his civil and military power to crush their enemies, and to extirpate the old religion from his dominions. Dependent on him, and sustained only as upheld by him, the Reformation was impotent to restrain his arbitrary power. The reformed religion, like gentilism, of which it was in fact only a revival, assumed at once the character of a national religion; and the reformed church was absorbed by the state, and became one of its functions, an instrument of police, which must always be the fate of a national religion.
But the Protestant nations not only helped on Cæsarism, which was the spirit of the age, but they gave up or were despoiled of their old liberties, which they had long possessed and enjoyed under the benign protection of the church. England saw her parliament practically annulled, and the prince governing, under Henry VIII., his daughter Elizabeth, and the first two Stuarts, as a Byzantine Basileus or an oriental despot; and it cost her a century of insurrections, revolutions, and civil wars to recover some portion of the political and civil freedom of which the Reformation had despoiled her. Even the Abbé Martin seems to forget that from 1639 to 1746 England was in a state as unsettled as France has been since 1789. She has not even yet recovered all her old liberties. She has, indeed, depressed the crown to exalt the aristocracy of birth or wealth, and is now entering upon a fearful struggle between aristocracy and democracy, most likely to end either in reviving the pagan republic, or in establishing once more the absolute authority of the crown.
The author very justly maintains that Protestantism has not created liberty, and that it has arrested or falsified it. He recalls that,
"At the breaking out of Protestantism slavery had entirely disappeared, and serfage or villenage, the transition state from slavery to complete liberty, was gradually disappearing, and giving place to free labor and domestic servants. The third estate was everywhere constituted, and nowhere had it more life and vigor than in the neighborhood of the churches and monasteries. This emancipation was the work of the Catholic Church, and never had a more signal service been rendered to liberty. The basis of all liberties, I say not of modern but of Christian liberties, was laid.
"Impartial history testifies that Protestantism has not accelerated this movement in behalf of liberty, but has arrested it. A few facts, gathered at random from the immense number that might be adduced, will sufficiently prove this assertion.
"'In Denmark,' says Berthold, 'the peasant was reduced to serfage as a dog.' The nobility profited by the reform, not only to appropriate to themselves the greater part of the goods of the church, but also the free goods of the peasant.
"'The corvées,' says Allen, the best historian of Denmark, 'were arbitrarily multiplied; the peasants were treated as serfs. It happened frequently that the children of the preachers and sacristans themselves were reduced to serfage. In 1804—mark the late date—personal liberty was granted for the first time to twenty thousand families of serfs. Sweden and Norway fared no better. In Mecklenburg, the oppression of the peasants, who had no one to defend their rights since they had lost the effective and vigilant protection of the Catholic clergy, followed immediately the triumph of the Reformation. At the diet of 1607, they were declared simple tenants at will—colons—who must yield up to the landlords, on their demand, even the lands which they had possessed from time immemorial. Their personal liberty was suppressed by the ordinances of 1633, 1648, and 1654. They sought to escape from this intolerable servitude by flight. The emigration was large. But the severest punishments, the lash, the carcan, even death, could not arrest it, nor prevent the depopulation of the fields. The lot of those miserable creatures hardly differed from that of negro slaves. The only difference was, that the masters were prohibited from separating families, and selling the members to the highest bidder at public auction; but they eluded it by trading off their serfs as horses and cows. Serfage was abolished in Mecklenburg only in 1820.
"The introduction of the Reform into Pomerania gave birth there to all the horrors of slavery. The ordinance of 1616 decreed that all peasants are serfs without any rights.... The ministers were required to denounce the fugitive serf from the pulpit. People are astonished to-day at the emigration from Germany, which nearly doubles that from Ireland. May not the cause be found in that old state of things, which, though recently abolished, has left but too many traces of its existence?
"A single fact will enable us to judge of the magnitude of the evil in Prussia. Under Frederick II., the contemporary and friend of Voltaire, who labored so energetically to make of his infant kingdom an immense barrack, the soldiers themselves, the support and instrument of his power, when discharged, returned to the common lot of serfs, after having fought his battles and won his victories. They were subjected anew to their landlords; and not only they, but also their wives, their widows, and their children, even though born in a state of freedom....
"Calvinism has not produced so sad results of the same kind. Less hierarchical in its nature than Lutheranism, and having taken its rise in Geneva, a free state, it has preserved something of its original constitution. Thus it has prevailed generally in countries organized under a republican form; in France, even, it aspired to a federation. But the liberty it has found, rather than created, it turns into an odious tyranny. It has, above all, no respect for individual liberty. The system which Calvin established at Geneva was even surpassed by that of John Knox in Scotland. The ecclesiastical domination over the faithful, and the inquisition into all their doings, were frightful. Every detail of private life could be brought before the presbyterial forum; nobody could feel himself safe. Espionage and domestic accusation were the soul of the system. The secrets of the family were scrutinized and inventoried; and the terrible arm of excommunication struck without relaxation and without mercy. Woe to him who fell under its blows; for him there was no social right. Will it be believed? The Puritans of England, who, to escape oppression and death, free, and masters of a virgin territory, became only the more rigorous, and their communities in North America were even more exclusive and tyrannical than those of their brethren in Europe." (Pp. 326-330.)
The author is too lenient toward Calvinism. It had, indeed, no partiality for monarchy, and just as little for democracy. What it aimed at was an aristocracy of the saints. Only those in grace could be freemen or exercise any authority in the community. The church was composed of the saints alone; and hence, in the colony of Massachusetts, only church members could be selectmen, or magistrates, or vote in elections. Church members had equal rights indeed; but those who were not church members had no rights at all, political, civil, or individual, and no social standing. The church members themselves covenanted to watch over each other, which meant, practically, that every member was to act as a spy upon every other member; and hence that cautiousness in speech, that fear of a mouchard in every neighbor, and that obsequiousness to public opinion, which marks not a few of the descendants of the New England Puritans even to this day. The rights of man in relation to his brother man were undreamed of, and for individual liberty there was no respect whatever. The individual was subject to the congregation, ruled by the pastor and elders or deacons, themselves ruled by two or three venerable spinsters. Calvinism sought, in fact, to govern society, minus celibacy, as a monastery, by converting the evangelical counsels into inflexible laws, and without the assistance of the grace of vocation. We shall never forget the odious tyranny to which Calvinism subjected our own boyhood. Life for us was stern, gloomy, hedged round with terror. We did not dare listen to the joyous song of a bird, nor to inhale the fragrance of an opening flower. Whatever gave pleasure was to be eschewed, and the most innocent pleasures were to be accounted deadly sins. We cannot even now, in our old age, think of our own Calvinistic childhood, which was by no means exceptional, without a shudder.
Thus far the author has spoken of individual liberty, which is the most essential of all, and without which civil and political liberty is a vain mockery. He asserts and proves, as we have seen, that Protestantism has not given to individual liberty a new development, but has arrested it. Well, was it more favorable to political liberty? We have answered this question already, but we cannot forbear citing the author's own reply:
"At the epoch of the outbreak of Protestantism, Christendom was advancing with rapid strides toward the practice of the largest liberty. For centuries the Italian republics had pushed liberty almost to license. They were, no doubt, often disorderly and turbulent; but they were full of sap, overflowing with life and activity, which availed for Italy a power and a glory which she seeks in vain from a factitious unity. Switzerland, by the energy of her patriotism and the wisdom of her government, won the admiration of the whole world. Flanders and the northern provinces of Spain watched with jealous susceptibility over their proud and noble independence; England had her Magna Charta, the basis of the strong constitution which has given her security in the midst of modern political and social convulsions; the cities and communes of France and Germany administered freely their own affairs, as small republics under the guardianship, often more nominal than real, of some few suzerains. The guilds or corporations of the mechanics and tradesmen enjoyed rights the most extended. Power was nowhere despotic, and, though not restrained by scientific and uniform rules, it encountered everywhere a counterpoise to its authority and obstacles to its arbitrary will. Christian monarchy, that creation of the church, unknown in antiquity, approached maturity, and there was room to hope that it would found liberty without opening the door to license, and without having recourse to that enormous centralization which has only too often become a necessity. Catholic theology, always liberal, in the true sense of the word, inclined more to the rights of the people than to the rights of the sovereign. It knew not yet that right divine of kings as it was understood under Louis XIV., a diminutive pagan Cæsarism, which, as we shall show further on, held more strictly than is commonly believed from the principles which the Renaissance and Protestantism caused to prevail." (Pp. 330-332.)
We remark here that the Christian monarchy of which the learned abbé speaks existed in the doctrines of the theologians and in the efforts of the church, rather than in the actual order. There were Christian monarchs or sovereigns, like St. Henry of Germany, St. Ferdinand of Spain, and St. Louis of France; but there was nowhere, that we have been able to discover, a Christian monarchy. The feudal monarchy was of barbarian origin, and was a development of the chief of the tribe or clan. Side by side with this, constantly struggling with it for the mastership of society, was Græco-Roman imperialism, or briefly, Cæsarism, favored by the whole body of the legists, and always opposed by the church, though not always by churchmen become statesmen and courtiers. This pagan Cæsarism, which concentrates in the hands of the prince absolute authority in both temporals and spirituals, survived the fall of the Roman empire, and never for a moment ceased to struggle to recover the mastership; and it was it that was in question in the long struggle between the pope and the emperor. Defeated in the last of the Hohenstauffen, it revived in every petty prince in Christendom. It drove the popes from Rome into the exile of Avignon, and caused the great western schism. Still, the church was for a time able to prevent its complete success. But in 1453 came the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, the dispersion of the Greek scholars through the west; and the revival of pagan politics and literature served to reinforce Cæsarism, to weaken the influence of the church, and to give birth to the Protestant Reformation—at bottom nothing more nor less than a revival of the pagan order, against which the church from her birth had struggled.