The movement of which Protestantism was one of the results dates from a period before Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, from the revival in the fifteenth century, and the successful struggle of Cæsarism against feudalism and the church. Protestantism may have prevented the development of a Christian monarchy; but it was itself a child of Cæsarism. The movement against feudalism, and for the concentration of power in the hands of the monarch, as well as for great centralized states, preceded the birth of Protestantism. Louis XI. in France, Maximilian I. in Germany, Henry VII. of England, the Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, and the de' Medici in Italy, all labored for the centralization of power, and paved the way for the revival and triumph in their respective countries of pagan Cæsarism. The Abbé Martin's statements are correct only in case we count Protestantism, under its social and political aspects, as the continuation and development of the movement in behalf of Cæsarism, or the centralization of power, and against the liberties secured by feudalism.
We are no admirers of feudalism; but we hold it better than the Græco-Roman imperialism it supplanted, or the absolute monarchy which succeeded it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Bossuet was a conspicuous defender. The Reformation aided the movement in behalf of Cæsarism, by bringing to its support an open rebellion against the papal authority and the faith of the church, and secured it the victory. Cæsarism followed it immediately, not only in the nations that accepted the new religion, but also, to a great extent, in the nations that remained Catholic. On the first point the author asks:
"Who does not know that Lutheranism depended solely on the princes and nobles to overcome and despoil the church, and to triumph over the resistance of the people? Through gratitude, and through necessity, it surrendered itself and the people to the discretionary authority of the princes. In all countries where it became predominant, absolute power prevailed.
"As the result of the revolution in 1661, Frederic III. of Denmark and his successors were declared absolute monarchs. The royal law of 1665 attests that the king was required to take no oath, was under no obligation whatever; but had plenary authority to do whatever he pleased. In Sweden, the violent and surreptitious establishment of Protestantism was done in the interest of royalty and nobility, and, moreover, raised up an antagonism between these two powers which produced a series of revolutions in that country unrivalled in any other European state. But royalty finally triumphed. The estates, in 1680, declared that the king is bound to no form of government. In 1682, they declared it an absurdity to pretend that he was bound by statutes and ordinances to consult, before acting, the estates; whence it follows that the will of the king was the supreme law. 'After that,' says Geijer, the classic historian of Sweden, 'all was interpreted to the advantage of the omnipotence of one alone. The estates were no longer called the estates of the realm, but the estates of his majesty. In 1693, the unlimited absolutism of royalty became the law; the king was free to govern according to his good pleasure, without any responsibility.'
"It would be too long to follow the introduction of the same régime as the consequence of the Reformation into the several states and principalities of Germany, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, the duchies of Hanover and Brunswick, Brandenburg and Saxony. Everywhere the introduction of the new religion was followed by an augmentation of the power of the prince and nobles, and everywhere the prince finally succeeded in absorbing the power of the nobility. Prussia affords us a striking example of this result. Under the reign of the Elector Frederick William, from 1640 to 1688, the arbitrary and absolute power of the prince was developed according to a regular plan. The General Diet after 1665 ceased to be convoked. Crushing taxes were imposed without the consent and against the protests of the estates, and collected by the military; and so heavy were they, that multitudes of peasants, despoiled of their goods, were driven to brigandage for a living. A great number sought refuge in Poland, and nobles even deserted a country that devoured their children. Lands which were taxed beyond the value of their produce were abandoned, and suffered to run to waste. The country was oppressed by an unprecedented tyranny. Prussia, according to the expression of Stenzel, was in the way of becoming one of those Asiatic countries in which despotism stifles the growth of whatever is beautiful or noble." (Pp. 332-334.)
We have already spoken of the effects of the introduction of Protestantism into England and Scotland. Calvinism, the author considers, caused less grave and less durable damage to liberty; yet it was not less tyrannical by nature, only it was less monarchical. "At Geneva it confiscated all the ancient franchises to the profit of the oligarchy it established, and it was not owing to it that in Holland the stadtholder did not become absolute." Protestant historians are perfectly well aware of these facts, and from time to time they concede them; and yet the best of them continue to assert the impudent falsehood, that Protestantism has created and sustained modern liberty, individual, civil, and political—not, indeed, because it has done so, but because they think it would have been much in its favor if it had.
The other point, that Protestantism is in great measure responsible for the establishment or partial establishment of the pagan monarchy, or Cæsarism, in Catholic nations, we have shown in our previous articles on the work before us; yet we cite the following from the author:
"It is not simply in countries in which it triumphed that the Protestant Reformation has given to liberty a retrograde movement; it has reacted in a most fatal, though generally in an imperceptible, manner on Catholic governments themselves. It was, at its first appearance, a terrible temptation to the princes and sovereigns of Europe. It broke that firm independence of the Catholic clergy which had for so many ages repressed the tyrannical aspirations of secular governments; it gave up the rich spoils of the church to them, reversed their parts, and after having placed the priest, the representative of heaven, at the mercy of the powers of earth, it constituted the prince the master and director of consciences. What could be more seductive? An obstacle to overcome, almost a yoke to break, independence to conquer, vast riches to appropriate, the empire of souls to place by the side of the empire of bodies, the ideal of a power veritably sovereign; is it not the dream of every man who feels himself at the head of a nation? Princes and sovereigns yielded to the temptation. They were, besides, already prepared for it, by the received theories of legists or civil lawyers, inherited from the pagan state; by the ideas propagated by the Renaissance and by the Machiavelian lessons then taught in all the courts of Europe; and if all did not accept Protestantism, it was far less due to their personal repulsion than to the decided opposition of their people. But the new ideal of power germinated in their minds. On the other hand, the church, weakened and her very existence threatened, saw herself reduced to the necessity of relying on them for support against the armed violence of the Reformation. She must purchase their protection, and could do it only at the expense of her independence. In various places she abandoned to them the nomination of bishops and the collation of benefices, giving by this sacrifice, rigorously exacted by circumstances, and by this abandonment of her rights, which afterward proved so fatal, a sufficient satisfaction for the moment to the secret reason which inclined them to Protestantism. She loosened a prey to them, in order not to be devoured herself. Their hunger thus appeased, they consented to sustain her, but without having a common cause with her.
"Profiting adroitly by their position, the sovereigns passed rapidly from the part of defenders of the church to that of guardians and masters, and while respecting the essence of the spiritual power, they labored to subordinate the church and the exercise of her authority to the surveillance of the state. Not content with excluding all control of the church over their own acts, all interventions of the spiritual authority in civil and political affairs, they sought, after the example of the Protestant princes, to penetrate the interior of the church, and make themselves pontiffs; and if we cannot say that they completely succeeded, we cannot any more say that they wholly failed. What is certain is, that thenceforward they ceased to find any serious obstacle in the Catholic clergy or their chief to their designs, and that the legists, imbued with the maxims of the Roman law, and for a long time hostile to the church, coming to their aid, absolute royalty, without much difficulty, prevailed. The indirect influence of Protestantism was there.
"Even the Catholic clergy themselves contributed to this fatal evolution. Whether moved by gratitude, by a monarchical impulse, or, in fine, by necessity, they accepted, at least in the civil and political order, the new pretensions, and acknowledged the new rights of those sovereigns who, in espousing the Catholic religion, had saved it from the greatest danger it had as yet run. Influenced by the tendency of the times, Catholic theologians, especially in France, deserted the highways of the political theology of the middle ages, and proclaimed not only the divine origin of power, but the divine right of the king, his dependence on God alone, and the passive obedience of the people. The idea of the Christian monarchy was perverted, and in Catholic as in Protestant countries it inclined to Cæsarism. The church was the principal victim of this political transformation; she was all but smothered in the cruel embraces of Catholic monarchs, when God himself delivered her by the blow which was intended to extinguish her—the French Revolution. When that revolution broke out, the work of the Renaissance and of the Reform seemed accomplished. Except in England, Holland, and some microscopic Swiss republics, Catholic for the most part, absolutism reigned everywhere. Is it not, then, the strangest falsification of history to attribute to Protestantism the initiation of modern liberty?" (Pp. 339-341.)
Unhappily, Protestants will pay little heed to the fact that the loss of liberty in Catholic nations was due either to Protestantism or to the movement of which Protestantism was simply a development. There can be no reasonable doubt that but for Protestantism the church would have been able to check and roll back the powerful movement for the revival of Cæsarism, which had commenced in the fifteenth century, and have prevented the growth of absolute monarchy in a single Catholic state. The Protestant rebellion so weakened her external power, and detached from her so large a portion of the populations of Europe, that she was no longer able to restrain the absolutist tendencies of all European sovereigns. The sovereigns themselves, almost without exception, were inclined to the movement—were, in fact, its chief supporters; and if they did not all join it, it was because they were held back by their people, whose faith in the old religion was too strong to be given up at the pleasure of their princes, not because they had personally any devotion or attachment to her faith. The French court and most of the higher French nobility openly or secretly favored Protestantism till the conversion of Henry IV.; and even that monarch had formed a league with the Protestant princes, and was preparing for a war against the Catholic powers of Europe, at the very moment he was assassinated. His policy was adopted and carried out under his successors by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who repressed Protestantism in the interior, but supported it everywhere else. That France remained Catholic, was owing to the concessions made by the pope to her sovereigns, and to the firmness of the French people under the lead of the noble Guises, so calumniated by almost all modern French writers.
Yet the abbé expresses himself too strongly. The triumph of absolutism was never so complete in Catholic as in Protestant nations. In Protestant nations, the sovereigns united both the political and the spiritual powers, as under Greek and Roman gentilism, absorbed the church, and made religion a function of the state. In Catholic nations, although royalty interfered beyond measure in ecclesiastical affairs, the two powers remained distinct, and the church retained, at least in principle, her autonomy, however circumscribed and circumvented in its exercise. This is evident from the concordats she conceded to the sovereigns, and the diplomatic relations of Catholic powers with the holy see. Throughout all her humiliations, the church asserted and maintained, in principle, her independence. In all Protestant countries, the state legislated for the Protestant church; it nowhere treated with it as a separate power, and held, and could hold, no diplomatic relations with it. In all Protestant nations, the church became national and local; but in all Catholic nations she continued to be Catholic, and was always and everywhere some restraint on the absolute power of the sovereign, as both Louis XIV. and Napoleon I. learned by experience, and hence their discreditable quarrels with the holy see, and the imprisonment of the holy father by the latter. Lord Molesworth remarked in 1792, as cited by the author from Döllinger's Church and Churches, that, "in the Roman Catholic religion, with the supreme head of the church at Rome, there is a principle of opposition to unlimited political power. It is not the same with the Lutheran [he might have added the Anglican] clergy, who depend on the crown as their spiritual and temporal superior." This principle opposes the unlimited power of the people no less than of the monarch, and hence the sects all agree, now that the age tends to democratic absolutism, in opposing the church in the name of the people; for Protestantism has the same absolutist instincts always and everywhere.
The author, we think, exaggerates the adoption by the Catholic clergy, even in France, of absolutism in politics. Bossuet, who was a French courtier as well as a Catholic bishop, as tutor to the dauphin, went, no doubt, as far in asserting the divine right of kings, and passive obedience, as the Anglican divines under the Stuarts; and some of the clergy, yielding to court influence and the spirit of the age, followed him; but the noble Fénélon, in no respect his inferior as a theologian, differed from him, held, with the great body of Catholic theologians in all ages, that power is a trust for the public good, and that kings are responsible to the nation for their exercise of it. It was his anti-absolutist doctrine, not his few inaccurate expressions on the doctrine of pure love, in his Maxims of the Saints, that caused him to be stripped of his charges at court, and exiled to his diocese of Cambray. Nor is it true, as the abbé insinuates, that the pope sanctioned the absolutist doctrines which prevailed in France or elsewhere in the seventeenth century. The four articles, dictated by the government, slightly modified by Bossuet, and accepted by a small minority of the French bishops, which contain the very essence of absolutism, were no sooner published by order of the king, and commanded to be taught in all the theological seminaries, and to be conformed to by all the professors and clergy of the realm, than the pope condemned them, annulled the order of the king, and finally compelled him to withdraw it, or at least to pledge himself that he would do so. The pope never failed to assert, and, as far as he could, to cause to be respected, the rights of the church—that is to say, the rights of God, which are the only solid basis of the rights of man.
Every theologian knows that, prior to the rise of Protestantism, and even for a considerable time afterward, Catholic political theology bears no trace of the absolutism taught by Bossuet, and which he had borrowed from contemporary Protestantism. It is worthy of remark that nowhere were the first acts of the French Revolution hailed with more joy than at Rome with the pope and cardinals, and it found no warmer, firmer, or more disinterested supporters than the French clergy as a body, whose representatives were the first to join the Tiers-Etats. Afterward, when the revolution run into horrible excesses, put forth doctrines subversive of all religion, and even of society itself, assumed the right to legislate on spiritual matters, and showed that it only transferred absolutism from the king to the mob, there was undoubtedly a reaction against it in the minds of the pope and clergy, as there was in the minds of all men not incapable of profiting by experience, and who could not prefer license to orderly liberty. The salvation of religion and society made it the duty of the church to sustain with all her power the sovereigns in their efforts to repress the revolutionary spirit, and to restore and maintain social peace and order.