The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 93.—December, 1872.
The Spirit Of Protestantism.
Recent events in Europe, particularly in Prussia and Italy, have done much to awaken the attention of thinking men in this country to the true spirit of what is known as Protestantism. While they have once more presented to our view humiliating spectacles of human weakness, injustice and downright tyranny under the guise and in the sacred names of religion and liberty, they have confirmed with remarkable force all that has been alleged against the spirit that actuates and has always governed the enemies of the Catholic Church.
When the revolt against Catholic doctrine and the spiritual authority of the See of Rome was first inaugurated in the XVIth century under the banner of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, it was asserted by those who then upheld the ancient faith that these were specious pretexts invented to cover ulterior designs, which, by giving full scope to the worst passions of our nature, would inevitably fix in the minds and in the hearts of mankind a moral slavery more debasing, and a servitude more irradicable, than even the most astute pagans of ancient times ever dreamed of; that dissent from the dogmas and discipline of the universal church did not in itself constitute a creed, but simply the negation of all Christian truth, and that the right of private judgment in matters of faith meant in reality the right, when seconded by the power, to pull down and destroy, to persecute and proscribe, to desecrate and desolate the Christian temples and charitable institutions which pious hands had reared and richly endowed throughout Europe. How sadly prophetic were the sagacious champions of true liberty and divine authority, the history of the last three centuries fully attests.
Whoever has studied the career of modern civilization, either in the detached records of nations and dynasties, or by following the course of the church herself from her foundation to the present day, cannot fail to discover [pg 290] that the advance of Europe from the epoch of the disruption of the Roman Empire until the commencement of the XVIth century was a steady, constant, and rapid march towards true civil polity and enlightenment; frequently checked, it is true, by wars and local schisms, but ever flowing onward in an irresistible and majestic flood.
From the barbarism and chaos incident to the disappearance of the central authority of the empire, Europe emerged into the preparatory condition of feudalism, at that time another name for order; and, through this state of order, the first necessity of freedom, she was fast acquiring that second essential element of political excellence—liberty. Already the humble peasants of Helvetia were as free as the air of their romantic mountains; Italy was dotted with republics; the Spanish peninsula was ruled more by its cortes than by its sovereigns; France had her several “estates”; Poland her elective monarchy; and Germany and the North were fast becoming imbued with liberal and constitutional ideas; England, the last to adopt the feudal system, had by degrees abrogated its slavish restraints and commercial restrictions, and, with justice, boasted of her great charters and independent parliaments; while over all a species of international law was established, the chief executive of which sat in the chair of S. Peter, before whose moral power warriors sheathed their swords and crowned kings bowed their heads in submission. Municipalities, the germs of which had first clustered around the monasteries, had become numerous and powerful enough to defy and, on occasion, to curb the power of the feudal nobles, and, under the protection of the guilds, the mechanical arts had acquired a degree of perfection fully equal if not superior to that of our own time. Those workers in wool, cotton, and silk, stone, metal, and wood, have left us lasting monuments of their skill not only in the productions of the looms of Flanders and Italy, and the forges of Spain and England, but, better still, in the multiplicity of magnificent cathedrals and basilicas, in the contemplation of which the artisan of this generation, with all his supposed advantages, is lost in silent admiration. Poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture, the four highest developments of creative genius, may be said to have reached, at the period immediately anterior to the Reformation, the acme of glory and greatness, never before nor since excelled or even equalled by man; while the discovery of the art of printing had given a new impetus to literature, and commerce spread her white wings in the Indian Ocean and along the shores of the New World.