[A] From an incident narrated in the newspaper account of the battle of Antietam. The reader will be reminded by it of Mrs. Browning's 'Forced Recruit at Solferino.'
[B] A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a change of masters, a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any choice, and in this sense an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.' Speaking, in another place, of the causes which brought about the decline of Protestantism, etc., Mr. Hallam says: 'We ought to reckon also among the principal causes of this change, those perpetual disputes, those irreconcilable animosities, that bigotry, above all, and persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle—the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much confidence to invalidate.'
Luther was one of the many reformers who, feeling the necessity of freedom for themselves, never dream of according it to others. His self-hold, his 'me,' was masterful, and led him far astray from the inevitable logic of his perilous position. His 'I-ness' was so supreme that he mistook his own convictions for the truths of the Most High—a common mistake among reformers! He did not feel the sovereignty of man with regard to his fellow man, his positive inalienable right to deal with his God alone in matters of faith and religious conviction. The golden rule of our Master, 'Do as you would be done by,' seems simple and self-evident, and yet it is a late fruit in the garden of human culture. Mr. Roscoe says: 'When Luther was engaged in his opposition to the Church of Rome, he asserted the right of private judgment with the confidence and courage of a martyr. But no sooner had he freed his followers from the chains of papal domination, than he forget other in many respects equally intolerable: and it was the employment of his latter years to counteract the beneficial effects produced by his former labors.'
Any system which saps the foundation of religious liberty, which forces itself between man and his Maker, cannot guarantee to us one of the main objects of all free governments—security in the pursuit of happiness. The Reformation did not give us religious freedom, therefore it did not give or suggest to us our democratic institutions. All that is true and pure in them springs from the very heart of Christianity itself. 'Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.' Much of the manifestation of the philosophy of freedom depends on individual character. Pope Alexander III., A.D. 1167, writes: 'Nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty.' Luther, in 1524, says to the German peasants; 'You wish to emancipate yourselves from slavery, but slavery is as old as the world. Abraham had slaves, and St. Paul established rules for those whom the laws of nations reduced to that state.' Many of our modern priests reëcho these sentiments! Guizot says: 'The emancipation of the human mind and absolute monarchy triumphed simultaneously.' The truth is we want a philosophical history of the Reformation, written neither from a Catholic, Protestant, nor infidel point of view, that we may rightly estimate what we lost, what gained in its wild storms. In judging this, we should not quite forget that it was the Catholic Lord Baltimore and Catholic colonists of Maryland who in 1648 first proclaimed on these shores the glorious principle of universal toleration, while the Puritans were persecuting in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia. 'Nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,' should be the rule of our souls. Humanity means eternal Progress, and its path is onward.—Ed. Con.
[C] Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in April, May, and June, 1861, by Max Müller, M. A. From the second London edition, revised. New York: Charles Scribner, 124 Grand street. 1862.