"But thou sayest once more: 'Yea, worldly power cannot compel to belief. It is only external protection against the people being misled by false doctrine. How else can heretics be kept it bay?' Answer: That is the business of bishops, to whom the office is entrusted, and not to princes. For heresy can never be kept off by force; another grip is wanted for that. This is another quarrel and conflict than that of the sword. God's Word must contend here. If that avail nothing, temporal power will never settle the matter, though it fill the world with blood. Heresy pertains to the spiritual world. You cannot cut it with iron, nor burn it with fire, nor drown it in water. You cannot drive the devil out of the heart by destroying, with sword or fire, the vessel in which he lives. This is like fighting a blade of straw." (10, 395 ff.)
Referring to the Anabaptists, Luther wrote in 1528: "It is not right, and I think it a great pity, that such wretched people should be so miserably slain, burned, cruelly put to death; every one should be allowed to believe what he will. If he believe wrongly, he will have punishment enough in the eternal fire of hell. Why should he be tortured in this life, too; provided always that it be a case of mistaken belief only, and that they are not also unruly and oppose themselves to the temporal power?" (17, 2188.)
To his friend Cresser he wrote: "If the courts wish to govern the churches in their own interests, God will withdraw His benediction from them, and things will become worse than before. Satan still is Satan. Under the Popes he made the Church meddle in politics; in our time he wishes to make politics meddle with the Church." (21b, 2911. Translations by Waring.)
But why did not these excellent principles attain better results in Luther's own time? On this question we have no better answer than that given by Bryce: "The remark must not be omitted in passing how much less than might have been expected the religious movement did at first actually effect in the way of promoting either political progress or freedom of conscience. The habits of centuries were not to be unlearned in a few years, and it was natural that ideas struggling into existence and activity should work erringly and imperfectly for a time." (Holy Roman Empire, p. 381.) This would be Luther's own answer. His work was among people who were just emerging from the ignorance and spiritual bondage in which they had been reared in the Catholic Church. They had to be gradually and with much patience taught, not only in regard to their rights and privileges, but also in regard to their proper and most efficient application. But it is not in agreement with the facts when the charge is directed against Luther that he employed the authority of the State for furthering the ends of the Church because he urged the Saxon Elector to arrange for a visitation of the demoralized churches in the country, and to order such improvements to be made as would be found necessary (Erlangen Ed. 55, 223); also when he sought the Elector's aid for the reform party at Naumburg at the election of a new bishop (17, 113). In both instances he speaks of the Elector as a "Notbischof," that is, an emergency bishop. But his remarks must be carefully studied to get his exact meaning. For he declares that the Elector as a magistrate is under no obligation to attend to these matters. They are not state business. But he is asked as a Christian to place himself at the head of a laudable and necessary movement, and to place his influence and ability at the disposition of the Master, just as a Christian laborer, craftsman, merchant, musician, painter, poet, author, consecrate their abilities to the Lord. This means that the "emergency bishop" has not the right to issue commands in the Church, but he has the privilege and duty to serve. The people needed a leader, and who was better qualified for that than their trusted prince? Besides, the churches had to be protected in their secular and civil interests in those days. The young Protestant faith would have been mercilessly extirpated by Rome, which was gathering the secular powers around her to fight her battles with material weapons against Protestants. The Protestant princes would have betrayed a trust which citizens rightly repose in their government, if they had not taken steps to afford the Protestant churches in their domains every legal protection. The protection of citizens in the exercise of their religious liberty is within the sphere of the civil magistrates. The citizens can appeal to the government for such protection, and when the government in the interest of religious liberty represses elements that are hostile, it is not intolerant, but just. If a religion, like that of the bomb-throwing anarchists and the vice-breeding Mormons, is forbidden to practise its faith in the land, that is not intolerance, but common equity.
One of the most pathetic spectacles which the student of medieval history has to contemplate is the treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Christians. "Few were the monarchs of Christendom," says Prof. Worman, "who rose above the barbarism of the Middle Ages. By considerable pecuniary sacrifices only could the sons of Israel enjoy tolerance. In Italy their lot had always been most severe. Now and then a Roman pontiff would afford them his protection, but, as a rule, they have received only intolerance in that country. Down even to the time of the deposition of Pius IX from the temporal power (1810) it has been the barbarous custom, on the last Saturday before the Carnival, to compel the Jews to proceed en masse to the capitol, and ask permission of the pontiff to reside in the city another year. At the foot of the hill the petition was refused them, but, after much entreaty, they were granted the favor when they had reached the summit, and as their residence the Ghetto was assigned them." In France a prelate condemned the Jews because the "country people looked upon them as the only people of God," whereupon "all joined in a carnival of persecution, and the history of the Jews became nothing else than a successive series of massacres." In Spain the Jews were treated more kindly by the Moors than by the Catholics. At first their services were valued in the crafts and trades, "but the extravagance and consequent poverty of the nobles, as well as the increasing power of the priesthood, ultimately brought about a disastrous change. The estates of the nobles and, it is also believed, those attached to the cathedrals and churches, were in many cases mortgaged to the Jews; hence it was not difficult for 'conscience' to get up a persecution when goaded to its 'duty' by the pressure of want and shame. Gradually the Jews were deprived of the privilege of living where they pleased; their rights were diminished and their taxes augmented."
To their lowest stage of misery, however, the Jews were reduced during one of the most holy enterprises which the papacy launched during the Middle Ages—the Crusades. "The crusading movement was inaugurated by a wholesale massacre and persecution first of the Jew, and afterwards of the Mussulman. . . . Shut out from all opportunity for the development of their better qualities, the Jews were gradually reduced to a decline both in character and condition. From a learned, influential, and powerful class of the community, we find them, after the inauguration of the Crusades, sinking into miserable outcasts; the common prey of clergy and nobles and burghers, and existing in a state worse than slavery itself. The Christians deprived the Jews even of the right of holding real estate; and confined them to the narrower channels of traffic. Their ambition being thus fixed upon one subject, they soon mastered all the degrading arts of accumulating gain; and prohibited from investing their gain in the purchase of land, they found n more profitable employment of it in lending it at usurious interest to the thoughtless and extravagant." In course of time the borrowers recouped their losses by inaugurating raids upon the Jews. Jew-baiting, persecutions, expatriations of Jewish settlers, were of frequent occurrence. Towards the end of the thirteenth century 16,000 Jews were expelled from England and their property confiscated. In Germany "they had to pay all manner of iniquitous taxes—body tax, capitation tax, trade taxes, coronation tax, and to present a multitude of gifts, to mollify the avarice or supply the necessities of emperor, princes, and barons. It did not suffice, however, to save them from the loss of their property. The populace and the lower clergy also must be, satisfied; they, too, had passions to gratify. A wholesale slaughter of the 'enemies of Christianity' was inaugurated. Treves, Metz, Cologne, Mentz, Worms, Spires, Strassburg, and other cities were deluged with the blood of the 'unbelievers.' The word Hep (said to be the initials of Hierosolyma est perdita, Jerusalem is taken) throughout all the cities of the empire became the signal for massacres, and if an insensate monk sounded it along the streets, it threw the rabble into paroxysms of murderous rage. The choice of death or conversion was given to the Jews; but few were found willing to purchase their life by that form of perjury. Rather than subject their offspring to conversion and such Christian training, fathers presented their breast to the sword after putting their children to death, and wives and virgins sought refuge from the brutality of the soldiers by throwing themselves into the river with stones fastened to their bodies." (McClintock and Strong Cyclop., 4, 908 f.)
All this happened under the most Christian rule of the Popes. The characteristic temper of the Jew in the Middle Ages, his fierce hatred of Christianity, his sullen mood, his blasphemous treatment of matters and objects sacred to Christians, are the result of the treatment he received even from the members and high officials of the Church. Now here comes Rome in our day asserting the kindness and generosity shown the Jews by their Popes, because these afforded them shelter in the Ghetto of the Holy City! How differently, they say, was this from the treatment accorded the Jews by Luther. Why, these Catholic writers do not tell the hundredth part of the truth about the attitude of their Church to the Jews in the Middle Ages.
Let this be remembered when Luther's remarks about the Jews are taken up for study. He is very outspoken against them; his utterances, however, relate for the most part to the false teaching and religious practises, to their perversion of the text and the meaning of the Scriptures, and to the blasphemies which they utter against God, Jesus Christ, and His Church, and to the lies which they assiduously spread about the Christian religion. In all that Luther says against the Jews under this head he is simply discharging the functions of a teacher of Christianity; for Scripture says that it was given also "for reproof" (2 Tim. 3, 16). No one can be a true theologian without being polemical on occasion. In another class of his references to the Jews Luther refers to their character: their arrogance and pride, their stiffneckedness and contumacy, their greed and avarice, which makes their presence in any land a public calamity. Though their church and state has long been overthrown, and they are a people without a country, homeless wanderers on the face of the earth, they still boast of being "the people of God," and are indulging the wildest dreams about the reestablishment of their ancient kingdom. They are looking for a Messiah who will be a secular prince, and will make them all barons living in beautiful castles and receiving the tribute of the Goyim. One may reason and plead with them and show them that their belief contradicts their own Scriptures, that their Talmud is filled with palpable falsehoods, and that their hope is a chimera; but they turn a deaf ear to argument and entreaty, and turn upon you with fierce resentment at your efforts to show them the truth. Although they know that their habits of grasping and hoarding wealth, driving hard and unfair bargains, their hunting for small profits by contemptible methods like hungry dogs searching the offal in the alley, rouses the enmity of communities against them and causes them to become a blight to all true progress, to honest trade and business in any land where they have become firmly established, so that laws must be made against them, still they blindly and passionately continue their covetous strivings. When Luther observes the corrupting influence of the Jews on the public life and morals, he declares that they ought to be expelled from the country, and their synagogs ought to be destroyed, that is, they have deserved this treatment. But it is a remarkable fact that even in these terrible denunciations of the Jews Luther moves on Bible ground, as any one can see that will examine his exposition of an imprecatory psalm, like Psalm 109 and 59. If these words of God mean anything and admit of any application to an apostate and hardened race, the Jews are that race, and a teacher of the Bible has the duty to point out this fact. But Luther has not been a Jewbaiter; he has not incited a riot against then, nor headed a raid upon them, as Prof. Worman tells us that Catholic priests in the Middle Ages occasionally would do. What Luther thought of persecuting the Jews for their religion can be seen from his exposition of Psalm 14. He did not believe in a general conversion of the Jews, but he held that individual Jews would ever and anon be won for Christ and would be grafted on the olive-tree of the true Church. "Therefore," he says, "we ought to condemn the rage of some Christians—if they really deserve to be called Christians—who think that they are doing God a service by persecuting the Jews in the most hateful manner, imagining all manner of evil about them, proudly and haughtily mocking them in their pitiful misery. According to the statement in this Psalm (Ps. 14, 7) and the example of the Apostle Paul in Rom. 9, 1, we ought rather to feel a profound and cordial pity for them and always pray for them. . . . By their tyrannical bearing these wicked people, who are nominally Christians, cause not a little injury, not only to the cause of Christianity, but also to Christian people, and they are responsible for, and sharers in, the impiety of the Jews, because by their cruel bearing toward them they drive them away from the Christian faith instead of attracting them with all possible gentleness, patience, pleading, and anxious concern for them. There are even some theologians so unreasonable as to sanction such cruelty to the Jews and to encourage people to it; in their proud conceit they assert that the Jews are the Christians' slaves and tributary to the emperor, while in truth they are themselves Christians with as much right as any one nowadays is Roman Emperor. Good God, who would want to join our religion, even though he were of a meek and submissive mind, when he sees how spitefully and cruelly he is treated; and that the treatment he can expect is not only unchristian, but worse than bestial? If hating Jews and heretics and Turks makes people Christians, we insane people would indeed be the best Christians. But if loving Christ makes Christians, we are beyond a doubt worse than Jews, heretics, and Turks, because no one loves Christ less than we. The rage of these people reminds me of children and fools, who, when they see a picture of a Jew on a wall, go and cut out his eyes, pretending that they want to help the Lord Christ. Most of the preachers during Lent treat of nothing else than the cruelty of the Jews towards the Lord Christ, which they are continually magnifying. Thus they embitter believers against them, while the Gospel aims only at showing and exalting the love of God and Christ." (4, 927.)
The Catholic claim that the Maryland Colony in the days of the Calverts became the first home of true religious liberty on American soil has been so often blasted by historians that one is loath to enter upon this moth-eaten claim for fear of merely repeating what others have more exhaustively stated. Catholics seem to forget what Bishop Perry has called attention to: "The Maryland charter of toleration was the gift of an English monarch, the nominal head of Church of England, and the credit of any merit in this donative is due the giver, and not the recipient, of the kingly grant." Prof. Fisher has called attention to another fact: "Only two references to religion are to be found in the Maryland charter. The first gives to the proprietary patronage and advowson of churches. The second empowers him to erect churches, chapels, and oratories, which he may cause to be consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of England. The phraseology is copied from the Avalon patent (drawn up in England in 1623 for a portion of the colony of Newfoundland) that was given to Sir George Calvert (first Lord Baltimore) when he was a member of the Church of England. Yet the terms were such that recognition of that Church as the established form of religion does not prevent the proprietary and the colony from the exercise of full toleration toward other Christian bodies." (Colonial Era, p. 64.) The Maryland Colony was admittedly organized as a business venture, and its original members were largely Protestants. It was to secure the financial interests of the proprietary that tolerance was shown the colonists. Prof. Fisher says: "Any attempt to proscribe Protestants would have proved speedily fatal to the existence of the colony. In a document which emanated partly from Baltimore himself, it is declared to be evident that the distinctive privileges 'usually granted to ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church by Catholic princes in their own countries could not be possibly granted hero (in Maryland) without great offense to the King and State of England.'" (p. 63.) We have not the space in this review of Catholic charges and claims to go into the religious history of the Maryland Colony as we should like to do; otherwise we should explain the machinations of the Jesuits in this colony, and prove that what tolerance Maryland in its early days enjoyed it owed to the preponderating influence of non-Catholic forces.
It requires an unusual amount of courage for a Catholic writer at this late day to parade his Church as the mother and protectress of religious liberty and tolerance. Any person who has but a smattering knowledge of the history of the world during the last four centuries will smile at this claim. The old Rome of the days of the Inquisition and the auto da fes may seem tolerant in our days, but she is so from sheer necessity, not from any voluntary and joyous choice of her own. Her intolerant principles remain the same, only she has not the power to carry them into effect.