Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/308

 Cujus regio ejus religio is a maxim as fatal to true religion as it is to freedom of conscience; it is the creed of Erastian despotism, the formula in which the German territorial Princes expressed the fact that they had mastered the Church as well as the State. Even for Princes religious liberty was limited to the choice of one out of two alternatives, the dogmas of Rome or those of Wittenberg. The door of Germany was barred against Zwingli, Calvin, and Socinus; and in neither the Lutheran nor the Roman Church was there the same latitude that there was in the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. The onslaughts of her enemies compelled Rome to define her doctrines and to narrow her communion; if the Catholic Church was purified in the process, it was also rendered more Puritan; it became exclusive rather than comprehensive, Roman rather than Catholic. To define the faith is to limit the faithful; the age was one of definitions, and it destroyed for ever the hope of a real Catholicism.

But even this meagre liberty of choice between two exclusive communions was denied to the mass of the German people. For them the change consisted in this, that instead of having their faith determined for them by the Church, it was settled by their territorial Princes; instead of a clerical, there was a lay persecution; instead of a remote prospect of being burnt, the German dissenter, after 1555, enjoyed a much more imminent prospect of being banished; for the tyranny of Wittenberg, if it was less than that of Rome after the Council of Trent, was certainly greater than that of the Catholic Church before the appearance of Luther. Luther enunciated the principle of religious liberty, of individual priesthood. But he and his followers imposed another bondage, which went far to render this declaration ineffectual. The chief actual contribution of the Lutheran Reformation to religious liberty was thus indirect, almost undesigned. It produced the first Church independent of Rome, and prepared the way for countless other religious communities, which, however narrowly they may define their individual formularies, tend by their number to enforce mutual toleration. Private morality has been evolved out of the conflicting interests of an infinite mass of individuals; international law depends upon the multiplicity of independent States; and the best guarantee for the freedom of conscience consists in the multitude and relative impotence of the Churches.

There is no more disappointing epoch in German history than the reign of Charles V; if in its course it shattered some idols, it also shattered ideals. It began full of hope, and the nation seemed young. There were plans for reforming the Church and renewing the Empire; no one dreamt of dividing the one and destroying the other. Yet such was the result. The Reformation began with ideas and ended in force. In the Germany of the sixteenth, as in that of the nineteenth century, an era of liberal thought closed in a fever of war; the persuasions of sweetness