Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/390

 Reformation, the Council of Two Hundred was established in order that Geneva might be assimilated to the Swiss Cantons whose help it invoked.

A State so constituted and governed could hardly escape from the consciousness that it was a Church, or feel otherwise than as if the ecclesiastic at its head made its acts and legislation ecclesiastical. The spiritual offices were made secular without the secular offices becoming spiritual; in other words, the clergy were assimilated to the laity, while the laity did not correspond to the clerical ideal. The priests dressed and armed like the people, played and fought with them, behaved more like examples of worldliness than teachers of the Gospel; in a word, sinned and lived like citizens of Geneva. The decay of clerical morals was not peculiar to Geneva, though it must be noted as a main factor of the situation there. Kampschulte, here a reluctant witness, declares that the Bishop had become a humiliation to the Church and a degradation to the clergy; and he cites the case of the old priest who, when ordered to put away his mistress, replied that he was quite ready to obey, provided all his brethren were treated with the same severity. But the constitution acted on the collective even more subtly than on the personal consciousness. The Council legislated, disciplined, and excommunicated as if the State were a Church, or, what may be the same thing, as if there were no Church in the State. The extent to which a man could sin and yet remain a citizen was a matter of statutory regulation: no citizen was allowed to keep more than one mistress, and every convicted adulterer was banished. The prostitutes had a quarter where they dwelt, special clothing which they wore, and a " queen " who was responsible for the good order of her community. The clergy were a kind of moral police, responsible for the citizens and to the city; and so their deterioration meant a moral decline.

But a more obvious and, so far as our immediate point is concerned, a more serious consequence was this: every ecclesiastical question tended to become civil, and every civil question to become ecclesiastical. A constitution has a way of working in a fashion either better or worse than, considered à priori, would have seemed possible; and this because the people are ever a greater factor of harmony or disorder than the laws they live under. Hence, so long as Geneva was inspired by one spirit, the anomalies of the constitution did not breed discontent; but, when new energies and new ambitions awoke, these anomalies became fruitful of disaster to the State. So long as the Bishop and the people had common aims and interests, loyalty to both was easy; but, the moment the interests of the Bishop looked in an opposite direction from those of the people, the situation became difficult. For loyalty to the Bishop as head of the State meant loyalty to the Church of which he was head; but loyalty to the people as the chief constituent of the State became disloyalty to the Bishop as head both of Church and city. How this