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 PROTESTANTISM

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PROTESTANTISM

which the English people are wont to boast, leading them to welcome a foreign usurper and foreign troops for no other reason than to obtain their assist- ance against their Catholic fellow-subjects, in part to do precisely what the latter were falsely accused of doing in the time of Elizabeth.

The Stuart dj-nasty lost the throne, and their suc- cessors were reduced to mere figure-heads. Political freedom had been achieved, but the times were not yet ripe for the wider freedom of conscience. The penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters were aggravated instead of abolished. That the French Revolution of 17S9 was largely influenced by the Eng- lish events of the preceding centiu-y is beyond doubt; it is, however, equally certain that its moving spirit was not English Puritanism, for the men who set up a declaration of the Rights of Man against the Rights of God, and who enthroned the Goddess of Reason in the Cathedral Church of Paris, drew their ideals from Pagan Rome rather than from Protestant England.

D. Progress in Religious Toleration. — Aa regards Protestant influence on the general progress of civili- zation since the origin of Protestantism we must mark off at least two periods: the first from the be- ginning in 1517 to the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), the second from 1648 to the present day; the period of youthful exjjansion, and the period of maturity and decay. But before apportioning its influence on civilization the previous questions should be examined: in how far does Christianity contribute to the amelioration of man — intellectual, moral, material — in this world: for its salutary ef- fects on man's soul after death cannot be tested, and consequently cannot be used as arguments in a purely scientific disquisition. There were highly-civilized nations in antiquitj', Assyria, Egj-pt, Greece, Rome: and there are now China and Japan, whose culture owes nothing to Christianitj-. When Christ came to enlighten the world, the light of Roman and Greek culture was shining its brightest, and for at least three centuries longer the new religion added nothing to its lustre. The spirit of Christian charity, how- ever, graduaUj- leavened the heathen mass, softening the hearts of rulers and improving the condition of the ruled, especially of the poor, the slave, the prisoner. The close union of Church and State, begun with Const ant ine and continued under his successors, the Roman emperors of East and West, led to much good, but probabU' to more evil. The lay episcopacy which the princes a-ssumed well- nigh reduced the medieval Church to a state of abject vassalage, the secular clergy to ignorance and worldliness, the peasant to bondage and often to misery.

Had it not been for the monasteries the Church of the Middle Ages would not have saved, as it did, the remnant of Roman and Greek culture which so power- fully helped to civilize Western Europe after the bar- barian invasions. Dotted aU over the West, the monks formed model societies, well-organized, justly ruled, and prospering by the work of their hands, true ideals of a superior ci\'ilization. It was still the ancient Roman civilization, permeated with Christianit}', but shackled by the jarring interests of Church and State. W;us Christian Europe, from a worldly point of view, better off at the beginning of the fifteenth century than pagan Europe at the be- ginning of the fourth? For the beginning of our distinctly modern progress we mu-st go back to the Renaissance, the Humanistic or classical, i. e. pagan revival, following upon the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453); upon the discoverj- of the new Indian trade route round the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese; upon the discoverj' of America by the Spaniards, and upon the development of all European interests, fostered or initiated at the end

of the fifteenth century, just before the birth of Protes- tantism. The opening of the New World was for Europe a new creation. Minds expanded with the vast spaces submitted to them for investigation; the study of astronomj', at first in the service of na^-igation, soon reaped its own reward by discov- eries in its proper domain, the starry heavens; de- scriptive geography, botany, anthropology-, and kindred sciences demanded study of those who would reap a share in the great harvest East and West. The new impulse and new direction given to com- merce changed the political aspect of old Europe. Men and nations were brought into that close con- tact of common interests, which is the root of all ci\'ilization; wealth and the printing-press supplied the means for satisfying the awakened craving for art, science, literature, and more refined living. Amid this outburst of new life Protestantism appears on the scene, it.self a child of the times. Did it help or hinder the forward movement?

The youth of Protestantism was, naturally enough, a period of turmoil, of disturbing confusion in all the spheres of life. No one nowadays can read without a sense of shame and sadness the history of those years of religious and political strife; of religion everywhere made the handmaid of politics; of wanton destruction of churches and shrines and treasures of sacred art; of wars between citizens of the same land, conducted with incredible ferocity; of terri- tories laid waste, towns pillaged and levelled to the ground, poor people sent adrift to die of starvation in their barren fields; of commercial prosperity cut down at a stroke; of seats of learning reduced to ranting and loose living; of charity banLshed from social intercourse to give place to slander and abuse, of coarseness in speech and manners, of barbarous cruelty on the part of princes, nobles, and judges in their dealings with the "subject" and the prisoner, in short of the almost sudden drop of whole countries into worse than primitive savagery. "Greed, rob- ber}', oppression, rebellion, repression, wars, devasta- tion, degradation" would be a fitting inscription on the tombstone of early Protestantism.

But violenta nan durant. Protestantism has now grown into a sedate something, difficult to define. In some form or other it is the official religion in many lands of Teutonic race, it also counts among its ad- herents an enormous number of independent re- ligious bodies. These Protestant Teutons and semi- Teutons claim to be leaders in modern civilization: to possess the greatest wealth, the best education, the purest morals; in every respect they feel them- selves superior to the Latin races who still profess the Catholic religion, and they ascribe their superior- ity to their Protestantism.

Man knows himself but imperfectly: the exact state of his health, the truth of his knowledge, the real motives of his actions, are all veiled in semi- obscurity; of his neighbour he knows even less than of himself, and his generalizations of national charac- ter, tj-pified by nicknames, are worthless caricatures. Antipathies rooted in ancient quarrels — political or religious — enter largely into the judgments on na- tions and Churches. Opprobrious, and so far as sense goes, obsolete epithets applied in the heat and passion of battle still cling to the ancient foe and create prejudice against him. Concept ioas formed three hundred years ago amid a state of things which has long ceased to be, still survive and distort our judg- ments. How slowly the terms Protestant, Pajjist, Romanist, Nonconformist, and others are losing their old unsavoury connotation. Again: Is there any of the greater nations that is purely Protestant? The richest provinces of the German Empire are Catholic, and contain fully one-third of its entire population. In the United imitates of .\merica, according to the latest census, Catholics form the majority of the