Page:History of Freedom.djvu/372

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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

both alike are in the interest and within the competence of the State. The Church of her own strength is not strong enough to resist the advance of heresy and un- belie( Those enemies find an auxiliary in the breast of every man whose weakness and whose passions repel him from a Church which imposes such onerous duties on her mem bers. But it is neither possible to define the con- ditions without which liberty must be fatal to the State, nor the limits beyond which protection and repression become tyrannical, and provoke a reaction more terrible than the indifference of the civil power. The events of the last hundred years have tended in most places to mingle Protestants and Catholics together, and to break down the social and political lines of demarcation between them; and time will show the providential design which has brought about this great change. These are the subjects treated in the first t\VO chapters on "The Church and the Nations," and on the Papacy in connection \vith the universality of Catholicism, as contrasted with the national and political dependence of heresy. The two following chapters pursue the topic farther in a general historical retrospect, which increases in interest and importance as it proceeds from the social to the religious purpose and influence of the Papacy, and from the past to the present time. The third chapter, "The Churches and Civil Liberty," examines the effects of Protestantism on civil society. The fourth, entitled "The Churches without a Pope," considers the actual theological and religious fruits of separation from the visible Head of the Church. The independence of the Church, through that of her Supreme Pontiff, is as nearly connected with political as with religious liberty, since the ecclesiastical system which rejects the Pope logically leads to arbitrary po\ver. Throughout the north of Europe-in Sweden and Den- mark, in Mecklenburg and Pomerania, in Prussia, Saxony, and Brunswick-the power which the Reformation gave to the State introduced an unmitigated despotism. Every security was removed \vhich protected the people against