Page:History of Freedom.djvu/614

 57 0

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

the worst crime that Christian nations have committed perhaps believed that ] e\vs spread the plague. But the problem is not there. N either credulity nor cupidity is equal to the burden. It needs no weighty scholar, pressed down and running over with the produce of immense re- search, to demonstrate how common men in a barbarous age were tempted and demoralised by the tremendous power over pain, and death, and hell. We have to learn by what reasoning process, by what ethical motive, men trained to charity and mercy came to forsake the anci nt ways and made themselves cheerfully familiar with the mysteries of the torture-chamber, the perpetual prison, and the stake. And this cleared away, when it has been ex- plained why the gentlest of \vornen chose that the keeper of her conscience should be Conrad of Marburg, and, in- versely, ho\v that relentless slaughterer directed so pure a penitent as Saint Elizabeth, a larger problem follo\vs. After the first generation, we find that the strongest, the most original, the most independent minds in Europe- men born for opposition, who \vere neither a\ved nor dazzled by canon law and scholastic theology, by the master of sentences, the philosopher and the gloss-fully agreed with Guala and Raymond. And we ask how it came about that, as the rigour of official zeal relaxed, and there was no compulsion, the fallen cause was taken up by the Council of Constance, the University of Paris, the States-General, the House of Commons, and the first re- formers; that Ximenes outdid the early Dominicans, while Vives was teaching toleration; that Fisher, with his friend's handy book of revolutionary liberalism in his pocket, de- clared that violence is the best argument \vith Protestants; that Luther, excommunicated for condemning persecution, became a persecutor? Force of habit will not help us, nor love and fear of authority, nor the unperceived absorption of circumambient fumes. Somewhere Mr. Lea, perhaps remembering Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, speaks of "what \vas universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seven- teenth century." The obstacle to this theory, as of a ship