Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/27

 Rh age to which ecclesiastical authority had doomed it. Before Protestantism there was the Renaissance when the mind of the West insisted upon looking upon the world with bare eyes. But Protestantism had carried liberty only up to a certain point. True it had been accompanied by an interesting upstirring of political thought and action, because reason can never be enlivened at one point without feeling the effect in all its activities. Luther was attacked by his enemies in the Diet of Worms for aiding and abetting social disorder; Carlstadt and Münzer accused him of not being revolutionary enough. The Kingdom of God was founded by the sword and "the Word" in Münster. So, too, in our own Puritan times. Democratic doctrine welled up from the same source as religious revivalism, But not until the French Revolution, two centuries and a half later, did the new wine burst the old bottles. Protestant reformations, geographical discovery, the making of roads and the extension of commerce, the triumph of natural science, the creation of a rich trading class all went to produce it; the special circumstances of France alone determined the stage upon which the blood was to flow and the collapse of the old was to be the most deafening and terrible.

The French Revolution paralysed the social organism in order that the rational abstraction "All men are born free and equal" might be proclaimed from the housetops. To begin with, Europe was plunged into wars;