Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/381

Rh Passing over that period during which ecclesiastical power throughout Europe was rising to its climax, we come, in the twelfth century, to dissenters of more advanced types; who, with or without differences of doctrine, rebelled against the then-existing church government. Such sects as the Arnoldists in Italy, the Petrobrusians, Caputiati and Waldenses in France, and afterward the Stedingers in Germany and the Apostolicals in Italy, are examples; severally characterized by assertion of individual freedom, alike in judgment and action. Ordinarily holding doctrines called heretical, the promulgation of which was itself a tacit denial of ecclesiastical authority (though a denial habitually based on submission to an alleged higher authority), sects of this kind went on increasing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' There were the Lollards in England; the Fraticelli in Italy; the Taborites, Bohemian Brethren, Moravians and Hussites, in Bohemia: all setting themselves against church-discipline. And then the rebellious movement of the reformation, as carried forward by the Lutherans in Germany, the Zwinglians and Calvinists in Switzerland, the Huguenots in France, the Anabaptists and Presbyterians in England, exhibited, along with repudiation of various established doctrines, ceremonies, and usages, a more pronounced anti-sacerdotalism. Characterized in common by opposition to Episcopacy, protestant or catholic, we see first of all in the government by presbyters, adopted by sundry of these dissenting bodies, a step toward freedom of judgment and practice in religious matters, accompanied by denial of priestly inspiration. And then in the subsequent rise of the Independents, taking for their distinctive principle the right of each congregation to govern itself, we see a further advance in that anti-sacerdotal movement which reached its extreme in the next century with the Quakers; who, going directly to the fountain head of the creed, and carrying out more consistently than usual the professed right of private judgment, repudiated the entire paraphernalia of ecclesiasticism.

It is true that the histories of these various non-conforming bodies, not excluding even the Society of Friends, show us the re-growth of a coercive rule, allied to that against which there had been rebellion. Of religious revolutions, as of political revolutions, it is true that in the absence of differences of character and culture greater than can be expected in the same society at the same time, they are followed by gradually established forms of rule only in some degree better than those diverged from. In his assumption of infallibility, and his measures for enforcing conformity, Calvin was a pope comparable with any who issued bulls from the Vatican. The discipline of the Scottish Presbyterians was as despotic, as rigorous, and as relentless as any which Catholicism had enforced. The Puritans of New England were as positive in their dogmas, and as severe in their persecutions, as were the ecclesiastics of the church they left behind. Some of these dissenting bodies, indeed, as the Wesleyans, have developed organizations