The Rise and Fall of Religious Liberty in America
By C. M. S.
Struggling Toward the Light
UNDER the sway of paganism, pagan and Jew found common victims in the persons of the followers of Christ. He who had given first utterance to the doctrine of soul-freedom must, through centuries to come, witness the struggles and trials and martyrdom of those who sought to practise his teaching, and follow his example. Then came the Reformation and the legal establishment of certain Protestant churches. But the times were no easier for him who would enjoy for himself, and grant to others “freedom to worship God.” The follower of Christ in the matter of soul-freedom had still two foes,—not now Jew and pagan, but Catholic and Protestant, each taking toll in human lives from those who would worship God “according to the dictates of conscience.” We saw last week how little came of the edict of Milan and the proclamation to the peoples of the East in the matter of religious freedom. The course entered upon by Constans and Constantius after the death of their father put the Christian church on the throne of Europe, and placed a ban upon freedom of worship for pagan and Christian alike. It took heroic men and women in those days to worship God in any way other than that prescribed by the state. In proof of this, note the barbarous cruelties from which the Paulicians, Albigenses, and Waldenses suffered while clinging to their belief and mode of worship. The bloodiest and cruelest of military campaigns were carried on against these and other sects. Concerning the war of extermination waged by the established church against the Albigenses, the Encyclopedia Britannica says:— The history of the Albigenses may be said to be written in blood. . . . As town after town was taken, the inhabitants were put to the sword without distinction of age or sex, and the numerous ecclesiastics who were in the army especially distinguished themselves by a bloodthirsty ferocity. At the taking of Beziers (1209) the Abbot Arnold, being asked how the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, made the famous reply, “Slay all: God will know his own.” The war was carried on under command of Simon de Montfort with undiminished cruelty for a number of years. . . . The establishment of an inquisition at Languedoc in 1229 accelerated the exterminating process, and a few years later the sect was all but extinct.
The Waldenses, for tenaciously holding to their belief, for their zeal in spreading it in spite of papal malediction, for their denunciation of the Catholic Church, for their appeal to Scripture instead of to the pope, for their rejection of a definite priestly order, and for their observance of the Sabbath of the decalogue rather than the day (Sunday) appointed and commanded by the church, became the special objects of the wrath of that church and the victims of its blood-mad legions. From the beginning of their history until 1848 they were regarded as a people beyond the pale even of toleration. As early as 1184 they were excommunicated by Pope Lucius III. Innocent III gave them similar attention in 1215. They shared with the Albigenses in the persecutions of 1209 to 1229. From 1316 to 1378 they suffered bitterly at the hands of Pope John XXII, Pope Urban V, and Pope Gregory XI. The duchess of Savoy began a cruel war of extermination against them in 1475. A regular crusade was proclaimed against them by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487. They were mercilessly persecuted by the French in 1545. In 1655 such barbarities were inflicted upon them by the French, with the aid of the Irish brigade, that Cromwell intervened in their behalf. In 1686 the duke of Savoy attempted their forcible conversion to Roman Catholicism, exiling to Geneva those who would not yield. Three years later many of them returned to their native valleys, and for a long period successfully resisted all attempts of their enemies to exterminate them or force them to conform their belief and practise to the teachings and the rituals of Rome. In the year 1848 Charles Albert of Savoy granted them full religious and political rights. While the soil of Europe was still wet with the blood of those slain for worshiping God as conscience and the open Bible taught them, while fire and rack, dungeon and thumbscrew, were still busy “converting” the people to the Catholic faith, the work of the Reformation began. It did in a way grow out of those very conditions; for, as one writer says, “The religious consciousness of Europe was aroused” by the barbarities practised by the persecutors of the Waldenses,—and, no doubt, by the cruel business of the Inquisition. We can speak here of the Reformation only as to its attitude toward religious liberty. Says Henry M. King in his book, “Religious Liberty,” page 7:— As there were reformers before the Reformation, so there needed to be reformers after the Reformation, to take the work, painfully incomplete, on to its full completion. As yet men demanded liberty for themselves, not for all men. Religious freedom meant their freedom, and not their neighbors’ who differed from them. They shrank from the logical conclusion of their own theses.
Luther’s declared program—“the Bible and the Bible only”—was wider than even he was willing to follow. We hear him declaring this truthful proposition: “No one can command or ought to command the soul except God, who alone can show it the way to heaven. It is futile and impossible to command, or by force to compel, any man’s belief. Heresy is a spiritual thing, which no iron can hew down, no fire burn, no water drown.” Again: “Whenever the temporal power presumes to legislate for the soul, it encroaches.”
That was as true religious liberty doctrine as has ever been taught. It harmonizes perfectly with the command of Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” It seems an echo from the edict of Milan and the proclamation to the peoples of the East. It is a justification of the course of the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses; but it did not characterize the acts of the early Reformers or shape the course of the Reformation. Had Luther and his coadjutors followed out the principles laid down in the above quotation, history would have told a very different story of the growth of soul-freedom in Europe and America from what the record now reveals. They accomplished a great work; but they found the church in unholy wedlock with the state, and left it so. They found souls struggling for freedom of conscience, and they not only refused to help, but forged fetters of their own. It is sometimes said that religious liberty grew out of the Reformation. It did grow out of it, because it was not permitted to grow in it. Says one writer, “The great Reformation movement of Europe was a case of arrested development.” “Under the Reformation it was soon found that Protestant hierarchies and synods could fine and imprison and torture and burn dissenters from the state religion as vigorously as under the old names. . . . The Reformation of the sixteenth century failed to get possession of Europe, because it did not reform far enough—borrowed too much from papacy, retained too much of Rome.”—Struggles and Triumphs of Virginia Baptists, p. 12. Upon the matter of religious freedom Calvin wrote: “Godly princes may lawfully issue edicts for compelling obstinate and rebellious persons to worship the true God and to maintain the unity of the faith.” But if “unity of the faith” had been of greater consideration than soul liberty, there had been no excuse for the Reformation. Rome had been working industriously for “unity of the faith,” and employing the same means of “persuasion” thereto as those which Calvin sanctioned—torture and death. There are two names that can never be dissociated,—Calvin and Michael Servetus, the latter burned for his faith, the former sanctioning the burning. And Luther, turning away from his declaration in behalf of religious liberty, said this: “Since it is not good that in one parish the people should be exposed to contradictory preaching, he [the magistrate] should order to be silent whatever does not consist with the Scriptures.” That made the civil ruler the judge of what is Scripture truth, and gave him the right to suppress whatever did not agree with his belief. Luther, writing of the Anabaptists in 1530, said, in a letter to Menius and Myconius: “Since they [the Anabaptists] are not only blasphemous, but also seditious men, let the sword exercise its rights over them; for this is the will of God, that he shall have judgment who resisteth the power.” That declaration was purely papal in its nature. Zwingli was not free from the same intolerant spirit, and we find him virtually passing a death sentence upon his former schoolmate, Felix Mantz. Concerning this, Prof. Williston Walker says: “The Zurich authorities, not without the approval of Zwingli we must believe, were led at last to add death to imprisonment, stripes, and banishment; and on Jan. 5, 1527, Felix Mantz became the first Anabaptist martyr at Zurich, meeting his death with heroic firmness, a death by drowning, in hideous parody of his doctrine of believers’ baptism.” Nor can we pass by the name of Melanchthon in this connection; for it is recorded of him that in a letter to the diet of Hamburg, written in the year 1537, he advised death by the sword to all who held Anabaptist views. How similar to the course of these men was that of Saul, who went to Damascus, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,” determined to bring them “bound to Jerusalem.” But our Lord asks: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” We do not desire to cast opprobrium upon any of these illustrious names. Their fault lay largely in their inheritance from the Church of Rome. The schooling and the example of centuries had had its effect upon the people. We desire in this merely to show out of what trials of faith, what turbulence, what strife, what cruel mockings, what bitter persecutions, there has come to us the blessing of religious liberty. Down through that dark and turbulent torrent of the centuries, from the days of Jesus to our own day, there has been flowing a small silvery stream, pure and sweet and wholesome, sometimes almost obscured and always threatened with complete extinction. But that little silvery streamlet has been ever under the eye of God, flowing where he willed, but always flowing to bless mankind. We shall see in our next something of the struggle that was made to suppress the gospel of soul-freedom before it should reach the New World.